Look who is here.

The Slough

Walkway

Francesca and friend

What would Solon say?

Solon

Juliet

Some friends

McCain assesses his chances

The relentless vetting he'll get shows him standing by the curb on Pennsylvania Avenue weighed down with the baggage from the Bush years.

The Back of the Napkin.

Works for me. Get a stack of napkins and a few (preferably colored) pencils and give it a try. There are several You Tube clips that Roan has made (The one for a Google group that runs for about an hour is the most helpful.) to illustrate his methods.

The rule of fifty

Nancy Pearl, a former librarian of the enviable Seattle Public Library library, and onetime regular contributor to N.P.R., once suggested that one is obligated to read fifty pages into a book before deciding whether it is worth further effort; until, that is, one reaches the age of fifty. After that, one may deduct one page per birthday, so that at age 75, for instance, one is obligated to read only 25 pages, and so forth. By inference from her salubrious formula, if we live long enough we are truly entitled to judge a book by its cover. Long live Nancy Pearl!

Noah Webster turns 250

As we celebrate 250 years since Noah Webster's birth, here are a few remarks by Professor Jill Lepore (Harvard):

"Webster at 65 was a failed schoolmaster, a passable flutist, a lousy lawyer, an intriguing essayist, an inexhaustible lobbyist, a shrill editor, a pompous lecturer, and a man once dubbed "critick and coxcomb general of the United States. But he was undoubtedly also a prominent American citizen and to many Americans an eminent and admirable man of letters."