28th February 2003

...genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

25th February 2003

...he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

A Florentine nobleman knew that to read Dante but ignore science was ridiculous.

24th February 2003

Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short...

What would therapy look like if repression came back into vogue?

Poems for Memorization and Reading Aloud Spring 2003

It's a tale of the frontier in which Jesus is a Clint Eastwood character..

23rd February 2003

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.  -- Dr. Seuss

22nd February 2003

Czech wisdom has it that there is a grain of truth in every piece of nonsense...

Poetry and Prose for Memorization and Reading Aloud

There are certain writers who are so great you can never throw them off. I'm not in that category...

The history of those who shed those other tears...

21st February 2003

Reading from Number 80

20th February 2003

An Irish Proverb:
Drink is the Curse of the Land. It makes you fight with your neighbors. It makes you shoot at your landlord. And it makes you miss him.

  Photography and Covers, 1936 to 1996

Bertrand Russell:

No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being.

Sign in a drug rehab hospital:

PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS

19th February 2003

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

"For to him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." --Mark 4:25

Barbara Kingsolver:

I began this book, without exactly knowing I was doing so, on September 12, 2001...

18th February 2003

Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.
-- Käthe Kollwitz

It isn't enough for your heart to break, because everybody's heart is broken now.
-- Allen Ginsberg

other quotations about love and war and forgiveness and more...

Ben Jonson:

My picture left in Scotland

Michael Ventura:

...nothing is sure but that every human heart is torn and deserving of mercy.

Leo Tolstoy:

How much land does a man need?

Hilary Mantel:

You come to this place, mid-life. You don't know how you got here

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN was published for fifteen years by a brilliantly cranky professor named Richard Mitchell.

26th February 2003

In diplomatic circles, our new allies from Eastern Europe are dryly referred to as "Bush's Warsaw Pact."

25th February 2003

"Since when do we hold a story hostage to the whims of governments and armies? "

24th February 2003

Many people in the world ...think President Bush is a greater threat to world peace than Iraqi President Saddam Hussein...

23rd February 2003

Land reform coming in Scotland, where half of private land is in the hands of just 343 landowners...

22nd February 2003

The aim of the Ark of Taste is to rediscover, catalogue, describe and promote almost forgotten flavors...

The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians

Ronald McDonald, welcome to your nightmare

Los Angeles Council Adopts Resolution Against Iraq War

21st February 2003

So there you have it. This administration does martial plans, not Marshall Plans: billions for offense, not one cent for reconstruction.

View the latest "Breaking News" headlines from top online news sources...

The 1997 outbreak ... prompted the slaughter of Hong Kong's entire stock of over a million birds.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. -Anatole France

The Bush administration plans to take complete, unilateral control of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, with an interim administration headed by a yet-to-be named American civilian...

20th February 2003

...choosing Iraq as the next target means that the oil, Israel and war industry lobbies will climb aboard.

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." Pericles 

"They have guns and bombs and the air will be cold and hot and we will burn very much."

19th February 2003

"It's not the first time Americans have poured French cognac down the sewers,"

People are willing to trade almost anything for greater security...

"The word 'scandalous' is, I think, greatly overused in our political life but..."

Hunting skills may not after all have triggered the tremendous burst of human evolution...

Those who oppose war are not cowards.

Exactly 40 years ago tonight, at 7pm on Monday 22 October 1962, President Kennedy went on television

Does this mean assassinations on the soil of allies?

President Bush has said that Jesus Christ is his favorite political philosopher....

750 Women Go Nude in Protest

There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen...

9,600 poets and counting...

A mutating art form is difficult to define...

18th February 2003

The new rulers of the world

If you can rationalize the deaths of half a million children you can rationalize anything

...a powerful lobby, including the Gallo wine and Mars confectionery families, ... created the name "death tax" to persuade people that many would be affected by the tax rather than just a tiny number of the very rich....

When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around...

The black students whom I encounter tend to arrive less well prepared than their classmates...

So what is Kundera's distinctive comic spirit? Like all modern Czech novelists...