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Giants - Post-Season Play-off Review
Back at the beginning of this season, I wrote a blog about the status of the Giants, one month in. At that point, the Giants were leading the division, with the Dodgers close on their heels. As the...
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Ebola Choices - Stage II
The big news the last 48 hours has been the new American victim of Ebola, nurse Amber Vinson, the second such "domestic" infection case recorded, since the arrival (and demise on Oct 8) of patient...
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Reversal of Fortune - Bumgarner shuts down the Royals in Game One of the 2014...
Last evening, Madison Bumgarner won the first game of the 2014 World Series against the Kansas City Royals.The media has been fawning over the Royals--who havn't appeared in a World Series since 1985,...
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Coke is Life!
I've never been much of a fan of Coca-Cola. One year during high school, I drank it frequently with my lunch, and that semester I wound up with 7 cavities discovered at one appointment at the family...
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Joe Panik Birthday
Just in case you haven't heard, the San Francisco Giants won the World Series of Major League Baseball last night in Kansas City. It was their third title in five years, a feat accomplished very rarely...
View ArticleSocial Criticism Masquerades as Poetic License, or Vice Versa
Poetic license is defined as any departure from convention or from factual accuracy taken by a writer to achieve a desired effect. It's a colloquial term, used to denote a distortion or alteration of...
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Good-bye Panda
In J.D. Salinger's classic The Catcher in the Rye, the hero Holden Caulfield says at one point, "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." I was only 9 years old when I...
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The Cemetery at Night - Mark Strand dead at 80
It was reported yesterday that Mark Strand had died, at 80, in Brooklyn. 80 isn't a young age, so it was not a surprise, and not tragic. Strand lived a long life, filled with literary accomplishments...
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Simic's The World Doesn't End
In T.S. Eliot's famous minor poem The Hollow Men, there is a repeated refrain, This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a...
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About Town - The New Yorker and the World it Made for Me
My Fall-Winter reading list this year has included Ben Yagoda's About Town, The New Yorker and The World It Made [Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000]. Ben YagodaI should preface my remarks about the book...
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Thoughts on Mixology
I think I've probably recorded mixes which are very similar to this one on this blog in the past.Lately, I've begun thinking about using aperitifs as the "goods" for drink combinations, instead of...
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New Year 2015
We begin this year on a couple of sour notes.First, our beloved 49ers lost no time in parting company with their head coach Jim Harbaugh, following the last game of the current regular season.To review...
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David Gitin's Woke Up This Morning
I've written about David Gitin's work before, here, and here. As with his previous book, The Journey Home [Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 2010], this is a selection of poems, subtitled "Selected Poems...
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The Mystery of the Water - Fishing at Night
Every sport has its attractions, which may or may not be easily conveyed to those unfamiliar with it firsthand. Fly-fishing, which developed over centuries of practice, originally as a hunting and...
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World Oil Production
Recently, we've heard reports that the rapid decline in the price of gasoline, which is a reflection of the drop in crude oil prices, has brought about a sudden crisis in the petroleum production...
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Going Postal in The Friendly Skies - The Coming Drone Wars
One aspect of the increasing sophistication of micro-technology has been the emergence of unmanned, or automated airborne devices, called drones. For decades, really since the invention of flying...
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Malamud's A New Life
Occasionally, drawn by a nostalgic urge, or the need to go back over something I had experienced in the past, I will reread a book I had first encountered decades ago. I first read Bernard Malamud's...
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We're the News Hour, and We Don't Approve This Message
Yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, September 4th 2014, the PBS News Hour show ran a segment in what it calls a "series of one-on-one interviews about how to handle the border crisis." As News Hour co-host...
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Tom Selleck's Late Career Surprise
I don't want any swingers out there to get the wrong impression. Hunks and studs don't turn me on, but I thought this shot might get your attention. I assume it's not a constructed photo (placing the...
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The Limited
What is a "traditional cocktail"? Of what would such a recipe consist?Tradition is what we make it, the constantly unweaving or weaving (raveling or unraveling?), unfolding present, which is being in...
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