It’s easy to teach even the minimally alert pooch to sit, stay. This is much more difficult with human beings (as it should be). For me it was off to Publix Saturday morning for some needed grocery re-supply. I’ve never in…
As the news of the spreading Wuhan coronavirus increasingly occupied the news over the past several months, the pinecones rained down from the ponderosa pines that comprise the Hidden Forest in the foothills of the Rockies south of Denver. Back…
There is a plaque at the Rose Park courts, and there are some mighty fine players here, nationally and internationally ranked, and others improving daily. When play resumes, they will do very well for a day or two and then…
Pursuing my explanation to P, in Paris with his American lit seminar despite le confinement, Huck Finn rejects Aunt Sally’s civilizing mission and runs away, toward freedom: his own (“ahead of the rest,” he says) and Jim’s. Civilization comes with…
I didn’t have much time to drink until this nationwide lockdown. Work always prevented me. Or family. Church, too, I suppose. Now all of that is gone. But at least I have time to develop my hobbies. My wife and…
P, my Paris correspondent, asks me how we are holding up, I tell him we as a society will be fine if we stay true to our own selves and our customs. I approve giving his students Hawthorne to read…
Joe Queenan wrote many so-so books and one great one, a memoir called Closing Time. What he had to say about reading books is vital for many people to hear right this minute: “[B]ooks are without question the wealth of…
My friend P in Paris, an occasional American Spectator contributor, notes that no one was celebrating or even remembering the day on Monday. Mouvement du 22 mars! The day it started! Ha, I say, that was when the jeunesse went wild in the…
I remember in rabbinic school one of the teachers, an acerbic and witty philosophy professor, dead-panned to the class, “I celebrate my Shabbos (Sabbath) on Thursday night, and so should you, because Friday night you are working!” Don’t get me…