October 2020
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The 2020 World Series is over, and I'm in a royal snit. It's Game 6, the Dodgers are ahead 3-2, and Tampa Bay has a chance to win and make the series go to seven, which is what I'm rooting for (I don't have a dog in the hunt, because I disapprove of both teams:…
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For the last eleven years, I've lived in a downtown Boulder condominium. I much enjoy living here — it's age appropriate. The rooms are all on one floor; there's an elevator; underground parking for the new Subaru; no snow shoveling; hardly any upkeep. It's quiet inside and out — but right around the corner, just…
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TCM, the indispensable channel, has been delivering us a raft of old George Raft movies. They Drive by Night (1940) of course, but also such unmemorable noirs as Johnny Angel (1945), Race Street (1948), and I'll Get You (1952) as well as a couple of others so unsubstantial that, although viewed during the past month, they've…
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The yips have been big news this week because Jose Altuve, Houston's golden-glove second baseman has made three throwing errors in two games. Glaring, costly errors. He's bounced balls to first base and to second base — throws of twenty or forty feet which he has made successfully thousands of times in his outstanding career.…
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There is no author with whom I feel greater kinship than with Michel de Montaigne and there's none with whom I've passed more hours and days, except for Shakespeare. For many years, Montaigne's Essais has been my bedside companion, first in the old Everyman Library edition as translated by John Florio, a book which I…
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It's unlikely that I will be killed by a tsunami. I just don't get to the seashore very often — the last time was five years ago — and I happen to reside most of the year at an altitude of 5300 feet. It would have to be one heck of a tsunami that would…
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Dear Diary: why is everybody always picking on me? It's been a really bad month, even before someone deliberately gave me the virus. Sometimes I want to cry, it's been so tough, but Daddy Fred would hate me for that. The press, the TV people, some of those losers at Fox (not Hannity). Even my…
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This standing stone might look like an ordinary piece of granite, but it has a rich history. If you look very closely, you can almost see the two deep holes that have been drilled into it. Though it's now merely a garden ornament, decorating a perennial border, it was once a working fence post. Hinges…
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I just completed another long stroll through Bleak House. It's either my fifth or sixth time through — or almost once a decade since 1958. During this reading, which will no doubt be my last, I felt that I was imprisoned by the novel, hogtied; that I couldn't do anything or read anything else until…