"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
Thursday, July 15, 2004 A belated Happy Bastille Day
A good bit of July 14 here was spent, appropriately enough, in a courthouse, on jury duty. The informational video for jurors opened with an Ode to Our Representative System of Democracy by, of all people, SJC Chief Justice Margaret Marshall. Nice Jacobinical touch, that.
Django was born into the open air, rambling lifestyle of his gypsy parents. At the age of eight, his mother's tribe settled near the belt of fortifications that surrounded the old Paris, near the Choisy gate. He never wore a suit or lived in a real house until he was twenty years old. These French Gypsies or Manouches were a world unto themselves, medieval in their beliefs, and distrustful of modern science. Django grew up in this world of contradictions, one foot in the bustling big city of Paris and the other in the age-old life of the nomadic gypsy. Though born into poverty Django had the soul of a nobleman and this natural elegance of bearing and attitude expressed itself in his music.
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My French Acadian forbears in Prince Edward Island are said to have hid in the woods to escape the mass deportation by the English recalled in the poem Evangeline. My Uncle Aubin was the first Acadian to head the government of a Canadian province when he served as premier of PEI from 1917-19, and it was my privilege to meet him when I was very young and he was very old. I can say that my children are related, on my side, to a PEI premier and Supreme Court justice, and on their mother's side, to two US presidents.
The Homies at Free Republic have picked up on the Episcopal Hip Hop Mass.
This spammer has a name after my own heart: Flail L. Attempting.
And a reader e-mails with an anecdote about President Taft when he was a professor at Yale Law before being named to the Supreme Court:
My grandfather was Yale '20…My grandfather and his roommates used to recall with glee how when passing President Taft on his morning walk they would greet him with, "Good Morning Mr. President." Taft always smiled and raised his top hat in return.
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