Peg Tittle

Most commented posts

  1. Short Men — 64 comments
  2. Bare Breasts: Objections and Replies — 27 comments
  3. Why Do Men Spit? (and women don’t) — 26 comments
  4. Short Men — 19 comments
  5. Walking Alone in a Park at Night — 11 comments

Author's posts

All the shit in space …

from Take Me To Your Leader, Neil DeGrasse Tyson If Bill Bryson were an astrophysicist, he’d be Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Overall, Take Me To Your Leader might be a bit too basic for a lot of readers, but this particular gem stood out for me: “On October 3, 1957, the number of artificial satellites orbiting …

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from Against Love, Laura Kipnis – commitment and the state’s discrimination against nonmarried people

from Against Love, Laura Kipnis “It’s generally understood that falling in love means committing to commitment. … Take the pervasiveness of intimate violence.  The problem here is hardly lack of commitment; this is commitment in overdrive: being less committed might mean being able to walk away.”  p56-7 I love her 9-page answer (p84-92) to “What …

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from Area Woman Blows Gasket, Patricia Pearson

Another fun read from Pearson.  Here just a very few funny bits: “For the record, here are the ten hottest toys in the Pearson household: A stick found in the park.  ….  The cat.  Preferably asleep and therefore willing to wear a kerchief and be transported in a stroller. …  Dollar-store stuff.  Perfect.  Quality matches …

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The Year of the Bad Decision, Charles Sobczak (2013) – HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Nay, REQUIRED READING.

The Year of the Bad Decision, Charles Sobczak (2013) HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.  Nay, REQUIRED READING. The final trigger imagined by Sobczak may not come to pass, but the outcome will be the same. Some excerpts (with a few comments): “People no longer talked about the weather—they trembled at it.” 3 “Global warming, or climate change, had …

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Schumacher’s The English Experience – delightful!

Another good one from Schumacher! (The English Experience, Julie Schumacher)   “The job of provosts was to create and then disseminate bad news …” p1 “I have an accentuating circumstance …” p20 The students’ assignment starting p42 is full of delights. “I am not saying this to make you an escape goat” p73 “Anyone who …

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How We Survived (a story from Fighting Words)

How We Survived (a story from Fighting Words)   You’re wondering how it happened.  How did we survive?  How did our population suddenly plummet from six billion to half that.  Enabling our natural resources to recover and, eventually, support us.  All of us. In 2020, all of the indicators pointed to our imminent extinction.  We …

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Our soooo left-brain society

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the western world is a lengthy work on neuroscience that will not appeal to many, but if you can sign out a copy from your library, I highly recommend reading the first six-page section of his conclusion (p428-434) wherein he presents …

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Ballsy (fiction from Fighting Words)

Ballsy “I’d like to thank all of you for coming,” the smartly-dressed woman smiled warmly at the several people seated around the board room table, each with a prospectus in front of them.  Only one was a man. “As all of you know, my name is Mariette Chandler.  Kristina Bolaenko, legal counsel, is at my …

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from Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods – delightful and pointy at the same time

“Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head …” p3 “… he had been let go from jobs at Harvard and the National …

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from Earth for Sale: The fight to stop the last plunder of the planet, Maude Barlow

“The disruption to the commons that followed Christopher Columbus’ initial journey dled to the death of 56 million Indigenous people by 1600 …” p13 “The total compensation to Indigenous people amounted to pennies per acre for Native territories … The treaty procedure was propelled by threats of war, forced removal, and simply taking the land …

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