What's Going On:

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

Recent Posts

Y Te Da Felicidad

Well, they called it a Country song. I guess it was, at least before Freddie Fender got ahold of it. Then it became another country song. It had been recorded by a bunch of people, including Jerry Lee Lewis, but no one remembers that now. The Freddie Fender

Read More »

Signs, Wonders, and Ecuadorian Elvis

We have friends here in Merida. It was already a polyglot crew, but now we seem to have inherited a Poligano posse as well. Poligano is a fraccionamiento, or perhaps a colonia in the northwestern part of the city. No one calls a neighborhood a barrio here. The

Read More »

The Irish Saved Civilization But I Couldn’t

When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties. ― Nicólas Gómez Dávila I was at a gathering. Certain kinds of people call a barroom a gathering. Certain kinds. Most everyone was familiar, although nearly no one is here. An extranjero

Read More »

Small World

I’m getting used to living in a city again. I’ve lived in Boston for a few years. Los Angeles. But for the most part, I’ve always gravitated to the exurban life. Occasionally the suburbs would swallow the exurbs I was in, but I’d generally moved on by then.

Read More »

You’re Living in Your Own Private Ivanhoe. Or Not

The image is cropped, but I know you know who painted it. The combination of subject matter and technique is unmistakable. Man, I love illustrations like that. If Norman Rockwell was Disney, than Leyendecker was Warner Brothers. I always like his Bugs Bunny style better than Rockwell’s Mickey

Read More »

What Grok Thinks About Sippican Cottage

[Editor’s Note: Offered without comment. Author’s note: There is no editor] Critique the writing style at sippicancottage.com The blog Sippican Cottage (sippicancottage.com) is a long-running personal site run by an author who describes himself in the tagline as: “A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him

Read More »

Greatest Hits

a boot stomping on a human face forever

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

People do get good at things. It’s more than interesting to get a peek at someone at the top of their game — no matter

Read More »

For Dorothy

They load them on the plane roughly, it seems to me. But that is the end of it. They are rough men with tender hearts

Read More »

Sagas and Compilations