Povey Prattle

I dreamed the other night that I was walking through an old industrial city with my friends Kathy and Mark. In the dream I pointed out a gorgeous old building which had spires and a dome.  I "knew" this to be the combined City Hall and Fire Station. The city and the building are in my dreams and nowhere else.  But all our dreams have a genesis or a trigger.  In the case of this particular dream the genesis may well have been that I am a great admirer of Victorian civic and commercial buildings, and the trigger was mostly likely the news that the gorgeous Lloyds Bank building in Corn St. Bristol is no longer open for banking. Corn St is a narrow road in the centre of Bristol. It was until recent years the place for commerce and law.  There were many banks on Corn St, some with outstanding architecture.   The street has "the Corn Exchange" - and old building which was once a trading place for grain sellers and buyers.  There is also the "Com...

What happens when cat owners go to work Originally from Crown Publishing Group

My good friend Fred Emrich offered to take me to a spring training baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates at the McKechnie Field  in nearby Bradenton FL. I did not accept Fred's offer, not so much because my priestly career in Massachusetts turned me into a "Yankees hater" (I knew which side my bread was buttered) , but mostly because I believe that organized sports are about as enjoyable as is the preparation for a colonoscopy. Fred was nice about this, but he encouraged me to think that sport might well be a window on the wider world, and he suggested that I should read Jackie Robinson's Autobiography. (American and Canadian readers will be well aware of  Jackie Robinson, and I suspect that my readers in other lands will have heard about him). I finished "Jackie Robinson -  I never had it made" (Putnam 1972 and The Ecco Press 1995) today. It was a worthwhile read  (thanks Fred). The book made me understand Robinson...

In the white racist play book black males are men  with  super-endowed penises who are a threat to every God-fearing white woman. Fearful lest this be true white racists have an alternative explanation.   It is that black males are less than virile. The ever boring and predictable Sarah Palin espouses this second point of view.  This is what she is reported to have said on Fox News, according  to the Daily Kos "People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil," Palin said to Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Monday night. "They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates." That's it Sarah:   impugn the virility  of black males by asserting that President Obama wears mom jeans  It's  cheap and easy It's  been done before in the old South. It fits  into white supremacist theory ---------------------------------------------------------------------------...

See this about Mario Livio.  I am one of his very many Facebook friends.  He is one heck of a cool guy. http://www.mariolivio.com/   He wrote the following on his Facebook page the other day..  I like it very much.   What we refer to as "history", really started at the cognitive (or, "language") revolution. That's when humans started to distinguish themselves from other animals. Given the huge importance of language, I was therefore very amused to read the following description in Dickens's "Dombey and Son":   "There was no light nonsense about Miss Blimber…She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead - stone dead - and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul."

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I am not impressed by the sanctimonious bleating of Pres. Obama, Secy. of State Kerry (a poseur if there ever was one), alongside   P.M. Cameron and Foreign Secy. Hague (another poseur - whose unctuous voice makes me long for ear plugs) regarding the Russian "invasion" of Crimea. One could easily forget that the U.S.A. has sponsored regime change in Chile, Panama and Grenada (to name a few):  regime change to suit our "national interest". Or that the United Kingdom and the United States have (with others) invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and thereby caused more problems than we could ever have solved. Or that Obama has no respect for territorial integrity as he plays his real life video games in the deployment of murderous weapons from his toys "the drones". OF course it's none of the above  (tongue firmly in cheek).  We in the west are masters at hypocrisy in foreign policy It was not for nothing that the U.K. was described as "Per...