RIP, my Kurtz and Ensign Yes, Rest in Peace, Mom and Dad. Those names were the pseudonyms I gave them seven years ago in my journals about their final years on this planet. Less than a year after their passing six months apart, their children were distributing their effects, selling their things and splitting their […]

Vic, Here are some postscripted thoughts on this gent. When my riding brother passed the age of 70 many years ago, he had one of the best minds of all my acquaintances. It had not been destroyed by madness, frailty of the body, or starved hysterically naked into clicking endlessly on digital internet ads or […]

In between college football game telecasts this past Saturday, I mindlessly surfed through the web and cable news networks. There on several of these feeds overtalked by outraged news readers and writers at opposite ends of the political spectrum was a woman sitting in the lap of the Lady Justice statue in front of the […]

The number of No votes on US Supreme Court nominees since 1900: Bork (Reagan) 58 Haynesworth (Nixon) 55 Carswell (Nixon) 51 Kavanaugh (Trump) 48 Thomas (GHW Bush) 48 Gorsuch (Trump) 45 Alito (GW Bush) 42 Parker (Hoover) 41 Kagan (Obama) 37 Rehnquist (Reagan) 33 [Chief Justice Vote in ’86] Is there an underlying pattern here? […]

G.K. Chesterton wrote the following a century ago, but it strikes me as relevant to the Kavanaugh hearing that I followed yesterday. “One of those wise old fairy tales, that come from nowhere and flourish everywhere, tells how a man came to own a small magic machine like a coffee-mill, which would grind anything he […]

The lone wolf that plagues the Catholic Church — sexual appetite Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, a universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power Must make perforce a universal prey, And last eat up himself. – Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Act 1 Scene 3 For many decades of my […]

Contented with the first morning’s discoveries, I came back to camp with goose in hand and fell to work to bring it to an edible state. Being a city boy, this took up a lot of that morning and afternoon. As I plucked and examined that day’s bounty, I knew what lay ahead of us […]

After a month on the road to see family, here’s another installment. Back in the 1980s, he opined that computer scientists would succeed in developing intelligent machines that could do all things better than human beings could do them and that man might be eliminated by them or their controlling elites. What follows are his […]

Most of our neighbors belong to a floating population, largely northerners, who turn up in town with job offers, rent then buy places in need of fix-up, stay for the most part a year or three or five, then decamp — often suddenly to be closer to family or the next job. They are of […]

We didn’t want to bug out to an out-of-the-way rock outcropping with too few of the things we needed since we snatched them up at the last moment from the house and from local stores. The best thing we could do we decided was to plan and pack carefully for a new life in the […]