Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Here.

That settles it: I have to attend a baseball game at Target Field in Minnesota. Does it get any better than walleye on a spike?

Luck of the Irish.

We need a new sport: drone hunting. It's like skeet shooting, but better, because skeets don't spy on you.

The only way of converting any one to a philosophic view is to show him that it necessarily grows out of reflection upon what he already believes.

(E. F. Carritt, The Theory of Morals: An Introduction to Ethical Philosophy [London: Oxford University Press, 1928], 3-4)

Longtime reader Tom Forister sent a link to this interesting essay about Eddie Van Halen, which I finally got around to reading. Thanks, Tom!

To the Editor:

Re “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner Will Be Renamed” (news article, Aug. 9):

The Iowa Democratic Party’s vote to change the name of the popular Jefferson-Jackson dinner to distance itself from the slaveholding of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson is actually a ploy to dissociate itself from American history.

George Washington held slaves. Shall we take him off the dollar bill? Should the Jefferson and Washington monuments in the District of Columbia be taken down?

The Capitol was built by slave labor. Can we distance ourselves from that? And what of all the places named after slaveholding founders?

Better to study our past in order to learn how and why we ended slavery than to engage in some kind of historical amnesia.

JOYCE APPLEBY

Taos, N.M.

The writer is professor emerita of history at U.C.L.A.

Crystal Ball (1976).

Here.

Here.