"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Cam Neely, a glorious throwback to the Big, Bad Bruins of old, and this space's favorite B of the past quarter-century, sees his No. 8 hauled to rafters tonight. The Globe's Kevin Paul Dupont writes:
What came through most of all in Neely's 10 years here was that meteorlike force, the ferocity, of everything he did. Power, yes, but more, far more.
His slapshots were blistering, his bodychecks devastating, and his fights were often frightful, Neely ripping at an opponent the way a bull gores and then thrashes a toreador. For those who forgot all that, the video replay tomorrow may be shocking at times. We live in an age now when NHL fights are mostly schoolyard tug-o-wars, combatants grabbing hold of one another's sweaters and spinning 'round until everyone grows weary of the no-punch monotony. The end of Neely bouts were more bloody dismemberments than exhausted disengagements.
Old-Time Hockey? What do you call climbing into the stands to battle the spectators and beat one with his own shoe? See a clip of a classic battle in Madison Square Garden between the entire Bruins team and New York Ranger fans.
Meantime, the Munsey & Suppes Ballparks site recalls the old Boston Garden.
And the Bruins' official website, all Cam all the time today, has a page of multimedia clips of historical highlights, including Orr's famous flying Stanley Cup-winning goal.
Etc…
A Valley Forge-esque pic from the Patriots archive captures the climate at the game in Foxboro just past, which provided an answer to the query: What is the sound of 130,000 mittens clapping?
A set of historic Russian monastery bells were saved from Stalin when Harvard acquired them more than 70 years ago. Now Russian Orthodox churchmen want them back.
You can virtually ring the St. Danilov Monastery bells here.
Edmund Burke's number is lifted to the rafters at Recta Ratio, ever a sagacious observer of high-scoring Whigs.
From the ivied halls: The Knickerbocker at the New York Sun reports in Society Page style on the American Historical Association convention.
Tales of history professors who demand not creative thinking but regurgitation are featured at Critical Mass. Erin O'Connor writes:
[T]he stories…have an almost archetypal quality to them. They exemplify the manner in which, on today's grade-grubbing, grade-inflated campuses, one's marks are all too often marks of conformity to a prevailing intellectual--or anti-intellectual--norm. They also exemplify the unconscionable choice many students face: sell out and survive, or sink with integrity intact. College students should never, ever have to face such a choice. It's soul-killing, and it's a mindfuck. The point of a college education--and here I speak as an idealist and not a pragmatist--is to expand the mind and sustain the soul, not to teach young adults the self-destructive art of lockstep.
Meantime, Glenn Reynolds, himself a law professor, links to a column he wrote post-9/11 on the alienation of the academics:
Not surprisingly, people who would rather be clever than right, who confuse oppositionalism with originality, who hold ordinary Americans and their beliefs in faux-aristocratic contempt, and who do all of this with an unshakable degree of self-righteousness, are not likely to be especially popular.
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