Adapted from the Twitter feed, Tuesday, September 17, 2019. Typed up Wednesday morning, September 18. “This will get their attention!”: Trump tweeting up another twitter-tantrum. The then candidate in his office in Trump Tower, file photo from September 25, 2015, by Josh Haner/NYT via SFGate. I've ridden this hobby horse before. I'm sure I'll be riding it again but… The political media has to stop building stories around HIS tweets. They aren't news. They're not "modern day presidential". They're just expressions of his vanity He doesn't use them to communicate with the American people. He uses them to stir up... Continue reading

Hoisted from the archives, September 5, 2014. Posted Tuesday morning, September 17, 2019. Yeah, him. O’Reilly when he was still with Fox News and the dean of their awfulness, February 2014. Three months before you know who descended that golden escalator. Image by Robert Wright, courtesy of the New York Times. [I wrote this post five years ago. I could have written the same post today or in any of the three years in between now and then. Except that I would have had to add a name in 2015: you know whose. I’m reposting it as a reminder: It’s... Continue reading

Posted Monday night, September 16, 2019. "Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap" by Pieter Breugel the Elder. 1565. Via Wikipedia. When the vines of my village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes, that the indignation of God has gone out against all the human race...Who is it that, seeing the havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand; without considering, that many worse things have been seen, and that in the meantime, people are... Continue reading

Lifted from the album, Wednesday, September 12, 2018. Posted Monday, September 16, 2019. Baskets of Cortlands ready for the baker to be ready for baking. Tantillo’s Farm Market, Gardiner, New York. Wednesday, September 12, 2018. Mrs M’s favorite apple pie apples. She’s not up to baking yet. Her coordination is coming back, but her short term memory still plays tricks on her----not only does she lose track of what she's doing in the middle of doing it---and her right hand literally still doesn't know what her left hand is doing, and her wielding a knife for peeling and slicing would... Continue reading

Posted Monday morning, September 16, 2019. “Royal Society, Crane Court, off Fleet Street, London: a meeting in progress, with Isaac Newton in the chair. Wood engraving by J. Quartly after [J.M.L.R.], 1883” I think that’s supposed to be Isaac Newton at the desk in the background chairing the meeting and not the droll looking aging fop literally in the chair in the foreground. Newton was still in the chair when Cotton Mather was elected a Fellow of the Society. Via Wikimedia Commons. Following up from last weekend’s post Silence conveys assent. Isaac Newton was still alive and still president of... Continue reading

Updated Monday night, September 16, 2019. New posts below but before scrolling down please read... Please help Mrs M get her pow-pow-powerful good-good feeling from her favorite Cheer-Cheer-Cheerios... Not the way I would like to be greeting you on a Saturday morning. Not the way you'd like to be greeted, I'm sure. But I have to ask you for help again. As I've mentioned, we've tapped out our savings,and until and unless Mrs M's disability is approved I need to do the fundraising appeals even more frequently. With Oliver's help, we were able to pay the next installment of the... Continue reading

Written between innings, Saturday night, September 8, 2018. Mined from the notebooks and posted Saturday morning, September 14, 2019. A note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Saturday, September 8, 2018. Mo Vaughn. There's a name always makes me smile. I’m sure I’ve told this story before on the blog. I tell it on- and offline every chance I get. One of my first old man fan moments. I wasn’t old when it happened. I wasn’t even a father yet. But the high school kids in the seats in front of me at the old Syracuse ball... Continue reading

Posted Thursday morning, September 12, 2019. “Spring Rain, Matsushima” by Tsuchiya Koitsu. 1936. Ohmi Gallery, Ross Walker. Early morning in cloud light to the sound of the last of the rain at daybreak dripping from the tips of the fronds into the summer day I watch palm flowers open pink coral in midair among pleated cloud-green fans as I sit for a while after breakfast reading a few pages with a shadowing sense that I am stealing the moment from something else that I ought to be doing so the pleasure of stealing is part of it ---"Theft of Morning"... Continue reading

Posted Wednesday morning, September 11, 2019. Other day Mrs M and I took a drive across the river to Hyde Park for no special reason except to sit on the patio of the Henry Wallace Welcome Center at the FDR Library and Museum at look out at the grounds. There, we stopped in the gift store to buy postcards and browse the bookshelves. Came across this trio on display: It was the middle book, “Winter War”, that focused my attention (although, unfortunately, not in focus by my camera. Sorry about that). The author, historian Eric Rauchway, is a longtime blogging... Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, September 9, 2018. Posted Monday morning, September 9, 2019. Not my favorite poet named Donald, but he was pretty good. Donald Hall, who died June 23, 1918, in his living room at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire in 2012. Photo by Gary Knight via Beth Macy. A note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Sunday, September 9, 2018. 6:28 a.m. Porch lights off. Screws on cabinet door hinges tightened. Laundry in. Three poems read, three cups of coffee downed, two blog posts written. Day underway. The cabinet doors close completely... Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, August 25, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, September 8. A note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time: Sunday morning, August 25, 2019. Let’s talk about me. Because I don’t do enough of that here on the blog. I hurt. I’m stiff and I’m sore. I’m tired---all the time. I don’t sleep. Often I’m too tired to think. I have no strength in my legs. I have no strength in my back. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. Some days it’s more than I can take. When I saw my back surgeon in March, I... Continue reading

Posted Saturday, morning September 7, 2019. “Examination of a Witch” by Thompson H. Matteson. 1853. University of Virginia Library Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. Clearly there are limits to the use of skepticism. There is some cost-benefit analysis which must be applied, and if the comfort, consolation and hope delivered by mysticism and cynicism and superstition is high, and the dangers of belief comparatively low, should we not keep our misgivings to ourselves? But the issue is tricky. Imagine that you enter a big-city taxicab and the moment you get settled in, the driver begins a harangue... Continue reading

Posted Friday night, September 6, 2019. “His joy showed in every word and movement.”: Theodore Roosevelt campaigning for election as President in his own right, 1904. Uncredited AP photo via the Atlantic. At age of forty-two he was not only the youngest President in history, he was an entirely novel figure in American politics---an Eastern Republican with national appeal (phenomenal national appeal, as [his 1900 Vice-Presidential] campaign had shown). Where McKinley had been Midwestern “of the plain people,” “TR” was big-city gentry, raised among nursemaids and gilded mirrors. He was a Harvard-trained, Harvard-sounding reader of books (two a day on... Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks Friday, August 30, 2018. Posted Friday morning, September 6. "Make it so! Now where are my clubs?": Trump pretending to listen at a meeting with FEMA staff and advisers who tried to brief him on Hurricane Dorian, September 1, 2019. AP photo by Jacquelyn Mitchell via CNN. Do we have to keep doing this? Of course we do. Ms. Westerhout’s abrupt and unexpected departure came after Mr. Trump learned on Thursday that she had indiscreetly shared details about his family and the Oval Office operations she was part of at a recent off-the-record dinner with reporters... Continue reading

Posted Wednesday night, September 4, 2019. Sagan again. This time on his way to making a deeper point. But I’m using it as an excuse to let you know that I know what the precession of the equinoxes is because I do my homework and looked it up. And as an excuse to post the painting up top because any excuse to post tasteful nudity. The painting is titled “Astrologer observing the Equinox and a scene of parting Adonis and Venus”. It was painted in 1684 or thereabouts by a lesser known Dutch contemporary of Vermeer, Domenicus van Wijnen. I... Continue reading

Saturday night, August 24, 2019. Saturday. 8:24 p.m. 67 degrees. Passing clouds. Breeze from the northeast, 3 mph.. Late evening grocery run. Twilight when I went into the supermarket. Near dark when I came out. Fully night by the time I was halfway home. Summer waning. File under How the Weather Was. Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday morning, July 30, 2019. Posted Tuesday morning, September 3. Mrs M's mysterious self-transporting coffee mug. Another note from the Department of Lost Time. This one's from July 30th of this year. As I like to say, all this would be fascinating if it wasn't my wife who was the subject of fascination. I’ve mentioned before how Mrs M’s thoughts sometimes have to take circuitous detours around the still healing parts of her brain to get where they need to go and how along the way they stop at stations and pick up passengers that don’t... Continue reading

Posted Monday morning, September 2, 2018. Detail from “Philosopher in Meditation” by Rembrandt van Rijn. 1632. Louvre via Wikipedia. If you’re only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything. You become a crotchety misanthrope convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) Since major discoveries at the borderlines of science are rare, experience will tend to confirm your grumpiness. But every now and then a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you’re too resolutely skeptical, you’re going to... Continue reading

Posted Sunday night, September, 2019. Trying to figure out how the world works and what their place in it might be: Detail from “Consulting the Oracle” by Henry Nelson O’Neil. Circa mid-19th Century. Courtesy of Glasgow Museums Media Resource Centre via Art UK. Have I ever heard a skeptic wax superior and contemptuous? Certainly. I’ve sometimes heard, to my retrospective dismay, that unpleasant tone in my own voice. There are human imperfections on both sides of this issue. Even when it’s applied sensitively, scientific skepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless, and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held... Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks, August 28, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, August 31, 2019. U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the head of Panama’s military government General Omar Torrijos signing the Panama Canal Treaties, September 7, 1977. Photo by @jonypanama courtesy of Panama Today. Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time: This time last year I’d finished listening to Stuart Eizenstat’s “President Carter:The White House Years” and was going back through it by way of the hardcover to fix some things in my mind and write down passages thought would come in handy for future posts about Jimmy... Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, August 12, 2019. Posted Friday morning, August 30. Mrs M taking a mini-vacation in her head while waiting for her root beer float to arrive at the A&W in Lake George Village, Monday, August 12. 2019. For the first three or four months after her major operations at the beginning of May, 2018, Mrs M experienced extended moments of what I learned are called confabulations when her brain would “get loose”--as she called it---and she would have what I likened to waking dreams. She would think things that were happening in her head---usually a mixing... Continue reading

Posted Thursday afternoon, August 29, 2019. Traffic on Storrow Drive in 2016 . Joe Difazio for WBUR. Mannion Rule of the Road: If you’re routinely weaving in and out of lanes looking for advantage and seeing every open space between the cars ahead of you as an opportunity to get ahead of the pack and get there faster, you are a menace to traffic and bad driver and a maniac or… You’re in Boston… Where everybody is a bad driver and a maniac. Continue reading

Posted Wednesday night, August 28, 2019. My brother Luke Mannion's new used camper at dawn, all packed up and ready for a trip to the far north. August 7, 2019. My brother Luke and my sister-in-law C just returned home to their little cabin in the Connecticut woods after a long explore of the wild North. THe'd bought a van---used. A 1998 Dodge Ram 3500. Nineteen feet from stem to stern.---filled its tanks with 35 gallons of gas and 13 gallons of water, loaded the larder and stocked the fridge, and set out at the beginning of the month for... Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks Monday, August 13, 2018. Posted Wednesday morning, August 28, 2019. Sarah Palin at a campaign rally during her first week as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2008. Photo by Brooks Kraft from a photo essay at TIME Magazine’s website. The caption on this photo is “Star Power”! Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time. [Editor’s note: I’m still trying to put my notebooks in order to make room in my head to write posts about more current events that will probably end up as entries in the notebooks that I'll turn into... Continue reading