The situation in Waco reminded me that many Americans (and Canadians!) aren’t familiar with the bloody and prolonged Quebec Biker War. Related: this deal we cut was not one of our better decisions as a nation.
On names in fiction:
For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of truth but not too much overt significance. The name Moyra Grabham he thought had ‘a little too much meaning’ to be used in The Ivory Tower. Even James had his Archers and his Goodwoods early in his career, though, and listed ‘Remnant’ and ‘Masterman’ in his notebooks as potentially useful names when he found them in the Times. Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The fact that Austen called the knightly Knightley ‘Knightley’ suggests the way the choice of a name can follow from the particular nature of a specific work, and may also feed back into a larger literary design. The point of the one-off over-explicit name is that Knightley’s knightliness is utterly obvious to the reader every time his name is mentioned, but it passes Emma by. That was a strong enough reason for Austen to break one of her unwritten rules about naming.
My friend Nozlee became depressed on hormonal birth control (this also happened to me, and why I am Team Bag It Up.) Pill = depressed, Nuva Ring = panic attacks, condoms = happy and serene as a clam. Hormonal methods are great for lots of people! But don’t let anyone gaslight you into saying it’s impossible to have negative psychological reactions to them.
This is not exactly national news, but I have BEEN to the pictured Flying J and I am outraged by their conduct!
Oh, great, the in-state tuition break is headed out with the dinosaurs:
The slow death of in-state tuition is a case where declining public investment and selfish institutional interests unfortunately coincide. National public universities are cutting in-state enrollment in part to make up for state budget cuts. But they also have a strong desire to become more like elite private universities — Stanford, Duke, the Ivy League — that have the freedom to enroll the best and the brightest from around the world and charge whatever prices the market will bear. Budget cuts give them an excuse to become what they wanted to be all along.
Some very complicated letters home from Dachau.
WORKOUT (then two minutes of running after):
