Assistant Village Idiot

Deaths are still high from covid, state after state. But number of new cases are down, much better than previous spikes. Hope.

Some discussion of "natural immunity." N ot terrible news, but not what we have hoped .  Summary:  (The longer reasoning is at the...

Not all languages have words for "yes," and no," or if they have them, they are not used much. Latin was one. Mandarin is ano...

 We have given the wrong advice to young people for two generations WRT having children. We have said "get to know your spouse, get set...

I spoke with the worship leader today about the sparse attendance (and weak singing) of those at the first service, the traditional service,...

I mentioned a few weeks ago that because of new rules about what eggs could be sold, the supermarket we get the donations from for the halfw...

It is a defunct section of Manchester.  No one calls it that anymore, and it is barely even there. It was even called just 'Skeg by old ...

I had a pastor I dearly loved in the 1980s, and scheduled an appointment with him to discuss my spiritual discouragement. It didn't help...

Listening to a rock history podcast, one comes up on things barely remembered, or not at all, because after 1975 I didn't listen much un...

There was a banner on Pilgrim Church in Dorchester, across from the Strand Theater where the Van Gogh exhibit was.  It read "Jesus didn...

A lot of energy is being spent on conservative sites, even more now than previously, when it was already considerable, in being skeptical of...

In a sociology experiment, eight people were dropped on a deserted island: two Danes, two Finns, two Swedes, and two Norskis.  They were che...

I am looking at the ESPN Top 100 baseball players of all time articles (1-25 comes out tomorrow, and I am not even going to bother). And it ...

City Journal has long published much of the excellent Theodore Dalrymple, and reprints older essays of his from time to time. This month the...

We went to the Van Gogh Immersive Experience exhibit at the Strand Theater in Boston today. I recommend it highly, including for children. ...

The Ruffian article linked over at Maggie's, The Banality of Genius reminds me much of Diana Pavlac Glyer's Bandersnatch, discussed...

 

I had an Inklings conference scheduled for mid-March at the Presbyterian Heritage Center in Montreat, NC but it has been postponed to Septem...

What if there was a new disease that never killed you by itself, but undermined enough systems in your body that it made existing weaknesses...

If you were a soldier in 1700, you were most likely a mercenary.  So also in 1300, or 700, or 700 BC, and so on. When your own territory was...