How Did This Little Piggy Get To Market?

If you grew up in the English-speaking world, you almost certainly heard this Mother Goose nursery rhyme:

This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none.

This little piggy went
Wee, wee, wee
All the way home!

A piggy eating roast beef?  Hmm... What, if any, are the ethics of that?  Sometimes I still feel guilty about laughing when Matt and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, fed bacon to Macon.




Did Macon stay home after that?

And what about the piggy that went to market?  How did he/she get there?

Let's hope that the piggy on the back of that bike didn't become Macon's lunch!

Or was that Macon on the back of that bike?

The Heights Of Fall

Today is the first day of Fall.  And it feels like it, in a pleasant way:  Billowy but thin clouds waft over cool breezes.

A few hundred kilometers north of here, the leaves have begun to change color. Here, though, they're still green.  So if we want Fall colors, we must look elsewhere:

People who don't know the area don't associate these houses with Harlem.  But they line Convent Avenue, a street that bisects the City College campus in a part of Harlem known as Hamilton Heights.  

I was all smiles on my bike, and everyone and everything--including the stones of these houses--seemed to smile back.

The Skies, And Days Off

If you are in North Carolina, my sympathies are with you.  Up here, in the Big Apple, we've gotten only hints of Florence.  The worst came on Tuesday, when torrents alternated with steady, driving rain.  I'm sure, though, that we didn't experience anything nearly as tumultuous as what folks in the Tar Heel State witnessed.

Since then, we've had three days of almost uninterrupted overcast skies.  A few stray showers have passed over us, and late yesterday afternoon the sun played peek-a-boo.  That, combined with the drop in daytime high temperatures from about 27C to 21C (80 to 70F) since the weekend has made for some very pleasant riding weather.

Oh, and I have to thank the Jewish people for giving me a couple of days off so I could enjoy it.  The funny thing is that, where I teach, Jewish faculty members probably outnumber Jewish students by about 20 to 1.  If anything, we probably should have Muslim--or Hindu--or, hey, maybe Buddhist--holidays off.  What about pagan feasts?  

Hmm...I'd have a lot of time to ride.  But I'd have a hard time making a living--unless, of course, those holidays were paid!