January 2012
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never bro’t to mind?
Should auld...”
– Robert Burns
December 2011
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Bye!
‘kay, guis, I’m out until January 3, 2012. Try not to post anything cool; I would hate to miss it.
This would be a great time to tell my handful of followers/followees that I really enjoy having you all on my dash. Even if we’ve never met or are in different countries, I enjoy hearing about your life and joys (and babies! [Meg!]) and kids (Ross!) and successes and romances and...
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Taxes
Why is it that when the Democrats let a temporary tax break expire, the Republicans are so quick to accuse them of “raising taxes” (can’t tell you how many times this comes up in election years!); but in every instance re: this payroll tax thing, the papers (and the Republicans) refer to it as “ending a tax holiday.” Srsly? I really hope that if the payroll tax break...
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Mistletoe
Also in the Czech Republic, I liked that my friends had these ancient traditions that were just accepted as common sense. One of these was that mistletoe had to be gathered by shooting it out of the tree it grew in. You couldn’t just climb up on a ladder or anything and just pick it.
But they’d tell me like it was the most obvious thing… “Well, you have to shoot it out of...
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Christmas Trees
The tradition in the Czech Republic is to not decorate your Christmas tree until Christmas Eve. You can get it and set it up lots earlier, but hold off on the decorating until the night before. I skipped that tradition, though. I wanted a beautiful tree to look at in the weeks before Christmas, so we decorated early.
Christmas-tree lights weren’t that common until recently. I think even...
“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is...”
– Christopher Hitchens (via mollycrabapple)
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I'm internet famous. →
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Tea Question
When I was staying with a friend’s parents in England, we drank tea like crazy. I know coffee is making inroads, but I assume tea-drinking is still part of the national identity. And if there’s one thing we know from watching too much British TV, it’s that you guys always ask “Do you take milk?” And: “One lump or two?”
Here’s my question,...
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Prague, January 1990
So in 1989-90, I was traveling around Europe. I’d planned on just seeing Britain, Benelux, and France, but it was surprisingly easy to get around by hitchhiking between big cities that I ended up going a lot further than I’d thought I would (as far as Israel, in the end). Anyway, I was traveling from NL to Paris in January 1990, and was stopped over somewhere in Belgium, when other...
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