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Black Lamb

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Black Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more)

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April 2010 in Black Lamb

Volume 8, Number 4 — April 2010

April 1st, 2010

In our cover essay, A regrettable decision, Terry Ross tells of a friend who gave away most of his carefully collected library and wishes he hadn’t. In Foundation for a bitter life, Greg Roberts deplores the sappy television commercials of the Foundation for a Better Life. Thong underwear devotee Beren deMotier describes the most embarrassing moment of her life in A cautionary tale.

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Category: Month summaries | Link to this Entry

A regrettable decision

April 1st, 2010

BY TERRY ROSS

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

A couple of years ago a close friend of mine, who was moving from one state to another, did a very strange thing. For reasons that I’ve never understood, he decided to get rid of most of stineshelfofbooksorderly.pnghis books, a library of around 1,700 volumes, almost entirely “literary” and carefully collected over a forty-year period. He said it would make the moving easier. In about a month, he parted with more than 1,200 books. He has regretted it ever since.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ross | Link to this Entry

March 2010 in Black Lamb

Volume 8, Number 3 — March 2010

March 1st, 2010

The All Crime Issue

In our cover article, attorney Bud Gardner looks back on My career in crime. In Even I am a criminal, Greg Roberts observes that practically everything has been criminalized. In Crimes against the person, Rosemary McLeish deplores the fact that almost every woman has been the victim of sexual assault at some time in her life.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries, All Crime Issue | Link to this Entry

The Case of the Missing Family Tree

March 1st, 2010

BY JOHN M. DANIEL

IN THE AJAX BUILDING

A dame shaped like Centerfold Barbie glided into my office. “Mr. Blank,” she purred in an upper-class English accent, “I’m Josephine Toy. My family has lost its family tree. Can you help us?”

“I know nothing about English trees, Mrs. Toy,” I answered. “Just the ones in northern Minnesota.”

“It’s Miss.” She tossed an envelope onto my desk, then turned to leave. Her jeans were so tight I could read the tattoos on her buttocks: “Right,” “Left,” in that order.

“Those are instructions, Mr. Blank,” she said over her shoulder. “So you can get in touch with me.”

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Category: All Crime Issue, Daniel | Link to this Entry

February 2009 in Black Lamb

Volume 8, Number 2 — February 2010

February 1st, 2010

In our cover article, Do inquiring minds want to know?, Terry Ross does some research and finds, surprisingly, that scientists are not in agreement on global warming, and that global warming may not even be occurring. Former prison inmate Dean Suess resigns himself to praying alone in Church without walls. In Ready for your closeup? Ed Goldberg ponders what lengths people will go to to achieve fame.

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Do inquiring minds want to know?

What one curious person discovered about global warming

February 1st, 2010

BY TERRY ROSS

When I was in my early teens I used to read — devour, really — the magazine Scientific American. There was no doubt in my mind that I would one day become a scientist. Along with four or five like-minded classmates, I even got to be on a TV panel show discussing science with a science teacher. No one saw the show except our families, because it was on the educational station, but that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

churchofglobalwarming.pngNone of the kids who were on that show became scientists. Somewhere along the line I shifted my allegiance to the humanities and let science make its way without me, but over the past few years I’ve re-subscribed to Scientific American, and each month I dutifully try to plow through the articles. Cosmology always attracts me, even when I bump up against my mind’s inability to imagine, for example, a curved universe. I can follow some of the medical stuff, and I do my best with everything else.

This is all by way of prelude to my saying that if I’m not a scientist in any sense of the word, I am still interested in things scientific. Which has led me recently to the subject of global warming. I’ve done my best to read up on the subject, in hopes of discovering whether the predictions of virtually imminent catastrophe are something I should be worrying about, and I’ve made a few discoveries.

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Category: Ross | Link to this Entry

January 2010 in Black Lamb

Volume 8, Number 1 — January 2010

January 1st, 2010

In our cover article for this Seventh Anniversary Issue, Terry Ross offers “suggestions for making the next few decades better than the last. In Got a light? Elizabeth Fournier tries hard to bond with her blind date over their common love for old matchbooks. Leslie Russell celebrates beekeeping in Light for the larder.

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Light for the larder

January 1st, 2010

BY LESLIE RUSSELL

If you could wring the color out of October aspens, distill it into a viscous light, and capture this light in a Mason jar, you would have honey. We capped thirty-five pints of it this fall. Like a piece of super-enlarged honeycomb, the jar pattern covers the countertop, too precious to put away.

beehive.pngThis honey has been seventeen months in the making, a big experiment to keep bees in high-desert snow country, far from orchards and verdant fields of clover. We assembled the hives, including deeps and supers, floorboards, lids, and enough trays to fill each super. The bees arrived in two screened cages, each about the size of a shoebox. Hundreds of them vibrated, a writhing ball of buzzing insect, twiggy legs hooked on the box or the wings or bellies of their sisters. The queens were sequestered within their own tiny boxes with cotton plugs laced with pheromone. Where the queen goes, the rest will follow. All were dumped from the cage into their new pine boxes and, with a supply of sugar water, they immediately took up the business of their hivedom, building comb and brood.
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Category: Russell | Link to this Entry

December 2009 in Black Lamb

Volume 7, Number 12 — December 2009

December 1st, 2009

In the cover article of our December issue, New world, Gillian Wilce writes her last column as London Pride. In our page two feature, Facing facts, Dean Suess re-relegates himself, once an extremely accomplished person, to the ranks of the mediocre. According to Ian Archer, raising children involves A thousand deaths.

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November 2009 in Black Lamb

Volume 7, Number 11 — November 2009

November 1st, 2009

In the cover article of our November issue, Till death us do…, Lane Browning discovers details of a friend’s death through an autopsy report, obtained online at 50¢ a page. In our page two feature, Dean Suess shows that “trials have little or nothing to do with truth” in Criminal Injustice. The world’s still going to hell, but in a heat wave, Ed Goldberg finds himself in Apathy season.

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