Recent Comments

1. 27 days ago on Edge City

   If you’re performing surgery or assembling an automobile, follow directions. If you’re making a model of a historical scene, there’s no reason not to be creative. Except to “follow the directions on the rubric” which means that the teacher doesn’t know how to grade anything that isn’t written down like the ABCs.

2. 28 days ago on Heart of the City

   No taller than Billy Penn’s hat brim, I think it was, so that City Hall would be the tallest. I don’t know if it was a rule or a tradition, but Philly was certainly a handsomer city when it was kept.

3. 29 days ago on Baldo

   Texas is a sad state which occasionally produces fantastic women.

4. 29 days ago on Edge City

   Given what was on that “rubric,” I think the teacher wanted to check off the items instead of thinking.

5. about 1 month ago on Edge City

   I wrote a few mildly amusing lines in the Acknowledgements page of my Master’s of Science thesis. I was told to take them out. I made the page as dry and unamusing as possible. Every thesis in my department on the library shelf was bound in red with gold lettering on the spine — I don’t know why. Nobody told me it had to be that way. And I’d already turned in the paper and gotten credit for it. So on my way out of town (I was heading from Illinois back to the mid-atlantic) I had mine bound in the colors of my beloved undergraduate liberal arts college: orange and black. As I said… nobody told me I had to, nobody told me I couldn’t.

6. about 1 month ago on On A Claire Day

   Your ancestors needed sugar, and found it in fruits. That’s the good stuff that’s good for you. They didn’t find ripe fruit very often, though, so they ate it like crazy when they did. Now we eat sugar like crazy and we can find it all the time, so we get fat.

7. about 1 month ago on Edge City

   Malvina Reynolds “Little Boxes”

   [Verse 1]Little boxes on the hillsideLittle boxes made of ticky-tackyLittle boxes on the hillsideLittle boxes all the sameThere’s a pink one and a green oneAnd a blue one and a yellow oneAnd they’re all made out of ticky-tackyAnd they all look just the same

   [Verse 2]And the people in the housesAll went to the universityWhere they were put in boxesAnd they came out all the sameAnd there’s doctors and lawyersAnd business executivesAnd they’re all made out of ticky-tackyAnd they all look just the same

   [Verse 3]And they all play on the golf courseAnd drink their martinis dryAnd they all have pretty childrenAnd the children go to schoolAnd the children go to summer campAnd then to the universityWhere they are put in boxesAnd they come out all the same

   [Verse 4]And the boys go into businessAnd marry and raise a familyIn boxes made of ticky-tackyAnd they all look just the sameThere’s a pink one and a green oneAnd a blue one and a yellow oneAnd they’re all made out of ticky-tackyAnd they all look just the same

8. about 1 month ago on Edge City

   So it had nothing to do with Abby doing it for him. Right, folks from yesterday?

9. about 1 month ago on Grand Avenue

   Yeah, it is fun to see them learn… the ones that WANT to learn. Some of them, you don’t know if you want to pound your head on the desk, or theirs.

10. about 1 month ago on Edge City

    Wrong. Show me one example of Abby doing any of the work. All she did was praise her son’s ideas.