Monthly Archives: September 2025

Discovering my past

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This post deals with old events, almost as old as I am, but I hadn’t known some key facts about them until a couple of weeks ago. They’d been kept secret from me. I was deceived without actually being lied to. I still don’t know all the parts of the history, and maybe I never will.

Several years ago, I went searching for information about my father. He died in 1954 in a traffic accident, or so I was told. I was less than three years old at the time, but that’s not the only reason I have no memory of him. My surname is rare, making an Internet search easier. It wasn’t too hard to find confirmation of his date of death. The surprise was that he died in Shasta, California. I grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, and my mother always lived there. He might have been there on a business trip, I thought. His family was from the west coast, so maybe he was visiting a relative.
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Abolitionism tour: Boston, Cambridge, and Portsmouth

This entry was posted in History Personal and tagged abolitionism history Massachusetts on by

Sometimes I overdo things. When I visited Boston on Wednesday for the next part of my abolitionism tour, I walked to exhaustion and had to skip one destination. It was worth the effort anyway. Here’s the start of a Flickr album for the tour, which is incomplete as I’m writing this.

The first post about the tour is here.
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Steven Goddu’s falsehoods

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Goddu ICE liberty New Hampshire Rockingham on by

It’s unusual for me to write on this blog about a local politician, but I want this on the record so that people doing searches for information on Rockingham County Commissioner Steven Goddu will find this and know why they should never vote for him for anything.

Rockingham County, New Hampshire, has been negotiating with ICE to hold abductees and get money for it. County government in New Hampshire (which handles only a few functions) is headed by commissioners. Rockingham has three of them: Kathryn Coyle, Steven Goddu, and Thomas Tombarello. I was able to find contact information only for Goddu, so I wrote an email to him urging that the county not collaborate with ICE. His reply shows he is a dishonest person and should not be elected to any public office.
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Another silent film, another copyright troll

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged copyright silent movies YouTube on by

My latest silent film video on YouTube is Georges Méliès’ Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc), with my original accompaniment. This is quite a nice film for 1900. Ten minutes long, it incorporates a lot of scene changes and makes heavy use of tinting. The quality of the movie as I got it from the Internet Archive isn’t bad for such an early film.
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Sympathy and empathy

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged language usage vocabulary on by

This is a post about word usage, not about the murder of Charlie Kirk, but it started from seeing a lot of online rage about a statement of his. According to Snopes, he once said:

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That’s a separate topic for a different time.

It’s strange that of all the things he said, this should draw so much anger. If I were cynical, I’d say it’s because people saw an opportunity to pull the first sentence out of context and create a deceptive impression. In this case, cynicism is fully justified.

How much difference is there between sympathy and empathy, anyway?
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Sorry

This entry was posted in Writing on by

A draft post titled “Flanders Festival Ghent disgraces itself” got published in error. It was a draft which I thought I had made private. I don’t think there was anything wrong with what I said, only that I should be focusing more on topics of more long-term significance. It’s deleted now.

An abolitionism tour?

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged abolitionism history Massachusetts New Hampshire on by

After my enjoyable tour of the libraries of Rockingham county, I started thinking about doing something similar to follow it. My first thought was sites relating to American independence; there are plenty of them in my area. Then an idea that’s more off the beaten track came to me: a tour of abolitionist sites. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport and conducted much of his activity in Boston. John Greenleaf Whittier was from Haverhill, just across the border from me. Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford after escaping slavery, and today I’ve learned how much other anti-slavery activity was based in New Bedford. (Sign up with Captain Ahab, and you’ll be out of the slave-catchers’ reach!) Also today (that is, Sept. 11, when I’m writing this), I found out the MBTA has renamed a ferry after Frederick Douglass. It isn’t obvious how to tell where the boat will be at any time, but it’s at least worth knowing.
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