Prolongation of woe

I.e., puking. Only Abel has been spared. We’ve brought the TV upstairs so as to get to the toilet promptly. Karin gallantly has been letting the children use the toilet first. She makes due in the hallway with her bucket.

Daniel, poor boy, is on his second cycle with this bug, having been symptomless one glorious week.

I’m well enough right now. I dread the second cycle.

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I’m teaching Samuel how footnotes work, using Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs. He’ll grow up thinking that studying history is fun.

Other reading:

• François Mauriac, A Kiss for the Leper (a mini-book)
• Voltaire, Candide (a re-read; a mini-book)
• N. T. Wright, God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

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R.I.P. Chuck Norris, aged eighty-six. And Robert Mueller.

Freddie Freeman, pt. 2

John-Paul: “Children, what should I blog about?”

Samuel: “Blog that we’re getting a new brother – ‘Pip’.”

A heartwarming answer.

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Let us again salute Freddie Freeman, who has homered in every game of this World Series. (As I type, it’s the third inning of Game 3.)

Freeman looks just like Mike, my next-door neighbor. Talks like him, too.

I mentioned it.

“It’s been pointed out before,” Mike said. “It’d be nice to be him.”

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Is it strange that I want to read a 900+ pp. textbook of British criminal law?

Is my anglophilia/​crime lit appetite out of control?

Today I learned of Lon Fuller’s “speluncean explorers” (1949), which I am a little ashamed not to have come across before. I had read about R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) and Philippa Foot’s “fat man stuck in the cave mouth” (1967), a sort of Lon-Fuller-Meets-Winnie-the-Pooh scenario (see p. 7; Foot says the case is “well known to philosophers,” although I confess I don’t know who previously discussed it).

Similar cases involve the shipwrecked guys who fight over a plank; and, in Candide, James the Anabaptist, whose plight, perhaps not interesting to the theorist, is (I hope) especially poignant to the person on the street.

Anniversary #3

Well, I turned in the three dissertation chapters, which I’m very glad about. I do wish they were better.

Now I have to finish writing one more chapter and the introduction.

Today, Karin & I celebrated our third wedding anniversary at a pasta restaurant called Macri’s that I recommend to all. While we were eating our pasta, we watched James Holzhauer, the virtuoso Jeopardy! contestant, slaughter two more opponents. It was very gratifying.

Also gratifying is our bedtime reading: Candide, illustrated by the great Sheilah Beckett (life story here; art samples here). If ever I get a tattoo, it will be of one of Beckett’s Candide drawings.