Almost two months had passed by my Harvard freshman door. It was 1961, early November, and the air was crisp and blue-gray. I had moved into Pennypacker Hall from a smallish farm town 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, the smartest of 900 kids graduating from a large public high school that had [...]
Monthly Archives: February 2008
Does a Curveball Break Left or Right?
February 17, 2008 – 7:52 am
Roger Clemens testifies before Congress, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform grills him about use of steroids and human growth hormone. He denies everything.
This tabloid shocker is getting far more press than real disasters in Darfur or the Iraq situation (can’t call it a war, because only Congress can declare [...]
Little Big Horn
February 16, 2008 – 5:47 am
At Little Big Horn National Monument, a low, iron railing surrounds the modest, marble slabs that mark where each white man fell. The fenced rectangle is smaller than my back yard. Custer’s Last Stand…an immense celebration of an ignominious outrage. The day is overcast, cold, and wet. Forty-eight degrees feels colder in [...]
Silverado Squatters
February 15, 2008 – 2:27 pm
Stevenson’s honeymoon cabin in Calistoga
Do students still read Robert Louis Stevenson? Treasure Island? The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Or have cinema and television overtaken literature, the adaptation become the source, and the source forgotten?
Stevenson was a mainstay of my childhood, a lingering consequence of his immense Victorian [...]
Mount St. Helena
February 14, 2008 – 10:08 am
I have, in my dotage, become a Peripatetic (derived from Greek… literally “ones walking around”). The Peripatetic School was founded by Aristotle in 335 BC, so I am far from a charter member, but as with philosophy, striding about—especially to high places—affords one a wider view of the world.
Bear Market Rap
February 13, 2008 – 7:14 am
In December 1990, when I was working as an investment banker in San Francisco, I wrote and recorded a rap song.
Happy Birthday to Great Men
February 12, 2008 – 6:44 pm
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Born 199 years ago, February 12, 1809: Charles Darwin, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in the bios, and Abraham Lincoln, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in society.
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Prof. Joshua Whatmough — Linguistics 120
February 11, 2008 – 11:30 am
This morning, rising with formless, benignant wonderings about my future and vague remembrances of my long-ago youth, I surprised myself with an abrupt focus on Prof. Joshua Whatmough (”WUTT-moe”).
I googled and found a perfect description of his terrifying and exhilarating classroom (in 1947) put up on a webpage by one of Whatmough’s former students, William [...]
