HAPPY HALLOWEEN!! Last Halloween I posted about the correlation between monsters and politicians and how Democrats are connected vampires while Republicans are analogous to zombies in the public mind. I explained that when the POTUS is a Democrat the horror de jure becomes vampires, and when the GOP is in the catbird seat zombies… Read more Turns Out It Was Zombies
I married my Sweet Babou sixteen years ago today, on 20 October 2001. Our wedding day had times of sanctity and sacred promises, but also had moments of profound silliness, like when the belly dancers gave us a sheep wearing a garter belt: That day, with its mix of solemn glory and ludicrousness, accurately predicted… Read more Sweet 16
On 17 October 1814 beer vats belonging to the Meux and Company Brewery ruptured at the Horseshoe Brewery, inundating the neighboring streets with a tidal wave more than 15 feet high of more than 323,000 gallons (1,470,000 liters) of alcohol. The aptly named London Beer Flood sounds funny at first, but it was an industrial… Read more Poverty, Beer, and an Act of God
The word chuffed is, in my opinion, one of the most British verbs in existence. It comes from a Tudor term meaning “swollen with fat”, but in today’s parlance it means absolutely swollen with delight. Filled with squee. Full of happiness that something really pleasing happened, often in a very flattering context. Frequently one is… Read more Well, I’m Chuffed
The public funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales took place 20 years ago today, on 6 September 1997. I, along with an estimated two billion other people, watched it on television. I cried. I cried because such a caring mother had been taken away from her little boys who loved her so much. I cried… Read more Thinking of Lady Diana
Yesterday we loaded the three girls into the car and headed out to the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, on the southern end of St Brides Bay, walking all the way out on the Marloes Peninsula to its tip, Wooltack Point, where you can see Skomer Island. Dear Lord, is the coast of Pembrokeshire picturesque. We… Read more Seal Pups and Meerkat Babies!
In October of 2004, National Geographic published an article by Joel K. Bourne, Jr. entitled Gone With The Water that warned what would happen should a hurricane hit New Orleans. The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the… Read more A Perfect Storm: The Submerged Cities at the Nexus of Climate Change, Political Ideology, and Coastal Development
On 12 August 2017, a single white 32-year-old legal assistant and civil rights activist named Heather Heyer was murdered by a radicalized Christian white supremacist terrorist, James Alex Fields Jr, when he drove his car into a crowd of people who were peacefully counter-protesting the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA. A further 19 people… Read more The Slut Shaming of White Women in the Civil Rights Movement
The worst thing about Jane Austen dying on 18 July 1817, when she was only 41 and should have had decades of writing ahead of her, is that those of us – and we are legion – who love her work must be content with the few novels and scattered essays she left us. We… Read more For the Love of Jane Austen, Peeress of Prose
Lice. AKA cooties. My daughters brought home the wee vermin this week in their hair, necessating a thorough saturation of their hair with a mixture of olive oil and a generous portion of tea tree oil. The olive oil smothers cooties and makes it easier to fine-comb them out, and the tea tree oil kills… Read more A Lousy Time Was Had By All