Posted in reseña on August 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.
It’s a shame this American-made film portrayal of a WWI German unit trapped in the vanity of trench warfare didn’t have currency in 1930’s Germany. It might have made a dent in the German people’s hunger for the bellicose rhetoric happily supplied by the young National Socialist movement.
Alas, we forget too soon.
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Posted in reseña on August 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.
Now eclipsed by the Streep-Redford film presentation that appropriated its title, Karen Blixen’s memoir of life on her Kenyan coffee farm speaks movingly of the more benign side of colonialism in Africa and of one European’s self-evident love for the land she had made her own.
Sadly, Blixen’s lush descriptions of ‘her people’ are often judged too quickly by modern criteria of racial attitudes, a game that is like asking this early twentieth-century writer to wrestle with one arm tied behind her back. If it can be granted that there was anything good about Europe’s colonization of Africa, then Bliksen (Isak Dinesen was her pen name) is its face.
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Posted in denkschrift, reseña on August 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.
If the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (‘CBQ‘) can be compared to AAA baseball, that’s only because they throw so hard in the bigs. Journals like the Journal of Biblical Literature and both Novum Testamentum and Vetus Testamentum may be the first choice when biblical scholars choose to publish their best work, but CBQ is on balance just about as capable and perhaps only slightly less consistent.
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Posted in paterfamilias, reseña on August 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.
Let’s hear it for the small inventions in the $5 – $50 price range that make life just a bit simpler with understated design and solid performance.
The Kamenstein Stainless Paper Towel Holder belongs to the genre.
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Posted in paterfamilias, reseña on August 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.
This sturdy ceramic kitchen compost holder has become an old friend, one of those dependable if inert gizmos that’s there waiting by the coffeemaker every morning, prepared to do its job without complaint. If I find myself experiencing the odd sensation of affection for a piece of mass-produced pottery, I find some justification in the countless late-night trips on which it’s accompanied me, summer and winter, dutifully bearing its load of fruit and veggie waste out into the backyard darkness to the compost unit.
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Posted in reseña on August 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.
The actual events that led to the siege of the Alamo and the establishment of the short-lived country called Texas lie shrouded in the fog of contested legends. Like the Middle East today, two peoples necessarily tell the story of the same land in far different ways. It is often said by Texans today that Mexico is achieving through immigration and fecundity what Santa Ana could not.
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Posted in textures on August 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Grace is at once the most threatening and satisfying of human experiences.
In biblical terms, divine grace makes it impossible for us to earn our way into God’s favor. It is so lavish, so inscrutable, so powerfully invasive of lives that it pulls out from under us the tightly-woven carpet of credits and demerits upon which we have learned to gain traction, to stand tall. It deconstructs and reconstructs identity as potently as any other force. So, it threatens the construct in which we have learned to survive and, occasionally, to thrive.
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Posted in reseña, tagged reseña on July 31, 2007| 1 Comment »
Male voices, when they work well together, are a marvel.
This is as true of England’s soccer stadiums as it is of a tightly knit gospel quartet. It’s hard to say whether the four men of Overtones have ever been near a soccer stadium, but the odds are long.
No matter. What they do, they do very, very well.
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Posted in paterfamilias, reseña, tagged gadgets, reseña on July 31, 2007| Leave a Comment »
There’s something just a bit rich about a middle-aged pencil-pusher like me choosing to open his junk mail and electric bill with a little sword.
But hey, we don’t get to do much hunting and gathering any more, so toss us a bone. A little bellicose letter-opening never turned anyone into a real-life axe-murderer.
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Posted in reseña on July 31, 2007| Leave a Comment »
This 1994 matchup of Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock would not be the last pairing of this couple. This fortunate outcome for movie viewers makes it even more fascinating to watch the chemistry between the two back in 1994 when they did not trip off the tongue easily as a twinned male-female leads. (more…)
Canter Bridge 