My old German grandmother used to call it “schnitlau,” though I’ve never seen the word used elsewhere. It was her name for the small wild onions that grew all over the place on our little farm — the same ones that grow all over the place hereabouts.
You’ve probably seen it: A movie or television drama that depicts news coverage of some anticipated disaster. It might be an alien invasion, or a nuclear attack, a volcano, an approaching asteroid, or — a tsunami.
Imagine a new Ferrari. The specs are incredible: great steering and suspension, 0-60 in around four seconds, a top speed exceeding anything you would ever hope for on a public road. On paper, the perfect machine.
We live in an age of confession. I don’t mean so much the heartfelt admission to ourselves and our Creator of our manifold sins and wickedness as a loud and public proclamation of some character flaw that henceforth is expected to excuse unsatisfactory behavior.
One of the best delights of the newspaper business is its unpredictability. Events, often unforeseen, dictate the course of the day. This can be exciting. Or, sometimes, it can be mortifying.
For some reason, talk turned to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. You may remember the remnants of that event, especially if you saw the movie, “Men In Black.” The centerpiece of the fair was a huge, skeletonized globe, called the “Unisphere,” and there were two tall, modern-looking observatory towers that in the movie were actually captured flying saucers. My favorite line of the movie has to do with the fair having disguised an alien invasion: “Why else would they hold it in Queens?”
The sheer vastness of the devastation in Haiti, a nation that was not a garden spot to begin with, is such that it is almost impossible to grasp. It appears that at least as many people as populate all of my county — every man, woman, child, and out-of-town college student — were killed. The mind lacks perspective for such things, even as a phrase like “a trillion dollars” is so big as to be meaningless.
Here we are, a third of the way through January and well into very cold weather, and I still haven’t fired up the furnace this winter. I don’t know if I will.
The article caught my attention — how could it not?
It seems that the Russians are going to get busy and, if they work hard and fast, they will push an asteroid away from Earth before it comes close — maybe too close — in 2032.
When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol In Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (the full title) in 1843, he chose to make the least frightening of his apparitions the Ghost of Christmas Past. That makes sense. Christmas memories tend toward the sweet.