Sentences and their fortunes
From Frasier: “Isn’t it sad when bad things happen to good sentences?”
Orange Crate Art
Four Duryea’s
City Island, the Bronx.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Break for biscuits.”
West Virginia University cuts
E. Gordon Gee and friends, destroying a flagship school.
Bill Griffith in Bushmillerland
Griffith’s admiration for Bushmiller’s “pristine simplicity of composition” is absolute.
OCA blog-a-versary
Nineteen.
Novels and theories
From Italo Calvino: reading for what you already know.
My proof that I never knew phonics
What’s a schwa?
Going to church
At some point during this service I noticed an illustration on my guitar that I’d never noticed before, down by the tailpiece: a cityscape of tall buildings with stylized windows — something that you might see in a Nancy cityscape.
A Frasier Mongol
In a cup on a desk.
Recently updated
There’s someone — maybe two people? — doing laundry in that photograph.
The formula
Italo Calvino anticipated the AI-generated books at Amazon.
A message on an egg
A handwritten message on an egg, and, seventy-two years later, a reply.
In search of lost passage
I may have found the passage Elif Batuman asked ChatGPT to find.
What’s on your nightstand?
T.S. Eliot in Joseph Losey’s film Eva.
Bill Griffith and the Reuben Award
Bill Griffith has won the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. Congratulations to him.
Yamandu Costa in Illinois
Yamandu’s range of expression on the guitar (the seven-string Brazilian guitar) is, to my ears, unparalleled.
Mind the gap
A recent real-estate listing ($2.695 million) tells the story of a property with “so much charm that even the pickiest Parisienne will melt.” At the time of this photograph though? Maybe not so much.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Corresponding request.”
Gothamist hears from Lucy Calkins
WNYC’s Gothamist reports on the dissolution of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. And Lucy Calkins responds — dishonestly and unconvincingly.
Recently updated
The real source of an odious odor.
Fani Willis to Jim Jordan
“Chairman Jordan, I tell people often ‘deal with reality or reality will deal with you.’ It is time that you deal with some basic realities”: Fani Willis’s response to Jim Jordan is a wow.
Salad years
Macaroni salad? “Nobody’s asked for that in” — and then the employee stopped herself.
Caravaggesque
From Till We Meet Again (dir. Frank Borzage, 1944). What lighting!
The case of the odious odor
A godawful chemical smell was coming from the cabinet under the kitchen sink. What the deuce?
A handful of pencils
A scene from a movie, with a handful of pencils.
Oops
“If me and my co-counsel”: a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, in a televised hearing from a Fulton County courthouse just now.
How to improve writing (no. 113)
A New York Times obituary opens with a sentence that tries to say too much.
A pocket notebook sighting
From Portland Exposé.
“Therapeutic and neuroprotective”
“The whole ritual of buying a new pencil case can be both therapeutic and neuroprotective.”