Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 34

• A typical house in Dot?

  By ljd42 on May 12, 2021

  Spotted on my walk yesterday afternoon—a longer walk than usual because the weather was so perfect—was this beautiful house. Is it really typical for Dorchester? Well, you be the judge.

• All Other Nights

  By ljd42 on May 11, 2021

  About 80% historical fiction and 20% chick lit—that’s my very rough estimate of the nature of this novel by Dara Horn. And it won’t surprise you that I enjoyed the 80% much more than the 20%. There are, of course,… Read More ›

• Foundation’s Friends (for, not by, Isaac Asimov)

  By ljd42 on May 9, 2021

  This is a collection of 16 original science fiction short stories, plus one novella, written by 17 authors and assembled 32 years ago in honor of Isaac Asimov shortly before his untimely death. Inevitably the quality is uneven, but the… Read More ›

• Finally… Dining in at the Ashmont Grill

  By ljd42 on May 7, 2021

  

  After more than a year, Barbara and I finally had dinner inside at the Ashmont Grill! It’s really a different experience, especially when we are greeted by Butterfly at the door and the meal is presented by our favorite server,… Read More ›

• Boston in Transit (the book this time)

  By ljd42 on May 5, 2021

  Five weeks ago I wrote about a BPL talk on “Boston in Transit,” i.e. the history of public transit in Boston. Now I’ve been reading the accompanying book, with the same title. What a gorgeous book it turns out to… Read More ›

• Department of Death

  By ljd42 on May 3, 2021

  The trouble with good academic satires is that they are too much like reality. This one is an excellent academic satire, and a mystery to boot. Department of Death is the latest and best of Lev Raphael’s literate mysteries featuring… Read More ›

• A cheery song about the MBTA! (Red, blue, orange, and green)

  By ljd42 on May 1, 2021

  Okay, so the lyrics aren’t perfect. That’s all right; don’t quibble. Just remember: always look on the bright side of life. No, wait, that’s John Cleese. Oh, well. Here’s the MBTA song:

• Ready Player Two

  By ljd42 on April 30, 2021

  How do you avoid being formulaic when writing a sequel to a creative and highly successful popular novel? The answer, apparently, is that you don’t avoid it; you give in to it. Now don’t get me wrong! Ready Player Two,… Read More ›

• Tavolo

  By ljd42 on April 28, 2021

  Scrumptious dinner last night out on the patio at Tavolo! Barbara started with chef’s burrata with arugula, melon, prosciutto, vincotto, and black pepper; my starter was frico (pan-fried grana Padang, potatoes, baby arugula, pickled red onions, with balsamic reduction). Unfortunately,… Read More ›

• Train of Thought

  By ljd42 on April 27, 2021

  Some fun reading for the pandemic! Linda M. Au’s Train of Thought is a light-hearted account of a two-week cross-country train trip—well, almost cross-country, being Pittsburgh to Seattle and back again. People who don’t appreciate train travel always observe that… Read More ›

• The Crying Game

  By ljd42 on April 25, 2021

  “If you reveal an ending that everybody already knows, does it still count as a spoiler?” There’s at least one flaw in this question: no matter what the movie, surely it can’t be true that “everybody” knows the ending, or… Read More ›

• Why is there a connection between crime novels and trains?

  By ljd42 on April 24, 2021

  You think of crime novels, you think of trains. Well, maybe not you. but many people. Murder on the Orient Express leaps to mind, of course, but there are a lot of other examples, as you can read about in… Read More ›

• The First King: Birth of an Empire

  By ljd42 on April 23, 2021

  The spoken dialog is entirely in Old Latin! Well, yes; it’s a movie, after all, so what do you expect? There surely are many movies in Old Latin, a.k.a. Archaic Latin, right? Well, maybe not. At least this one has… Read More ›

• Isaac Asimov’s “Black Widowers” stories

  By ljd42 on April 22, 2021

  Isaac Asimov was best known as a science fiction writer, though many readers justly prize him for his ultra-clear writing of science fact. Not so many readers realize that Asimov was also a prolific—stop there! “prolific” anything is redundant when… Read More ›

• Following directions, a.k.a. lather-rinse-repeat

  By ljd42 on April 21, 2021

  If you’ve ever built a model railroad structure (or a model airplane or whatever), you either build it from scratch, build it from a kit, or do some combination of the two. I am definitely not a scratch builder, so… Read More ›

• Calendrical linguistics: What a wonderfully nerdy combination!

  By ljd42 on April 20, 2021

  You’ve wondered, I’m sure, about some of our names for the months. Perhaps you are puzzled about why October is the tenth month when the name clearly suggests that it should be the eighth. Similarly for September, November, and December…. Read More ›

• A welcome respite from takeout

  By ljd42 on April 19, 2021

  Now that Barbara and I are both fully vaccinated (two jabs + two weeks), we ventured out to the Ashmont Grill at 6:30 last night for the first time in six months—dining on their beautiful patio of course: Note the… Read More ›

• Seven Types of Atheism

  By ljd42 on April 18, 2021

  What a misleading book title! What I had expected was a book about… well… seven different types of atheism. A reasonable assumption, isn’t it? But no. It’s not about seven types of atheism. It’s a very interesting book nonetheless—but it’s… Read More ›

• The Mattapan-Ashmont “High Speed” Line in 360°

  By ljd42 on April 17, 2021

  When I first moved to Boston, the Red Line went from Harvard to Ashmont (red because it’s close to crimson). Then the northern portion was extended from Harvard to Alewife. It was supposed to go to Arlington and Lexington, but… Read More ›

• What? A model railroad can be a computational device and a musical instrument?!

  By ljd42 on April 15, 2021

  Surely you’re joking, Mr. Aaronson. I can (just barely) believe the musical instrument claim, but a computational device??? Actually, both claims are true, hard as it is to believe. For the musical instrument, watch this short video and you’ll see… Read More ›

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