Assistant Village Idiot

Son #1 sent a link to David French over at The Corner, Oprah, Snowflakes, and Despair. Excellent brief commentary, which includes a further...

Arnold Kling has an interesting piece on how Liberal, Conservative, and Libertarian tribes speak different languages when writing about eve...

A coworker mentioned signing up for ancestry.com (this in context of my mentioning that her surname Voegler seemed related to English Fowle...

My wife asked how it is that so many diner waitresses are “like that,” refering to the bantering style we had just encountered.   We had...

I watched my two-year-old granddaughter handle the puzzles in church nursery yesterday.  She's good at them*.  But noticing that doesn...

I was given, and read, On The Map by Simon Garfield. I don't know what I was expecting, but this wasn't it.  The first half is a hi...

A young gaming friend asked on FB about alignment , and enforcing declared alignment.  I think there's more than gaming here. In the D...

I have mentioned that much of the Eastern New England accent, which sounds its O and other low vowels a little differently while droppi...

A neurologist friend at the hospital was fond of taking educational leave to obscure places.   While there, he would take in their esote...

In 2001 we brought two immigrants to America: orphaned Romanian teenagers.  My framing of that event now is only slightly different from my ...

I came across another London Tube parody, in a similar but unrelated search.  This one has anagrams of all the stations .  There was controv...

Short version.   We want to be generous, and believe Christ commands it, but what if something is not ours to give?

Pew Research has frequently checks up on how (some) Europeans feel about each other.  The year it is entitled The New Sick Man of Europe: Th...

The London Underground schematic is the greatest map of all time.  Wonderful to behold, clear, original... And easily parodied, perhaps th...

There was a Bob Newhart routine in the 60's on his The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back album called "School For Bus Drivers." T...