Old Man

Dr. John Burchard turned 90 on January 15.He is still going strong.

Tony Angell: New Art

Tony Angell has a new book about bird behavior coming out from the University of Chicago Press. Here is an example.

Joan Didion, RIP

Joan Didion died last week at 87. She was the best, from her bleak existential novels of the sixties and seventies to her late memories of a certain kind of California girlhood. I used her to teach, and I think sometimes that everything my writing students needed to know was in this short passage, about …

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How to Win a Long Distance Pigeon Race

  From Patrick Porter, the best  writer you haven’t  read: How To Win a Long Distance Pigeon Race   It helps if your Dad kept pigeons in his youth because his father dabbled with them along the Saugus River in Lynn, Massachusetts.  They also kept ducks and a few chickens but Dad spent most of his …

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True and Ominous

Think about it. I have this written on the flyleaf of Charles Pellegrino’s Ghosts of Vesuvius, a book about 9-11, Thera, the Antikytheria mechanism, and  Yellowstone, among other things. It is not in the book,  but states its theme exactly. “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”  Will Durant

Surprise Facebook Post

Much to our surprise, this popped up on our Facebook page as I was shutting the computer down last night. We had no idea that anyone had done such a thing, and were. of course, totally delighted when we listened to it this morning. A very special thanks to Paul, Lauren, Matt, and Jonathan for …

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Apologies for my lack of posts recently

I apologize for my lack of new posts lately. I am still not completely recovered from not having my meds for ten days and our computers have been misbehaving: the keyboard on the MacBook refuses to type several letters, and the email on the iMac duplicates itself at the server end, sometimes more than 75 …

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