Here’s another unattributed fragment from American Wit and Humor: “Soon after [later] Chief Justice Chase assumed the gubernatorial chair in Ohio, he issued his proclamation appointing a Thanksgiving Day. To make sure of being orthodox, the governor composed his proclamation almost entirely of passages from the Bible, which he did […]
This is an unatrributed fragment in a little book I picked up called American Wit and Humor. The title page is missing, but it appears to be from the late 1800s. The unsigned preface states that the fragments are culled from newspapers and magazines. So it appears unlikely that we […]
I got these cool wire sculptures for my birthday from my brother Shady. They’re designed to fit on a wall mount, and you can change the sculptures and make new ones. I like these faces.
My friend Harold and I have been going to the UMass basketball games, so we’re hardcore fans, but everybody agrees Chaz Williams is one of the most exciting players in college basketball. He’s listed at five-foot-nine, but he’s actually about five-six and he tears around the court as if the […]
Let’s hear it for the Comparative Breakfast Club! The whole point is you don’t have to have any special news, you just say what you had for breakfast. I got the idea from a play John Alsop and I staged at Groton School called The Feast. I have a video […]
It is well known that Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd consulted a medium after the death of their son Willie, who died at the age of eleven. The medium they consulted was Mrs. Cranston Laurie, the wife of a statistician in the Post Office Department. Lincoln also consulted […]
I gather up the bark and wood chips as I go through my woodpile from Lashway Logging. I get twenty or thirty of these baskets every year. I throw a bunch of it in the stove and make a log fire on top of it.
There’s no greater challenge than trying to sculpt the sublime contours of the human form. For my medium, I chose tag sale clothing and plastic grocery bags. It takes a lot of them.
I went to a lecture about by Jim Vieira, a stonemason from Ashfield, about stone chambers in New England. The notice I saw mentioned a similarity to a stone structure in Ireland, and I was hoping to hear at last about an Atlantic connection in the prehistory of America. I […]
I’m really enjoying The Armada (1959) by Garrett Mattingly. It’s a great story, of course, an epic, and Mattingly really does a superb job with it, giving telling portraits of the characters and adding lots of interesting details. I guess that’s why it won the Pulitzer Prize. One of that […]