Blood libel redux
“They’re eating the pets”: a new version of the medieval blood libel.
Orange Crate Art
The New Grown-Ups: “My Heart’s Own Love”
Bluegrass.
The zibaldone
The mid-fourteenth-century word zibaldone, a bit of Florentine slang, came to signify a personal notebook of miscellaneous contents. That sounds a lot like a blog.
Rocks, unnoticed
Zippy is looking at his phone.
An Atlantic crossword clue baffles
“11-character fig. on a form.”
Parataxis (with cats and ducks)
Drudge Report headlines.
Mystery actor
This actor is best known for a television role, reprised in film, playing a character with no known first name.
The Last Republican
The story behind The Last Republican, a documentary about Adam Kinzinger: “‘Do you have contempt for my views?’ How a leftwing film-maker and a Republican came together” (The Guardian ).
Irony alert
J.D. Vance: “We admire Taylor Swift's music, but I don't think most Americans, whether they like her music, are fans of hers or not, are gonna be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.”
Some field
Just some field. Whatever you do, do not click for a larger view. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
About last night
In the lastest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson offers an astute analysis of last night’s debate:
Swift FTW
As just reported on MSNBC: Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Cleanup on aisle 45
Kamala Harris: “What we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”
The New Grown-Ups: “Cumberland Gap”
The New Grown-Ups just took first in a new-band showcase at the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Brunswick, Maine. Here’s a sample.
EXchange names sighting
Restaurants in the telephone book. From The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin, 1992).
Typo alerts
From the podcast Mac Power Users, episode 760. Stephen Hackett is talking with David Sparks about readers calling attention to typos: “Nine times out of ten that comes with an apology attached, like ‘Oh, hey, I’m sorry, I found this.‘ Thank you for sending them in. We didn’t catch it, we want to be accurate and correct, and there’s nothing worse — I’m sure you’ve had this experience too — where you come across a blog post from eight years ago and there’s a typo in it. That’s been on the Internet for almost a decade, and no one told you. It’s the worst feeling, so thank you for sending those in.”
James Earl Jones (1931–2024)
Darth Vader? Mufasa? Sure. But I always think of him as Lear.
Mystery actor
Wait, is that ? Yes, that’s .
Fifty blog-description lines
“Puissance without hauteur” and others.
“Red flags for scholars of fascism”
Heather Cox Richardson: “Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.”
Neon in semi-daylight
4920 New Utrecht Avenue: I chose this photograph for its neon in semi-daylight, vivid in the shadow of the El. The band of light between the El and the buildings looks itself a bit like neon, or at least like fluorescence.
Sanewashing
Margaret Sullivan, former public editor at The New York Times: “Why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.”
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“It could have wings.”
Trump splatter, transcribed
Yesterday at the Economic Club on New York, Donald Trump gave a lengthy non-response to a question about the cost of childcare. The non-response is incoherent enough when you watch and listen. But I wanted to see it, and I think the incoherence deepens with print, or with pixels. So I typed it out.
Fading technology
“Are you old enough to run the cash register?” “What’s a cash register?”
ChatGPT and a forklift
Ted Chiang: “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.”
Word of the day: frisket
“Th’ space outside th’ panels is un-specked because a frisket is being used to confine th’ spattered areas!”
Orange Crate Art: Georgia, 46th of 50
From The Washington Post: Gun-control advocates consistently report that Georgia’s gun laws are among the nation’s weakest. The nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety ranks Georgia 46th in the country for gun law strength, in a tier of states referred to as “national failures.” The Giffords Law Center, another organization that advocates for stricter gun measures, gives Georgia an F rating on its annual scorecard, faulting the state for lacking rules such as universal background checks and red-flag laws. During his term as governor, Kemp has expanded gun rights, including signing a 2022 bill that allows residents to carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit. When Giffords delivered Georgia its failing grade, Kemp replied: “I’ll wear this ‘F’ as a badge of honor.”
“We have created this hellscape for our children”
Dr. Annie Andrews, pediatrician and senior advisor to Everytown for Gun Safety, on MSNBC a few minutes ago: “My heart is broken for this community, for every child that was in that building today, for the children whose lives were stolen by this public health crisis of gun violence. And I have a pit in my stomach, as I do every time I see these headlines. “This is a public health crisis, and what is so infuriating about it is we have created this hellscape for our children. Every child in this country goes to school and sits in a classroom where they should be learning how to read and write, and they're also learning how to hide from a bad man with the gun. And for far too many children in this country, that reality grows even darker when an active shooter incident happens. “This is a public health crisis, and we know the solutions. The solutions include commonsense gun laws, like expanded background checks, secure-storage laws so that adult gun owners cannot allow access to children to their firearms, and red-flag laws. What we lack in this country is elected leaders with the moral courage to pass the laws that the majority of Americans know that we need and that the children in this country so desperately need and deserve. “We have robbed every child in this country of a sense of physical and psychological safety in their classrooms, and as a mother, it breaks my heart.”
Mystery actor
Who?