The Oath Keepers, a militia group, is (still) in the news, as the Department of Justice and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol continue their work on the scope and causes of that day’s events. “Members of the group brought rifles to the Washington […]
On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan went from being a former B-movie actor to a rising political figure by giving a speech in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. The speech is called “A Time for Choosing,” although in conservative movement circles it is simply referred to as “The […]
A tiny, gnarled apple tree, its trunk curved. A foot-tall banyan tree, holy as a relic. Horror vies with love. I want one of these bonsai trees. Every leaf, every strip of bark is perfect. Enchanted, they belong to a fairy world. Each has two ages, one counted from a […]
Once you have seen it, seen even a photo of it, you will be haunted by it. And maybe that is what it was: a haunting. The demonveggen, or Demon Wall, covers a limestone archway in a small church in Sauherad, in southern Norway. I cannot do better than the Atlas Obscura description: […]
Above the treetops and pitched roofs of our clean, sweet little town, a giant bobble sits atop stilts. I see it from our window, and I would not blame beer-soaked teenagers if they climbed up (careful, though!) to adorn the thing with graffiti. Anything would be an improvement. Now Waterloo (its name rendered a pun […]
Every few years the Mississippi at St. Louis drops enough to reveal the wreck of a WWII minesweeper, the USS Inaugural, lying in a few feet of water, next to the Missouri shore. How it came to be there is a strange story, well worth reading. The River is relatively low now, so […]
I have learned that the highest-grossing film in China is The Battle at Lake Changjin (the Chinese name for the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir), a film about China’s entry into the Korean War, which coincided with one of America’s worst military defeats in the winter of 1950-1951. The Korean War (1950-1953) is largely […]
Stretching, squishing, popping, poking. . . . we are coping with the stress of the apocalypse by playing with slime. There are billions of #slime views on TikTok and YouTube and an array of slime products for sale online: Witches Brew slime for Halloween, Spooky dense butter slime, Elmer’s Fruity Slushie slime (foam beads that […]
I saw No Time to Die yesterday. The much-publicized Lashana Lynch’s turn as the Black 007 was just a bit of PC tokenism. She was a sidekick, and a second-rate one at that, not even offering the hero a comic foil that might have impressed an audience. (This criticism has nothing to do […]
For us mainlanders, islands are vehicles for nervous jokes (how would we survive if stranded on one?) or wild fantasy (Gauguin, fleeing to his sexy tropical paradise). The developed world patronizes anyone who chooses to live cut off from urban convenience and absorbed in a culture all their own. We picture the carefree […]
