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Post by Russell Letson on May 17, 2024 13:00:35 GMT -5
Those look like sheet metal screws but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were bolts with a washer and nut inside. That’s what I do. And wingnuts--that way you can change out the patches for woods with different acoustic properties--or colors.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 17, 2024 12:22:24 GMT -5
Sound track, off-camera voice: "OK, that fucker's not going anywhere. Looks good, too."
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Post by Russell Letson on May 15, 2024 11:54:05 GMT -5
One of C's university friends keeps giving us bags of frozen strawberries from last year's crop in her home garden. They have way more/more interesting flavor than the giant supermarket kind, and they have led to an increased consumption of gelato and ice cream to put under them.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 13, 2024 11:00:33 GMT -5
I see that I'm not the first to observe that this is not a real estate but a family-dynamics issue. Even in cultures where multi-generation living arrangements are common there are plenty of familial frictions that make things less than pleasant. I got just a hint of that from observing my father's family--it wasn't a single house but a small-town situation in which the three eldest siblings lived within a five-minute walk of my grandparents' home. (In fact, the second daughter lived about 30 yards away, within moderate shouting distance.) My father (fourth oldest and second son), on the other hand, chose to settle seven miles away, and his younger brothers never did come back after military service. I can't imagine what it would have been like to have shared a big home with my domineering grandmother and her pecking-order view of her children--the village-neighborhood version was bad enough. Then there are the stories about my maternal great-grandmother's hold over her youngest daughter, who didn't get free of the big Victorian family home--even after marriage--until great-grandma died. (Incidental irony: after my great aunt's death, the house passed out of the family to her husband, who promptly sold it, and it ended its days cut up into apartments. Sic transit, etc.)
I'm sure that there are sane, harmonious families who could make some version of the multigenerational home work, but I wouldn't expect a frictionless environment in one made up of people raised in our individualist culture. My father's family arrangement is probably as good as might be expected.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 11, 2024 12:36:58 GMT -5
I knew Nygaard mostly as an editor at Acoustic Guitar--and a very good one, too. But this track triggered a memory of seeing him with Anonymous 4 at a concert at St. John's or St. Ben's--I can almost picture the auditorium but can't be sure which one. Google does report that there was a Gloryland tour, so I'm guessing that my memory is not playing tricks on me.
When I looked at Scott's website, I was a bit surprised to see that he's pushing 70--though I shouldn't be, given that my editorial work with him goes back to 1997.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 10, 2024 23:36:15 GMT -5
CNN has been showing gaudy skies as far south as Atlanta and west of us in Grand Forks--but the skies over St. Cloud got nothin', though there's a nice sliver of moon. We feel left out.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 10, 2024 10:13:07 GMT -5
Optimized version of the joke:
"Ever notice how some people take everything personally?"
"I do not!"
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Post by Russell Letson on May 8, 2024 20:11:03 GMT -5
If I didn't already have an ex-Bill Goodall. . . .
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Post by Russell Letson on May 4, 2024 17:00:50 GMT -5
Hmm--this cream seems to have clotted. Smells funny, too.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 4, 2024 16:58:04 GMT -5
What does being "infertile" (which isn't what Goldman really means in his rhetorical flailing) have to do with being "equipped for the coming set of crises"? Would having children help us face the social chaos that climate change promises? With any luck, we will be gone before the worst of it hits*, but if we were twenty years younger, we'd still be in the shit right along with everybody else, with or without children.
If the "current set of young adults" has handicaps in the coping-with-crisis department, they're more likely a matter of lacking practical skills and the kind of education that allows intelligent analysis of conditions (including political conditions--despots love the poorly educated).
* Though it looks like earlier estimates of the arrival of really bad shit were optimistic.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 4, 2024 11:36:17 GMT -5
So, this is a day to celebrate? Maybe they can combine it with Banjo Appreciation Day. 😉🪕🪗 Just add slide whistle.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 3, 2024 16:37:53 GMT -5
This current secularist finds Goldman's lumpy stew of assertions about what various religio-cultural populations think and feel not even halfway convincing. And stuff about "self-doomed, infertile, futureless post-Christians" is particularly strange--and interestingly reminiscent of the ethnic-politics assholes who fear that some other demographic will outbreed (and replace) them. What world does this guy live in? (FWIW, no ethno-cultural group lasts forever unchanged or unabsorbed. "O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark."** Fucking get over it.)
** T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"
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Post by Russell Letson on May 3, 2024 14:50:56 GMT -5
Is that John Gardner as in the author of "Grendel" John Gardner? Yup. He would have become my dissertation director if he hadn't gone off to become a Famous Author.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 3, 2024 13:28:41 GMT -5
LJ: As far as any of us could figure, he was a deeply closeted or perhaps unconscious homosexual--lifelong bachelor with a prayer kneeler in his home library. (Praying for what, I recall wondering when I saw it.) Word was that he never gave a woman student an A--until Cezarija. He also was said to have undercut or driven away every one of his potential mentees. So I doubt that he had the hots for C, or any woman. His acolytes were all men. And he bullied a student of C's that she had sent to Carbondale for grad school to the point that she went to Carnegie-Mellon for her Ph.D. The only dissertation I knew him to have overseen to completion was by a friend ours, a gifted artist and scholar, whose project was an original faux Old English poem. Rainbow (the prof's actual name) gave the go-ahead on it, with the proviso that the poem be treated in full academic-edition manner, with a scholarly introduction and full linguistic impedimenta, meaning a glossary including every word and its grammatical function, just like the Klaeber Beowulf edition. I somehow came across one of the file copies of the finished dissertation, and Jerry had done it up in style. But then, reproducing ancient artifacts was one of his hobbies--he painted the ikonstasis for a local Orthodox church and, for fun, painted a historically-correct Renaissance fresco on another friend's apartment wall. He gave me a tiny practice study for a saint and a Madonna, both with gold-leaf backgrounds, and (for my mother) I commissioned a Byzantine-style Christ (can't recall whether it was a Sacred Heart or a Pantocator--my brother has it now). He also designed the wrap-around dust cover for John Gardner's Life and Times of Chaucer. The figure at the bottom holding a paintbrush is a self-portrait, while John looks out from the middle window on the left. To be fair to Rainbow, he was completely competent and a more-than-decent teacher in his area of medieval linguistics, if a bit stuffily old-fashioned on the literary end--he did not at all resonate with John Gardner's big-tent sensibility. And I think that once he saw me as one of John's students, he soured on me.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 3, 2024 11:28:22 GMT -5
I was introduced to Cezarija at an annual departmental meet-the-new-people reception in 1967--she was one of the new grad students and I was a second-year oldster. She doesn't remember that, but I do. The introducer was the professor who three years later would later go from being my mentor to trying to get me drafted. She recalls us meeting in Old English class that term, taught by that same mentor/traitor. But we got fully acquainted when I provided a Christmas-break ride home for her and two other Pittsburghers. It was a long drive from Carbondale to Pittsburgh back in 1967 (the interstates were not quite finished), and we had a lot of time to talk. By the time I got home, I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to end up. It took a bit longer for C. come to the same conclusion, but by 1970, everybody we knew (including our parents) was saying, "So when are you two going to get married?" So we did, just to shut them up.
(And then the draft notice came, and I filed for CO status, and my mentor sent a letter to my draft board suggesting I be inducted, and we parted company academically, and he tried to fail me out of the doctoral program, and I changed my dissertation area from medieval to science fiction and fantasy and finished anyway, and here we are. We're still married and my ex-mentor, I find, has been dead since 1998.)
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Post by Russell Letson on May 2, 2024 18:14:47 GMT -5
And by what means are Hamas to be beaten? How much collateral damage is acceptable? And who gets to do the accepting? We've been through something like this before, and I don't mean the insistence on unconditional surrender at the end of WW2.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 2, 2024 18:02:34 GMT -5
They knew going in that our government would turn on Israel. It only took them a month or so. And the question that remains begged is an evidence that the majority of the Palestinians weren't in favor of the attack. Still, our government asks Israel to surrender, not Hamas. First, I wouldn't mind seeing some evidence (or analysis) that supports the first bolded phrase. (I've already offered my thumbnail analysis: that Hamas intended to provoke the Israeli government.) Next, I'd like to see some support of the assertion that the US government "turned on" Israel, perhaps including a definition of "turn on." Third, I'm not sure how one would establish the factuality of the other bolded passage--even after establishing that the exact nature of the attack could be presented for approval. Fourth, has the US government actually asked Israel to surrender? The reports I see (AP, Reuters, NBC, ) say that the US is pushing for a cease-fire and release of hostages--for example: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel on Wednesday to press for a cease-fire deal in the Israel-Hamas war, saying “the time is now ” and warning that Hamas would bear the blame for any failure to reach an agreement to halt the war in Gaza.
On his seventh visit since the latest war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October, Blinken is trying to advance a truce that would free hostages held by Hamas in exchange for a halt to the fighting and delivery of much needed food, medicine and water into Gaza. Palestinian prisoners are also expected to be released as part of the deal. apnews.com/article/israel-iran-hamas-latest-05-01-2024-a461b0aab9b8d25cddf386f2dfd30d6fNow, is a "halt to the fighting" as a condition of freeing hostages the same as surrender? Is "warning that Hamas would bear the blame for any failure to reach an agreement" an abandonment of Israel? And how would asking Israel to surrender square with supplying them with the arms they need to continue prosecuting the war? (There is a lack of unanimity on material support in Congress and the general public.)
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Post by Russell Letson on May 2, 2024 16:36:18 GMT -5
The post reads, "The obvious question asked by one lone journalist. It's the most obvious question, but heretofore conspicuously unasked." "Heretofore conspicuously unasked" is an assertion about the public discussions surrounding the Hamas-Israel war, and it is clearly made in a manner that implies neglect or bias on the part of those commenting. Even if "heretofore" is adjusted to the time frame of Lane essay, it's not accurate. Which is not the same as arguing the question of surrender itself. On which I offered no opinion.
In fact, I'd be tickled if Hamas surrendered. Do I think it's at all likely? Nope. Do I think Hamas gives a shit about the fate of ordinary Palestinians, in Gaza or Israel? Nope. Do I think that killing everybody around them is a good way of stopping them? Nope. In fact, I suspect that Hamas did what they did on Oct. 7 precisely to provoke Israel's government into doing what they've done, and that many Hamas fighters and strategists are not only not afraid to die but are quite willing to have uninvolved others die as well. Or as badly.
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Post by Russell Letson on May 2, 2024 16:07:52 GMT -5
One lone journalist? I put "why doesn't hamas surrender" into both Google and DuckDuckGo searches and got back quite a few hits, most of which seem to be dated after the Charles Lane WaPo op-ed (11/15/23), but I don't think he was the first to bring up the topic*. In fact, I did find a thoroughly pro-Israel piece published a week before Lane's, by a Democratic "pollster and political consultant" (according to Wikipedia): thehill.com/opinion/4299596-mellman-to-protect-gaza-civilians-hamas-should-surrender/And just to make things interesting, I came across a 2018 Brookings Institute analysis piece with this observation: Israelis might be tempted to celebrate Hamas’ weakness—it’s hard, after all, to feel sorry for a group that has an avowed intention of killing you and works with Iran, Israel’s arch-enemy. Yet Hamas’ continued control of Gaza also serves Israel’s interests. Hamas is not the worst of the Palestinian groups opposed to Israel. www.brookings.edu/articles/why-israel-is-stuck-with-hamas/* Also: His piece was picked up by Yahoo News, MSN, and The Week
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 30, 2024 17:23:38 GMT -5
Tip for housekeeping: Don't look under the bed. And if you do, use tongs to remove what you find there.
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