Month: December 2002
“Jumping the gun on race,” by Barry Saunders, in the North Carolina
“Some Charlotteans—who accepted the former team’s reptilian owner, George Shinn—are disturbed that the owner of their new team is black and are complaining that he is the beneficiary of race preferences. “I know, I know. It seems laughable that a billionaire would have any acquisition tainted with charges that he got something only because of…
3.5 million black Americans moved to the
3.5 million blacks in America moved to the South in the 1990s, about twice the gain in the 1980s, and well above the gains in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Census. The Northeast, Midwest and West all saw more black people leave than arrive.
About 60 percent of new maga
About 60 percent of new magazines fail in their first year. One in ten will still be publishing after a decade.
“All that scrubbing and dieting won’t stop mum believing we live like pigs,” by Richard Glover, in t
“It’s true my mother has two photographs of me on her hall table. They are side-by-side. One of me at age 14, looking painfully thin. And another, taken a year ago, in which I’m photographed from below in a way that makes me look like Marlon Brando after a binge. Says Jocasta: ‘It’s her way…
Folkways: A study of mores,manners, customs and morals, by William Graham Sumner. 2002 Dover,
“Fashion in dress has covered both absurdities and indecencies with the aegis of custom. From the beginning of the fourteenth century laws appear against indecent dress. What nobles invented, generally in order to give especial zest to the costume of a special occasion, that burghers and later peasants imitated and made common. In the fifteenth…
The Complete War Memoirs of Charles Degaulle, translated by Jonathan Griffin and Richard Howa
“Vichy’s liquidation coincided with the development of the battle in the capital. What had been reported to me of it during my brief stay at Rennes intensified my eagerness to see the crisis past. It was true that the German command, for reasons that were still vague, did not seem to wish to bring matters…
“Building rededicated to retired officer,” by Terry Boyd, from
“When the first female engineering officer showed up in 1976, Snow says, the brass called him in “and they told me, ‘Stretch the regulations to the breaking point, but find some way to get rid of her. We want her gone.’” So he placed nude soldiers liberally around the camp—in a bunk, in a latrine…
According to a survey,
According to a survey, 60 percent of Canadians would put refugee claimants arriving without valid identification back on the next plane back to where they came from, 51 percent favor locking up refugee claimants in “secure locations” until their cases were heard, and 44 percent would restrict Canada’s intake of Muslim immigrants.
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. 1997 HarperPerennial, New York. Ch. 7 “Wisdom Exce
“She had woken up at night to escape from a familiar, recurrent dream in which policemen approached her with snicking scissors, wanting to hack off her hair. They did that in Kottayam to prostitutes whom they’d caught in the bazaar—branded them so everybody would know them for what they were. Veshyas. So that new policemen…
The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, by John Pearson. 1995, Harpe
“Before long The Double R was bringing in a steady income and it was clear he had hit on the formula for success—the orderly raucousness, the sentimental cockney songs of Queenie Watts, the villains mixing with celebrities and the presence of several large but well-behaved old boxers[…] Sometimes the gipsies came, and Reggie, remembering his…