Category: Varia

Edgar Allan Poe, 1840. 

Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Philippa Foot's maiden name was 'Bosanquet.' Her grounding of the normative in the natural, however, is decidedly Aristotelian, and thus peripatetic, and therefore pedestrian, in keeping with her married name. Running with the pun, my Foot notes are accessible here. Related articles 3quarksdaily: Philippa Foot was one of a group of brilliant women philosophers who…

"They are come, but not yet gone." Thus spoke the soothsayer to Caesar when the dictator perpetuus said to the soothsayer that the Ides of March had come and he was still alive. Dictator perpetuus has an overly confident ring to it much like tausendjähriges Reich.  Some history here. The Death of Caesar (1798) by Vincenzo…

The moral of the story: never let anyone into your life whom you haven't vetted. It seems that all the people Jamison Bachmann tormented were liberal do-gooders.  So a little blaming of the victim is in order here. I can't expect a liberal to understand it, but one has a moral obligation, to oneself and…

"Study everything, join nothing."  I am sometimes asked for examples.  Here are some from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary under the entry Regalia. (Borrowed from Gilleland the Erudite): . . . Knights of Adam; Visionaries of Detectable Bosh; the Ancient Order of Modern Troglodytes; the League of Holy Humbug; the Golden Phalanx of Phalangers; the Genteel Society of Expurgated Hoodlums;…

Here. #3: "Wash teeth if any." Last year a man asked me what my resolutions were. "I don't need any," was my joking reply.

'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings. Impersonality in the minimalist style typically takes the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better is…

Take this test. One of the tough tasks we introverts face during a holiday season is to find plausible excuses for nonattendance at all the endless and pointless parties that extroverts cannot help but organize.

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To all States-side readers, and best wishes of the season to the rest of you.  Let's make it a politics-free day, shall we? I'll do my best, and you do yours. I am indeed grateful for your readership! If you care to read my Thanksgiving homilies and such, go here.

The more I know about Hillary, the gladder I am that Trump sent her packing. The cartoon appeared before the election, but proved to be prophetic. What is truly scary is that if she had won, all her recently-revealed greed-driven dirty dealings would never have come to light.

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