Isaac Rosenberg, Break of Day in the Trenches, 1916 The darkness crumbles away It is the same old druid Time as ever, Only a live thing leaps my hand, A queer sardonic rat, As I pull the parapet’s poppy To…
Dear Democrats in the House and Senate, Well done! I mean well done in the election campaign, of course. There are millions of us feeling the same mixture of elation, relief and anxiety that I’m sure you are now. I’m…
When I heard that Dick Francis had written another book at last, I must admit I was skeptical. Even aside from the rumors that the last several books had, in fact, been written by his wife (now, sadly, deceased and…
Well, well, well. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. Hoo-ah. That’s Interesting. And good, of course. If nothing else, it’s yet another taboo broken; the next female Speaker won’t have to be the first female speaker. I’ve never…
[for quadrennial, read mid-term] Election Day, November, 1884, by Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, Book XXXIV: Sands at Seventy. If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show, ‘Twould not be you, Niagara–nor you,…
Rust is life. Rust is what separates us from the Egyptians. Rust is the natural process of our unnatural achievements. Most of the time, we think about rust as what happens when iron turns to crap. Rust is the destroyer,…
So, the other day, I was in the middle of reading The Vor Game when I could not find the book. I mean, I could not find it. It wasn’t any of the places it might be, and it wasn’t…
November, is it? Well, as Gentle Readers are no doubt aware, November is National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short). Now, Your Humble Blogger has been to see the doctor recently, and it turns out that I do not…
I’m not sure that Gentle Readers will all have seen Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s column over at Redstate called The Choice Could Not Be Clearer. The concluding paragraph has been making the rounds: In short, Democrats do not…
If I remember correctly, the Bride was black and beautiful in Song of Songs, Chapter 1, verse 5, and that nobody else in the whole Scripture was black, and that beauty itself was a little suspect, at least in the…