heat

Gimbling in the Wabe – Persistence

On summer nights – well, on many nights, really – I end the day out on my front porch, in the dark, relaxing on a wrought iron glider while my dog sniffs around in the yard one more time before we both retire for the night. I like letting the […]

Gimbling in the Wabe – It’s Too Danged Hot!

Dang, it’s hot. Too hot. I know you folks in Southern climates may well be guffawing at us Northerners now, like we don’t know hot, but I don’t care. Heck, I moved North to get away from all this! For those who may not know, I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota; […]

Birthdays

On this day, August 11, in 1921, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York. He was author of the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a fictionalized account of his own family’s history, for which he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize. One year later, the book was made into the popular television miniseries, “Roots”, which was seen by a record breaking 130 million viewers. He also was the ghostwriter for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He died of a heart attack in 1992; he was 80.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.