Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

With Berlin’s mercury at 88 degrees (Fahrenheit) and forecast to stay up there through Monday, don’t expect much energy-expenditure from me today, sitting here buck-nekkid and still sweating, but I’ve just made an important discovery about what’s struck me for years as the website of all websites, and I urge you to poke around into its remotest cranny and nook, for it truly does offer a veritable fountain of wisdom, on a six-days-a-week basis – and totally free of charge!

Its generous provider explains these riches: a journal rather intimidatingly called “The Chronicle of Higher Education” – but don’t expect some dry publication you might well prefer to avoid, especially on a hot summer day.  It would take too much time and space here for me to list all the goodies ready and waiting for you there, but six times a week it judiciously picks out individual articles its editors regard as especially valuable to the kind of person that curmudgeonly critic B. H. Haggin aimed at years ago when he published a book he entitled “Music for the Man [sic] Who Enjoys ‘Hamlet’”.

I’ve long paid reasonably close attention to its bountiful array of Anglophone newspapers and magazines, but just now – after years of having http//www.aldaily.com (the A and L stand for Arts and Letters) installed as my homepage – I’ve discovered a staggering array of individual columnists it also permits you to tap into at will.  I chanced across this particular peripheral bonanza while snooping around to see what one of my favorite anti-Dubya dissidents, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s polymathic Prof. Noam Chomsky, might have cut loose with recently.  Not only did I find him there, I also found an entire gamut of opinion ranging from leftist-liberal Chomsky all the way to that reactionary but intellectually brilliant son of a bitch W*ll**m B*ckl*y.

They continue to list one of my all-time favorite fellow Texans, the late but immortal Molly Ivins (who even during Bush II’s pre-Presidential sway as Governor of the GREAT state of Texas invented two undying monikers for him: Shrub and Dubya), with a touching tribute to Miz Molly that appeared soon after her death.

I hope this endorsement will suffice for you to make tracks to http://www.aldaily.com/ and instal it as your homepage – permanently.

And kindly remember who put you up to that, okay?