"The reason so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything."

I don't know if it's a verifiable cause for a celebration, but this will be the 300th blog that I have written since August 2007. I cannot remember how I got into this blog writing thing. I didn't even know what a blog was. I'm still not sure. I hope it's legal and that "blog" is not a code word for porn. No matter. The fact is that I am still writing them, and now there are three books of these blogs published as "Pater Noster in Condoland." I suppose they can serve as an addenda or epilogue to my autobiography, "Memoirs of a Tail Gunner," available on any online bookstore. I think I found this blogging website somehow from "googling" and there it was ready for pen and ink--metaphorically speaking. If I had to write my memoirs and 300 blogs in pen and ink, they would never have gotten done. There are some pens in the house, but no ink--only Elmer's glue and some scotch tape.

Today, I went back into the archives and found a blog that dealt with the difference between working and retirement in terms of which was most boring. After a bit of editing, I emailed it in to the Sun-Sentinel as an article for their forum page. If it gets published, I'll be a star in Huntington Lakes. If not, I'll remain in obscurity--a famous unknown author. Since I can't keep writing blogs forever, I've decided to take my teaching out of mothballs and give a class of "Fun with Shakespeare" in January here in the TV room of our clubhouse. I'll examine for the class all the nuances I can find in "Hamlet," my favorite play and probably the greatest ever written except perhaps for the one I wrote in the third grade called "Brisket and Kashe Varniskes." No kidding. Unfortunately that play was never published and no longer exists. It vanished in the hands of Miss Garmere. At any rate, those who register for my class will have the advantage of a book that has a modern English version of the text on the opposite page of the Elizabethan version. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Shakespeare's English is far, far superior to modern English. And I do not believe people when they claim that they could not understand Shakespeare in high school. They didn't try hard enough--they didn't work at it. In high school, you're supposed to work. It's a given. I will even prove to the class that they can surely understand Geoffrey Chaucer's middle English from the "Canterbury Tales." For example--from his Prologue: "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droughte of March hath perced to the roote..." meaning "When that April with showers sweet has pierced the drought of March to the root." There; what's so hard? I prefer Chaucer. And so ends blog #300. I hope you've enjoyed some of them.