Tag: Frolic and Detour

  • Watching Downton Abbey

    Downton Abbey premiered in 2010, but my wife and I never watched it. We decided to start this weekend. In the first episode, the Earl of Grantham, who married a rich American but who has only daughters, learns that his presumptive heir, a cousin, has died on the Titanic. Drama ensues, because when the Earl……

  • Tony Bennett, 1926-2023

    Tony Bennett, 1926-2023

    Farewell to Tony Bennett, one of the greatest performers of the Great American Songbook. I don’t know what the experts would say, but to me, these songs, from Broadway, jazz standards, and even movies, are are our Puccini, our great popular art. They are as American as baseball, and Tony Bennett is the Joe DiMaggio……

  • Thanks, WordPress!

    I read that WordPress, the software that I use to make Letters Blogatory, is turning twenty this month. I’ve been using WordPress since 2011, and I want to take the occasion of the anniversary to give a shout-out to the many people who contribute their time to developing and maintaining the software. If you think……

  • Letters Blogatory: Still Against Abolishing The Leap Second

    Letters Blogatory: Still Against Abolishing The Leap Second

    In her prologue to The Human Condition, written at the dawn of the space age, Hannah Arendt wrote: The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitant in which they can move and breathe……

  • America’s Pastime

    America’s Pastime

    Our English friends got a taste of America this weekend when the greatest rivalry in sports came to London. You might have been forgiven for wondering whether the teams were playing American football rather than baseball, since the two teams combined for thirty runs over the weekend, but the score aside, I hear the organizers……