In today's dispatch, Rita recalls her very own courtroom drama... “Moon pie! Moon pie!” A young man’s voice shouted this nonsensical phrase over and over in the background of the 911 recording as the voice of an elderly woman calmly explained her emergency. Her back door had burst open and a ... Read More...
America
Douglas Dalrymple on Before Philosophy, Black Elk and Catholicism... My paternal grandfather’s sympathies were evenly split, I think, between cowboys and Indians. When he died, my grandmother begged me to take a few items from his closet. I kept a button-up cowboy shirt with a nighttime western scene stitched on the ... Read More...
A saucy comic book causes Rita to reflect on American attitudes to sex education... The little girls sat in a corner giggling hysterically over a comic book. Not an unusual sight, until I saw the comic book in question. This happened at a large family gathering in Belgium some years ago ... Read More...
Rita celebrates an Art Deco gem in an unlikely location... Where would you expect to find the venerable American Film Institute’s movie theater? There is one in Los Angeles of course, on the non-profit organization’s eight-acre campus in the Hollywood hills. You might expect their second theater to be in New ... Read More...
This week, Mahlerman's guide to classical music in America... When the Scottish philanthopist Andrew Carnegie built the hall that carries his name on Seventh Avenue, New York City, it was constructed in brownstone masonry - rare enough, when you consider that most of the large buildings around it are steel framed, ... Read More...
How did Thanksgiving evolve from a simple religious ceremony into a violent shopping stampede?... Spaniards have their Running of the Bulls at Pamplona; Americans have their Stampede of the Shoppers on Black Friday. Both are high risk, violent sports that frequently end in severe injury or death. Black Friday falls on ... Read More...
Selling Scottish genealogy to Americans is big business. Pity it's mostly a load of bunk... Exploring my father’s bookcase on one of my visits home, I came across a curious little pamphlet entitled 64 Common Errors in Scottish History. My father had quite an extensive library but I had never known ... Read More...
As America shuts down, Rita dreams a dream... I travelled to the nation’s capital recently and found it a much changed city. Streets usually thronged with government workers were deserted, museums shuttered, great monuments to the founders and the fallen barricaded with closed signs. Portents of the end times abounded – ... Read More...
I very much like the fact that the alien airport featured in today's unusual wikipedia article was named by the local council. Opened in 1963, Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport is located about four nautical miles (7.4 km) south of the central business district of Green River, Wyoming on a mountain known ... Read More...
Nige recommends Jonathan Raban's account of the praire homesteaders... Mixing history with reportage, travelogue, reconstruction and personal narrative, Jonathan Raban's wonderful book Bad Land (available for 1p here) tells the story of the homesteaders who came to settle on the all but unpopulated prairies of Montana in the teens of the 20th ... Read More...