Of course we try to be grateful every day.  But I’m pretty pleased that as a society we take a whole day off for it once a year – it’s even one of the big ones, and it’s long been my favorite holiday.  A great many people in our society, including me, objectively have a […]

It’s Labor Day weekend already, and yesterday I discovered a phenomenal new piece of music, coincidentally titled The Last Rose of Summer.  I suppose I had heard of the old Irish folk tune, but I had not heard of the composition for violin, written by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst in the mid 1800s as the finale […]