Grammar or logic
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
Orange Crate Art
Meta Raft
“But your type never changes. Just looking at you makes me think of alley fighting, tommy guns.” “Is that bad?”
On all three counts
Our household, too, just rose for the jury as they left the courtroom.
Heather Cox Richardson’s latest
Heather Cox Richardson writes about gun violence, Brown v. Board of Education, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and cowboys, real and imaginary.
Walter Mondale (1928–2021)
I remember riding in an elevator in 1984 with a clean-cut collegian wearing an orange button on his jacket. In black letters on an orange background: FRITZ IS A WIMP. I think that moment must have been my first awareness of toxic masculinity at work in politics.
Twelve movies
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and others.
“Too small”
Jerry Blackwell, Special Assistant Attorney General, in his final words for the prosecution in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial: “You were told, for example, that Mr. Floyd died, that Mr. Floyd died because his heart was too big. You heard that testimony. And now having seen all the evidence, having heard all the evidence, you know the truth. And the truth of the matter is that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr. Chauvin’s heart was too small.”
How to improve writing (no. 92)
From The New Yorker: “A couple of weeks ago around dinnertime, neither my husband nor I were in the cooking mood.”
“Fending,” &c.
Roz Chast catalogs words for opening the refrigerator and having whatever for dinner.
In search of lost hair
Gee, my hair looked so good on videotape.
Mutts and Peanuts
Today’s Mutts is a nice homage.
Seven vs. eight
Jon Gruber juxtaposes Jon events.
“Have loved”
A close reading of Kim Potter’s letter of resignation, by Lauren Michele Jackson.
Recently updated
There’s much more to the Swiss peeler than I imagined.
Today’s Newsday Saturday
“Put page numbers on.”
The Rite of Spring Toy Orchestra
It’s the work of Chris Ott and his assistant Igor.
Rogers cardigans
“Every color of cardigan Mister Rogers wore on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1969–2001, presented in chronological order.”
Is there a Swiss peeler in the house?
A kitchen drawer opened, and a peeler, still on its display card, shifted forward into view.
“Merely contingent”
A sentence from The Fugitive.
Bye, Blogger e-mail subscriptions
Google is making changes to its Feedburner service and will discontinue Blogger e-mail subscriptions in July.
More about H. Neil Matkin
The Chronicle of Higher Education has its most detailed report to date on the life and times of H. Neil Matkin, president of Texas’s Collin College, where students are customers, professors work without tenure, and the dangers of COVID-19 are deemed to be exaggerated.
A letter from Oliver Sacks
To Austin Kleon. And it’s handwritten. Bonuses: the note-taking effort that prompted the letter, and a tour of Sacks’s desk.
Recently updated
More tedious discussion of the phrase “a pair of twins.”
Thankful
Typed during the memorial service for William “Billy” Evans, Capitol police officer.
Time travel
A sentence from The Fugitive.
SAFE-T
The killing of Daunte Wright and the events that followed last night in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, prompt me to share a Chicago Reader article about Illinois’s SAFE-T Act.
“That attention to detail”
A sentence from The Fugitive.
“It’s pathetic”
Here’s an anonymous resident of Villa Grove, Illinois, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times. She’s speaking of life in the town where a bar opening in February 2021 was linked to forty-six cases of COVID-19 and a two-week-long school closing.
Airing of grievances
For some people, every day is Festivus.
Idiom of the day: soup up
A clue in yesterday’s Newsday crossword — five letters, “Jazzes (up)” — prompted me to (finally) write a post about “soup up.”