|
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 |
|
Over here we seem to be having intense difficulty with what are known, in high-brow linguistic circles, as intensives: words or phrases that are used to intensify, or perhaps point out the importance of, something, as when you say "First of all". That "of all" means that whatever-it-is is really, really first rather than "neyh, sort of first-ish". That's why you can't really say "Second of all". Second just isn't that important, especially over here! You might as well say "twelfth of all", or "seventeenth of all"
|
| Read More... |
|
Good morning.
Please put aside what you are doing for a moment and sit down and compose yourself in a dignified and responsible manner.Today I'm going to try to engage your sympathy. You see I am, unfortunately, a member of both of the only two groups that can, in today's society, be safely, and with propriety, subject to open prejudice and discrimination.
|
| Read More... |
|
Something really odd happened the other morning-I listened to the BBC's World Service. Now I know that that in itself wasn't odd, well at least not odd for me. What was odd came in that segment where they tell you what the day's newspapers in various parts of he world are saying.
Among all the foreign papers they mentioned a couple of British ones---both commenting on the same event and so one right after the other. Again this might not strike you as too odd either, the British Broadcasting Company mentioning two British newspapers, Ah! but when they came to name the papers I was so shocked that I had to rush off to put finger to keyboard.
|
| Read More... |
|
(This was written in very late December 2000)
Well it's finally here after a thousand years of waiting and at least one false start we have really, finally, actually reached the new millennium. Really! Tomorrow night we will at last be able have the celebrations we have waited so long and so patiently for, (and we can finally expunge the memory of all that innumerate frivolity they had last year) and the new year, the new decade, the twenty-first century and the third millennium will all begin. (And at the same time too!)
|
| Read More... |
|
Good morning class.
Today we are going to have a pop quiz. Get your pencils and paper ready, and here it is:
What day do the Twelve Days of Christmas start?
Right?
Got it?
Well I know you did, but everyone else out there was dead wrong I mean all that furtive counting backwards on their fingers and a couple of toes.
Yeuch!
|
| Read More... |
|
Forget the fearful turkey-caust of Thanksgiving: ignore the ignoble ritual disfigurement of Easter Eggs at Easter: fail to notice the nauseating calumnies heaped upon witches at Halloween: completely miss the malicious bonfiring of Guys just after that on the fifth of November (even though, since that's only in England I don't suppose it should matter too much to YOU)---But DO NOT, do not ever, or for one moment forget, ignore, fail to notice or completely miss the tragic plight and sad, sad fate at this otherwise joyous time of year of...
the sad fate of...
of...
CHRISTMAS TREES!!!
|
| Read More... |
|
Well excitement has certainly reigned at our house for the last couple of weeks (or is is months--she’s got everything in such a tizzy that that’s certainly what it seems like) the reason being that Rowie is going to be off off into the hills along with (apparently) the entire fifth grade of Plano to camp, to study ecology and geology and all sorts of other stuff that till now I didn’t even realize that Texas has.
|
| Read More... |
|
Columbus, of course, didn’t discover America: he didn’t intend to discover America, didn’t think he had discovered America and most decidedly wasn’t even the first European to reach America. So naturally we just celebrated Columbus Day---presumably to help him get over the awful misery of his triple disappointment.
|
| Read More... |
|
Hello, my name is Richard and I am ethnodeficient.
My condition of ethnodeficiency is probably the last remaining one which cannot be discussed in polite society, or even, for that matter, in the most disgusting and impolite society. It is, to be frank, completely ignored, even by such an adopter of obscure causes as NPR---when, for example was the last time you heard about ethnodeficiency on that afternoon news programme 'Almost All of the Things We Originally Considered We Had to Reject Because of Time Constraints' or whatever it's called.
|
| Read More... |
|
You know the more I loiter around in this sublunary sphere of ours the more I come to the conclusion that absolutely every single explanation, or even every supposedly simple straightforward description, of absolutely everything is flawed, wildly inaccurate and, frankly, not the real one.
That almost certainly goes for that statement I just made as well.
And for what I said just then too...
Hmmm.... but we can’t waste our precious few minutes here following that path into infinity.
|
| Read More... |
 |
 |
