Fifty blog-description lines
“Puissance without hauteur” and others.
Orange Crate Art
“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?
Departure Mono
A monospaced pixel font.
Phi Better Whatchamacallit
From Chicago Syndicate (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1955). Some hoods are giving undercover agent Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe) a hard time: “Must be Phi Better Whatchamacallit.” “Kappa.” “Kappa — or copper.”
Twelve movies
Chicago Syndicate and others.
NPR, sheesh
You can walk a line. You can thread a needle. You can walk the line if you’re Johnny Cash. But you cannot walk a needle. Ouch.
Moleskine: seventy-five words
Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities — usefulness and emotion — to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak.
Labor Day
“Commuters, who have just come off the train, waiting for the bus to go home, Lowell, Mass.” Photograph by Jack Delano. January 1941.
“False balance” in the NYT
Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of The New York Times, writes about “an ugly case of ‘false balance’” in that newspaper. It’s in a story about Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s plans to increase afforable housing.
When crosswords try to do jazz
Count Basie was was known as the Kid from Red Bank. But it was Benny Goodman who was known as the King of Swing.
Empire of signs
In Columbus Circle.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Possible response to ‘Don’t know.’”
Bacon, wind
This headline alone makes me think that I should be supporting The Guardian.
University library or storage room?
“A university library without academic librarians is called a storage room.”
NYT, sheesh
The NYT misspells “stationery.”
Smells
From Daniel Pinkwater’s The Education of Robert Nifkin.
Bushmiller pareidolia
Parking meters.
MSNBC, sheesh
“He can also pretty regularly say things that drive a wedge between he and their support.”
Word of the day: trig
As found in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877).
Unwanted political spam texts
Daring Fireball has a suggestion about how to stop them.