Platypus of Truth

 The Wooster monument at Oak Cliff Cemetery Derby, Connecticut.  Many of the graves in this cemetery are arranged in family plots with a central monument that lists the names and dates of those buried there.  Small stones with initials mark the actual burial site of individual family members.  I have written about another family plot in this cemetery here . Buried along with the Woosters in a place of honor is Harry N. Thomas, their African-American servant.  I'm in the middle of teaching The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass  and Up From Slavery  to my seniors.  We've had some hard conversations and will be having a few more.  One goal of those conversations is to help them see that slavery may have ended in 1865, but the effects of slavery continue on in all manner of forms down to the present day. W.E.B. Du Bois begins his magnum opus The Souls of Black Folk  by saying that there is one question he continual...

The Church on the Green There are two churches on Huntington Green.  I passed them nearly every day.  Neither of them are particularly grand -at least not by the standards of other churches on other greens.  I never attended either of them, but I love them each in their own special way.  I've already shown you two gems from the Episcopal church pictured above.  Let me show you the rest.  The sky blue vault represents heaven.  The lamps you see would originally have burned whale oil but have been converted for electricity.  All these pictures were taken in natural light at about 10:30 in the morning.  The church is not laid out in a cruciform pattern, but follows the simple "salt box" colonial architecture.  In this, as in its general austerity, Congregationalist influence is evident.  To add a little Episcopal twist, the rectangular sanctuary has been divided (by the columns that support the balcony) into three pa...

Homestar Runner is back on the map with a new music video "Fisheye Lens."  This quirky little flash comic provided infinite entertainment for me and my associates in years past.  I was sad when the site finally ground to a halt half-a-decade ago.  As promised in an interview this past summer, however, the brothers chaps have vowed to make a comeback.  Their quirky first offerings seem like a good start.  Where it goes from here, only time will tell, but I'm glad to see them back in the saddle again.

After twelve issues spanning the better part of a decade, Hellboy's life on earth came to a apocalyptic end in The Storm and the Fury .  While his existence on this plain ended as was foretold, Hellboy's story is far from over.  That story continues with the launch of the brand new series Hellboy in Hell.  The collected first volume came out this summer and I was happy to stumble upon it at Barnes and Noble while I was looking for a map of Southern New England. The original Hellboy series ended with such a resounding "bang" that I had a little trepidation upon first opening the volume.  The new series has to start at the start and build up the action from scratch.  That sort of relaunch can kill all interest in a story.  I was glad to find (and I've just finished my third reading) that this is not the case with Hellboy in Hell: The Descent .  By now, Mignola's imagined world is so thick that it can sustain our interest even when the action slows almo...