Computers and butterflies
From Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
Orange Crate Art
Hallmark censors Frasier
As our household makes its way through Frasier, we listen closely for the missing words.
Recently updated
Enrollment at Emporia State University drops sharply.
Sardines in the news
A Picasso ceramic and TikTok.
A thingy
The thingy is a bread clip.
A pocket notebook sighting
From Ivy (1947). Police Inspector Orpington (Cedric Hardwicke) and his pocket notebook mean business.
Uh-oh, a Marxist
A judge rules against Donald Trump and cites Chico Marx.
Phone etiquette
The Washington Post has tips about phone etiquette in our times (gift link). Useful stuff.
James Joyce holiday cards
Utterly distorting a sentence from “The Dead.”
Awkward metaphor of the day
“Nikki Haley has tried to straddle it, and all she’s gotten is strained muscles”: Claire McCaskill on MSNBC.
Charlie Watts: Literature and Jazz
A Christie’s auction.
Mr. Parrish and Mrs. Cameron
It’s just a brief scene with bit players: a customer looking to buy a watch, a salesclerk trying to find something he’ll like. But there must have been someone in a 1950 audience who appreciated the pairing of Walter Baldwin and Dorothy Adams in this scene.
Eleven movies, one mini-series
Telemarketers and others.
Laundry day
The likely residents of 561 Union Street, and a connection to a grocery store down the street.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Half a prominent name in modeling.”
Dickinson State is the new WVU
Steve Easton, president of North Dakota’s Dickinson State College (and critic of tenure) is looking to cut and cut and cut.
Google to delete inactive accounts
Long story short: if you want your Blogger blog to outlast you, you need to make your, uhh, arrangements.
Textise
A handy tool for navigating the Internets.
Builder’s tea
I learned this term from Michael Mosley’s BBC Radio 4 podcast Just One Thing.
Squirrel with avocado skin
A squirrel enjoying an avocado skin, as seen outside Boston last month.
“Thick with virtual dust”
New York Review Books says that the blog form is “thick with virtual dust.”
Seeing and smelling
“The judge was smart enough to smell a rat when she saw it”: Representative Tom Tiffany (WI-35), mangling an old idiom at the Merrick Gatland show trial just now.
Travel by plane and book
A passage from Italo Calvino captures what flying always feels like to me: it’s not being anywhere.
Got stamps?
In today’s Dustin, paterfamilias Ed is looking for stamps. Snarky Meg wonders who still uses them.
Facts and truth
Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall an observation from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing.
Fact-free history
In The New York Times, an introduction to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin adviser and lead author of new history textbook for Russian high-school students. War is peace, &c.
“A fairly precise notion of the book”
Calvino anticipates what’s now called “distant reading.”
Reporting the teacher
A South Carolina high-school English teacher was reprimanded after two of her AP students reported her to the school board for teaching about race.
What not to-do
A scrap of paper, a fresh index card, or a page in a pocket planner is always a better choice than a classified document.
The rules
From a pre-school.