Unless you have read The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,[1] Eskimo Words for Snow,[2] or Stephen A. Jacobson’s Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary,[3] or are a native speaker of Inuit or Yup’ik, you probably think that the Inuit have a limitless number of words for snow. That is bunk.[4] Yup’ik has rich derivational and inflectional morphology.[5] There is …
Near the end of his life, the American poet Theodore Roethke went to visit the Irish poet Richard Murphy on the island of Inishbofin, off the west coast of Ireland. After several weeks of increasingly erratic behavior (Roethke suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder), he became violent and was carted off to an …
A few months ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York called me and said, ‘I’m hurt.’ I pushed a blonde out of my lap and said, ‘What happened?’ ‘I was threading the pins on the bucket to Old Bessie and it slipped.’ Old Bessie is what he calls the backhoe. ‘Pin’ …
Content Warning: This post does not contain a discussion of options trading or musings about other random shit. It is about mobile home park management. Does anyone remember Jack Welch? Until shortly before 9/11, Jack Welch was the darling of the business community. He was Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Sam Altman and Sam Bankman-Fried back …
Content Warning: This post contains language regarding option trading. Readers looking for the usual crap should peruse old posts or copies of Mad Magazine. Any discussion of investments herein is for entertainment purposes only. Dirt Lease does not give investment advice. Readers should consult their own advisers before making an investment decision. Writers should avoid …
A man mounts a stage in the Catskills. He looks out at the audience but he can’t see much, because the lights blind him. Glasses clink, people look up expectantly. A drop of sweat falls from his armpit into his tee shirt. Another runnels down the side of his face. He contemplates telling a Jew …
The angel’s share is the portion of a batch of whiskey that evaporates when the whiskey is aged in wooden barrels. Up to one percent of a batch of can be lost each year this way. That is a cost of doing business that whiskey producers factor in when they do their planning. The angels …
Phaedo is a deeply affecting story, but the philosophy is problematic. It is one of the dialogues in which Plato – or, Plato speaking though his avatar, Socrates – discusses the theory of forms. The idea is that there is a world of forms, in which the essence of things exist. Things in our world …
This afternoon, I received a registered letter telling me that a resident in my park in northern New York thinks that my manager is blowing off his job. That is usually untrue, but a registered letter is a marker that the sender is trying to lay a paper trail. A paper trail means the threat …
Jinx Lennon has a standard Paddy resume. He worked on building sites in London after school and poured beer at South Street Seaport for a while before he returned to his hometown in the northeast corner of the Republic of Ireland to make music. Here’s what an article in the Village Voice said about him: …