About that post on the former slave invited back to the old plantation. Someone tried to figure out what happened to him.
"In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdan Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. " http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/to-my-old-master.html
From a profile in Vanity Fair, from 1995. A lot of the article is how his then-wife really didn't want to be first lady. But the quote to savor is this:
This is sort of like that picture of Clinton hugging Monica on the rope line. Little did we know at the time…But in Washington there are many demands on the Speaker's time. Since Newt became a national celebrity, he has no shortage of female admirers --from Callista Bisek, a former aide in Congressman Steve Gunderson's office who has been a favorite breakfast companion, to the ubiquitous Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, who has become a self-appointed guardian to the newly desirable Newt.
Ran into Bobby Coyote today. He's a big Nick Lowe fan and I told him I like Lowe's latest. Bobby wanted to know which song was my favorite. It's this one:
From the New York Times obit:
He became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in the late 1970s and fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. The group liked to play a game in which members came up with the sentence least likely to be uttered by one of their number. Mr. Hitchens’s was “I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”
and, later:
He also threw himself into the defense of his friend Mr. Rushdie. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved,” he wrote in his memoir. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”
Wish these kids would head west.