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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Just Being Part of It.

04-Nov-12

buy Ivermectin Walking around in some of the black neighborhoods of Cleveland I find myself thinking of this Crowded House song: I’m not lying – Or asking for anything – I just want to be there. Doing this kind of work – knocking on doors, most of which don’t get answered – you don’t feel terribly important. […]

Essays on the Inner Life.

09-Oct-12

unconquerably Below is a long (6,000 word) essay that is a mixture of autobiography, psychology, and religion, about my father and what I will call my conversion to Christianity.  I occasionally write essays of this sort, which always cost me great blood and sweat and (in cases like this, many) tears.  But I find them incredibly […]

Identifying Smells and Controlling Impulses.

25-Sep-12

This correlation impresses me: The researchers found that those individuals who scored highly on psychopathic traits were more likely to struggle to both identify smells and tell the difference between smells, even though they knew they were smelling something. These results show that brain areas controlling olfactory processes are less efficient in individuals with psychopathic […]

Mountain Floods and Mountain Life.

21-Sep-12

I spent several days hiking the Devil’s Path this weekend, and when I got back I needed to attend to some internet matters and go to the supermarket.  So I spent the greater part of a day in Liberty, where it was raining very impressively.  I drove back not terribly worried. I didn’t realize that […]

Bear Trashes the Cabin.

02-Aug-12

I returned home in the late afternoon yesterday, feeling a bit tired from a pair of days in the city. The cabin looked fine, but as I came up to the front door I paused – there was a beer can by the front door. I had guests last weekend, and we drank more than […]

Horatian Easychair.

02-Aug-12

Something I have never seen before, an easy-chair whose cover is stitched with quotations from Horace’s Ars Poetica.  “There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”  Unfortunately the shop, in Delhi, New York, where this was seen, was closed.  “It is not enough that poems should be beautiful; […]

Fritz Haber.

23-Jul-12

This is undoubtedly one of the great stories I have come upon recently: Haber, the inventor of fertilizer and hence one of the great benefactors of mankind, also the inventor of chemical weapons.  A thorough tragedy and utterly Faustlike and amazing.  I heard the Radiolab story; other resources are here.

The Richness of Human Life.

15-May-12

Two fifth grade students finished their tests later than the rest of the class and as a result their tests ended up in a different pile from everyone else’s, and when I got to grading them I figured I would skip the scantron – it was only two tests – and grade them by hand. […]

Grafton and the Colleges.

06-May-12

A good read.  The next thing we need is someone to analyze the budgets of these colleges to figure out just what is meant by the political phrase “the rising cost of college.”  It’s not getting more expensive to hire teachers.

Marilynne Robinson.

25-Mar-12

This woman sounds astonishingly promising for a contemporary professional writer.  She has a shot at being interesting.  I’ll find a way for a copy of something she’s written to get into my hands.