Six parties
A New York Times quiz: “If America Had Six Parties, Which Would You Belong To?”
Orange Crate Art
Two eyes, eight parts of speech
A sentence from Northanger Abbey.
Hi and Lois watch
Desks without legs.
Phil Schapp (1951–2021)
Better books?
Catherine Morland doubts that Henry Tilney could be a reader of novels.
Methods of communication
Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night. They were talking, of course, about their Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. SC: “Now there’s a lot of texting in the show. Do you guys have your own text chain between the three of you?” SG: “No, it’s strictly e-mail with these guys.”
“Tilneys and trapdoors”
Catherine Morland is riding with John Thorpe. But her mind is elsewhere.
Teaching the unmasked
An eighty-eight-year-old professor encounters a student who refuses to wear a mask.
A Blogger warning
If you upload an image to Blogger, tinker with the code, delete , but forget to delete , your sidebar will end up where the body of your blog used to be and you’ll wonder what’s gone wrong. There’s a fix.
Michael K. Williams (1966–2021)
One of his roles: the trickster-god Omar Little on The Wire.
Nancy Labor Day
In today’s Nancy, Olivia Jaimes follows Ernie Bushmiller’s practice of taking holidays off, or “off.”
Labor Day
A poster thanking healthcare workers.
Starring Robert Mitchum
I was on the other side of the table from Mitchum, and at the greatest possible distance. It was impossible to ask him about what Jane Greer was like off camera.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Pink elephants, perhaps.”
Mess with Texas
“Pro-choice users on TikTok and Reddit have launched a guerrilla effort to thwart Texas’s extreme new abortion law, flooding an online tip website that encourages people to report violators of the law with false reports, Shrek memes, and porn.”
Local lunacy
“Pass me the Robitussin DM, please.”
A king on the bus
I stood up to stretch in the aisle and saw the Imperial Margarine king several rows back. He too was standing up to stretch.
Rewrite that sentence, PBS
“Designer Ed Welburn’s passion developed early, as a small child.”
Word of the day: tittuppy
From Jane Austen: "Break down! Oh! Lord! Did you ever see such a little tittuppy thing in your life? There is not a sound piece of iron about it.”
Hi and Lois watch
The menu has a picture of a juice box. Jeez.
Misspelling in the news
An Illinois woman has been arrested for entering Hawaii with a fake COVID-19 vaccination card. It showed her as having received the Maderna vaccine.
Lives of the fakes
“Works declared to be fake often enjoy diverse afterlives, according to law enforcement officials, academic scholars and art market veterans.”
Burying the lede
An odd headline in The Washington Post: “Four conservative radio talk-show hosts bashed coronavirus vaccines. Then they got sick.” They died.
“Aloha, Mabel!”
From “How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?,” the third episode of the new Hulu series Only Murders in the Building: “Hey, I figured out the perfect greeting for the text.”
Mabel’s pencil
A screenshot from “True Crime,” the first episode of the new Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. I’m pretty sure it’s a Tombow Mono-R.
Recently updated
A mid-June Christian youth camp in Illinois — no mask, no vaccination required — is now the source of 180 “confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19.”
Scooter construction
Three photographs, New York, 1947, kids with orange-crate scooters.
iA Writer keyboard commands
From Bicycle for Your Mind.
Roller-Scooter truck assemblies
From the Johnson Smith & Co. 1938 catalog.
“Fanatical attention to detail”
Simone just told Dustin that he needs to edit his new résumé. He’s written “fanatical attention to detail” twice.