The Suffolk Punch : Mother Earth News...
Once, a woman came up to Rutledge to scold him for mistreating his horses by entering them in a pulling contest. Feisty as ever, he put his fingers in a circle on the horse's haunch. 'See that?' he asked. 'That's about the size of an Alpo dog food can. That's where this horse would be if he weren't out here. Do you suppose he'd rather be out here pulling and entertaining people or in the Alpo can?' Rutledge has pulled out of contests when he thought the conditions were wrong. 'I don't ever want to hurt these animals.' One of his Suffolks, obtained from another breeder, has a bobbed tail, a cosmetic custom that evidently makes the horses haunches look larger and more powerful. 'That's just plain stupid cruelty,' he explains in anger. 'That's the end of their spinal column those (bleep) people cut off.'

Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world
Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome... good news via fait accompli

Oxyrhynchus Papyri Online

Astronomical Papyri >From Oxyrhynchus

all year i've been keeping track of the nytimes Today in History & can't help notice (from this p.o.v.) what an exceptionally disastrous month april has been...

4.2... wilson asks for a declaration of war... 1917
4.4... m l king, jr. murdered... 1968
4.5... the rosenbergs sentenced to death... 1951
4.8... the death of picasso... 1973
4.12... the death of f roosevelt... 1945
4.13... apollo 13 gets in trouble... 1970
4.14... lincoln assasinated... 1865
4.15... the titanic goes down... 1912
4.16... the texas city explosion... 1947
4.17... the bay of pigs fiasco begins... 1961

maybe a close look at any month will reveal similar strings of sadness and badness... but it seems april has had more than its share... maybe eliot was on to something... or maybe the editors of the nyt are just raining on our parade...

but then, of course, april is the month of my dear mom's birth... so it ain't all that bad

Sherman Alexie

julia keller appreciates ray bradbury...
You can read him at 10 for the thrills; you can read him at 40 or 50 for everything else that waits patiently in great fiction -- thoughtfulness, poignancy, life's sadness and its rhyming joys, a deep-scooping sense of wonder, the everlasting awe.

a pretty good day with the paper pile

Getting Along with Animals: Wendell Berry on being a good stockman

IMF / World Bank - Joseph Stiglitz...
I watched carefully what the IMF had done, the mistakes that it had made in crisis countries in East Asia, Latin America, Africa and the economies in transition. The mistakes were sufficiently frequent that they clearly weren?t just an accident ? as an academic you look for patterns.

just back from the school's production of Annie... which i've never ever seen completely in any of its various incarnations... but whose tunes i seem to have known forever... i remember when it opened in d.c. before broadway... remember seeing tiny black & white video on the street... or somewhere... at any rate...

i'm taking one student's wise advice and flushing my head with a good loud dose of beck's guero... not that the play was bad... it was quite good... but it takes some strong medicine to counteract the cute tunefulness of "maybe"... "it's a hard-knock life"... and the inescapable "tomorrow"...

the show was packed wif wonderful stuff... here at carmel - as in lake woebegone - all our teachers are good-looking... and all our kids are above average...

LA Weekly: Style: Full Mental Jacket... Despite an increasingly compromised world of pop-graphic mediums, book-jacket design remains diverse and thriving.

Secret Rendezvous cover design

John Gall on Systems... A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked*A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

The Uncertainty Principle by John Gall... To ask the question is to see the answer, almost immediately. It is the element of Paradox, to which we have already alluded. Things not only don't
work out well, they work out in strange, even paradoxical ways. Our plans not only go awry, they produce results we never expected. Indeed, they often produce the opposite result from the one intended.

Lexington Herald-Leader | 04/14/2005 | A mountain of an issue
I want it to show what the entire mountaintop removal process looks like from the beginning to the end, from an intact forest to essentially a Western desert...

always enjoyed John Gielgud... today is his 101st birthday... yesterday i linked to the pinter page on No Mans Land... that was my only live encounter with gielgud... the play was in new york but came south to d.c. for a brief stint... gielgud and richardson... at the kennedy center.... a very good day

seniors learned today that their vote yesterday leads to a project instead of a semester exam... project: relate works we've read all semester to calvino's structures in invisible cities...

right now they are in groups of three discussing the five cities within a selected calvino category... this class:: sky, desire, eyes, trading, continuous, hidden... some good conversation... they seem to be looking closely and carefully...

No Man's Land

Silliman's Blog reviews wendell berry's new book of poetry... i'm guessing he's got an advance review copy... lucky bugger... a brief (for rs) thought-full review

o to be in barcelona in the spring

Keep on Having a Happy Birthday, Mom!

Over-priced Cat Buddha... but kinda cool

Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip... lots of good stuff here

Ray Wood

Until the end of the 19th century, all the physical labor of
maintaining a household still had to be done by hand.

The Cult of Domesticity

Braidwood, Illinois - Wikipedia

Early Days of Coal Mining in Northern Illinois

Illinois Coal Mining Towns on Route 66

Braidwood, Illinois

they were lucky to be born in your company...

Happy Birthday, Mom!

norman birnbaum's sober comment on the jp2 papacy appears in the print edition of The Nation... not available online... An Ambiguous Papacy... one bit: on future prospects: Loving concern for the earth and its inhabitants, refusal to accept inequality and abhorrence for violence are themes on which philosophical antagonists can unite, but first their philosophical differences will have to be confronted in dialogue. It is difficult to see how Catholics can engage in that dialogue with secular progressives, and with other world religions, if dialogue in their own church is so attentuated. so... where's the spirit of j23 when we need it?