Germany has been rocked by scandal this past week, as Helene Hegemann, the 17-year old writer of an astonishing novel called Axolotl Roadkill, has been shown up by Munich blogger Deef Pirmasens (Gefühlskonserve) to have lifted whole passages of her book from the writings of one Airen, a blogger in Berlin. Her publisher had asked [...]
J.D.Salinger died yesterday.
“I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete – that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theater Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about [...]
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
John Ray (1670) cited as a proverb “Hell is paved with good intentions.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153): “Hell is full of good intentions or desires.”
On Christmas Day the 23-year-old “Underwear Bomber” tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253. Priviledged, rich, well-connected, educated, and so completely [...]
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991) is pronounced “Zeus” in English, like the Greek god. And he is a, if not the, godhead in the pantheon of English literacy. In a hilarious reading of Green Eggs and Ham, the Rev. Jesse Jackson called him a “latter-day saint”. He was a third-generation German-American who grew up [...]
Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne (Illustrations by E.H. Shepard) is the first book I remember having read to me. Every character rings true, every scene feels right. As a child I dragged my stuffed animal behind me just like Christopher Robin did his, and perfectly understood the “thump, thump, thump” of Winnie ther [...]
Movers and shakers are people who initiate change and influence events, now most often applied to the rich and powerful in politics and business. The public perception of the term began after the first performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s choral work The Music Makers, in 1912. The work is a setting of Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s 1874 [...]
Nobody spotted the dwarf yesterday, eh? Pity, such a sweet little one, I wonder where George found him. Now for advent calendar day 5:
“Eat your words!” (Nimm alles zurück!) … and Milo does. The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) takes him into a parallel world where you have to eat words to use them. — I’m always [...]
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Created by Philip Norton