Charlie

If you like horse racing, you might enjoy going to Kranji Park. My spouse was one of the architects.

Are we sure that beer is what #14 is drinking?

Getting the scramble consistency just right is not easy, and I often miss--a little too wet or a little too dry. Sometimes I don't try, and just make an omelet, with either cheese or ham.

I have even your father beat. I was shocked the first time I pulled up to the pump at our local station and discovered that the price had risen from 25 cents to 27 cents.

I just started reading Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest, and I am fascinated by it. I hadn't read anything by him in years--Myra Breckinridge when it was published may have been the last novel--and I had forgot what a viciously witty writer he was.

I recently visited the newly renovated Rijksmuzeum in Amsterdam and found it greatly improved as a museum-going experience. I also cast another vote for seeing the new Barnes, where it is much easier to actually see the art than it was in the old building in Bala Cynwyd. (I'll admit it: I am one of those who often finds museum buildings more interesting than the art within them.)

I am a frequent museum goer, but I have the same problem. I can sprint around a tennis court, or hike for an hour, but the slow walking in a museum makes my back and legs ache.

Still the longest running thread in site history, because the subject is as eternal as escort prices. Whatever became of the lovely Talvin? By the way, in Palm Springs we are still paying about $2.80 for unleaded regular.

I am not normally a reader of science fiction, but A Wizard of Earthsea is one of my favorite books.

I hated to have it end. It was one of the best, most memorable, most informative books I have ever read.

My spouse loved The Wright Brothers, so it's on my list for the near future.

I read only Swann's Way, many years ago, and I don't remember a word of it.

I think you and I may be the only persons on this site (maybe on the Internet) who have ever read Wieland. When I wanted to teach it in an AmLit course a couple of decades ago, I found it had been out of print for years. (Any other Brockden Brown fans out there?)

I knew we must have something in common: I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Jane Austen, tried to write a novel once about a lost manuscript by her sister Cassandra, and still re-read her novels occasionally (I recently finished Sense and Sensibility again). I visited her home at Chawton several times, and did some research in the Austen papers at St. John's College, Cambridge. But I never joined the Jane Austen Society, because zealots make me uncomfortable. At the moment, I am working my way through Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, which I was given as a gift when it was first published, but somehow sat unread on my bookshelf for the last half century. However, I don't read much fiction anymore. I prefer history and biography instead. Concurrent with the Styron, I am reading Augustus to Constantine: The Thrust of the Christian Movement into the Roman World, which is dry and academic, but informative. I am learning more about the theological positions of Eusebius and Tertullian than I ever knew before (and I am sure I will have forgotten it by next week). As WilliamM noted, Lucky used to prod us to talk about books we were reading--he is a voracious reader, but our tastes and interests are totally different--but I have seen little about books since he left. He hoped that the Comedy&Tragedy forum would provide a home for book discussion, because it tends to get lost in the Lounge.

The mere contemplation of the subject makes me weak in the knees, and not from pleasurable anticipation.

My first serious sexual experience was with someone who picked me up in the Port Authority Terminal in 1960, so I think of it fondly.

I was assigned "The Power Broker" in a graduate political science class, and it was the most enlightening text I read in any course that whole year.

I was in the new one in Liege, Belgium, a few months ago. It was designed by Santiago Calatrava, and is spectacular.

I used to commute daily in and out of Penn Station in the 1960s, while the new one was being built aboveground. It was a mess, but I figured that once they were finished with the rebuilding, it would be OK. It wasn't.

No, but I have been to Durham at that time of year, though I have never seen it from that angle.

It looks like Durham Cathedral to me.

This thread caused me to rummage through my drawers, where I found a dozen copies of other magazines I bought on 42nd Street in the mid to late 1950s, like "Body Beautiful," "Adonis," "Vim," "Tomorrow's Man," and "Popular Man." They are very small format, mostly 4x6 inches or 5x8 inches, and most cost 25 cents. A few have color photos on the covers, but everything else is black and white. Some of them had names and addresses of the photographers in the back, and one night while I was sharing the mags with my best friend (we were both teenagers), he noticed that one of the photographers lived near us in the New York suburbs. He suggested we go to the house, knock on the door, and say we were interested in buying posing straps (the mags often carried ads for posing straps). We parked on the street near the house, and I stayed in the car while he rang the doorbell, and then disappeared inside the house. I sat there nervously in the dark for 10 minutes, until a man emerged from the door, came over to the car, and said "You better come inside." I followed him into the house, and....well, I suppose what happened next should remain private between me, my friend and the four men in the living room.

These photos brought a sentimental tear to my eye, because I used to buy these magazines when they were new, at the newsstands and magazine stores on 42nd Street west of Times Square, before it became "family-friendly." A few years later I even got to meet Bob Mizer, through a friend of mine who was an aspiring pornographer.

In my public high school, students took Latin, German, French or Spanish. Then at the beginning of WWII, they stopped German, and never reinstated it. When the urban community college I taught at first opened, liberal arts majors were required to take German, French or Spanish, and one could also major in one of those languages. So few students chose German that all courses were dropped after a few years. After ten years, we were down to a single professor of French, who had to teach an occasional Italian elective to fill her teaching schedule; when she retired, she was replaced by a part-time adjunct. The school now offers courses in Arabic, Chinese, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese and Swahili, but Spanish has become the only foreign language with full-time professors and possibility as a major, in a college with over 40,000 students.

+1 Recently, at an AT&T store, I was helped by a young salesman who had the barest hint of an accent. I asked if he were Canadian, and he said he was from Uzbekistan. He had come to the US in his 20s, speaking no English, and had spent a few months at a relation's apartment in San Francisco, watching American television all day long, to learn English. When I probed a bit deeper, it turned out that he already knew three other languages before he came to the US. Most language learning research shows that the earlier one learns another language, and the more languages one knows, the easier it is to master another one. When Serena Williams won the French Open in 2002, she tried to give an acceptance speech in high school French, and it was such a garbled mess that the audience could hardly keep a straight face. When she won again eleven years later, she accepted in fluent, idiomatic French that left them cheering. In the meantime, she had bought an apartment in Paris and lived there for long periods, and had a French tennis coach (and rumored lover). There is no substitute for being immersed in the culture when trying to learn a language as an adult.