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To make a BLT, start (with) tomatoes 
Check. 🌱
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Victoria Goddard Fantasy readers, I highly recommend Victoria Goddard’s wonderful books. Her masterpiece, in my opinion, is The Hands of the Emperor, and for sheer fun (and, at first, disorienting weirdness), Stargazy Pie and its companion books are wonderful. Goddard is so good.
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Bueller… Bueller… Bueller… Um, he’s sick. Vis a vis the 2025 coup: Checks and balances only work if the other two branches check and balance. Congress and the courts are, um, sick (unto death, for Congress). If they croak, they’ll be very difficult to resurrect.
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Caught. 
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Whaddya Think? Ringo Starr and Lucinda Williams need to record together. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, daylight’s burning.)
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Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama Often, a highlight of my week is a new (to me) poem shared by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Today’s, “Neanderthal Dig” by Don McKay, is especially rich.
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Hangin' Out A good one from Poorly Drawn Lines.
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RIP, Garth Hudson “Anybody who gets a chance to play with Garth Hudson, they’d be a fool not to. As far as The Band is concerned, he’s the one who rubbed off on the rest of us and made us sound as good as we did.” – Levon Helm
Update: more here.
🎵
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Garden Note January 18 2025: Started tomato seeds inside today.
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Three Little Buechners From a trip to Half-Price Books.
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Pink Moon 
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I Can’t Stop Loving You Rewatching, and loving, Ken Burns' “Country Music,” Episode 4: “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” It’s gotten a little dusty in here a few times.
Modern Sounds, indeed. Thank you, Mr. Charles.
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Walt Whitman: Democratic Vistas Of all the dangers to a nation as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn–they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.
Plus ça change…
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Chili Dog Day 
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Ringo at Eighty-four Here’s a thoughtful and appreciative review of a new(!) album of all-new country songs by Ringo Starr. Some remind me a little of Nick Lowe.
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Linky Goals @simonwillison.net says,
I wish people would post more links to interesting things ... Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.
That sounds right. I'll make that a goal for this year, and I'll start with Simon's (may I call you Simon?), "My approach to running a link blog." His custom-built image-size reducer is a real gift.
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Yuck Ted Gioia:
Few things are more distressing than praise lavished on irredeemable ugliness.
At the risk of becoming a yeller-at-clouds, I fret about this in our current media environment: The Joker, American Horror Story, Saw (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, 3D), etc. This can’t be a sign of cultural health, right?
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Coherence A couple of years ago, @ayjay’s Breaking Bread With the Dead. Today, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift:
… art is not confined by time. Just as material gifts establish and maintain the collective in social life, so the gifts of imagination, as long as they are treated as such, will contribute toward those collectives we call culture and tradition. This commerce is one of the few ways by which the dead may inform the living and the living preserve the spiritual treasures of the past. To have the works of the past come to life in the active imagination is what it means “to have gathered from the air a live tradition,” to use Ezra Pound’s wonderful phrase. Moreover, as a commerce of gifts allows us to give more than we have been given, so those who participate in a live tradition are drawn into a life higher than that to which they have been born. Bestowed from the dead to the living and from the living to the unborn, our gifts grow invisibly among us to sustain each man and woman above the imperfections of state and age.
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Noice, Abe Hard to imagine a sweeter time than the Sunday afternoon between Christmas and New Year listening to “My Bar’s Jukebox” and enjoying local IPAs in the backyard on a sunny 67(F)-degree day with my associate.
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Begin with the Heartbreak Russell Moore (italics mine):
On the other side of the sword that cuts through Mary’s heart at the cross (or those that cut off the martyr’s heads in first-century Rome), there’s a weight of glory that cannot be described adequately with words. We can free ourselves to risk heartbrokenness because a broken heart is the beginning of the story, not the end.
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Grade-A stocking stuffer 
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Two-dog Christmas 
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A Christmas Carol, Sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall Robert Herrick:
The darling of the world is come,
And, fit it is, we find a room
To welcome Him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart …Merry Christmas!
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