by jpAdmin | Essays
“It’s as clear as mud.” Since mud is not clear, the speaker cannot mean what he says. (Let us assume he is male). In fact, he means that what he has heard or read is unclear. Very unclear. He says the opposite of what he means to emphasize his difficulty in...
by jpAdmin | Essays
The modern world has suffered in the past century, and into the present one, from the tyranny of monomaniacs, from murdering monsters of depravity like Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao, to cultural purists infected with the arrogance of privilege, like Trump and...
by jpAdmin | Reviews
If you haven’t seen it yet, Happy Valley is a television series you should see. The last of the series just ended so I want to promote it before it disappears under another surfeit of maudlin Disney rehashes which seem to never stop. You really do want to stay up...
by jpAdmin | Essays
Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias uses the Greek name for Ramesses II, the most famous of Egyptian pharaohs, and was written as a great statute of him was in transit to the British Museum in a wave of awe and Orientalism sweeping Europe. The poem captures both the power...
by jpAdmin | Essays
When I was young, there was a bare patch under some tall and shady basswood trees (I called them ‘lollipop trees’, as that is what they looked like) where regular grass just didn’t want to grow. So, I started to play mud games with the hose. While my brothers were...
