Hacker News: cafard

New comment by cafard in "Writers and Their Day Jobs"

cafard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:36:03 +0000

Trollope eventually got quite responsible work at the post office.

Some writers found consular and diplomatic posts: among the Americans, Hawthorne, Howell, and (James Russell) Lowell; among the French, Chateaubriand and Stendhal.

Louis Auchincloss was a lawyer.

New comment by cafard in "Study shows two child household must earn $400k/year to afford childcare"

cafard — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:55:46 +0000

I am not in that market, but this seems implausible. My neighborhood is pretty prosperous, but I doubt that $400k/year is the standard. Yet kids do go off to daycare.

New comment by cafard in "“Playmakers,” reviewed: The race to give every child a toy"

cafard — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:01:41 +0000

That was the story that was current back then, at least the tying to a tree part. It may have been invented, but not by the New Yorker writer.

New comment by cafard in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

cafard — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:04:16 +0000

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

New comment by cafard in "Garment Notation Language: Formal descriptive language for clothing construction"

cafard — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:11:35 +0000

What does this have to do with the post?

New comment by cafard in "A shortage of tenors"

cafard — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:33:01 +0000

An acquaintance made some money as cantor to a synagogue around here. He was not Jewish, but I gather that the combination of singing and getting paid felt just fine.

New comment by cafard in "A shortage of tenors"

cafard — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:31:10 +0000

In 1982 the Secretary of the Interior, James Watts, announced that Wayne Newton would perform at the National Mall on Independence Day, at least implying that the Beach Boys, who had been there the year before, really didn't reflect good American values. He was mocked for his, and the next year the Beach Boys came back. I did not go to the Mall, but heard some of their performance on the radio. They were terrible, and a musician I knew said that this was because men's voices deepen with age but the Beach Boys were still trying to sing in the original keys.

New comment by cafard in "Early Christian Writings"

cafard — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 23:16:37 +0000

Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine runs to five volumes. I haven't read the last, but the first four are very readable. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) runs to something under 400 pages. Given the word "Catholic", I will add that Pelikan started off Lutheran and ended in one of the Orthodox churches.

New comment by cafard in "How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)"

cafard — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:14:40 +0000

Elite distance runners are likely to be running farther than a half marathon every day. There used to be a notion that your weekly mileage ought to be triple the distance you are training for, which for a marathon is about 79 miles per week, eleven-plus miles per day. My body would not tolerate much more than 60 miles per week, and honestly I don't know what most other recreational runners did.

New comment by cafard in "Evolution of car door handles over the decades"

cafard — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:41:28 +0000

Kids today miss the chagrin of damaging a protruding door handle, and the entertainment of one of their elders entirely removing one against some obstacle.

New comment by cafard in "Housman's Introductory Lecture (1892)"

cafard — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:58:35 +0000

The most important Latin scholar in the world at that time? That is quite a claim. My recollection from Bernard Knox's essay "Closet Modern", collected in Essays Ancient and Modern is that Houseman's work, whatever its quality, was primarily on an author of limited interest.

But good for Houseman recovering from bilged examinations. Jonathan Swift did terribly on his examinations, but then made up for it.

[added}

>> Virgil and the Greeks would have made Shakespeare not merely a great genius, which he was already, but, like Milton, a great artist, which he is not.

Really?

Housema praises Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer*. When I read it, I found its premise odd: "My one object is to give practical advice to a translator." If this is to say "a translator of Homer", then there are few in any generation who attempt the task. If to translators in general, then an essay of Hilaire Belloc's strikes me as much more to the point. Then "or what he has in common with Milton--the noble and profound application of ideas to life--is the most essential part of poetic greatness." seems to me to offer cover for some pretty bad poetry.

New comment by cafard in "Immanuel 'the Königsberg clock' Kant (2015)"

cafard — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:49:08 +0000

The FBI used to like to hire the young from southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and such places: generally the kids wouldn't have traveled at all far from their birthplaces, and so security checks were that much easier.

New comment by cafard in "TikTok allegedly blocks 'Epstein' in DMs after sale to GOP-linked investors"

cafard — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:15:08 +0000

I don't use TikTok, but I can think of more than one Epstein who is not Jeffrey but whom I can imagine somebody sending a message about, for example Joseph Epstein.

New comment by cafard in "Amazon inadvertently announces cloud unit layoffs in email to employees"

cafard — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:13:14 +0000

This seems to be the week for retrenchment in Bezos World. The Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores are closing, The Washington Post is laying off half of its foreign correspondents, and the Post was planning to send nobody to the Winter Olympics but reversed that decision.

New comment by cafard in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

cafard — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:47:32 +0000

Something to do with being located between Germany and Russia? Or, if you will, Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, and Russia?

New comment by cafard in "White House Posts Digitally Altered Image of Woman Arrested After ICE Protest"

cafard — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 23:45:11 +0000

I don't quite get your point about the blurring of church and state. What a government employee does with his own time can hardly be considered an act of the government.

Having said that, I otherwise agree with you, though I don't know about the flagging.

> - said tweet parrots Trump's own tweet style

Haven't you noticed that grownups in the presence of a baby will speak baby talk?

New comment by cafard in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

cafard — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:52:25 +0000

As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer.

But somebody who was a dean at (I think) Virginia Tech wrote that the British "His work is quite sound, actually" could be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standard we all aspire to."

New comment by cafard in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

cafard — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:35:20 +0000

Americans don't celebrate failure?

Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon.

And I urge American HNers to walk or drive around, and see how long it takes to see a Stars and Bars.

New comment by cafard in "Ask HN: What non-fiction do you read?"

cafard — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:58:17 +0000

History: about halfway through The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis. (About halfway through 918 pages, not counting notes etc., so you will see that it holds the interest.)

Philosophy: about halfway through A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer.

Memoir: last year read Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown, The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustofsky.

New comment by cafard in "Many college players among dozens charged in point-shaving plot"

cafard — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:33:04 +0000

There were point-shaving scandals in the 1950s and 1960s. (And, I see, 1970s and 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_shaving).