[Alfalfa, of the Our Gang comedies, sings of his love for sweet little round-faced, soft-focus Darla. And yes, I know: the song title doesn't have that extra syllable in it. :)] Whom, exactly, do you try to impress? Note that I’m not asking about classes or groups of people. Most of us would like to [...]

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When my siblings and I were kids, at some point Mom and Dad bought us a huge collection of LPs of music of all sorts — a passive music-appreciation course, of sorts, for kids in a small town. The entire set arrived in a cardboard box which none of us (but Dad) could lift. Each [...]

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Yesterday, Granta magazine kicked off a new collective-memory project called “Nostos Algos.” From a publicity release which just made its way to my Inbox: The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from the Greek words nostos (‘a homecoming’) and algos (‘pain, grief, distress’). We have all known the desire to return to another place or time, and the [...]

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[Image: backglass from a new(ish) pinball game by Stern, currently available from Premier Amusements] From whiskey river‘s archive (a/k/a the commonplace book): A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. “Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?” he asks. “No,” replies the colleague, “but I’ve [...]

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[Twenty-year-old Dad-to-be applies an arc-welding torch to a tank, somewhere in Europe, 1944-45. Handwritten caption on back: It's me again. Actually working. I told you so!] For years, this has been a psychologically complicated few days — at least for those of us in my family given to psychological complication. In no particular order: Dad’s [...]

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[For information about this photo, called "Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida," see the Note at the bottom of this post.] From whiskey river: Adrift Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake loose. Let me be drowned, bap­tized, in the light given me. Day comes around, night, fall, win­ter, spring, sum­mer. Leaves over­head, under­foot. Waves arrive, buf­fets from [...]

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As some of you on Blogger-based weblogs may know, a fraction of those sites recently had to convert from a particular old technology to a newer one. The owners of affected blogs received a series of email notifications from Blogger tech support, and by now any such sites have been converted over to The New [...]

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I’ve been trying to come up with something… different to do for this blog’s second anniversary. And then along comes Google, with its wacky “Search Stories Video Creator” for YouTube. The Video Creator’s first page gives you up to six search boxes, into which you enter search terms — presumably forming some sort of “story [...]

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In a recent blog post, loyal friend of RAMH Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.* I no longer have any idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output [...]

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The scene: the living room of a rustic but solidly built house in Vermont, with a gorgeous view spread beneath and a Green Mountainside above. It is a summer morning, and the sun is still low but bright and cheerful. The Guest and The Erstwhile Missus are there at the invitation of D—, a colleague [...]

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