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One of the more interesting holiday traditions to come forth in recent years is “The Polar Express Christmas Train Ride”, where tourist rail services redress one of their leaf-peeping trains wit...

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Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a lot of things which is fine. Leonard was a poet long before he sang, Cohen appreciated the value of ambiguity. When people leave wanting more, constructing thei...

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Having a national symbol is a wonderful thing, in concept. Something inspiring and unifying to rally around. In practice, it usually comes up short as any country is too varied and fractious for...

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(sometimes, I write the same idea twice in two forms, in parallel, to see how they manifest differently) Have you ever noticed how the names of skin conditions if they weren’t actually diseases...

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One of the more overlooked difficulties with the structure of American culture is the way we lay out our holidays. Folks act like holidays are inviolate pillars of historical and societal consta...

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I was a very different person when I was a child. I mean, I hope we all change over our lives. It’d be a profoundly boring thing if we all remained constant through this entire befuddling journe...

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Dorothy, Wendy and Alice, so different on the surface but so very much the same at the end of the day. Each of these lost girls three thrust into worlds beyond their young reckoning, beyond imagi...

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It was the most exciting day of Charlie Bucket’s life. Of course it was. Growing up poor as dirt, barely having his own surname’s sake to relieve himself in, winning The Golden Ticket contest fro...

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The bad news is there are no happy endings in this life, as nothing really ever ends at all. You might get sick or might get healthy, might get married or divorced, still as long as you draw bre...

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One day, Rose awoke to discover she could suddenly be two places at once. Literally, two places at once. She could copy herself over to live out her lives twice at a time. She was never sure why ...

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My father played the piano like it was his actual voice, not the crude low grumble erupting from his throat, constantly code-switching and dumbing down his impressively self-taught vocabulary so ...

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Working in a library is, at its essence, a daily battle with the universal force of Entropy. I mean, sure, every other job is as well, just living is temporary defeat of physics’ tendency to degr...

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The worst part about being functionally-immortal is watching people you loved age to death and places you cherished crumble to dust, sure. That sort of trauma never erases your humanity, soul or ...

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The mythological creature as tourism hook is hardly new, of course. Shysters have been selling crude plesiosaur carvings at Loch Ness in Scotland since the 500s, before the word “plesiosaur” was ...

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The sailor indeed said “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be… but my life, my love and my lady is the sea”. That much is entirely accurate, but you gotta understand, that’s a...

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“Your son is a wonderful writer for his age,” Miss Sobiecki told my parents or at least something approximate to that through thirtyish years of gauzy memory, “but that doesn’t mean I can read a ...

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“So,” he asked gently, holding her hand in his right hand and an engagement-ring box in his left, “what do you say?” She stared blankly, clearly in shock. He couldn’t tell if it was good shock or...

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“It wasn’t a dream,” a voice called from the darkness, “we had to pretend it was for a while but we’re sorry nonetheless.” As Dorothy opened her eyelids, vibrant colours made it clear this was in...

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The heart is a palimpsest. That’s a sentence as difficult to explain as it is to spell or pronounce. Explaining what a palimpsest is, that’s actually the easy part. It’s the original recycling s...

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Someone once asked John Lennon an obvious question, as to whether the song “Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds” was actually about drugs, because yes, of course it was about drugs. The initials were L...

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I don’t collect things because I think they are worth a lot of money or are going to be worth a lot of money someday. Far from it. When I was a child, I suppose I thought that way about some of m...

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You can’t judge a book by its cover, they say, whoever the hell “they” are. And far as aphorisms go, it’s mostly true, at least literally so. A book’s cover isn’t made to reflect its contents, ra...

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The Clio Awards are an annual awards program recognizing innovation and creative excellence in advertising-related fields, according to some basement-dweller weirdo writing on Wikipedia. Sort of ...

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There are some things we will never know. If you consider the vastness of this universe, how long it’s been and will be around, the percentage of things-knowable by the human race is so infinites...

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He’s afraid he needs to be perfect. He doesn’t need that. It’s easy as putting a disc in the slot and hitting a button on the remote control. I know that even if he made a mistake, it’d do no dam...

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