December 2017
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The person with whom I share a bed reported that last night, following some incomprehensible mutterings, I sleep talked, clear as a bell, the sentence fragment "four ones, which I interpret as eleven hundred and eleven." I have absolutely no remembrance of saying these words, nor of any dream that might provide them with…
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Dear Talia, Oliver, Ella, Lola, Luke, Caleb, Asher: Althea's grandfather, Solomon Goss (born Guza), who contributed 1/16 of your genetic inheritance, fled Poland after the worker's rebellion in Lodz in 1905, walked across Europe to Rotterdam where he boarded a ship and traveled steerage-class to Philadelphia. He had been a silk weaver in the old…
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When you start to watch a 1945 black-and-white movie called Lady on a Train you have certain expectations, especially when you're told in advance that it's about a woman who sees a murder take place from a train window. And when the movie features such noir stalwarts as Dan Duryea and Ralph Bellamy. And especially when the title…
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“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious — perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with…
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Inasmuch "on horror's head horrors accumulate" every single Trump day, I wonder why an atrocity out of the mouth of Senator Charles Grassley (of once progressive Iowa) pisses me off to the top of my bent. Over the top, actually, even though he's probably no worse than the others. In an aha!! moment with the…