My Duck Companion

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If you are reading this page on a Windows browser, there should be a logo on left side of the tab at top, a little green-brown-yellow blob. I first placed it there as an inside joke with myself, but the story is worth sharing. The full-size photo is at the top. (Most of this first appeared in a post from December 2013, “A Duck About Town.”)

It is a photo of a duck. The photo was taken in 2013, and it was added at the last second on the very first post written later that year. If you have looked at this web site once or a thousand times (thanks, mom!), the duck has been there, on whatever device you use, each time. It is this site’s mascot, a companion to each piece I write.
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Today in History: June 21

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is the first full day of summer. The summer solstice came last evening at 6:34 p.m. EDT.

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It took two ratifying conventions for New Hampshire to accept the United States Constitution, one in February and one in June, but on this date in 1788, by a vote of 57–47, New Hampshire ratified the Constitution. With New Hampshire, nine of the 13 states had ratified the document as the law of the new land, which set in motion the process of forming the new nation’s federal government.

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John Lee Hooker died 15 years ago today.
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School’s out for Summer

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I taught freshman composition at two upstate New York colleges in the early 1990s for five years. My last class met for its final session at the conclusion of the fall 1995 semester, just over two decades ago now.

From the start of my last-ever school term, 20 autumns ago, I knew that this was going to be my final semester teaching or attempting to teach or even putting the word “teacher” on the line marked “profession”; thus, of course, two of the three sections that I worked with that semester were two of the best, brightest, most entertaining groups of students I had yet worked with, and they almost made me regret my decision to retire at age 27. Almost.
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