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Goodbye, South Dakota

At 12:55 pm CDT on Friday, May 27, my status as a lifelong South Dakotan ended. I crossed the state line en route to the city in which my wife and I now live. Two of our three daughters and our granddaughter live in the university town larger than Sioux Falls.

Family was the […]

Tim May 31st, 2022 | Tags: , , | Category: Personal/Family, Politics, State and local matters | Comments are closed | |

World War II almost killed Animal Farm

Find a list of the best 20th-century novels, and you’re likely to find both George Orwell’s 1984 and his Animal Farm. The former, published in 1949, is such a classic of dystopian literature that it’s hit the top of Amazon’s bestseller lists twice in the last four years. Yet his first tale of dictatorships, Animal […]

Tim October 20th, 2021 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: A Reading Life, History | Comments are closed | |

The politics of Thomas Jefferson’s donation to the Library of Congress

In 1800, the seat of the U.S. government relocated to the District of Columbia. Among final preparations for the move, in April 1800, Congress appropriated funds for what would become the Library of Congress. With the U.S. Capitol as its home, the library’s first books arrived the following year. But in August 1814, the library […]

Tim September 27th, 2021 | Tags: , , , , | Category: A Reading Life, History, Libraries | Comments are closed | |

This blog is old enough to vote

Eighteen years ago tonight, the first post appeared on this blog. It addressed how George W. Bush was the only president other than Nixon to cause me so much anger and fear.

Before Dubya, I never thought I could despise a president more than Nixon. I certainly never thought I could hate a president more […]

Tim September 9th, 2021 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Blog/Internet | Comments are closed | |

Goldarn and fudge you SNL

This week governmentattic.org (“Rummaging in the government’s attic”) released a response from the Federal Communications Commission to a Freedom of Information Act request for complaints filed about Saturday Night Live. With a cover letter dated “December 21, 2021,” the FCC provided more than 350 pages of documents, which also covered a request for complaints regarding […]

Tim July 15th, 2021 | Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: Culture, Media | Comments are closed | |
 
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