In Austria, 206 years ago this Christmas Eve, one of the most enduring religious (as opposed to secular retail) Christmas songs was sung for the first time. In Athens, Ohio, 10 years ago, I did what I used to do every year after Christmas Eve midnight Mass (no longer held at midnight, I’m sad to say). Savoring, yes, the silence of the night, I would take a long walk through town, breathing it all in and thinking of a place now all buttoned up for (as Clement Moore put it in a poem published five years after the introduction of “Silent Night”) “a long winter’s nap.” Students mostly gone home, residents in their houses enjoying their own Christmas traditions, there were quiet and peace.
In my elementary school, we weren’t given grades of A B C D F as was the standard before and since. Instead, New Haven R-II school employed a different set of letters that meant the same thing. They were E S M I F. I have no idea how this came to pass, but I hope it was because some person seeking a doctorate in education realized that his dissertation was due tomorrow and he had nothing. Frankly, I could get behind that kind of education theory. Beats modern pedagogy, anyway.
It’s important, I think, to begin by saying that I’m writing this on my television, as I sit on the couch 10 feet away and use a wireless keyboard.
Yes, it is a stunt, but one in service of point. In that respect, it’s a little bit like the old television ads that began, “We’ve replaced the coffee in this fine restaurant with Folger’s Crystals to prove a point.” In this case, though, the point is not that even if you have enough money to dine above your station, your tastes are still probably those of a field hand.
Here we are, at sort of the end of the beginning of the spending orgy that starts the annual accumulation of debt in honor of the birth of Jesus. While the season should involve debt, it’s not the kind that can be redeemed by money and not the kind owed to the credit card company.
Most every publication in the country has run at least one column or “lifestyle” story this month about how to get along with relatives on Thanksgiving even though they are evil fascists. (To which I’d add, or football fans.)
Was it fate or just the path of least resistance? It’s been 20 years and I still don’t know.
In the autumn of 2004 circumstances too long and boring to explain gave me the opportunity to live pretty much anywhere I wanted. There was no particular reason, no special interest, leading me to one place over another.
The internet and phone went out Halloween night. There was a light rain, and with Frontier Communications that’s all it takes. The rain doesn’t need to be local. As long as it is raining, or someone sneezes, anywhere in the world, Frontier Communications internet and phone service is likely to fail.
If you look around or listen, you’ll hear the newly minted cliché that the Democratic Party is now engaged in soul searching after it got hammered yesterday, top to bottom, by voters who did not like what it was selling.
If all goes well, we’ll awaken a week from today to the ghastly thought that we’ll be listening to that voice for the next four years. I say if all goes well, because if the election is as close as the predictors say it will be — sooner or later, just by chance, they will be right — this thing could drag on for months, or it could result in instant rioting. I say that voice because no one who should be allowed to run free can stand the sound of either of the presidential candidates.
There was a time, longer ago than most of us who remember it would like to admit, when most people in the country could identify the three national television news anchors. Well, except for ABC; at the time it seemed as if ABC could not identify its own anchor.