I finished Plutarch’s life of Romulus, which reads a lot like one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Just as Kipling mythologizes animal history such as how the leopard got its spots or how the camel got its hump, Plutarch explains the beginnings of Roman history, including such tidbits as why fast people are said to have celerity, why lawyer-client privilege exists, and even why the bridegroom carries his new […]
Failblog amuses me. So when I saw the following sign at the grocery store, I knew I needed to snap a picture with my phone and submit it to Failblog. If this picture makes you grin, click here to vote for the photo so that it will appear on Failblog. If not, well, never mind.
Periodically I’ll pick up Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis and read a few chapters. (Ironically, he wrote the book before being surprised in late life by finding love and marriage in the person of Joy Gresham.) Today I was delighted to find that Lewis’ perspective on getting new books was very similar to my own. He loved to order them and have them arrive in the mail, much […]
I’m a little bit freaked out after this morning’s intellectual endeavor. I’m listening to a Teaching Company course entitled How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by an entertaining Berkeley professor named Robert Greenberg. He describes concert halls as “reanimation studios” where music from the past is brought back to life. In lecture two the discussion centers on music from the ancient world, specifically Greece. Greenberg tells about a […]
This year for the first time I let The Boy participate in the school science fair. I never did it before because science fairs for little kids are a lot of work for their parents, and I wasn’t sure he’d get anything out of it anyway. Now that he’s in second grade I thought we’d give it a whirl. I wanted to do a cooking experiment, and The Boy was […]
I’m enjoying The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs as my bedtime reading. At the age of 35, Jacobs embarked on a “humble quest to become the smartest person in the world,” something he figured he could do by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from a-ak to zywiec. What is it about being halfway to 70 that makes one feel a sudden need to go on a knowledge quest? I don’t […]
The re-start of school and all the fresh promise of a new year have me hankering to get back to my intellectual improvement through reading the classics. I picked up Plutarch’s Lives this afternoon (current month’s reading in my Great Books group) and dug into the life of Theseus. He was the mythical founder of Athens and probably is best known for slaying the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature, in […]
We’re a couple of days into 2010 already, but hey, I didn’t resolve to stop procrastinating. We had a lovely time at a New Year’s Eve party at our neighbors’ house. They graciously invited the four of us to join them and some of their longtime friends in an evening of revelry. By my count 11 kids were there in addition to parents, 10 stayed up until midnight, and, unexpectedly, […]
Flabby Brain 