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A cross between Audrey’s favorite, flamingo, and Robert’s favorite, penguin. Appropriate stuffed animal for the two of them, doncha think?

Built in 1911 or 1913, depending on which account you believe, it fell long ago into disrepair and became the seediest of the seedy. At dawn on Sunday morning, it stood there, all eleven stories, for the last time.
At 7:15am, the explosives rolled across the air, louder than anyone expected. Everyone jumped. But the building stood - for a moment more. Another round of explosions, fire seen through some of the lower windows, and the south end fell down, followed shortly by the north end.

About halfway to the ground, the outline of the building falling was obscured by the dust of the former building rising.

And when the dust cleared - actually it will never be completely cleared - it went everywhere - there was nothing there. Less than one story of building materials. And the other stories. Which over time will fade away as surely as the dust of the Hotel Cotton will blow away forgotten.

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

This post is dedicated to the student who is told any long sentence is a run-on. What follows is from the well-respected author of Robinson Crusoe in another novel of his. I know there are longer ones, but read it aloud, increasingly urgently and breathlessly, to get the full effect. Take that, Hemingway and your modern disciples of short, indeed, non-sentences!

“The captain, rather provoked than cowed with this, came to the barricade of the quarterdeck, and speaking very prudently to the men (for had he spoken roughly, two-thirds of them would have left the ship, if not all of them), he told them, it was for their safety as well as his own that he had been obliged to that severity; that mutiny on board a ship was the same thing as treason in a king’s palace, and he could not answer it to his owners and employers to trust the ship and goods committed to his charge with men who had entertained thoughts of the worst and blackest nature; that he wished heartily that it had been anywhere else that they had been set on shore, where they might have been in less hazard from the savages; that, if he had designed they should be destroyed, he could as well have executed them on board as the other two; that he wished it had been in some other part of the world where he might have delivered them up to the civil justice, or might have left them among Christians; but it was better their lives were put in hazard than his life, and the safety of the ship; and that though he did not know that he had deserved so ill of any of them as that they should leave the ship rather than do their duty, yet if any of them were resolved to do so unless he would consent to take a gang of traitors on board, who as he had proved before them all, had conspired to murder him, he would not hinder them, nor for the present would he resent their importunity; but, if there was nobody left in the ship but himself, he would never consent to take them on board.”

Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton, (Doylestown, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press), 38-9.

I was only 6. Dusting shoes in my Dad’s store in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Being embarrassed when I didn’t know a customer had come into the store when I was singing “Victory in Jesus” as I worked my way down the aisle with my feather duster. Thomas Sowell (about my Dad’s age) was watching the world at a different level.

Ann Coulter remembering her father, who just passed on.