The day of your cancer surgery Buppy Puppy went missing. Her name no longer age-appropriate for a tired old girl of 15, the days of frolicking with you on the farm were over. Uncle Harold looked all over, then declared she probably crawled under the river bluff and died, not wanting to cause a fuss […]
Buppy and Benny: In Memoriam Read More »
MGMT’s first appearance on the music scene was as unexpected as it was uncompromising. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser showed up at a Wesleyan University college party as an inauspicious duo called “The Management,” playing nothing but a continuous loop of the Ghostbusters theme song for hours. The idea was to mock the pop culture music scene, mostly through the
MGMT: The Management Is Still In Charge Read More »
Whenever I discuss the trip I took to Barcelona this past summer, the topic of language always comes up. Nearly everyone asks what Catalan is, having guessed that one would speak Spanish everywhere in Spain. In the case that they have heard of Catalan, they will erroneously consider it a dialect of Spanish. If they
What a Language Means: Catalonia’s Linguistic Pride Read More »
“So what do you think of Trump?” my eighty-eight-year-old father-in-law, Arnie, asked. Internally, I winced. I am under standing orders from my wife, reinforced by kicks to my shin under the table, to never discuss politics with her dad. Then I remembered she wasn’t there. Besides, he asked my son, not me. “He’s the most
Fox News Is an Oxymoron Read More »
As is true for most readers of garden lit, Joel Salatin entered my awareness in 2006 via Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. While I had always been interested in farming and food production, I equated Salatin, a self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic Farmer” with ranching, and so wasn’t compelled, right off, to read his
Joel Salatin (America’s Libertarian Agrarian Intellectual) Reveals His Writing Secrets Read More »
Many of the political disagreements I’ve had with staunch progressive friends end with their telling me I “shouldn’t watch so much Fox News.” Whatever the political topic, I can usually expect this precise dismissal. Apparently, no other explanation than, “You are wrong because… Fox News” is necessary. My other conservative friends and colleagues report similar
Lazy Arguments: On Right-Wing Media Bashing Read More »