Roars of laughter and approval billowed from the Downtown United Presbyterian Church last Thursday night as Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword puzzle editor, charmed the sell-out Rochester Arts and Lecture crowd with secrets of the trade. He had the normally polite and reserved audience shouting answers to tricky crossword clues and volunteering to […]
Warren Wightman
Posted inCulture
Dash and swoop
Not 10 minutes after I stepped onto the pedestrian bridge at High Falls, a Peregrine Falcon swooped up from the falls side of the bridge and made a breathtaking flyover. “It’s Hafoc,” said one of the regular falcon watchers, not even raising his binoculars. The bird was barely eight feet above us — close enough […]
Posted inCulture
A concise handbook of astrology
Is it appropriate for our nation’s leaders to consult astrologers on critical decisions? Should you check your horoscope when buying a car? In this column, I will show why astrology is 99.9 percent bunk. Astrology is confused in some people’s minds with astronomy. The latter is a meticulously accurate body of knowledge that describes […]
Posted inCulture
The rockets’ red (white and blue) glare
In the wake of the World Trade Center’s destruction, are celebratory fireworks still OK? More than ever. For one thing, fireworks can be used for Freudian sublimation: Take that, you rotten, sub-human terrorist scum — POW! ZAPP! and BANG!! And just to show that our spirits (of ’76) aren’t dampened, nor our ability to appreciate […]
