Weekend Wonk
Final Doings: Danube
Jerome Shea November 25, 2011
So on the eleventh of July, the Sheas and the senior Dinsmores (aka Bob and Pat) got on a Lufthansa Airbus at Boston’s Logan Airport for a long hop to Frankfurt, a short hop to Budapest, and the beginning of their Danube cruise. Ports of call would be Budapest, Vienna, Passau, and Regensburg, with …
Fiat Lux
Jerome Shea November 25, 2011
Light. The first Light. “Let there be Light,” said the Lord God, and it was so. Light is both humble and holy, practical and profound. Modern artificial light, electric light, is a wonder that we take for granted. I like to remind myself from time to time what a small miracle it is to get up in the …
Do You Feel a Draft?
Jerome Shea November 25, 2011
In a typically brilliant Gary Larson cartoon, we find a deer behind a tree, hiding from a hunter in the near distance. Panicked, the deer is saying to himself, “He is definitely shooting at me! I’ve gotta think: do I know this guy?” We laugh because we seldom see it that way—a hunter has no personal …
Big Stuff, Deep Stuff, Heavy Stuff
Jerome Shea November 25, 2011
We live among immensities of time and space. Sometimes the question is not so much how we manage to grasp those immensities, but how we entertain that knowledge without just blanking out, clicking off, like a spaniel trying to understand quadratic equations (woof?). What started me thinking about …
Argumentums
Jerome Shea November 25, 2011
At some point in the tropes course—last week, this time around—we study the argumentums, which are great things to hang tropes on. I’m talking about such familiar terms as argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad ignorantium, and so forth (no, I am not going to add ad nauseam, …
A Rose by Any Other Name
Jerome Shea November 25, 2011
In a recent column Tom and Ray Magliozzi, my favorite car guys, said of a certain unethical mechanic that he had earned a place on their “fecal roster.” I chuckled all morning over that felicitous rephrasing of “sh*t list,” and even sent it to a couple of friends. I am calling that a euphemism, and …
Madison
Jerome Shea June 6, 2010
The other day I discovered a wonderful cache of old letters, and I would like to share some with you. This one has to do with Diana’s family’s place in Madison, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie, where we went every year when the kids were growing up. It seems a wonderful celebration of summer. I hope …
Mappa Mundi
Jerome Shea June 1, 2010
“Map” is a strange word. Broad-voweled but abrupt, it rhymes with yap, zap, slap, clap, and so on. It might be an acronym (Mercator Area Projection?) or the call of an ill-tempered tropical bird (“That infernal mapping kept us awake all night!”). In fact, it comes from the medieval Latin mappa, …
Maps
Jerome Shea May 26, 2010
I love maps. I don’t even have to leave my recliner to haul up my eight pound world atlas (oof!) or my USA/Canada/Mexico road atlas. Should I see some place mentioned in the morning paper—Storm Lake, Iowa, say—I will grab the road atlas and have a looksee. Just to see, and maybe imagine my being …
Pandora
Jerome Shea May 12, 2010
Quite often there is something new at the stump in the bosque. Last week it was that rosary; on tomorrow’s run I’ll probably find something else. About a month ago, I found this note, protected from the elements with plastic: Letter to the Cross Remover To the person who removed the cross from our …