John Havard

Thrilled! Ecstatic! In raptures!

...so it will be very interesting how the parents of the many students, from all kinds of backgrounds, with such high school learning plans respond to Trump's proposed dismantling of the Department of Education!

Great point. Rather than privates being at an unfair advantage, state students are at an unfair disadvantage. As far as the U.S. goes, I can only comment on my large state Uni, where students from all kinds of backgrounds come in with disability (etc) accommodations dating from high school plans...

The Harris campaign have blamed the timeline and seem to think they did nothing wrong and that she was a great candidate...

bsky.app/profile/moir...

That said, she was sometimes obligated to write on the stairs. I am sure the women with no financial independence who escaped abusive situations to protect their children will be sympathetic, such are the common struggles faced by all Women.

I won't walk out of a bar if it is playing Michael Jackson (a predatory child molester, if you believe the survivors, whose abuse *was also enabled by and not incidental to* the art and its self-mythology). I wouldn't take Munro off a syllabus. I don't know if I'll ever open one of her books again.

At times she sounds a bit psychotic, which she also wrote about (see "Dimension," raising the question of whether psychopaths can write about psychopaths, which presumably they can, since the psychopath in that story writes to the mother of their child, who he has killed, about being a psychopath).

The point is not just that she wasn't a sprightly Canadian lady with a twinkle in her eye. It's that she ultimately folded this depravity into her personal self-mythology. She made it inseparable from the art. She used people as fodder, as content. Her own children, my god.

That said, I never had any personal attachment to Alice Munro, beyond a vague feeling that I might not enjoy having her as a neighbor.

(Reading the article whose online title is "Alice Munro's Passive Voice" and whose print title is "You Won't Get Free Of It." I would have been fine with "The Monstrosity of Alice Munro.")

Does anyone know whether PLUTOCRACY is based on a real board-game? (he asked meaningfully). From Alan Hollinghurst.

That’s Gavin and that Stacey and that’s Nessa and that’s Smithie (James Corden, who I once observed serially eating three hamburgers).

Is anyone else watching the “Gavin and Stacey” Christmas special with an insistent family member? Know you are not alone.

A cover of the year!

X, Threads, Facebook being the other three. I remain very active on Instagram @johnowen82

Abandoning this site will mean having FOUR defunct social media profiles!

Why do I feel so rough? Do you think it was all the wine?

Not really passing the "spark joy" test here, is it?

Watching QUEER did not make me curious to know more about William S. Burroughs, to be completely frank about it.

I’m sorry but “we were successful where we campaigned!” is a bit like saying “my garden isn’t a total mess in the small, familiar area that I have devoted my energies to gardening intently (helped out by a small army of gardening volunteers)!”

Frank O’Hara, our great poet of the Troubles.

I just binged “Say Nothing” ask me anything about the history of Northern Ireland.

I’ll be on Instagram for the foreseeable future, find me there! @johnowen82

According to the book I am reading, “what used to be called lace-curtain Irish”!

I was today years old when I realized that Frank O’Hara was Irish.

It’s finally our season on this new app. What could go wrong?

Fellow Blue-Sags, rise up! ♐️

“Really holding space with that and feeling power in that… I’m in queer media, so…”