June - 2019

Favorite Fictional Characters, #371: The Grouchy Ladybug

Joe Pace

Jun 30, 2019

Favorite Fictional Characters, #371: The Grouchy Ladybug

You can see all the brown bears and hear all the polar bears you want. You can feed that hungry caterpillar and stay busy with that spider. You can hang out with that slow sloth and that quiet cricket and that painted horse. These are all gems from the mind and brush of Eric Carle, staples of our own early years and those of our children. But of all the memorable anthropomorphic creatures Carle has given us, my favorite has always been the mannerless rude dude of the insect w

Favorite Fictional Characters, #370: Dr. Abigail Bartlet

Joe Pace

Jun 29, 2019

Favorite Fictional Characters

Favorite Fictional Characters, #370: Dr. Abigail Bartlet

Part of what made The West Wing such great storytelling was the great characters that populated television's best show. And it wasn't limited to the main cast, either - the roster of recurring characters was littered with fully-realized men and women, often portrayed by top-tier talent. There is perhaps no greater example of this than the President's wife, the long-suffering, take-no-prisoners Abigail Bartlet, inhabited with sultry charisma by the legendary Stockard Channing.

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #101: Savage Inequalities

Joe Pace

Jun 27, 2019

Favorite Non-Fiction Books

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #101: Savage Inequalities

I first came across Kozol's writing in college. It was 1995 and I was dating an education major. This book was in her dorm room, and I started reading it in chunks during my visits. I thought U knew all about inequality in education - after all, I'm a New Hampshire kid and this was the era of the original Claremont lawsuit about unfair discrepancies in funding for public education in the state. Rich towns vs poor towns is something we're still struggling with a quarter-centur

Favorite Fictional Characters, #369: Thanos

Joe Pace

Jun 25, 2019

Favorite Fictional Characters

Favorite Fictional Characters, #369: Thanos

For several years, the sole argument of any merit leveled by DC partisans against the juggernaut artistic and financial success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was the relative paucity of compelling screen villains other than Loki. Personally I thought Ultron was fine, and Jeff Bridges' Iron Monger was bombastic fun, but I see the point. Part of the problem was that the best Marvel super-baddies were being ruined by other studies (see Magneto, Doom, Dark Phoenix, Galactus, t

Granite State of Mind, #149: Nike Employee Store, Greenland

Joe Pace

Jun 24, 2019

Granite State of Mind

Granite State of Mind, #149: Nike Employee Store, Greenland

A brief homage today to another New Hampshire place that no longer exists. For many years, my brother worked for Cole-Haan and then Bauer Hockey, both - at the time - subsidiaries of Nike. As such, employees and their immediate families enjoyed admittance to the company store on Ocean Road in Greenland, near the truck stop. I shopped there often, buying running shoes and athletic gear despite the fact that I rarely ran or did anything particularly athletic in those days. Sara

Favorite Fictional Characters, #368: Nick Miller

Joe Pace

Jun 22, 2019

Favorite Fictional Characters

Favorite Fictional Characters, #368: Nick Miller

Like everyone else, we watched The New Girl because Zooey Deschanel is quirky and funny and cute, the most improbably, awkwardly sexy leading lady since Alyson Hannigan. The show starts slow, like most new episodic television, with the writers and actors still feeling out how it's all going to work. From the opening gun, Jake Johnson knew where his wheelhouse was, and he immediately inhabited the grumpy man-child Nick Miller with a slouching charisma that served as the rumple

Favorite Fictional Characters, #367: Eleven

Joe Pace

Jun 21, 2019

Favorite Fictional Characters

Favorite Fictional Characters, #367: Eleven

I've been hearing for months and years that I need to watch Stranger Things. One of my (many) flaws is that the more I'm told to do something, the less interested I am in doing it. I should know by now that this is nonsensical Taurean stubbornness, and I should try harder to trust the recommendations of those who know me best. And so a few weeks back I started watching Stranger Things. I can understand why it's been recommended to me. The setting, especially in time, is deepl

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #100: A Shopkeeper's Millennium

Joe Pace

Jun 20, 2019

Favorite Non-Fiction Books

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #100: A Shopkeeper's Millennium

For the hundredth entry in this series, I'm sharing one of the most important books I've ever read. Johnson's volume is brief - under 150 pages excluding appendices - but is dense with important observations about how our modern American ethos and structure came to be. If the theory of our economy, society, and politics was promulgated by the founders, the praxis dates from the subsequent generation in the 1815-1835 era. It was in this time that America emerged as unapologeti

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #99: Star Trek Memories

Joe Pace

Jun 17, 2019

Favorite Non-Fiction Books

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #99: Star Trek Memories

I can't speak rationally about my love for William Shatner. More specifically, Shatner's depiction of the swaggering, libidinous, conflicted, iconic James T. Kirk. Over the decades, this portrayal has been endlessly lampooned and mimicked, with the halting delivery and dry-heave physicality that Shatner brought to the Enterprise's top man. Shatner's lines of dialogue are battalion of commas in search of parenthetical phrases to bracket, with mixed success. And yet, and yet, i

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #98: Exeter High School Yearbook, 1993

Joe Pace

Jun 11, 2019

Favorite Non-Fiction Books

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #98: Exeter High School Yearbook, 1993

The deeper the well of memory, the trickier it becomes to separate history from myth. As the years pass by, favorite stories become embellished legend, and eventually not even the teller can recall the truth of the matter. And yet even our personal histories are rooted in fact, however shrouded by narrative packaging. And this is where photographic evidence comes in - black and white, permanent, unforgiving. One score and six years ago today our class graduated from Exeter Hi

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #97: Plagues and Peoples

Joe Pace

Jun 10, 2019

Favorite Non-Fiction Books

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #97: Plagues and Peoples

Disease has been with humanity for as long as we have roamed the Earth, and McNeill skillfully retells our collective narrative through the prism of illness. The argument can be made - is made, by this book - that infectious disease has been a significant contributor to seismic shifts at key moments in human history. From the domestication of animals to the adoption of sedentary agriculture, from the growth of cities to the transoceanic exchange, from military conquest to med

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #96: The Big Scrum, How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football

Joe Pace

Jun 3, 2019

Favorite Non-Fiction Books

Favorite Non-Fiction Books, #96: The Big Scrum, How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football

I love history, and sports, and Teddy Roosevelt, so there's no universe in which I'd pass by a book covering all three, even one penned by right-wing National Review scribe John J. Miller. The book spends precious time covering the well-trodden ground of Roosevelt's early health troubles that led him to so fully embrace a sporting life, so familiar to TR-philes but perhaps necessary context for more casual readers or those coming from a more football-centric background. There

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