Clément Pit-Claudel writes: I was recently at the Boston antiquarian book fair, where I spotted a book titled The Battle of Foochow about the Fuzhou Uprising of November 8, 1911, in which revolutionaries defeated the Qing (Manchu) army, a significant step on the way to the fall of the last dynasty in traditional Chinese history, when the six-year-old Last Emperor, Puyi, […]
Just coming across this now: Report from The Siberian Times (7/4/18), "Boy, 11, finds ‘1,000 year old message’ written in runes on pendant made of mammoth bone":
Here's little two-year-old Leah having a discussion with her great-grandma (bisnonna). At a young age, Leah is already very aware of her cultural trait of Italian hand speaking.
The people are outraged at what happened to a doctor named Li Wenliang at Wuhan Central Hospital who called attention to the outbreak of the coronavirus on December 30, 2019, before it became an epidemic. Instead of the government praising him, they sent police to threaten and harass him, as part of their effort to […]
Megan McArdle ("Four things Democrats need to understand about beating Trump", WaPo 1/31/2020) has something important to say about the style of Donald Trump's extemporized speeches: Trump is a good public speaker. “Nails on a chalkboard” doesn’t quite capture how educated urbanites feel about Trump’s speaking style. A closer analogy would be having your teeth […]
Many people have asked me, should it really be the lunar new year of the rat? Such a disgusting creature! Or should it be the year of the mouse? Although we do our best to trap them and otherwise keep them out of our living spaces, mice are much cuter than rats, and some people […]
From Nathan Hopson: Can't believe I had never heard this marvelous Japanglish until now: トップレス‐ミーティング（toppuresu mītingu = "topless meeting"）or トップレス会議 (kaigi = meeting)
Stone artifact from around the beginning of the first century AD, excavated at the Tawayama remains in Matsue, capital of Shimane Prefecture:
Four days ago, we were treated to the "Arrogant squid of North Texas" (2/2/20). The longer we pondered this conundrum, the more puzzling it became. We know exactly where the sign is located (23 miles southeast of Houston and about 10 miles west of Trinity Bay, which joins with Galveston Bay to the south), but […]
Email today from Edwin Williams: I constructed "new" sonnets from Shakespeare's sonnets by this formula: from a set of 7 randomly selected Shakespeare sonnets (a…g) I made a new sonnet "a b a b c d c d e f e f g g", which means, the first line is taken from the first line […]