Assistant Village Idiot

Reposted from 15 and 10 years ago. Well knock me over with a feather. The commonly-told explanation for the early Christians choosing th...

Republished from 2011, inspired by the comments about appropriateness for children under the "Train Songs" post. I recall when Jon...

There is a whole style of comic performance and writing that relies on snark, on archness. It is comic hipness. I won’t try to trace its hi...

Listening to The Moth Radio Hour on NPR. I never heard it before. I like it. Do you think they know that this is a secular version of Tes...

Since I'm not part of the 1%, I must be part of the 99%.  As such, does anyone think I would be welcomed by the 99% Declaration Working ...

Manchester HS Central, class of 1971, meets twice Saturday, for breakfast and then evening. We have about 100 from a class of 424. There a...

New Harmony , Indiana, was founded by the Harmony Society, a German utopian, socialist, anarchist, pietist,,,well, you get the idea - group ...

Don't be alarmed if you don't get most of the references.  Neither did we, though we got the idea. Actually, I still don't ge...

Ben, this would have been a much better science project than squirrels. We’re thinking the bird feeders got ripped down by a bear. We h...

Sponge-Headed Scienceman has two singing videos from 1978 about energy consumption. I defy anyone to listen to both all the way through. I...

I learned the song at YMCA day camp. I confess I didn't get why it ever became popular. I thought I'd post it here, just as a lark -...

Via Instapundit, salt is apparently not the killer we thought it was, according to Scientific American. I had, within the last year, modif...

Underneath Herman Cain's troubling comments - Volokh refers to Nine-and-a-Half Amendments in Some Copies of the Bill of Rights - there ...

I grew up on the song " Charlie on the MTA, " of course, because it was local, and my mother was a big Kingston Trio fan. It'...

Paul Zrimsek, commenting over at Ann Althouse: Every NYT columnist is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first sneer. (Related to...

A friend with celiac disease mentioned that some restaurants get it WRT gluten, and others don't. The latter say they have gluten-free ...

Humans become pets. Our ancestors from 1700, observing us, would say that this has already happened. Most of our daily activities are for e...

Listening to my semi-modern Norwegian Christmas music today on a whim, and heard an odd track come up. (Yeah, I know, what are the odds, r...

Tracy listens while washing the dishes, and we catch some of it. You can feel the discomfort of some of them as they report more market-fr...

I wasn't surprised at the Gandhi biographies starting to see through the fraud at this point, but I admit that I was surprised and sadde...