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Books and CDs ordered, September 2026

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (gift for sister) Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume I: The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790) Albert Cossery, A Splendid Conspiracy Lydia Davis, Collected Stories Mavis Gallant, Selected Stories (Canadian edition of Collected Stories) Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman E.H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World Gustaw Herling, Volcano and Miracle: A Selection of Fiction and Nonfiction from the Journal Written at Night Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness (gift for sister) John Keats, Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics) Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It ... Every Time (gift for parents) Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denmark's Jews Escaped the Nazis Flannery O'Connor, Complete Stori...

🎶 'I'm high-nutted, suck it and see' 🎶 by Forager, or, An unaesthetic anesthetic, or, A vicious circular, or, Indonesia gnaw more than ever, or, I betel think twice next time, or, 🎶 'You're a jawbreaker/Groove maker/Toothacher/Dent-chew mess around with me' 🎶 by Spat Dentacar

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  Science Indonesian foragers may have sucked on mind-altering nuts 25,000 years ago, research finds Analysis of two skeletons reveals tooth wear and traces of psychoactive substance in what may be earliest known evidence for human drug taking Ian Sample Science editor Wed 9 Sep 2026 14.00 EDT The researchers examined skeletal remains of two pre-agricultural foragers. Photograph: Pubu Alar_sulsel/ What may be the earliest known evidence for human drug taking has been traced to ancient Indonesian foragers who sucked on mind-altering nuts as long as 25,000 years ago. Analysis of two exceptionally rare skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi revealed dramatic tooth wear and traces of a psychoactive substance in the individuals’ remaining teeth, suggesting they routinely sucked on hard, abrasive betel nuts. Although little known in western societies, betel nuts are the world’s fourth most widely used psychoactive substance after alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, with an estima...

All's Vanity Fair in the War on Love

A friend writes: I am bad at picking out boyfriends so I’ve kind of given up. I make bad choices. Whenever I give my famous talks to at-risk men and women and the women and men who put them there - the first series collected, of course, as Uncle Scott's Guide to Women for Men from Two to Six Inches  - I like to tell them that "if you had told me, all of you, that you had deliberately intended to wreck that portion of your respective lives devoted to romance, to judge by the results, I'd say I believe you. "For all of you have, since very earliest childhood, accepted from society, from your parents, teachers, friends, classmates, the media, blindly, uncritically, a whole vast network of false, vicious assumptions that lead you, time and time again, to involve yourself with the worst - and to reject the best, many of them hiding in plain sight for ages, though you in your blindness left them on the shelf till, alas, it was too late ..." To Be Continued (?) ...
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W hen visiting the Treasure Coast and its crown jewel, The 1337 Club, we invite you to stop in to the Vero Beach branch of the Lahti Library of Learned Literature - whose Chocolay Township branch, after its recent renovation, now devotes one of its three shelves right of the TV to the most concentrated assortment of classic writers east of, er ... Apartment 319 -  among whose 100+ titles are the 2001 edition, mentioned in the article below, of Jacques P é pin's Complete Techniques (Christmas 2024) and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home: A Cookbook (Christmas 2020), the latter a book version of the most inspired pairing of his-and-her immortals - not for nothing were Julia's initials ... J.C.   - since Ella and Louis took their turns cooing and belting the Great American Songbook seventy years ago. Don't miss, from Julia's Wiki page, her hair-raising shark-infested Second World War espionage, and, of course, the 1978 episode with Jacques on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, w...

Family-ar Brew: In a White Cup with Black Coffee, Sons Shine of Their Love

L atest "Great Minds" Google deflation of my presumed originality, as I thought, What if Eric Clapton had left Cream? Would Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce restyle as ... "Half and Half?" So spring 2026, almost sixty years on, their two sons, along with Rob Johnson, calling themselves Sons of Cream, playing half songs of their eminent dads and half all their own, release a debut album called, I guessed it .
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O ne of the CDs of sacred choral music I recently bought featured this hymn , whose opening melody I from earliest early-morning childhood TV recalled at once. Do you? Probably the only show whose opening-theme composer was the one and only Martin Luther, and whose voice actors included Hal Smith (Mayberry's town drunk Otis) and Paul Frees (Boris Badenov, nemesis of squirrel and moose Rocky and Bullwinkle). Hint: clay animated boy and dog from Gumby and Pokey (autocorrect, 2x: "Pokémon") creators, homiletic in church sponsorship, named after young Israelite shepherd-cum-king and giant Philistine warrior wot he with sling slew and with sword decapped. No more phone calls ... MAJ (email): Thank you for the musical link and the ginormous old covenant hint  ! PS Director Sir John Rutter is a fine choral music composer in his own right and well worth hours of prolonged listenings.  Maj   DSL. :  Re Sir John Rutter , I also of course loved him as the Regal Beagle's favori...

Who Read the Dogs In? A One-Man Show Starring, Featuring and Reviewed by ...

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  L atest "Mental Health Break" ( "his", not yours ) courtesy the Marquette Bureau Chief of the TLS , whose mailbox, speaking of letters of other sorts, so say Informed Delivery alerts from the usual aUSPiceS, is crammed to bursting with today's trifecta, Alan Bullock , Hitler and Stalin : Parallel Lives , Italo Calvino ,  Italian Folktales and Ferdinand Mount, Jem (and Sam) . U ncle Scott Says ™, When you bring together three of the ten best things in the world* - children, dogs and books** - the results speak bow-wo w nd volumes [2 min] . *The other seven , tied and in alphabetical order, are of course cake, cheese, ice cream, pepperoni,  (Uncle Scott's) pizza, (Uncle Scott's) root beer - - and (His) root beer floats. **Children, dogs and books  : except for that time when, in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville, c. 1972-1973, your irascible Miniature Schnauzer Tiffany followed you on  your bike ride to  the library next to  the Tom Thumb inc...