Obviously, a bunch of things bugged me about New York Times op-edifier Frank Bruni's We've got to stop coddling our kids column and it's hard for me to settle on which thing bugged me most. But the one thing that's back on my mind today is Bruni's casual acceptance of the main selling point of education "reform" used by all the would-be reformers including the President, which is crassly economic. We need to improve our schools so that the nation can "compete globally." Basically, they're telling us, we need schools to make us money or, more specifically, to turn out... Continue reading

Three A.M. Wide awake. If I had a sheet of 1” plywood in the house, I’d be under the kitchen sink, replacing the floor of the cabinet. Home Depot should be open 24-7. What good is having two sleeps if you can’t use the awake time between them for home repair projects? How Our Ancestors Used to Sleep Twice a Night and Highlighting the Problem of Present Shock 8 hour sleeping is a modern invention. Imagine you are a denizen of the 18th century. It’s just past 8:30 P.M., you’ve got your night-cap on. You blow out your candles and... Continue reading

The view out our window. Right now. Tuesday afternoon. December 10, 2013. Continue reading

Click on the link for Part One. For most people, money is something you get in order to do things. For the greedheads who run the economy, you do things in order to get money. I’d say they’re like the dwarfs in Discworld for whom the point of having a pile of gold is having a pile of gold, but the dwarfs also make things. These twisted souls don’t want to make anything beside money except more money. And to them, the rest of us are just means to that end. Continue reading

I’m repeating myself with this one, but… The economic fate of this country is in the hands of people who, if they were on their way up a mountain where they knew a pot of gold was waiting for them at the top and a stray dollar bill blew by them, they would stop in their tracks, turn around, and run right off a cliff chasing after that buck. Continue reading

When last we left Holmes and Watson… January 19, 2014, here in the U.S. at any rate, we find out how Holmes did it. The video is interactive. Keep your cursor hovering over the left corner of the screen and watch for the targets to slide by. Click and you’ll get to see other clips and photos. Minor spoilers, if you’re fussy about that sort of thing. My favorite bit in the trailer is when Holmes learns Watson has grown a mustache during his absence and determines it will have to go. It makes the good doctor look ancient and,... Continue reading

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In Red 2, the even more over the top follow-up to the over the top action-adventure comedy Red, retired CIA super-spook Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), thrill-seeking former government clerk Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), and paranoid assassin Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich) are running for their lives again, this time from lovelorn spies, wine-snob double agents, grudge-bearing contract killers, and well-mannered mad scientists. [Editor’s note: This week’s feature for Family Movie Night was Red 2, which is now out on DVD and available for streaming. Turned out I enjoyed it more on second viewing than I appear to have when I saw... Continue reading

Meryl Streep as Julia Child, public intellectual, in Julie & Julia. Finished up the semester Tuesday with pizza and a movie, Julie & Julia. Talk about coddling Millennials. I’d direct you to our usual Twitter hashtag so you could look at their live-tweeted responses to the movie but they were forbidden to open their laptops. No live-tweeting. Their assignment was to sit back and celebrate the work they’d put into the course and enjoy the movie for the movie’s sake. But it wasn’t as though Julie & Julia wasn’t relevant to the class. After all it’s about a blogger and... Continue reading

All of us Mannions in Mannionville hope those of you who celebrate it had a Happy Hanukkah! Photo: The Lubavitch Mennorah and the Edgware Tube Station by Chesdovi. Via Wikipedia. Continue reading

Oh my God! Somebody shot Santa! A Christmas Whodunnit? On the road home from the Christmas tree farm. Deflated inflatable. Sunday. December 2, 2012. Continue reading

Far worse than the sound of leaf blowers in the morning is the combined noise of chain saws, wood chippers, and stump grinders. Our next door neighbor has four beautiful catalpa trees in his front and side yards and he’s in the process right now of having all four taken down. I don’t know why he’s suddenly decided to clear cut his property. He’s been living there for seven years. Maybe he’s suddenly got good reasons. The roots are ripping apart his sewer line. All four have rotted out from within at once. Like us, he doesn’t have a real... Continue reading

Updated below. In his post The Pope And The American Right, Andrew Sullivan touches on themes that have been running themes of mine (and many others, of course, including Sullivan himself) and I keep hoping against hope will someday soon finally sink in the National Press Corps: The Republican Party is not in any way, shape, or form a “moderate” party that has temporarily lost control of its crazies. The so-called moderates are as big a bunch of magical thinkers as the Religious Right worshiping their malicious sky wizard and the Tea Party with their paranoid delusions of various Others... Continue reading

A difficult year here in Mannionville recently got a lot more difficult. I'll be posting about it soon---don't worry. Everyone's health is ok.---but just for right now, let's just say there's going to be a lot more belt-tightening around here. Meantime, tomorrow's our last class of the semester which means it's my last trip up to Syracuse until mid-January when the new semester begins. Which will be a relief. Still, it's 60 bucks for gas, tolls, and parking and I could use some help with that. So... If you like what goes on around here and you can swing it,... Continue reading

Dropped Ken off at school this morning and as he crossed the street ahead of me, hurrying to the library to work on his report on Herodotus for his history class, I felt my heart break just as it used to do when he was a little boy heading across the schoolyard to join his friends on the playground before school. Of course my heart broke when Oliver trundled out the door too and still does, which always makes me ask myself, When does it end? But I know the answer. Couple weeks ago I arranged to stop in at... Continue reading

I swear, there’s now a critical mass of cars on the road driven by people who people who learned how to drive from playing video games. They drive aggressively and for advantage as if a Thanksgiving trip to grandma’s is a race. One of them cut me off on the highway yesterday afternoon. He was coming down the entrance ramp. I was in what he clearly thought of as his lane. There were cars on my left, so I couldn’t pull over to let him in, and another car coming up fast behind me so I couldn’t drop back. If... Continue reading

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New York Times’ op-edifier Frank Bruni wrote a column the other day wondering What’s the matter with kids today? Because no one else has ever looked into the issue before. The subtext, I swear, is When I was your age I had to walk to school barefoot, in the snow, uphill, both ways! I’d have thought that at forty-nine Bruni was too young to be this old, but there he is on the op-ed page of America’s Paper of Record telling us how spoiled, coddled, and soft our children are. Well, their children, maybe. Our kids are hardworking, overachieving go-getters.... Continue reading

Didn’t need David Greenberg’s negative review in the New York Times to convince me not to read Chris Matthews’ Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked . I’m no fan of Matthews. Nothing personal. I’m no fan of any TV talking head shows mostly because I think all they do is stoke angers. I can’t bear to listen to Matthews’ yelling but more than his yelling what I find hard to take is that he’s a sentimentalist. This actually makes me like him more than I do most of his colleagues who either go in for cheap cynicism or sophomoric... Continue reading

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God tweets. Of course He does. And this is one of my favorites of His tweets ever: Every word in the Bible is literally true. Then they start grouping themselves into sentences and you've got yourself a problem.— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 23, 2013 Some keep the Sabbath by going to church. I keep it by going on Twitter. Follow God by clicking here. Continue reading

Norman Mailer in 1949, just after The Naked and the Dead made him rich and famous. Photo by John H. Popper, courtesy of the Paris Review. Bogging down in J. Michael Lennon’s biography of Norman Mailer, A Double Life, just about the point where I’d have expected. The Naked and the Dead is a bestseller and Mailer’s trying to cope with his newly acquired celebrity---mostly by sleeping with as many women as he can find time to---hanging out in Hollywood, looking to sell the screen rights and struggling to come up with an idea for his next novel. Which puts... Continue reading