Welcome to the Daily Blague/reader, the sister, or perhaps spinster niece, of The Daily Blague. I launched it shortly after the introduction of the iPad, in 2010, thinking that my long-form essays required a wider page. The older Web log has been mostly inactive ever since, but as of the beginning of 2018, I am doing my best to update it every weekday, in the character of an Incidental Housekeeper. The difference between the two sites is that Hannah Arendt is less likely to be mentioned at The Daily Blague — but only less. She has a lot to say about the labor of housework that I still haven’t digested, because it’s so clearly not based on any personal experience on her part.

My name is Robert John Keefe. I was born in New York City at the beginning of 1948, and raised in Westchester County (north of the city). I spent much of my youth either in South Bend, Indiana, where I attended the University of Notre Dame twice, the second time as a law student, or in Houston, Texas, between the two stints at Notre Dame. In Houston, I was the Music Director of the local classical-music radio station. After law school, I worked for about seven years on Wall Street, in relatively unglamorous settings. My wife, Kathleen Moriarty, is the lawyer in the family, and if you know anything about exchange traded funds from a professional standpoint, you may well have heard of her.

I am often asked if I have read all the books in my library. The answer is “yes.” I haven’t got room for books that I haven’t read. The better question would be, “How many have you re-read?” The answer to that: “Not nearly enough.”

Kathleen and I watch television once a year: we turn the set on to see the Academy Awards. Nobody believes us, but it is nonetheless true that we never watch anything else. We have more than six hundred DVDs (at last count), and we rent movies, too, from the venerable Video Room. But we do not know what “streaming” involves, and probably never will. Nor do I make use of my Netflix subscription, which I took up to entertain our grandson, who now lives in San Francisco. We watch Woody Allen’s Radio Days on New Year’s Eve; we’ve done so for at least twenty-five years and hope to keep doing so.

My greatest regret in life is that Mozart and Jane Austen died so young.

Let me know what you think! I’m at rjk@dailyblague.com.