Stopped in at my local office-supplies megastore for some printer ink cartridges. Total expenditure: $47.78. Total length of printed receipt: 341/2 inches"nearly a yard. Most of that yard was a Rebate Redemption Form. Had I taken the trouble to fill it out, I would have received a time- and ...
Somewhere in the London Daily Mirror's billionfold archives is a photograph taken in February 1964 and published in that estimable newspaper of a small but enthusiastic crowd of Londoners on the Soviet Embassy's grounds in Britain’s capital city. They had assembled to greet Valentina ...
Get yer hankies out. Here is the tale of little Emily Ruiz, four years old, the victim, according to her attorney, of “a tragic injustice.” Little Emily is the daughter of Leonel and Brenda Ruiz, illegal immigrants from Guatemala who live in Brentwood, Long Island. She has a brother, ...
Mention of Libya always makes me think of Joe Orton, I’m sorry to say. Does anyone remember Joe Orton? The people maintaining that website clearly do, though mainly it seems as a “gay icon,” a thing Orton would have hated. He was actually a British playwright briefly famous in ...
With the nation broke, Congress snoozing, and the president dithering, what we need is a laugh. Here are two offerings of different kinds of humor. My own taste"English Lad Crude & Silly"inclines me more toward the first offering: Indian pop lyrics. Here’s a catchy little number ...
Last week was the 70th anniversary of the Café de Paris bombing during the London Blitz of 1940-41. By March of 1941 most Londoners had learned to take shelter underground when the air-raid sirens went off. Among the capital’s young moneyed swells and débutantes, however, was an element ...
Churchgoing New Englanders in the early settlements normally heard two sermons every Sunday"one in the morning and another in the afternoon, each at least two hours long. There was no heat in these buildings. They were bitterly cold in winter. It was a point of honor for the minister never to ...
The world beyond our shores seems to be entering a zone of dangerous instability. Five years from now we may be looking back nostalgically at the decades 1980-2010 as an age of blessed tranquility when unsightly but skillful autocrats such as Mubarak (Egypt), Gaddafi (Libya), Ben Ali (Tunisia), ...
In the penultimate chapter of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, our narrator is reviewing a list of the ships mustered in orbit around his base planet preparatory to a major assault: Big ships"the new Valley Forge and the new Ypres, Marathon, El Alamein, Iwo, Gallipoli, Leyte, ...
Among innumeracy's great heroes must be reckoned Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Sir Winston. Shown a column of figures that included decimal points, His Lordship grumbled, “I never could make out what those damn dots meant.” Since Lord Randolph was Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., ...
