Blogroll

Best of 2007 – Music

My choice for Record of the Year shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It’s got to be Bruce Springsteen’s Magic. I don’t know that I find it as strong as some others have but when you combine a return to the essentials of rock music with the underlying themes of many of the songs, it […]

Best of 2007 – Books

This year I again wonder if limiting my list of books of the year to those actually published during the year is the right standard. There were a couple — Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat comes to mind — that would have made the list but for the fact they were published before 2007. Adhering […]

Missing the “reason for the season”?

The sad but all too true irony of this just grabs me. The Associated Press reports:

Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests attacked each other with brooms and stones inside the Church of the Nativity as long-standing rivalries erupted in violence during holiday cleaning on Thursday.

The church is built on the spot in Bethlehem where […]

My Christmas gift/New Year’s resolution for myself

Following through on something I mentioned a while ago, I’ve decided to sign up for the Russian Reading Challenge 2008. The post title comes from the fact I view reading as always a gift to myself and the challenge requires me to resolve to get certain books read. Besides, it fits in with the foreign […]

Of libel suits and legal bills

No, this isn’t what I got for Christmas, let alone a smooth transition from Christmas cheer to real life. Still, at least two items of legal interest have been in the Argus recently that I believe deserve some comment or explication.

The most recent is that a judge refused to dismiss Dan Scott’s libel action […]