New Year's Day - Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.--Mark Twain The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.--W.H. Auden Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.--Brooks Atkinson May all your troubles … [Read more...]

Hugh Massingberd, the longtime obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London, died on Christmas day at the age of sixty. From 1986 to 1994, Massingberd converted the dullest page in the paper into one so entertaining that his obits were collected in six anthologies. In her obituary of Massingberd in today's New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote that he spoke "frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead." She provided translations of some of his terms. To dispatch his subjects, Mr. … [Read more...]