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Sunday, July 03, 2005
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As the Fourth Approaches, Four Easy Pieces I We’ve had a toad on our doorstep for the last three days. Wanting to know why, I googled toad and doorstep and instantly got a sermon from the First Lutheran Church of Galion Ohio titled "Toadily Awesome" : There was this contented, poised, inquisitive, observant toad. We might call him, in fact, a pondering toad. He had perched himself on the brick threshold and was taking in the world scene from his unobtrusive vantage point. …I’m grateful to the pondering toad. I’m sure he makes my life quite a bit easier by reducing the pest insect population in my garden. He looked pretty plump, fattened, I’m sure, by a gullet of flies and ants and mosquitoes and aphids and other assorted bugs. II Americans, says the New York Times, citing a big study, “were evenly split between absolutists and relativists in 2000, a significant change from 1981, when 60 percent fell into the relativist category." I am not sure what this means. My social scientist husband tells me it doesn’t mean anything. “What - to begin with - do they mean by absolutist?” III Martin Weitzman goes to trial soon. “[A]n avid gardener who sought the manure for flower beds at his Gloucester home,” writes the Boston Globe, the Harvard economics professor “said he often took it from farmland about a mile from downtown Rockport. But Weitzman is adamant that he was given permission to do so about three or four years ago from a man who was hauling manure to nearby fields at the time. The professor said he can't remember the man's name or what he looked like, but he assumed the man had the authority to grant the OK, and that it applied to the surrounding fields.” IV '"My mantra is, if you don't expect anything, you'll never be disappointed," said Mr. Kooper, who has the air of an eccentric English professor, his curly hair thick and gray, his voice given to odd, owlish inflections.' |