Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 2

• Three cheers for Jason Jensen — not only a model railroader but also a true American artist!

  By ljd42 on November 17, 2025

  

  Model railroading is both a craft and an art. My favorite model railroader on YouTube is Jason Jensen, who is #1 as both a craftsman and an artist. Many of his videos are lengthy, but they’re worth it, as he… Read More ›

• Thai Oishii

  By ljd42 on November 16, 2025

  

  Looking at the name of this Dorchester restaurant, your first thought is that its cuisine must be Thai. It’s right in the name after all! But then you realize that the second word, oishii, is clearly Japanese, not Thai (we… Read More ›

• The new Springsteen bio-pic

  By ljd42 on November 11, 2025

  

  Your most urgent question (I’m sure) is why did I put a hyphen in biopic. The answer is that I learned recently that a majority of people pronounce biopic to rhyme with myopic! (In other words, they are parsing it… Read More ›

• Happy birthday, Cassandra. You are no longer a kitten.

  By ljd42 on November 8, 2025

  

  Happy first birthday, Cassie! You have left your kittenhood behind and are now officially a full-grown cat.

• Everything possible

  By ljd42 on November 5, 2025

  

  Back in 1983 I first heard this beautiful song, as a result of a recommendation by my sister Ellen. It was written and performed by Fred Small, who is least known as a lawyer, better known as a UU minister,… Read More ›

• Chinese food in Greater Boston, then and now

  By ljd42 on November 1, 2025

  

  A shout-out for Richard Auffrey, the Passionate Foodie, whose blog by that name has been providing thorough and accurate info about food and wine for almost 20 years! In particular, I want to commend him for his numerous posts about… Read More ›

• Abby wants more admirers.

  By ljd42 on October 24, 2025

  

• “I am a Jewish man.” —Daniel Cainer

  By ljd42 on October 19, 2025

  As I was thinking about these matters yesterday (for obvious reasons), this popped up in my YouTube feed. Who knows why the algorithm chose it for me. In any case, even though I was never a bar mitzvah — or… Read More ›

• No Trump. No Kings.

  By ljd42 on October 18, 2025

  Be sure to turn on closed captioning for this one, so you can see the parts that you can’t hear: https://youtu.be/_2KOMWr0qNA

• Very sad news

  By ljd42 on October 17, 2025

  

  My sister, Ellen Davidson, died unexpectedly in her sleep Wednesday morning at age 77. No information yet about cause of death, although she did have Parkinson’s, so that may be it. If you knew her, you realize that she was… Read More ›

• Triple threat: Carl Sagan, critical thinking, and an exam

  By ljd42 on October 13, 2025

  

  Carl Sagan. A blast from the past, you’re going to tell me! But not really. As several commenters have pointed out after watching the video linked below, he’s more relevant than ever at this point. So go watch it yourself… Read More ›

• Dumpling Kitchen

  By ljd42 on October 11, 2025

  

  Yum! Barbara and I enjoyed a truly delicious dinner yesterday evening from Dumpling Kitchen in Mattapan, a new-to-us Chinese restaurant. We started with three flavorful appetizers: har gow, Peking ravioli, and scallion pancakes. Each was better than the next, and… Read More ›

• The Last One

  By ljd42 on October 8, 2025

  

  Don’t read this novel if you are susceptible to nightmares! Amazon calls Will Dean’s The Last One “an unputdownable locked-room thriller,” which is true as far as it goes. I would like to tell you more, but I don’t know… Read More ›

• A Scourge of Vipers

  By ljd42 on October 3, 2025

  

  My one-word review is “meh.” Bruce DeSilva’s A Scourge of Vipers is not a bad mystery. (There’s litotes for you. You can look it up, as I think I said in my last post in a different context, though still… Read More ›

• Morning glories on a glorious morning

  By ljd42 on October 1, 2025

  

  Chiasmus here. (You can look it up.)

• Truly these are oldies but goodies — songs from… wait for it… two millennia ago!

  By ljd42 on September 28, 2025

  Back in the ancient world, when I was in high school, a friend and classmate of mine was named Dwight Wayne Batteau, better known (then and now) as Robin Batteau. For quite a while now he has been half of… Read More ›

• Dead in the Frame

  By ljd42 on September 20, 2025

  

  Sooner or later, in the lives of all private investigators, they always get arrested for a murder they didn’t commit. At least the fictional ones do. It’s apparently a requirement of the genre. And sure enough it happened to Lillian… Read More ›

• Quick! Живојиновић and more

  By ljd42 on September 16, 2025

  

  What is that strange word in Cyrillic letters in the title? At first glance it looks like Russian… but then the letters ј and ћ show that it isn’t Russian. Hmmm… Be patient now; you’ll find out soon what’s up…. Read More ›

• An Enemy in the Village

  By ljd42 on September 14, 2025

  

  Clearly this is another familiar, comforting Bruno-Chief-of-Police novel by Martin Walker. What’s not so clear is what the title, An Enemy in the Village, refers to. My initial guess, based on previous novels in the Bruno series, was that the… Read More ›

• The kittens (a follow-up to my 8/31 post)

  By ljd42 on September 10, 2025

  

• ‹ Older Entries
• Newer Entries ›