Yet another non-literary post from so-called Bookworm. I took our dog to the vet yesterday morning to have a growth removed from her front leg. It was a small, benign growth; the main reason for removing it was because it itched and because if we didn’t remove it, it could, possibly, turn into something bad. We went [...]
Category Archives: People
In memoriam
I learned last night that a very dear friend of my parents passed away on Friday. She was the mother of the Cool Older Girl who read Catcher in the Rye out loud to me. She died of complications from diabetes. She was a person for whom the diagnosis of diabetes must have felt particularly cruel. [...]
Sad news
Stanislaw Lem died today. For those not in the know, he’s a Polish sci-fi writer. His stories, the ones I’ve read anyway, are fairly straightforward spaceshippy stuff, but his style is literary and, well, inimitable. Here’s a taste to whet your appetite, the opening lines of the short story “Pirx’s Tale.” Sci-fi? Sure, I like it, but [...]
Two more cool dudes
Well, first of all, before I get off the topic of saints, I should mention that yesterday, May 19, was the Feast Day of my favorite one: St. Dunstan. I learned about him from my literary hero Robertson Davies, who writes about St. Dunstan in the Deptford trilogy. Which you should all go out and [...]
Another 19th century hero
I heard about this guy on The Vinyl Cafe last weekend. David Thompson, Canadian surveyor and explorer. He surveyed much of Canada — he logged thousands of miles, mostly on foot — and wrote about everything he saw. His surveying was so incredibly accurate and precise that you can go to the places he wrote about, [...]
A 19th century hero
I love being married to a high school social studies teacher. Have you ever heard of Dr. John Snow, the father of public health? There was a cholera outbreak in London, ca. 1850. Cholera outbreaks were common in those days because of overcrowded living conditions and poor sanitation. This is pre-Pasteur. They didn’t know about microbes. [...]
Charlotte Plummer Owen, 1918-2004
I spent most of the afternoon at this woman’s memorial service. Mrs. Owen was my clarinet teacher. She taught me everything, starting with how to put the instrument together. “It’s been a long time since I’ve started from scratch,” I remember her saying at my very first lesson. She was a great teacher. Her students [...]