“Suckers”
From The Best Years of Our Lives. I never could have imagined that an American president would join the man in the hat in characterizing service members killed in war as “suckers.”
Orange Crate Art
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“It's often between 23C and 23D.”
Beware of user error
I made a mistake. But I still think that the Wayfair business model, one of selling stuff from “the warehouse,” with no ready access to a supply of extra hardware for the furniture sold, is a lousy business model. No one can pick out a fastener or screw or knob or bolt and send it out.
“Losers,” “suckers,” and Trump*
There ain’t any bottom, there ain’t going to be any bottom, there never has been any bottom, that’s the bottom.
Christopher Fame
Something about this artist’s work seemed familiar to me. “Your work seems familiar to me,” I said. “Would I know your name?”
Goodbye, legacy Blogger interface?
It comes and goes.
A “publicity-inflamed dummy”
From William Lindsay Greshman’s Nightmare Alley.
Misheard
“A dictionary is just right for Beatrice. At sixteen they get the urge for grammar.”
Postcards to Voters
“Friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast.”
Greek tragedy and Theater of War
In The New Yorker, Elif Batuman writes about Greek tragedy and Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War.
Goodbye to old Nancy
Nancy disappears from and returns to GoComics.
A letter of appeal
A young Chicagoan, makes an appeal to the people of her home county, a COVID-19 hotspot, asking them to help keep her mother alive.
WCW to a young poet
“You should be glad that people (the magazines) do not accept them (at your age); it is the first sign of worth — even of coming greatness (such as you imagine).”
“My dear Mr. Cleaver”
Uh-oh, it’s a letter from the principal.
AJ on ED
Alice James: “It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate — they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle.”
Dr. Pepper × 20
A Dr. Pepper jingle, as interpreted by Eubie Blake, Doc Watson, Muddy Waters, Grandpa Jones, Maybelle Carter, the Swan Silvertones, Bill Monroe, the Four Freshmen, Bo Diddley, Melissa Manchester, Bobby Short, Ike and Tina Turner, the Mills Brothers, Teresa Brewer, B.B. King, Lynn Anderson, Chuck Berry, Hank Snow, Dana Valery, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.
None of this is normal
He’s armed, dangerous, at least semi-mobile, and running out of hyphens. Vote, early, as if your life and the life of our democracy depend on it.
Cheese barn or cheesebarn
An Ohio location in Zits.
Play Music on the Porch Day
“I got blisters on my fingers!”
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Ferocious problem-solvers.”
Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk
A favorite of mathematicians.
Charlie Parker centennial
I can claim to have known one musician who played with (or behind) Parker: the composer and cellist Seymour Barab, who was a member of the orchestra for Bird with Strings at New York’s Birdland. Seymour said that from set to set, night after night, every Parker solo on a given tune was a new creation.
“This country does not love us back”
“It’s amazing why we keep loving this country and this country does not love us back”: Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers.
Sour-deens
Lean Grove, eating.
“Anthony! Anthony!”
I remember “Anthony! Anthony!” not so much from the commercial as from Bob and Ray’s radio repurposing of it.
“It clarifies the palate”
“It clarifies the palate”: I can’t tell you a thing about the plot of The Barbarous Coast, but that line has stuck in my head since I read the novel in the late 1970s.
Purple prose
A college exam, in beautiful ditto purple. Readers of a certain age will immediately flash back to classroom “handouts,” still warm and slightly damp in the early morning, an exotic aroma rising from the paper.
NKDC
Autocracy and fashion.
Something I guess I wrote
Lines, which I guess I wrote, in a text file of odds and ends.
Source?
“I’m not afraid of death. It just don’t suit me to be lookin’ at it.”