Monthly Archives: November 2021

No Bookee No Fuckee

November 9, 2021 – 1:44 pm

Throughout the centuries the Vatican has maintained an Index of Prohibited Books comprised of proscribed authors such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Locke, and Galileo. Nazi Germany extolled the SA and SS and […]

By Peter | Posted in america, Books, Education | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Illiterati of the Modern Age # 1

November 9, 2021 – 12:20 pm

Back in the early 1960s I attended a good Catholic grammar school on the South Shore of Boston. Dyslexia was considered a sign of the Devil by the Nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills along with writing with the left or sinister hand. The inability to decode words has been declared incurable by various […]

By Peter | Posted in Education, Internet, language | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Allergy to Silence

November 7, 2021 – 12:44 pm

Last month I staying in Bannok about sixty kilometers from Chai-nat. Every morning I was woken by the village loudspeakers. The announcer read off farming information to the locals. I couldn’t understand a word that he was saying about rice prices. Finally someone pulled the plug and the world was serenaded by a chorus of […]

By Peter | Posted in Thailand | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

SUNDAY QUIETUDE by Peter Nolan Smith

November 6, 2021 – 1:46 pm

Ten years ago I took a young friend to see the Strokes at Saturday Night Live. The host was Miley Cyrus, the Disney teen sensation. The 19 year-old’s current worth is in the hundreds of millions and SNL’s producer followed the svelte brunette’s every move, as if he had plans for the perennial good girl. […]

By Peter | Posted in friends, good, semi-fiction, Traditions | Tagged | Comments (0)

A FLYING DIME by Peter Nolan Smith

November 2, 2021 – 11:55 am

On an June evening in 1939 my uncle and three of his teenage friends exited from Portland’s State Theater’s western matinee of STAGECOACH and JESSE JAMES. The gunfights in the cowboy double bill had had a funny effect on their blood, for while America was still peace, the threat of war loomed across the Atlantic. […]

By Peter | Posted in 40s, Driving, maine, semi-fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)