Assistant Village Idiot

There is comfort food; to me this is comfort music. C Am F G7 - only about a thousand songs from that era with that progression, eh? Gent...

...at Straw School in the 1960's.  Except Miss Morse played the piano better than this. Note that even for performance, everyone has to...

Alt-history, whether personal or global, has always been both attractive and repellent to me.  Those of us with memory or historical knowled...

I sent my "Tevye Channel" post to a physician friend who is also a medical researcher.  (I have mentioned him from time to time.) ...

Years ago, when I commented on "Ship of Fools," I or another Yank had asked if there were a British equivalent to Nine Nations of ...

I did the reader’s theater production in Concord.  My son hinted pretty strongly that I over-acted – “hamming it up” was the tweet, I beli...

In Jerusalem. Perhaps the earliest.

Elizabeth Scalia wrote a piece at First Things almost two weeks ago about the dissatisfaction of many older Catholics with mass as it is of...

The young friends (previous post) and I chuckled over Christian cliches a bit last night, as we both encounter a fair number of believers wh...

Young friends who are believers but have no church home were over last night. I understand why they are distant and unltracautious about ch...

In case you were wondering why there was no "Australian Invasion" in 60's pop music. I always liked the 12-string guitar that...

Thus the Wyman Family Culture was slated to drift into its next phase, dispersion, in 2000. Jonathan was a Junior at Asbury and was still d...

In these foreign-language robot spam comments I get on my back posts, I got my first one in Romanian: deratizare bucuresti. I think it mean...

I am reading tomorrow for a coworker's original script at the Concord Auditorium. The few rehearsals have reminded me why I loved actin...

Part of my ongoing correspondence. My uncle mentioned the great hypocritical irony of blue states supporting red ones, of red states that r...

I first heard this at scout camp, which would have been 1965.  It had the Kingston Trio sound I grew up with, and I thought it must be old -...

Searching for something else, I found this post from eighteen months ago, Who Goes Nazi?

I keep wondering if it is only my liberal friends, or if it applies to all liberals, but I get a lot of emails and work comments that focus ...

I picked the right day to wonder what was up with Nicholas Nassim Taleb, it seems.  He's all over the news. I have said all year that ...