As everyone knows — everyone, that is, except certain cats — Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym that J.K. Rowling adopted for her Cormoran Strike series of detective novels for adults. Lethal White is the fourth in this series. This is a long… Read More ›
Kristen Lepionka grew up mostly in a public library and could often be found in the adult mystery section well before she was out of middle school… She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her partner and two cats. That’s what the… Read More ›
If you didn’t listen to the NPR report Why a High High Schooler Started Covering The Supreme Court, on this morning’s Weekend Edition Sunday, you should definitely do so! Do it right now, before you forget. OK, now that you’re… Read More ›
“Hey, Larry!” shouts my neighbor as I take out the trash yesterday evening. “Where are your fireworks?” “People shouldn’t be setting off fireworks in residential neighborhoods,” I reply. “They scare cats and dogs.” “But you’re not scared,” he reasoned. “No,… Read More ›
Yet another linguistics podcast has come to my attention! It’s The Vocal Fries, subtitled “the podcast about linguistic discrimination.” This series, now four months old, is of course named for the phonological register commonly called “vocal fry,” but that’s only the starting point…. Read More ›
Three of the cats, doing their best to sit at the vertices of an equilateral triangle (even though William isn’t paying attention and Vincent is messing up the covers):
Continuing some of the themes that have been lurking just below the surface of my past three posts, I turn to an essay by Joel Wagner. Most of his essay actually springs from a blog post by a different author,… Read More ›
From a recent New York Times opinion piece by Tony Schwartz: Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is… Read More ›
Today we took 200 high-school freshmen on a full-day combined geometry-and-physics field trip to the Museum of Science. It was fun, educational, and…exhausting. Sometimes it was like herding cats. Fortunately we had a dozen adults, so no one individual was responsible… Read More ›
What an annoying book! How did it become a New York Times best-seller??? In the words of H.L. Mencken, “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” so maybe that’s the explanation. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie… Read More ›
Back in March…and April…and May…a group of freshmen kept pestering me (nicely, of course) to write a photo-essay about my cats, so I finally gave into the pressure and wrote one. Just follow this link.
The Franklin Park Zoo is only two miles from my home, and I’m a member, but I don’t get there often enough. But I had a great time there yesterday — and how often does one get to visit a… Read More ›
What an amazing book! Or perhaps I should say “What an amazing house!” Bob Walker and his wife Frances have turned their house into a jungle gym for their nine cats, as you can see in this image. But… Read More ›
Ah…Ken Jennings! The Jeopardy geek’s favorite. He’s our favorite, not just because he’s the big all-time long-lasting winner, but more because he combines encyclopedic knowledge, intellectual curiosity, sense of humor, and surprising humility. I earlier reviewed his book Brainiac, and I just… Read More ›
I’m sure that you’re motivated to read Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel, The Windup Girl, because it was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell… Read More ›
My D Block class was even more hyper and less focused than usual today, since it was the afternoon of the last day before vacation. Some of them really wanted to have a cat-drawing contest, so I gave in and… Read More ›
Last year I listened to the audiobook version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and reviewed it in this blog, so I figured that I would follow it up with Franzen’s fourth and latest novel, Freedom. While Freedom held my interest all… Read More ›
Maybe I am inadvertently committing the Recency Fallacy, but it seems to me that up until last year or so the past participle of pet was petted: “Where do your cats like to be petted?” <http://www.mihav.com/en/forum/share-amp-chat/where-do-your-cats-like-to-162014> “pet; petted; petting” <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pet>… Read More ›
Geometry was never their strong point. It’s hard to get them to understand what “parallel” means:
Barbara and I highly recommend a small Bed & Breakfast in Amherst, the Stone House Farm. Right on the northern edge of town, a mile or so beyond the end of the U.Mass. campus, it’s convenient to get to but… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 