Pleaded or pled?
Joyce Vance thinks, wrongly, that “pleaded” is wrong.
Orange Crate Art
The last Beatles song?
Paul and Ringo are finishing “Now and Then.”
Separated at birth (DeSantis edition)
That downturned mouth, that scrunched-up face — Ron DeSantis looks the evil manager known to fans of 1970s professional wrestling as the Grand Wizard.
Kind of Kind of Blue
A dog-food commercial with faux Kind of Blue (specifically, "So What") as background music? Clearly, the commercial was made so that I would notice it and then say something about it.
Soul “Eyes”
Soul Music (BBC Radio 4) has a beautiful episode about Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
Great typos
From Jack Shepherd’s On Words and Up Words: six great typos of history.
A book from Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson, the historian who writes Letters from an American, has a book coming in September, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.
Mark Hurst on Vision Pro
“The only way for users to see anything is to accept the representation of the world as offered by the corporation’s filters. I don’t know about you, but my grip on reality — incomplete and imperfect as it may be — will not improve by passing through the hidden manipulations of a two-trillion-dollar company with an insatiable need for growth.”
116th and Park
What made me look up the corner of 116th Street and Park Avenue: The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964).
Boxes
Between the toilet And the shower Fall the Boxes.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Cat without a coat.”
Unsealed
“I saw you put boxes to Potus room”: that’s gotta be Melania Trump, sounding a bit like Natasha Fatale.
How to convict
If I were to read one item today about last night’s indictment, it’d be this one, by Norman Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, and Joyce Vance: “How to Convict Trump.”
Writing it and changing it
John Kander: “The ideas can be terrible, and nobody is a bad person because they have it. So you write it, and then you change it.”
Snoopy, downstairs
I always like seeing a Peanuts strip that references some once-obvious, now-gone bit of popular culture.
Sláinte!
Opening a bottle of Redbreast.
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas”
A 1942 poster with words from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Cather in the Capitol
I think of Susan Howe’s repudiation of another writer’s characterization of Emily Dickinson: “Who is this Spider-Artist? Not my Emily Dickinson.” Who is this Nebraska nostalgist? Not my Willa Cather.
Out the window
A sentence from Josh Marshall that would make a fine sixth exhibit in George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I hope
Indictment fever.
Mike Pence beareth false witness
Mike Pence just said that he and his wife Karen have “the three most beautiful granddaughters ever born in the history of the world.” Grandparents everywhere know that’s not true.
Amusements
From Steven Millhauser’s “Paradise Park.”
A lost sauce
Aunt Millie’s.
Astrud Gilberto (1940–2023)
I sometimes took the opportunity to play “The Girl from Ipanema” when teaching Odyssey 13, the episode in which Odysseus sees the princess Nausicaa frolicking on the beach with her maids. I played the album version, with no introduction, for greater mystery and, when the English lyrics kicked in, greater amusement.
A new Nancy book
Olivia Jaimes is a brilliant successor to Ernie Bushmiller. The Family Ritz and friends are in good hands.
Two kinds of people
Bruce Springsteen explains why he cannot agree to an interview about the Fender Stratocaster.
ATTN: Tim Cook
My surroundings already are “an infinite canvas.” I suspect that yours are too.
“White ladders”
From a Steven Millhauser story.
Recently updated
Munson Diners, now with more diner history.
“NEVER CLOSED”
Munson Diners in NYC.