My last trip home to Chicago, I asked my parents about their genealogy research. On my dad’s side, the story I always heard was that theBartlettsmarried into the Carrolls; my grandfather and father were then given the name Bartlett Carroll. I ended up as Bart Carroll on my birth certificate, and later changed it to [...]
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
The other day, I mentioned hunting dictionaries for words. I tend to do the same with wikipedia, for factoids. I imagine a good many people do as well; I wonder who many wikipedia searches are specifically directed, and how many are just from wandering curiosity. Today I was poking around wikipedia, looking up “mattock” and [...]
I used to love flipping through the dictionary to find new words. Not all of them were useable—at least not in everyday conversation—but still interesting to come across. For example, I remember finding “snickersnee” and thinking it about the greatest word ever—the sound of it, the definition (the art of fighting with knives), the etymology [...]
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 35 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the [...]
At the start of a new year, I wanted to look back at 2011 (Year of the Wabbit) and what it meant to me personally. Quite a great deal happened, a great deal to be thankful about. This is clearly my most patently self-centered posts—but hey, that’s some of the reason for keeping a blog [...]
Football Champions vs. Heroes
Posted: November 9, 2011 in General, HeroesTags: Brett Favre, champion, Deion Sanders, football, hero, Joe Montana, Joe Paterno, Reggie White, walter payton
(Continuing yesterday’s discussion of football heroes. Also, here’s a tremendous article on the warfare of sports.) The Heisman Trophy: celebrating champions or heroes? The difference between “champion” and “hero,” I think, has a lot to do with qualities we’d hope to see in our heroes that don’t necessarily need to be in our champions. Namely, we [...]
Ghost in the House
Posted: November 7, 2011 in GeneralTags: Always Sunnin Philadelphia, American Horror Story, League, Walter Peyton
Catching up on my other TV shows. All from FX, apparently. And oddly enough, this week had both It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League poking fun of social networks—which was fantastic, as I’m in class now studying social networks. And in American Horror Story, their Halloween 2-parter concluded with, as my wife called [...]
