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My First Year of Blogging, and My Books (Part 2)

December 13, 2021

Below is the second installment from the beginning of my revised memoir. This part is newly added and does not appear in the original Bending the Twig (See here). As I explained in my previous post, the revised manuscript is as yet unpublished.             I was twenty-six when I enrolled […]

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My First Year of Blogging, and My Books

December 10, 2021

I passed a minor milestone about a month ago. I noted it silently at the time, but, as I said, it was a minor event, so I didn’t even celebrate the occasion with a Manhattan, my favorite drink. What was that minor achievement? Drum roll, please. I completed my first […]

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Fishing in Finland

November 4, 2021

  How many times has this happened to you? Your mind is stuck on a specific thought pattern and then “boom,” up pops a made-to-order complementary object that tops off your thought as neatly as a cherry tops off a sundae. That happened to me yesterday. I was thinking of […]

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Joys from a Finnish Smoke Sauna

October 26, 2021

My friends, Martti and Kaarina, as is common for many Finnish families, own a summer cottage on a lake shore. When I first visited their site a few decades ago, the only building standing was a rough-hewn log cabin, its left side walled off and made into an authentic smoke […]

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Casualty Numbers from the Covid-19 Vaccine Battlefield

October 13, 2021

“Mr. Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings institution, argues that human beings have a natural tendency to believe what they wish, irrespective of evidence.” (From a book review in the October 13, 2021, Wall Street Journal) Let’s look at some specific evidence related to our nasty battle over the […]

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Tribute to a Friendship

October 5, 2021

It began in Illinois decades ago, four young men having no idea they were forming a lifelong friendship. They were just having fun. “Friendship does not arise out of necessity, but out of pleasure,” wrote one of my favorite contemporary writers, Joseph Epstein, in Friendship: An Exposé (Link), a delightful […]

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Political Correctness, continued

September 17, 2021

As I said when posting my recent quiz on political correctness (see it here), I knew little about the term. At the time of that posting, PC was just a mild annoyance to me, probably because I don’t like others telling me how to talk (I prefer to put my […]

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My Precise Internal Clock

May 16, 2021

I describe my incredible internal clock in my memoir, but the story is of good length for a blog, so I’ll retell it here. First a bit of necessary background. My mother died at age 37. I was 13 at the time, the oldest of four children. Our dad, with […]

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