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.
I actually read this novella a few years back, in preparation for teaching it to my ninth grade students. I have an Audible version, narrated by the great Donald Sutherland, may he rest in peace.
You might have heard of an article published by Reuters late last week in which after extensive research and what I guess they’d call shoe-leather detective work they identified the famous British stencil-graffiti artist known as “Banksy.”
If there is anything as embarrassing as confessing one’s sins it has to be confessing one’s stupidities.
Yet here we are. Instead of describing how well my cool new Starlink-based phone-internet setup is coming together, I’m obligated to detail how I fell for a swindle so obvious that there’s no escaping the fact that my mind must have got disengaged for a while.
A few hours away from me you can visit Silver Dollar City — a scenic, wooded theme park in the Ozark Mountains where craftspeople blow glass and mill flour 19th-century style. It’s charming and memorable. It’s also not the way I buy glassware or food normally.
Okay, yes, it was my fault that the propane ran out before I ordered a refill. It was not my fault, though, that the internet went down, forcing me to watch a bit of the Olympics.
People love this year’s Budweiser commercial. I get it: it’s beautifully filmed and feels good when so much is angry, ugly or both. It is also real to a surprising degree: the commercial was filmed with cameras, not constructed with computers.
As it turns out, if it snows a lot, then rains a little on top of it, it won’t go away until things get warmer.
That’s my theory, anyway. I won’t be able to say for sure until things get warmer, if they ever do. Hope is found in it always having gotten warmer before. But we live in strange and troubling times.