Miscellaneous

Taki published a new piece this weekend. He was writing about the westernization that the Nigerian kidnappers are rebelling against. Perhaps the best passage from the piece: > When I first heard the meaning of Boko Haram–the words for the Islamist movement that kidnapped some two hundred girls and

Miscellaneous Rambling Okay, hopefully the cold weather is gone for good. Memorial Weekend is nigh. I'd like to finish off the garden this week, so I can attend to some serious front porch reading. . . . On the docket: Chicks. Simone Weil, a Dorothy Day biography, maybe some Edith Stein.

If you enjoy tribute bands, I doubt you'll find one much better than this one: Marie is out of town this weekend, so I took six of the seven, plus one of their friends. Everyone greatly enjoyed it. Daughter Abbie (an amateur musician) was blown away by the

A new Michael Jackson album was released this week and it contains a track titled "Do You Know Where Your Children Are?" Even worse, the next song is called, "Can You Give Me Directions?"

From Pascal's Pensees: "Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same." Pascal is one of those thinkers I'd like to settle down with for an entire summer: a close reading of the Pensees,

A Chicago priest is offering a $5,000 reward to help stop gun violence. Meanwhile, people with guns just found out about a priest who has $5,000.

In his essay, “The Intimate Abstraction of Paul Valery,” Joseph Epstein writes that Valery spent his life in pursuit of one thing: to understand the functioning of the mind. In his effort, he sought supreme detachment, so he can sit back and contemplate what it is, exactly, that occurs in

During his trip to the White House yesterday, Uruguay's president said that more Americans should be bilingual. Then Joe Biden said, "Thanks, but I'm happily married."

A new study claims that 1 in 10 Americans no longer carry cash. They're called English majors.

Well, another round of cold is about to hit southern Michigan. I'll be hauling my tomato plants in and out of the house for the next five days, which really sucks (15 self-watering containers, five of them holding over ten gallons of dirt each) but everything looked great