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Where is Tarquinia? Why should you visit? And how do you get there? Read all about beautiful Etruscan painted tombs in this fun virtual tour. The Etruscan necropolis (burial ground) of Tarquinia is the perfect site for an inexpensive day trip from Rome. Visiting ancient tombs might not seem like your idea of a fun …
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What do elephants and flies have in common? Let's look at a fun idiom about exaggeration and find its earliest use back in the 2nd century CE.
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For my birthday, I was given a subscription to Master Class, which is great, because I am the sort of person who reads course catalogs for fun. When I first logged on to Master Class, I was asked to click on the courses I was interested in, and, well… if Master Class was a dating site, I’d be that gal who right swipes for anyone who has a pulse & doesn’t appear to be a serial killer.I was especially eager about the cooking courses and the writing courses. I&rs [...]
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We all have quarantine stories to tell; this is mine.In a time of loss, we must find joy.This might be too easy for me to say. I’ve had it good, comparatively. I haven’t lost my home, or my livelihood. My loved ones are safe and healthy, as far as I know. For me, the loss that came with quarantine was secondary. On the Monday of the second week of March, I got news that my dad had suddenly died (not from Covid.) My brother, stepsiblings and I told ourselves that [...]
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If you teach high school English, I expect you've seen this list before. I'll bet you even showed it to other members in your English department, and you all shared a good laugh one afternoon, as students left the building and you braced yourself for an hour or two of essay grading before you headed home.That's how it happened for me, when I saw this list for the first time, but that was toward the beginning of my teaching career, before there was Facebook. Since then I have seen it posted [...]
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I’ve never been the type to carefully read instructions. I don’t have the patience. Or, maybe it’s more like most of the time, I don’t understand. I’m not a visual, step by step sort of person. I’ll just assume I know what I’m doing enough to figure it out, that through some combination of instinct, common sense and magic, everything will come together.That strategy worked in the Before-Times, back when there was room for human error because there [...]
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A little over four years ago, I promised Pauline, my daughter who was six at the time, that we would soon have our first female president.Then, that damn New York Times election needle that kept moving in the wrong direction. I had a sleepless night and had to break it to Pauline the next morning that Trump would be our next president.I went to school and saw the scared, deer-in-headlights expressions on my students’ faces. They were sure that they and their families would be deported s [...]
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Normally over Winter Break, my big "me-time" outing would be going to a movie by myself in the afternoon, seeing something that neither Rich nor the kids would want to see, and which I would thoroughly enjoy partly because it's such an indulgence, to sit alone in a movie theater in the middle of the afternoon. However, that was obviously not happening this winter break, so I had to find a new way to indulge myself.The solution was to lose myself while following the recipe for a sausage-ap [...]
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lLet’s talk about “Karen”. Karen is a white woman who takes her privilege for granted and she uses her power by diminishing or degrading others in the process. Conservatives think Karens are women who consider themselves woke, and that Karens go around telling others that they’re not anti-racist enough. To them, Nancy Pelosi is the ultimate Karen, because she is a woman who uses her gavel, rips up Trump’s speech, and claps at Trump slowly and maliciously. Mea [...]