Author Archives: fustianist

My mom flew in Thursday night to keep me company for a week.  Since then we’ve been hibernating, with only one excursion out of the house over the weekend.  Partly we’ve stayed close to home because we both needed and … Continue reading →

Remember the fish that absorbed their mates? Here’s the next installment on weird animals. Caecilians are tropical amphibians that completely lack limbs. Hence, smaller species sort of resemble earthworms (they also live underground), though larger species might remind you more … Continue reading →

A recent survey found that males between the ages of 18 and 34—note that I said ‘males’, not ‘men’—spend more time playing video games than males between the ages of 12 and 17. (Members of the latter group average about … Continue reading →

As my salute to the beautiful day, I swung over to the University Parks this morning on my way to get groceries. Here are 0.2% of the snowdrops—absent any snow—that I saw: There were also a few daffodils: As usual, … Continue reading →

It’s always nice to find someone else thinking exactly what you’re thinking: Wandering from one television channel to the next the other day, I came across young people playing the piano. One man, bearded and a little hefty, rippled through … Continue reading →

… and the crocuses look even better: I don’t quite understand how things work here. I’ve been told that Oxford is most likely to get snow in March. So, if it’s spring in January, does that mean that the order … Continue reading →

I managed to get myself on a student advising board for the library here on campus, and I have to say, I’m learning some interesting things. One of them is that I am no longer cool enough to work in … Continue reading →

On Friday Ithaca experienced an ice storm.  Cornell very helpfully sent out an email saying that the university was not closing, but that conditions were really, really, really bad.  Thank you, my dear university, for putting the onus on your … Continue reading →

So Nicholas D. Kristof writes a column in the NYTimes about how liberals should perhaps stop mocking evangelicals and instead realize that they actually share certain goals and could work together on those. Now it seems to me that this … Continue reading →

Winters around here are pretty wimpy. Crocuses, snowdrops, cyclamen, cherry trees, winter aconites, and several things I can’t identify are in bloom here. And I’m not talking about greenhouses. Here’s the view out the kitchen window this morning: Not that … Continue reading →