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Monthly Archives: June 2022

A haul from the farm stand

Thursday, June 30, 2022

The vegetable gardens are to the left behind the tractor. Here in the middle of nowhere where some people consider Dollar General a grocery store, the best thing that has happened in years is the new farm stand. Two years ago, they started with strawberries. This year they expanded to include summer vegetables. Strawberries and […]

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First Fiona Hill, now Cassidy Hutchinson

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

I have written here in the past about Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who worked in the White House and who gave such brilliant testimony during Trump’s second impeachment. Fiona Hill went on to write a beautiful book, There Is Nothing for You Here. Yesterday, during the sixth of the January 6 committee’s televised hearings […]

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Pity the poor witches

Saturday, June 25, 2022

A Facebook meme The day before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were stories in the media about an effort in the Scottish Parliament to pardon the thousands of witches who were burned at the stake in Scotland between between 1563 and 1736. Earlier this year, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of […]

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No basil yet, but pesto season begins

Saturday, June 18, 2022

Romaine pesto with walnuts After weeding the garden this morning and telling the young basil to grow, grow, grow, I couldn’t get pesto out of my head. So I made pesto from Romaine, because Romaine was what I had. That means that the pesto was still what I would consider a winter pesto. Though the […]

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Avoiding (and detecting) fallacies

Monday, June 13, 2022

The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Albert O. Hirschman. Harvard University Press, 1991. 198 pages. Political discourse is a minefield of fallacy. Whether we are considering the arguments of others, or framing an argument of our own, an undetected fallacy may lead us badly astray. Those who argue in good faith work hard to […]

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Fountain pens

Sunday, June 12, 2022

What was I thinking? I don’t think I had owned a fountain pen since high school. I used to always have a fountain pen, though it always was an inexpensive one. Strangely enough, it was a practical rather than an aesthetic matter that led me to buy a fountain pen. It was that my roller-ball […]

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The justice we’ve been waiting for

Friday, June 10, 2022

For years, our televisions brought us the horror story that was Donald Trump. Last night, our televisions brought us something completely different: an end to the despair that Trump and the Republican Party would inevitably get away with everything. It should now be clear to all that Donald Trump and many others are going to […]

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A surprising new study on older drinkers

Friday, June 3, 2022

This is — no lie — the first martini I’ve ever made. Wine and ale suit me better. Several European newspapers have had stories this week about a new German study which says that older people who are “heavy drinkers” are leaner, healthier, and have a better quality of life. Here’s a version of the […]

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