The sullied and the pure

A good article by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! :

“NCAA in a Nutshell: Bill Self, Kansas Win National Title with Infractions Case Still Pending.”

Good game, too. The 16-point comeback was breathtaking.

I’ve always liked the Jayhawks. They’re probably my favorite cheaters.

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Now, a dose of anti-cynicism. These videos are by the hero who unclogs drains.

In this episode, he travels north through New Hampshire, unblocking culverts as the snow melts.

And in this 44-minute video, he climbs into a culvert to clear away a beaver dam.

He is an amazing narrator. His sentences are punchy and staccato. He says his consonants crisply. He wastes no words.

In the first video, he peers out over campers on a frozen lake and describes the peril of driving on it as the weather warms. You can feel the ice melt beneath you.

In the second video, he is silent for long stretches while he clears out debris. The rhythm is lovely. It’s more like Terrence Malick than like Stanley Kubrick.

He concludes the video with scenes of bear tracks and chipmunks.

“The Radical Left is out of control”

… also, “They want to destroy America.”

Why have I been getting emails with these subject headings?

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I got this, too (click on it to enlarge):

It brought relief. (I’d worried that my thesis’s submission to ProQuest wouldn’t be approved in time for the August degree conferral.)

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Karin & I watched Paper Moon. It’s pretty thin, plot-wise, but I didn’t tire of admiring the black-and-white photography of Kansas and Missouri.

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More reading (continued from the previous entry):

(5) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights – still not all read.

(6) Bill Hybels, Too Busy Not to Pray. This is our current Sunday school textbook.

(7), (8) Patrick White, The Aunt’s Story and Patrick White Speaks.

A busy holiday in my chair

I had my Spring Break this week, and I made good use of the time, sitting at home in my armchair. I wrote and read and kept company with the kitties. I applied for one full-time job (the response, so far, has been perfunctory) and plotted to apply elsewhere. I wondered if I could get a scholarship to do research in Scotland. … Tonight I read Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2007 essay about Barack Obama. I typeset it into a handsome 13-page, 2-column PDF, using William Addison Dwiggins’s neglected font, ITC New Winchester. (The relevance is that this font is like Dwiggins’s Eldorado, and Obama’s maternal grandfather hailed from a Kansas town named El Dorado.)

Karin went to work each day and played video games each night. On Tuesday, we ate supper with our old pastor’s family, and, last night, we washed our clothes.

Karin has been trying to interest the kitties in their mirror reflections. Ziva is downright alarmed by hers. Jasper at first feigned indifference to his reflection, but tonight I noticed him perching on the bathroom sink, looking at himself.