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Here is a Sup—I mean repository of the texts of my together with some readings of them. The essays were broadcast by WXXI 91.5 Classical of Rochester, NY on Salmagundy each Saturday at 9:35am Eastern Time, from the beginning of time (1985) till May 2009 when Entropa (evil Goddess of Change-for-the-Worse-or-Possibly-the-Worst) troubled the minds of the WXXIites and they retired Simon and Salmagundy, and Rochester went into a terminal decline---for ever.
I continued on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though weekendage varied, till the horror crept ever onward and that too was devoured (in August 2023, a date which will live in infamy or at lease mild irritation)... and only I remain, defiant though wimpering.
Richard Howland-Bolton
There are pop-up pics and links all over the place here. In text they are indicated by a double underline like this:
mouse-overing brings the pop-up up and clicking (usually) goes to the link |
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Now here’s a New Year’s resolution ... for you, of course, since I obviously don’t need one.
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A Visit from Inclement Verse
Now that the month of Christmas has got well under way (after spending the last couple of weeks rudely trying to elbow it’s way into becoming the six-weeks-of-Christmas-and-then-some and we all gave a great sigh of thanks for Thanksgiving Day for standing up to the nasty great bully) I am ummercifully driven to the dominant question of the season: What is it about Christmas that brings out the crass, the trite and possibly the down-right evil in people?
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Ahh!
This is the perfect time of year to reminisce about ones childhood and of course I’m no different from anyone else, indeed the other day I couldn’t stop thinking about The Woodentops .
The Woodentops, way back in the late 50s, and when I was getting on for ten-ish1, were a rather stiff upper-middle -class-ish marionette family on the BBC telly, who very obviously lived (if that’s quite the right word) up to their name by being made of wood---one could see the strings, and the structure of the joints; but mainly one could see the wood. The over-all impression they gave was of those cute little artists’ mannequinny-modelly things being animated in a rather wooden way.
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Early in those few mornings that I choose not to run---and Hey! Before you tut-tut and get all “my health regimen is more grueling than you-urs!” at me, it’s my choice: to push my body up another notch of healthiness or not; to cut my risk of heart attacks and the like, or again not; after all it is still a free country, well it’s still a sort of free-ish country more-or-less to a certain extent, particularly where risk is concerned (but we’ll get to that in a mo). Well, anyway on those mornings that I choose not to run (rare events that they are---Really! Really rare!! I-I mean it!) I tend to listen to the World Service of the BBC. And so the other day, when it so happened that I chose not to---Hey it’s my life, so stop being so intrusive---I ended up listening to a programme (‘programme’ spelt with two ‘M’s and an ‘E’ of course since it was the BBC) called Politics UK which is (somewhat surprisingly for the BBC) all about politics in the United Kingdom.
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Ma Fellow 'Mer'c'ns A've called ya hear to 'nnounce ma cand'cy...
Oh! God no! This is not going to work!
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There is a well-known phenomenon in non-logographic languages called ‘pronunciation spelling’ which has been used since time immemorial (which, by the way, has been the 3rd of September 1189 ever since the year 1276) to separate the linguistic men from the um... not-yet-men.
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It was the best of times; it was the worst of times---at least it was and, it appears, still is for those of us who love Old English poetry in general and its most important surviving example Beowulf in particular.
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Neasden! … [ sfx: laughter choked back ]
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I bumped into Monica and Melanie in Einstein Bagels last Saturday and we started reminiscing, as one does at our ages, about our pasts.
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Way back, through the dim mists of deep time, when giant sauropods slouched down Monroe Avenue; when computer makers were still hopefully banging rocks of silica together and a 128 Kilobyte Mac was considered a big deal; when photography was still something silvery that the great (and of course very English) Fox Talbot would have recognised; when printing was still something leaden (not to mention antimonic and stannous) that Gutenberg could still have made sense of; when ...
when ...
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