Oh, Nancy
Nancy is now “an inspirational lifestyle blogger.”
Orange Crate Art
The Great Chicago Fire and type
It helped standardize type.
Elijah Cummings (1951–2019)
“When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked: in 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact? Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing?”
Current events
All I can say, with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, is “Clickety clack, clickety clack, / Somebody’s mind done got off the goddam track.”
Speeding up the Mac dictionary
Also because it’s National Dictionary Day: How to make your Mac’s dictionary popup way, way faster, from Cult of Mac.
Egg-cream dispute
Also because it’s National Dictionary Day: “The Disputed Origins of the ‘Egg Cream,’” from Merriam-Webster.
Word of the day: brevier
Because it’s National Dictionary Day.
Dancing with Robert Walser
“Early 20th century Swiss author Robert Walser’s witty writings inspire an eccentric and hyper-detailed landscape of movement, text, visual design, and live chamber music.”
Quiet
Quiet is a 64-bit white-noise generator that lives in the menu bar.
Harold Bloom (1930–2019)
I was never very much on the Bloom wavelength — partly because of my distrust of such schema as his six “revisionary ratios” of poetic influence, partly because of my distrust of his pronouncements of canonical value. I’m always suspicious of such authority.
Aaron Rupar’s Twitter
the journalist Aaron Rupar’s Twitter account is a great resource for choice bits of the Donald Trump Improv Tour. Contrast, say, this bland Associated Press sentence — “[Pastor Andrew] Brunson led Saturday’s audience in a prayer for the president” — with what was said. Don’t hide the madness.
Maupassant on crowds
“There’s a popular saying that ‘A crowd can’t reason.’”
No bottom
“A video depicting a macabre scene of a fake President Trump shooting, stabbing and brutally assaulting members of the news media and his political opponents was shown at a conference for his supporters at his Miami resort last week, according to footage obtained by The New York Times.”
Free Ruler 2.0
Now a 64-bit app.
No quid pro quo?
“It was a quid pro quo, but not a corrupt one”: spoken by someone familiar with the upcoming testimony of Gordon Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“‘I pity the fool who don’t eat my cereal’ guy (c. 1985).”
A World Book cameo
On MSNBC.
“Like pasta in a soup”
Afloat (first published in 1888 as Sur l’eau) is something of a daybook, eight long entries purportedly written in the course of a sailing trip along the French Mediterranean, one writer-passenger and a crew of two.
Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind
The latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
Whoa again, at least a local whoa
Commenting on Donald Trump’s decision to remove U.S. troops from Syria, our representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), told an interviewer, “Pull my name off the ‘I support Donald Trump’ list.
Whoa again
“Two business associates of President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani have been charged with a scheme to route foreign money into U.S. elections, according to a newly unsealed indictment.” But wait — there’s more!
Nancy, and more Nancy
Highly recommended, two new books from Olivia Jaimes: Nancy: A Comic Collection, which collects the first nine months’ worth of Jaimes’s version of the comic strip, and Nancy’s Genius Plan, a board book that enlists its reader in Nancy’s scheme to sneak a piece of cornbread.
The Idiod
Stephen Colbert: “In the end Trump may be defeated by his greatest weakness — his Achilles mouth. It's all detailed in the epic poem The Idiod. It’s The Idiod and The Oddity.”
Whoa
It’s really beginning to feel as if floodgates are opening, walls are closing in, and clichés are taking over this sentence.
Among the oranges
“Ah, South California.”
Marshall Efron (1938–2019)
His comedy was heady, subversive stuff for a bookish, skeptical high-school student. I still remember “Olives.”
Who can it be now?
I’m sorry, but having seen it, I can’t unsee it: the gob of mucus with the glasses really does look like our president’s Mr. Fix-It, Attorney General William Barr.
“An important Rubicon”
A Rubicon is by definition important. Ask Julius Caesar. Or Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd.
Not prolific
The word’s associations with new life and creativity make it a particularly grotesque choice for characterizing a killer.
Nancy vs. Lucy
Olivia Jaimes: “I feel like Lucy wakes up some mornings and thinks ‘What’s the point?’ Nancy thinks that too, but then she remembers that bread exists.”