One Kid, 16 Drops of Wine

If my count is correct, I celebrated my 100th Passover Seder this year. Given so many trips through the Haggadah, I was surprised that it took me this long to realize that the four songs (“Ki lo naeh”, “Adir hu”, “Echad mi yodea?” and, of course, “Chad gadya”) which come at the very end of the ceremony have nothing to do with Passover. That led me to what seems like a good philolo-historical guess to the effect that the songsRead more

The End of Death Comes As The End

WARNING:  I know that it’s considered seriously uncool to reveal the solution of one of Mrs. Christie’s mysteries (indeed, the person who blew the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for me still ought to be on her guard), but there are times when the outcome of a detective novel requires discussion. One such case, I feel, is the dénouement of Mrs. Christie’s 1944 opus, Death Comes as the End. In what follows, I have done my best notRead more