Archives in Category: Things to Ponder

Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

Oxymorons

Posted on May 6, 2024

Oxymorons are everywhere. Earl recently gave me some, and my son Kevin and I have had more than one laugh about them.

By definition, according to one Richard Nordquist (whose credentials I didn’t check, but he seemed erudite enough) an

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Mending Wall

Posted on April 30, 2024

I’ve always been struck by Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” about the spring ritual of two neighbors meeting to repair the stone wall that divides their properties. There are so many things about the poem to ponder. To read the

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Time . . . to go

Posted on April 23, 2024

I’ve subscribed to “Time” magazine for decades. At first, when it was in its heyday before there was instant news, I looked forward to its drop in my mailbox every week. It was contemporary, informative, and succinct.

But that was

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Connections

Posted on April 19, 2024

The NY Times offers a game called “Connections” every morning for free. In other words, you don’t have to subscribe to the paper to play, but I imagine it’s something like a loss leader in grocery stores. You get hooked

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Vacations

Posted on April 18, 2024

I’ve been home from Boston about 24 hours and have begun to assume the mantle of my daily life in Benton Harbor. It’s a comfortable life: we have more money than month; we’re entering the most gorgeous time of the

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FrankenSteinway

Posted on April 1, 2024

You’ve heard of them: the leaders in the piano world. Steinway, Baldwin, Yamaha, Kawai. And, if you got the money, Bosendorfer. You’ve heard of the second tier: Everett, Essex, and Celviano. Maybe others too.

But if you’ve ever heard or

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Black Forest

Posted on March 23, 2024

Last night we had dinner at the Black Forest, a German restaurant about a mile from where M lives. It was obvious that Earl, who is German, was in his glory with potato pancakes, pate, sausages, red cabbage, mashed potatoes,

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Beware

Posted on March 15, 2024

Today is the Ides of March, the day in the ancient Roman calendar that fell on March 15. There are a variety of explanations for the Ides surviving to the twenty-first century, but the most famous is that Julius Caesar

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Statistics

Posted on March 4, 2024

Yesterday’s essay on baseball contained a serious mathematical error. And since baseball is all about statistics, I feel compelled to correct it. I noted that the MLB package Earl and I purchased each season enabled us to watch a game

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Cubes

Posted on March 1, 2024

It’s not a crisis on the level of governmental intervention, but it is a personal antidote to the problems of the world right now. While Hungary, Israel, the United States, and other sovereignties duke it out, I’m studying cubes.

Not

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