ABlog

1. thinking I saw a prayer shawl in the park but it was some dude in an African-type cape

2. horoscope: race clusters and clumps in your vicinity this week

3. as Thelonius bops behind some so-called Nut with a Nuke

4. that small blast or failed blast or chemical fakery flagrant violation grave breach

5. but don’t you need a way to differentiate your idiom from the next guy’s

6. what do you make in a nutshell of the sack of Constantinople in 1204

7. when rape is the answer, what is the question

8. hot October, hot October

9.heard about those planets that whiz around their suns in under 24 hours?

10. well I’d like to be on them

11. Democratic Party strategists quickly circulated a “talking points” memorandum to Democratic candidates, urging them to cast the reported North Korean nuclear test as a “colossal foreign police failure of the Bush administration.”

12. when fealty is the issue for untenured faculty must be time to get out of Dodge

13. …to visit my friend in North Carolina. She lives on a base. It’s so weird down there. Tons of camouflage outfits. There’s all this open space, everything really clean. Their apartment looks out on a lake. You see how the government takes care of people. Her husband came back from Iraq one afternoon. Just shows up at the door. She didn’t even know he was coming home. I didn’t ask was it for a break or what. I mean, she cuts hair. He just shows up, she could have been in the middle of something. The military’s been a good choice for him, a guy who didn’t finish high school. Got him off the streets. For lots of people like him it’s the only way out. He doesn’t agree with the war, I can tell you that much. But someone’s got to keep the peace over there. He’s a sergeant, he’s responsible for eleven guys. I just said I can’t imagine some of the things you must have seen but I want you to know I appreciate what you’re doing. Remember when the soldiers came home from Vietnam and nobody even thanked them? This guy I knew was in a cab and says, “I just got back from Vietnam,” and somebody goes, “so what?”

14. I suppose I could learn, from one of my students, even, to place two women in a room and just go from there.


Note: The italicized sentence is a quotation from The New York Times, 10/10/06, “Bush Rebukes North Korea, and U.S. Seeks New U.N. Sanctions” (p. A6).