Sunday NYT digests
Matt Thomas of Submitted for Your Perusal is moving his Sunday New York Times digests to e-mail.
Orange Crate Art
A notebook sighting
Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson in Bombshell.
John Prine (1946–2020)
“I always likened the mail route to a library with no books,” he wrote on his website. “I passed the time each day making up these little ditties.”
Sincerity
When it comes to spam comments, one might think of sincerity as the test of a writer’s technique. Sincerity is crucial. Once you can fake that, &c., as the saying goes.
Twelve movies
The L-Shaped Room and others.
“Try it”
For a minute I thought that the pharma-rep-in-chief was going to lapse into the catchphrase from a memorable commercial.
Pessoa now
“If our life were an eternal standing by the window”: that seems to be most of us right now.
Please don’t laugh at my recipe
Baked beans, onion, ketchup, chili powder: Western Beans on the Range.
The Art of Quarantine
“If the subjects of the world's most iconic paintings can practice social distancing, you can too.”
Screwballs
A great line from a movie: “Teachers, writers — screwballs!”
So many
Manu Dibango. Ellis Marsalis. Bucky Pizzarelli. Wallace Roney. Adam Schlesinger. Bill Withers. All but Bill Withers from the coronavirus.
“Bedtime”
A New Yorker cover for these times, by Chris Ware.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“‘Brush your breath’ sloganeer (c. 1980).”
Duo MemDi, live-streaming
Violinist Igor Kalnin and pianist Rochelle Sennet, Duo MemDi, playing music by Bach, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and H. Leslie Adams.
Dilettantism and sociopathy
“This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy”: Michelle Goldberg on Jared Kushner’s role in the White House’s coronavirus response.
“Nov shmoz ka pop?”
In today’s Zippy, a catchphrase spoken by a character in Gene Ahern’s comic strip The Squirrel Cage.
“Some nice rocks”
Beetle Bailey rocks.
“Meaning everyone”
In The New York Times, Virginia Heffernan writes about attending virtual Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the time of the coronavirus.
Keeping our distance
“They don’t know about social distancing. These are countries that aren’t highly sophisticated.” Not like our country, where the president stands shoulder to shoulder with the day’s cast, all of them getting to touch the same microphone. Not like our country, where the governor of Georgia learned only yesterday that people with no symptoms can transmit the coronavirus.
“The Handkerchief”
Garton’s = Snotrag.
Word of the day: hunker
A trip through the OED.
“Is that so?”
The hand of God — i.e., Ernie Bushmiller — intervenes.
“Pathogen Resistance”
Today’s xkcd is beautiful and moving and hopeful.
Hair and what to do with it
The perfect tool for giving yourself a uniformly short haircut, the Remington ShortCut Pro Self-Haircut Kit, is sold out at the manufacturer’s website and Amazon.
Groceries emoji
I can describe what I’d like to see: a brown paper bag, appropriately dented in two or three places, with a loaf of bread, a box (perhaps of cereal), and a head of celery jutting from the open top. A cliché, of course, the groceries people used to carry in on television, though the emoji need not be in black and white.
The Catalina update reminder
If you, like me, have no interest in moving to macOS Catalina, you may want to remove the annoying update reminder from the System Preferences icon in the Dock. I’ve seen various suggestions for how to do so. This one works.
“Say, have you got frogs’ legs?”
Magnus Eisengrim describes Charlie Wanless’s monologist routine “on the bottom shelf of vaudeville.”
No questions
When Trump* says that he’ll take questions from reporters, they should remain silent. And after a suitable silence: “We have some questions for Dr. Fauci.” No reporter is obligated to give a narcissist further opportunities to lie, exalt himself, and propagandize.
Margaret Atwood on pandemics
“So here we are again”: Margaret Atwood writes about pandemics and this pandemic.
Fred Hersch pencils
The pianist Fred Hersch writes his music by hand, as seen in the documentary film The Ballad of Fred Hersch.