Eric the Blue
Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews
Category: Reviews
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In Civil War times, before we commemorated Memorial Day, Walt Whitman, author of the self-published book of poems now known as Leaves of Grass, traveled to northern Virginia upon hearing that his brother George, a soldier in the Union army, had been wounded and was convalescing there. He found George, whose wounds were slight, but…
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Sitting at home with a bad cold and Swag, one of Elmore Leonard’s early crime novels. Favorite parts are those in which the lucrative trade of armed robbery brings the low-level criminal team into contact with similarly affluent young men and women who work in the legitimate part of the economy. After just a few…
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It’s been ten years and two days since Prince died, which means it was ten years ago today that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played a scheduled concert at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn. When the musicians took the stage, which was bathed in purple light, they opened with: I’m going to establish…
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It occurred to me yesterday, while watching the NCAA women’s tournament game between the Gophers and UCLA, that in basketball it’s helpful to be tall. Don’t look now but, for the first time since before last year’s all-star game, the Twins do not have a losing record. I saw that if you want to bet…
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As predicted, I stalled along the long open road of Henry Adams’s History of the US, but, as reading in bed is still my Ambien, I was lucky to stumble again upon the novels of Evelyn Waugh. The one everyone knows is Brideshead Revisited, which was made into a movie as well as a lauded…
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I saw a Replacements tribute show at the Turf Club a week ago and have been listening to their records again ever since. My God. A friend and I like to play the game, Favorite album? Favorite song? For me, it’s changed, and it will again, but tonight my answer for the first game is…
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Shoveling snow. Watching sports on TV. Ubering teens to their New Year’s parties. Debating with myself whether to be asleep at midnight or stay up till my young reveler is delivered home by someone else’s dad. In short, living life all the way up. According to the actuarial charts, I have maybe 15 years left,…
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Got back this morning from running some errands and discovered a dog biscuit sitting atop my mailbox. My mailman–though it’s a she–loves dogs, and always has a treat ready when our ways cross on walks. It’s to the point that the dog gets excited when he sees those postal service vans, and can hardly be…
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The Wikipedia article on Elon Musk’s chatbot commences: Grok is a generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) chatbot developed by xAI. It was launched in November 2023 by Elon Musk as an initiative based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name. Grok has apps for iOS and Android and is integrated with Twitter…
Eric the Blue 