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Topic

Essay

A collection of 206 issues

Friday

BYCU Man, BYCU blogging is almost too easy this week: Halloween is now a big drinking night, as evidenced by this infographic [http://scramsystems.com/blog/2014/10/scary-truth-halloween-drinking/#.VEzmQPnF-So] . There are many sites dedicated to boozy Halloween costumes, Halloween parties, and Halloween drinks. But it&

Tuesday

Zombie Me Dien Ho asks, What's So Bad About Being A Zombie? [https://philosophynow.org/issues/96/Whats_So_Bad_About_Being_A_Zombie] This passage, especially the last line, cracked me up: > [T]he life of a zombie has characteristics many of us strive mightily to

Friday

BYCU I hung out at Central Michigan University quite a bit when I went to school at Alma College in the 1980s. These days, I only get back there when I go to Soaring Eagle, Michigan's first indian casino and one of the few in the lower peninsula

Thursday

Ruminations on the Fall of Rome Belloc wrote, “The Catholic Church was the only subsidiary organism that had risen within the general body of the Roman Empire.” Belloc's idea that the Catholic Church was an organism that grew out of the organism of the Empire is important. Combine

Friday

BYCU Back in my beer-drinking days, I loved keg beer. Whenever I helped set up for a party, I was in charge of putting the tap on and getting the foam out . . . a job I attacked with white-mustached zest. When I went to the bar, I always asked,

Montaigne and Our Silliness

William James' stream of consciousness, that fundamental fact of our existence that cannot be stopped (we "think" like we breathe, not like we walk or fish or watch TV . . . thinking cannot be stopped) "explains without moralizing what that wonderful self-observer Montaigne found as the chief

Friday

BYCU (Kinda) Even though I converted in 1991, which, I think, was the height of Mother Angelica's popularity, I never listened to her. Partly, it's because I rarely watched any TV back then, but partly out of arrogance. Mother Angelica, I vaguely felt, was for the

Friday

BYCU I never knew this: "With more breweries per capita than any U.S. city, Asheville, N.C., has become a sort of Napa Valley of beer." Of course, the bigger boys now want some of the action, too: "Outsiders have noticed that Asheville's locally

BYCU

BYCU I'm still catching up on good TDE leads I received last year. I should've ran this one a long time ago: Renewed interest in sour beer [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/07/sour-beer-cantillon-a-brief-history.html] . It's

Monday

Nock Notions “The decade 1887-97 was one of the most extraordinary periods in all the history of America's fantastic civilization; even the period 1929-39 can do but little more than match its bizarre eccentricities. . . . Free silver, the initiative, referendum and recall; farmer-labourism, votes-for-women,