A friend sent me a YouTube video for an art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, devoted to the artist Raphael. It is one of the largest exhibitions of his work ever put on. It is exquisite. Watch the video. https://youtu.be/y5vnCnB4JcE?si=M3snocb7Aeo2wJY5 Lots of paintings are on view but also, lots of drawings and [...]
Category: culture
May 1 odds and ends…
May 1 is supposed to be some Communist deal, but when I was a little girl we had our own little ritual that was supposed to honor Our Lady at the start of her month. On the first day of May, we went out and picked flowers, tucked them into homemade paper cornucopias, and took [...]
Eye candy for walking …
After all kinds of events, including simply celebrating Easter, I'm trying to return to a normal schedule of exercise. This led me to the entirely motionless activity of finding beautiful pictures of walkways on the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC website. All pictures are in the public domain. I just want to walk into [...]
Thinking about regret …
This is not about me! What is regret? I’m trying to figure out the ‘exact’ meaning of regret. If you had feelings of regret and they were somehow expunged, what would you feel instead? Google says it is a “complex and painful emotion” that stems from imagining a different outcome of past action — or [...]
Book report — January 2026
In the last month I’ve read some very odd books, or an eclectic selection of perfectly normal books, take your pick. I started with “Laura Spinney’s utterly engrossing Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global [which] tells the story in magnificent detail” of how the Indo-European group of languages got its start. The quote is from the [...]