I watched the investiture on TV back in the Sixties. Those hats!

It was fine for me while I watched the final season of Game of Thrones because I had never seen any of the previous seasons and therefore any close analysis of characters’ history with one another would have been lost on me.

To be fair, in the book the reveal of Lyra’s parents occurs during the gyptians’ big meeting, which is quite early in the story anyway. I am re-reading the book along with the series, so since I’m trying not to get too far ahead it’s slow going. It turns out it was 17 years ago that I read the books -- no wonder I…

I have not yet seen any of “The Crown”, but I do remember the Aberfan tragedy. It was truly unspeakable, and received a lot of press in the States.

A winter thunderstorm is rare but not unheard of. Ever see the guy on the Weather Channel freaking out over thundersnow?

When Vera laid the knife on the mantel in Act One I immediately thought of Chekov’s gun: bound to be used by the end of the play.

Also in New York State, I ceremonially wait until November 7th, or maybe the 10th, to get out my parka and my overcoat. April 7th, they get laundered or cleaned and go to the back of the closet. Sometimes I put a 5-dollar bill in a pocket of the parka and then have the delight of finding it the next November.

That is obviously a very rough estimate. How big is the type? Are there illustrations taking up space on the pages? What proportion of the page is footnotes? Is it a gripping thriller (fiction or non), or a scholarly tome? Are the pages covered in conversation rather than prose?

Surely he’s too old to be under the thumb of his father... Oh wait.

Yikes! What are they circling? I hope it isn’t someone’s cat.

Daemons are of the opposite sex, except for the rare times when they are of the same sex. I got the impression from the book that in this instance it suggests that the person is gay. I suspect that the ultimate form of the daemon reflects the true inner character of the human.

As the scenes of terrorizing Elliot’s allies racked up, I was not too comfortable with the fact that the victims were all women. But then I reflected that there aren’t any sympathetic male characters left. Gideon? Mobley? Both dead.

Flying from Toronto to the US means that you have to go through US customs and immigration BEFORE you leave for the States, so the passengers are half-freaking out because they don’t want to miss their connections and the inadequate staff is crabby.

I visited an old friend who’s a bit of a recluse and he had newspaper over his windows. I kind of liked it.

Yeah, my birthday is the week before Christmas, so it’s all part of the holiday season. Also it makes it easy to figure out how old I was/will be in any given year.

Kathleen Norris, author of “The Cloister Walk”, offered this theory in her book “Dakota”: Jello salads, especially as part of the traditional church supper, were something of a status symbol for rural Midwestern housewives, because getting it to set right required a refrigerator, and if you had a refrigerator it meant…

And here I was hoping that the abused wife finds a way to make bad men invisible and powerless.

Despite it being an extremely simple recipe, for me it’s soda bread. It won’t mix and the texture is always poor

To each their own, but I really don’t get the hobby of collecting lifelike dolls. My sister-in-law has about 50, small and large, and I wonder “Why? Why?”

Many commenters have the same complaint, but not being a very observant person I didn’t notice it at all. It seems like something one wouldn’t pay attention to unless you were engaging/looking at a person directly. Of course, a snow leopard would be hard to miss!