cafard

49 ms·

781.
by cafard 3y ago
This didn't work out all that well for the US Selective Service 55 years ago and more.
782.
by cafard 3y ago
I have a really hard time seeing either 100 Years of Solitude or Catch 22 as hard to read.
783.
by cafard 3y ago
From the NY Times obituary of Tom Jones, writer of the book for the long-running musical "The Fantasticks": """ As Mr. Jones put it in his memoir, "Sometime during my sophomore year at Coleman High School, I be
784.
by cafard 3y ago
For the most part, I choose books where I know at least the author's reputation. I am willing to leave a nonfiction book unread or partly read if it doesn't seem worth my time. One exception is for books chosen (by others) for the
785.
by cafard 3y ago
The art world, or the art market? I can see a historian of art finding interest in an artists doodles. But would the acquisitions arm of a museum want them, unless part of its mission was to serve historians?
786.
by cafard 3y ago
Dialogue? I suppose the FDR had better writers, and was better at sticking to his scripts. But there were a lot of people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" rather than use his name. And Edmund Wilson quoted some
787.
by cafard 3y ago
I can think of two rails-to-trails projects in my area. The first is the old Georgetown Spur, running from about the Silver Spring Metro station to the old C&O Canal towpath. That right of way was never used for passenger trains, it ser
788.
by cafard 3y ago
This doesn't happen just down on the coastal plain. There are plenty of aquifers on the piedmont that were open streams until someone filled them in. Walk around the neighborhoods and you can spot houses that are leaning or have been j
789.
by cafard 3y ago
The comment you replied to refers to the Russian Revolution after WWI. The damage inflicted by WWI greatly damaged the Tsarist regime. (And, no war, no German government shipping Lenin back home.)
790.
by cafard 3y ago
The Russian performance in Ukraine hasn't been astonishing, but the losses don't compare to 1914-1917.
791.
by cafard 3y ago
What would be the status of those six million refugees (not to mention those who haven't left) under the Russian regime?
792.
by cafard 3y ago
In the 1950s, there were British "Teds" who affected the clothing of the Edwardian days forty years before. Some of them, I guess, were thugs. But deliberate anachronism isn't entirely new.
793.
by cafard 3y ago
The ones I encounter (on robo-calls to my cell phone) seem to be cheap IVR programs that march happily along through inconsequential answers.
794.
by cafard 3y ago
The joke goes way back. But decisions affect careers--those who have invested eight or ten years of post-secondary education hope to find a forty-year career. There is not (by banker's standards) a lot of money involved, but it is a bi
795.
by cafard 3y ago
I assume that in Europe and America the prohibition of divorce comes from Christianity, deriving from Matthew 19.
796.
by cafard 3y ago
Fifty years ago, when I had nothing to do with the tech industry, I knew that IBM made computers. I didn't know what those computers looked like or who used them, but I knew they made them.
797.
by cafard 3y ago
Doesn't that assume that you will sell or trade in that vehicle after some years? If you drive it until you can't maintain it, the 15% seems less relevant.
798.
by cafard 3y ago
Back in the early 1970s, Boulder, Colorado, had a referendum on restricting housing starts. It was pitched as an environmental thing, and it probably got help from the students at the University of Colorado. The referendum passed with absol
799.
by cafard 3y ago
They might accomplish more by hacking banks in Cyprus and putting the data out there.
800.
by cafard 3y ago
Having been paid a tipped wage, I have for half a century tipped 20%, almost invariably without regard to the service. For the first thirty years, this was thought to be on the generous side, now I guess I'm a piker. I will say that on
801.
by cafard 3y ago
Or maybe they are the youngest cohort now in the workforce and so get the least interesting jobs and the least slack. Soul of a New Machine quotes Tom West saying (roughly), The problem with brain-dead jobs is that you go home too tired t
802.
by cafard 3y ago
Can the NY Post do something more on the paragraph scale?
803.
by cafard 3y ago
I take that to be enabled by the English rules on libel. As far as I know, Americans are limited to striking people off party lists (Quinn v. Buckley), veiled threats of fisticuffs (Mailer v. Simon) and letters of complaint--what Paul Fusse
804.
by cafard 3y ago
Only Americans can fight a secret war with massive publicity. Wikipedia confirms what I thought was the case, that the AVG's first encounters with the enemy occurred a couple of weeks after Pearl Harbor, which had removed the uses of s
805.
by cafard 3y ago
Was this the case involving Alice Sebold? The man was cleared, but I don't remember whether DNA evidence was involved.
806.
by cafard 3y ago
Chateaubriand ended up broke and recouped as best he could by selling his memoirs. One might forgive him for a certain amount of padding, and there is plenty of padding to forgive. He was remarkably unreliable. If memory serves, none of his
807.
by cafard 3y ago
First, doesn't this assume that Dvoracek was in fact a spy, deserter, etc.? Second, should we give Lewis Strauss a pass for his treatment of Oppenheimer on account of the Cold War? (Edit: I know nothing about the Dvoracek case, having
808.
by cafard 3y ago
"but also in his determined ‘erasures’ of past writing, be it private letters, early poetry or inconvenient passages in reissued essays and novels." It occurs to me that there are a couple of stories in The Book of Laughter and F
809.
by cafard 3y ago
I live in Washington, DC. Two or three times a week on the neighborhood listserv there is an email asking whether anyone got the sender's package. Some of the problem is certainly theft, but I doubt all of it is.
810.
by cafard 3y ago
Lubeck has an excellent museum of the Hanseatic League. My recollection is that the portion dealing with the years after about 1500 were almost perfunctory compared to the richness for earlier years. Those who actually know Lubeck will feel

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