Immediately after Japan’s “sneak” (ha!) attack against Pearl Harbor, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt damned December 7th, 1941 as “a day that will live in infamy”.
I submit that his eloquent terminology also applies, for all time, to that entire abominable era in American history when the country’s administration totally forgot F.D.R.’s earlier assurance that “We [...]
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It should surprise no one familiar with her writings that as soon as decently possible after her so casual, offhand invitation to stop in for a drink the next time I found myself in her Manhattan neighborhood around that time of the afternoon, I did just happen to find myself around Madison Avenue and the upper [...]
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“HERR CHARLES PAUL MOOR, GEBOREN [undsoweiter], HAT MIT DEM ZEITPUNKT DER AUSHÄNDIGUNG DIESER URKUNDE DIE DEUTSCHE STAATSANGEHÖRIGKEIT DURCH EINBÜRGERUNG ERWORBEN.”
“HERR CHARLES PAUL MOOR, BORN [etcetera], HAS UPON RECEIPT OF THIS CERTIFICATE RECEIVED CITIZENSHIP OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY THROUGH NATURALIZATION.”
[Understandably, this event - yesterday morning - has temporarily distracted me from absolutely everything else, [...]
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By way of preparation for what I myself hope to write about Dorothy day after tomorrow, this afternoon I pulled out a book I’d bought when it first appeared in 1981: “The Last Laugh” (Simon & Schuster), a collection of odds and ends left by that master humorist S. J. Perelman when he died. I [...]
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On August 22d 114 years ago, the Rothschild couple who lived in New York but had a summer cottage at 732 Ocean Avenue in the New Jersey village of Long Branch became parents there of a baby girl they named Dorothy. In due time she married a gentleman named Parker, and in the years after [...]
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[From Mathias Herzog, the Berlin bureaucrat responsible for surnames beginning with "M":]
Sehr geehrter Herr Moor,
Ich habe meine Vorlage an die Senatsverwaltung für Inneres und Sport nunmehr zurückerhalten.
Man hat meine Entscheidung zustimmend zur Kenntnis genommen und teilt meine juristische Auffassung. Ich freue mich daher aufrichtig Ihnen mitteilen zu können, dass Ihrer zügigen Einbürgerung nun nichts [...]
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Goosed by a passer-by who stopped briefly at this dump, I’ve done a bit of Googling myself and excavated this:
“September 24, 2003
“Dr. Seuss on Blogs
“I was reading to Colter tonight and discovered a story called “Scrambled Eggs Super” in a Dr. Seuss collection. It was published in 1953, so the next time someone wants to [...]
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Blog, blogosphere, blook, cookie, facebook, folksonomy, godcast, me-media, netiquette - do those philological horrors have the same emetic effect on you that they do on me? According to a poll just published, they rank high on the list of repulsive Computer Age neologisms as ascertained by the linguistically fastidious (and presumably British) Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary [...]
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Excavated from June 4th (with me still struggling to whup this damned blog technology to the mat), this excerpt from my long-suffering, much put-upon father substitute Perry (a.k.a. St. Perry) Nelson:
” . . . I enjoyed reading these reminiscences of the times you spent with Rostropovich. Such an intimate portrait as emerges here provides a [...]
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During my San Francisco years (1982-95), “Time” once began its report on an election there with this sentence: “San Francisco is a tree-house for adult delinquents.”
I believe that story reported the November 1982 election that listed one candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors as Sister Boom-Boom, with the explanatory addendum one line lower “Nun [...]
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