I grew up listening to the Beatles in real time as they hit the United States, and I learned to play Paul McCartney-style left-handed guitar and bass from their records and chord books. But I have to admit that I did not hear the best Beatles album until I moved to England in 2000 and bought the remastered compact disc… Read more »
I currently live a short distance from a permanently busy Florida street called Tamiami Trail, so named because it is the old pre-freeway route connecting Tampa to Miami, following the Gulf Coast south through Sarasota and Naples, where it then heads east across the Everglades on “Alligator Alley” to its southern terminus. That road is also designated as Route US-41…. Read more »
I’m on my first post-Covid trip back to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where I spent some formative years, and I realized that it was fifty years ago this year that I was the projectionist for an annual cinema tradition in Marquette, a small university town on Lake Superior. That featured film was itself another step backward in time. The on-location shoot… Read more »
Our four-footed companions go through life on a quite different timescale from we humans. Matilda Beagle was the second dog that we have nursed through old-age infirmities and held as she left this world, this one shortly after her 13th birthday. As I come through the human equivalent of aging myself, this passing could not help but prompt a lot… Read more »
Trumpeter and singer Chet Baker died 33 years ago this week in Amsterdam. He was found dead on the street underneath his room, and with traces of heroin and cocaine in his system. The circumstances behind his death were never officially determined, but one biographer has commented that it was equally likely that he either fell from the window, or… Read more »
A coincidence, surely, that Rush Limbaugh and I share a birth year, or that he died of lung cancer on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Christian 40-day “penance” tradition of Lent. When I would visit my then-88-year-old Norwegian grandmother while attending university near her Upper Peninsula Michigan home, she would open the Houghton Daily Mining Gazette in the… Read more »
Today, a respite from ugly political news. I wrote at the New Year about the human tendency to relegate old Gods to lowercase gods but still keep them around in cultural practices. We have done something similar in the way we count. New ways to count show up and old ones fade, yet they never quite disappear. This is a… Read more »
Note: This is an update and expansion of a New Year’s post two years ago. Happy Janus Day 1, in the New Year of 2021 AD or CE as you prefer. It was not until I moved to England at the turn of the century that I learned of their far superior method of keeping professional sports teams from getting… Read more »
I am not known to be a great sentimentalist about Christmas. There is one “carol” that I do like to play this time every year, however, which is a based on a poem by John Pole about a homeless newborn child, called “Anti-Carol.” The best-known version of this was recorded acapella in a strong Cockney accent by British folksinger Frankie… Read more »
“[T]he present Pope, who abhors the liberal arts and this kind of mind, cannot stand these novelties and subtleties; and everyone here tries to adjust his mind and his nature to that of the ruler.” Piero Guicciardini, describing Pope Paul V (1550–1621) Astrophysicist and Hubble Telescope guru Mario Livio suggests that you substitute the name of some current political ruler… Read more »