http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090409/wl_nm/us_italy_quake

The Vatican's No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, will preside at a funeral in L'Aquila for the victims on Friday, which required a special dispensation because mass is not usually celebrated on Good Friday ( Read more... )

Municipal elections are about six weeks away, here in Jersey City. Two days ago, as I was coming up out of the PATH, I saw a truck parked alongside the curb, at the corner of Grove Street and Christopher Columbus Drive. On one side of the truck was an enormous TV screen, and the screen was showing an image of Obama giving a speech. He was ( Read more... )

As a follow-up to an earlier entry, I've since thought of another four words that are spelled identically to their proper noun counterparts, only without the initial uppercase letter, and could conceivably lure someone into challenging you on their validity, if you played them in a game of Scrabble ( Read more... )

As I approached the Grove Street PATH stop this morning, I saw something I'd never seen before: a small group of people (one man and two women, all middle-aged) reminding commuters that today was Ash Wednesday. They had extra big crosses on their foreheads, and they had pamphlets to hand out. (I guess I should've gotten one, just to see what it was ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to post this photo of a shopfront (the Pier One Imports on Fifth Avenue) for some time now. Kendell took it on November 2nd, but the poster and display you see here were both present at least a week before Halloween.


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Lots of cheers and whoops of joy audible on 23rd Street, despite our being about two miles from Times Square...

You know how, right around Valentine's Day, you hear people and see newspaper columns complaining about how hard that day is for single people to endure, and how much it aggravates them, and forces them to feel left out of the big lovefest going on, etc., etc ( Read more... )

Or: proper nouns that aren't ( Read more... )

Ever find your life enhanced by a small success out of all proportion to that success's actual worth ( Read more... )

Remember my Russian coworker who collects odd examples of phonograph technology? He showed me another cool one today: the Mikky Phone (some kind of pun off "microphone"?). It was a portable record player. But, he hastened to add, it was only one of many such models that have existed, and by no means the smallest of them ( Read more... )