IdyllopusPress Presents

The Bad Homeschooler is what we ought to call this blog except for the fact that I don’t write much about homeschooling here (relatively speaking) and it’s not like we want to draw attention to ourselves and have people gathering about going, “Look, they’re bad homeschoolers!”
It’s that time of year in which books I’ve ordered [...]

Anybody got a Harold Jacob’s “Mathematics, A Human Endeavor” book they want to sell me for cheap? Never mind. I found a second edition copy that I purchased for $26.
I should not have. H.o.p. will hate it. But we’ll have it none-the-less.
I’m on a math list that is starting a study [...]

Me, I’m just waiting for the water for my coffee to heat up. Waiting for Marty to get home from the laundry. Waiting for H.o.p. to get going (he drug a pile of books to bed with him and read late into the night). In the meanwhile I clean the bathroom which [...]

Penthouses From 14th Street

Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage…
Music for the ride. Smashing Pumpkins, Bullet with Butterfly Wings at You Tube.

The truth is the world really does look different from the penthouse, or the mountain top. And the ministers never tell their congregations the truth. I [...]

Dorothy and Dylan in Sepia, 2
When we first got goldfish, it freaked me out that we had pets that didn’t blink or close their eyes when they slept. They just stared. What were they thinking? Marty still sometimes stands by the aquarium, regarding, and asks, “What are they thinking?”
I don’t believe a [...]

I’m so tired I can hardly focus but I’ve had this sitting on my computer for a couple days and it’s time to clear the desk.
First confounded then allured by pre-Raphaelite art…
…I have just wasted some time trying to read Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, upon which this painting of the pagan, Greek philosopher, by Charles Williams [...]

So Vonnegut has died.
The first post I made on this blog, I ended with a few paragraphs on Vonnegut, one of a few of my favorite authors.
He said one should write for one person.
We who enjoyed his work are fortunate to have been that one person.

“We are prone to think the Indian problem is solved. It is not. Generation after generation must pass away before the last drop of Osage blood in amalgamated lines shall be lost. The future of the remnant of this once great tribe, its influence in the middle west, is a story yet [...]

This will be perhaps the toughest book I’ve ever read and hope I am ever likely to read.
By way of the internet, I came upon Gideon Grief’s “We Wept Without Tears; Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz”. How I came upon it was first I had read a NY Times story of Dina [...]

My computer, which had a bad Windows install with which I’d been living for a while, finally went crash and I ended up without it a couple of times over the past several weeks. The thing is everything is on my computer. All the work I do is on my computer. Words. [...]