Quoting Roosevelt Quoting Dickens

Letters to His Children by Theodore Roosevelt now available from Project Gutenberg. An excerpt:

March 4, 1908.

DEAREST KERMIT:

You have recently been writing me about Dickens. Senator Lodge gave me the following first-class quotation from a piece by Dickens about "Proposals for Amusing Posterity":

"And I would suggest that if a body of gentlemen possessing their full phrenological share of the combative and antagonistic organs, could only be induced to form themselves into a society for Declaiming about Peace, with a very considerable war-whoop against all non-declaimers; and if they could only be prevailed upon to sum up eloquently the many unspeakable miseries and horrors of War, and to present them to their own country as a conclusive reason for its being undefended against War, and becoming a prey of the first despot who might choose to inflict those miseries and horrors—why then I really believe we should have got to the very best joke we could hope to have in our whole Complete Jest-Book for Posterity and might fold our arms and rest convinced that we had done enough for that discerning Patriarch's amusement."

This ought to be read before all the tomfool peace societies and anti-imperialist societies of the present-day.

Fix my slice from the comfort of your chair

Let me know if you see anything screwy. I'll be forever in your debt (just figuratively, I hope).

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continued...

"Two-time Masters champion" has twice as good a ring to it as "Masters champion"



Phil makes all us lefty golfers proud. He's inspired me to deck the next moron on the driving range who says to me, "Hey buddy, aren't you standing on the wrong side of the ball?"

(By the way, thanks to Mike Weir, Tiger is the only non-lefty to win the Masters in the last six years.)

From the AP:

VIENNA, Austria - For centuries, historians have portrayed Mozart as poor, but new documents suggest the composer was not nearly as hard-up for cash as many have believed. Scholars who combed through Austrian archives for an exhibition opening Tuesday on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's later years in Vienna found evidence that he was solidly upper-crust and lived the good life.

From Slate:

Because this is prime time, however, it was also inevitable that the courtship would take ages. Television hates nothing more than a happy couple. Elaborate mating rituals and thwarted love seem to make better viewing than the comfortable routines of life à deux. Still, seven years? Is it possible that Josh and Donna have set some kind of record?

Also see second item here from my former B&C blog

I'm no Bush supporter, but I've always sympathized a little with this viewpoint. The U.S. Civil War and the two World Wars would have been called "quagmires" long before we won them, had we had cable news in those days...

Masters 2006


The week when we inevitably venerate the pretty flowers of Southern golf aristocrats. This year there's live video feeds from Amen Corner, the par-3 contest, and even the driving range, at masters.org.