“Down-to-earth food”
“Everybody Who’s Been to the Moon Is Eating Stouffer’s.”
Orange Crate Art
Kirk Douglas (1916–2020)
Kirk Douglas as Ulysses, 1954.
Unplugged
TUXES? No, AMPS.
Reaching Q
Thought as an alphabet of progress. From Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
The Elements of Penguins
Omit needless sounds!
George Steiner (1929–2020)
“I’d love to be remembered as a good teacher of reading.”
Brian and Al in the news
“Beach Boys founding members Brian Wilson and Al Jardine alerted fans Monday that they have no part in an appearance later this week by a version of the group fronted by cofounder Mike Love at a trophy-hunting convention where Donald Trump Jr. will be the keynote speaker.”
Iowa as metaphor
Frank Bruni: “This wasn’t a political contest; it was a kidney stone.”
“A scrubbed kitchen table”
From Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
Goodnight commas
The title of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon is without a vocative comma. The text, too, is comma-free.
Some boulders
New Zealand’s Moeraki Boulders.
“Lying”
An especially good episode of the BBC Radio 4 podcast Word of Mouth: “Lying,” with Michael Rosen, Laura Wright, and guest Dawn Archer, professor of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.
Hi and Lois watch
Lois and Irma and a calendar.
Overheard
“I’m just gonna go without toothpicks and drink.”
Re: the trial
Michael Che, on Saturday Night Live just now: “What better way to start off Black History Month than to be failed by the justice system?”
“Books saved my life”
One of the better moments from The Public (dir. Emilio Estevez, 2018).
“Just words”
An excerpt from A Warning, by Anonymous.
“Don’t be surprised, be angry”
Words from Garry Kasparov.
Autocratic solipsism
Alan Dershowitz, I regret to say, is the Rudolph Giuliani of Stanley Fishes.
A Ravel Kaddish, arr. Fine
Yesterday, at the European Parliament in Brussels, the Karski Quartet and Naomi Couquet performed Elaine Fine’s arrangement of a Maurice Ravel setting of the Kaddish, originally for voice and piano.
Distance learning
“When the movement to MOOCs was at its rabid peak a couple of years ago and some members of our board were talking about starting to do more distance education, I regularly told them that at our school, distance education is the length of a table.”
Small pleasures
House Manager Adam Schiff (D, California-18) today spoke the word copasetic on the Senate floor. And he referenced some famous phrasing from Casablanca : “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” casting Burisma as Rick’s Café Américain.
Word of the day: gormless
From Wuthering Heights.
Prefix workout
From The Chicago Manual of Style, ten questions about prefixes.
Thug life
“That reporter couldn’t have done too good a job on you, eh? I think you did a good job on her, actually.”
Pete Buttigieg and Seneca
I think Buttigieg must be describing the Penguin Great Ideas paperback On the Shortness of Life (2005).
“Peace, prosperity[,] and”
The ‘Brexit’ 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma.
Separated at birth
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Adam Driver.
Sluggo’s noes
Sluggo says “no,” yesterday and today.
“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”
The latest episode of the BBC Radio 4 show Soul Music.