You can find la Porta Magica in Rome, on the Piazza Vittorio.  It’s what remains of the villa of Massimiliano Palombara, a 17th century occultist.
There are at least two competing stories about it.  One is that an archetypical mysterious stranger visited Palombara, and asked for funds and a room to test his alchemical know-how.  Palombara agreed; the stranger locked […]

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[Here is, approximately, the outline Dr. Mamie Caton and I followed for our bit in our Medi-Vaudeville event.  I prepared it to allow interaction with Mamie (who was too busy to write anything herself) and with the audience.  And I’ll pursue it on another page, to keep the home page tidy.]
(Posted by Doug Skinner)

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In May 1776, the Continental Congress proclaimed a day of “Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.”  Since then, our presidents have occasionally marked off a special day for prayer; and in 1988 Reagan fixed the first Thursday in May as “The National Day of Prayer.”  Humiliation and fasting have apparently been cut.
Not all presidents have hopped onto […]

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Happy New Year.  It’s cold here.  We offer you a round to sing as you shiver.
Here is old man Janus, the double-faced gatekeeper, gazing in the mirror and realizing how much colder he’s grown.  Given the subject, I’ve set it as a crab canon (that is, palindromic) — except for that flickering between F sharp […]

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To our earlier post (10/21/08), illustrating the classic axiom, we add this variant.  It’s from 1902, from Underwood & Underwood; the caption reads “Try our sausages!  Made while you wait!– you can see just what you’re getting!”
(Posted by Doug Skinner)

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The sonnet is a neglected form these days.  Verse of all stripes is unpopular — at least under that name, although it still defines popular music.  It’s all in the branding, I suppose.
And current taste often brands the sonnet as precious, artificial, or old-fashioned.  Fair enough; although you could tar most American entertainment genres with the […]

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It’s been said that the two things you should never watch being made are laws and sausages.  This vintage stereo card shows one of the above.
The observation is usually credited to Bismarck; a check of the www reveals multiple versions of it, and no definite source.  Huh.  The image can be safely ascribed to the […]

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The circle is a rich and potent symbol: of knowledge (Charles Fort’s “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere”), of divinity (the proverbial “God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere”), and of futility (those “vicious circles”), to name a few.  I know of only one passage, however, that literally dissects the circle, […]

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