Everything considered, it was inevitable. If there’s any surprise, it’s that it hadn’t happened before now.
Then again, maybe it had.
My father died 21,550 days ago, and I still don’t really have him figured out.
If you do the arithmetic and remember leap year days, you’ll find that it works out to 59 years.
Leland Vittert of NewsNation has been making the point for weeks, but when he said it on a radio program Sunday night, a lightbulb came on for me. He was talking about the Iran war, but it might as well have been about our society generally, a society that has forgotten the necessary task of persuasion on matters that matter.
Sometimes it seems as if the universe is warning us against something. Or, perhaps, it is just measuring our determination. Testing us. In “The Once and Future King,” the fine telling of the Arthurian legend that set to music became “Camelot,” T. H. White offered the parable that sometimes bad things happen to keep worse things from happening.
Over the last few years, as frequent readers here know, I’ve taken interest in the lovely, even cute, Japanese culture.
I can remember Mandy Patinkin in various movies of the week on broadcast TV when I was small. Let me say that I definitely grew up with his work, and if it could be said that I love him in a real way, I do.
If the art form known as anime received the attention and credit it deserves, you would already have heard of a series called “The Holy Grail of Eris,” or in romaji Japanese, Erisu no Seihai.
I watched it Tuesday night, all 12 25-minute episodes. It is a masterpiece.
My internet is reliable. Reliable at going down at 7 p.m. every Monday night for years. That’s unfortunate given that I preach a livestreamed sermon every week at that time.
A Farewell To Arms is about as positive as Hemingway is going to get. Frederic Henry is the American protagonist wounded while serving as an ambulance driver. A lieutenant in the Italian army, he lets us see World War I through his eyes.
The mood in the CBS Radio Networks newsroom was grim, depressing, and tense.
There had recently been buyouts, with longtime employees being offered cash and benefits to . . . leave. Many, including longtime employees who didn’t accept the buyouts (or ones who for some reason weren’t offered them), were laid off, never to return.