Jean who?
Shepherd.
Orange Crate Art
Woolworth’s
Night. We were standing in front of a Woolworth’s. We hadn’t been inside one for years. A month’s page from a calendar hung from a string in front of the store. It looked just like a month from my homemade calendars.
Recently updated
“Woman”: another word of the year.
New to me: decadal
I would just say decade-long.
Free months from Backblaze
Now through January 31, 2023.
Coot collective
I thought it appropriate to devise a collective name: codger. “A codger of coots” sounds right to me.
Image correction
I think that keeping a blog is a way of converting time into space. The space is always expanding, even as time runs out.
Mondegreen of the day
“Strumming my face with his fingers.” “Strumming my fate with his fingers.”
A 100-word blog post
Generated by ChatGPT in response to the prompt “write a 100-word blog post.” It’s fourteen words short.
I’m sorry too, ChatGPT
A couple of days ago Elaine was a celebrated pianist who had performed with orchestras around the world. Hot damn! And I was a writer who had won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. $100,000! But now it has no info about us.
Flatiron
The Flatiron Building has always been ready for its close-up.
Red Pen
The first episode (forty-four minutes) is ostensibly about who and whom, but it’s really two friends talking, and their talking goes all over the place: Christopher Columbus, bad reviews of the Sistine Chapel, commercialism at Egypt’s pyramids, a Geocities fan page for Rage Against the Machine, Jay McInerney’s tweets, and looting at Duane Reade stores, with none of those topics touching upon who or whom.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Silence, perhaps.”
Sold a Story : responses
Two responses to the podcast Sold a Story : How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong: a letter signed by fifty-eight teachers, writers, and administrators, “A call for rejecting the newest reading wars,” and a reply to that letter signed by more than 650 current and former teachers, “For the students we wish we’d taught better.”
A quiz, revised
A Buzzfeed quiz with a misspelling: Which Head of State Should You Date?
Frenship
The Frenship Independent School District hosted a district-wide spelling bee earlier this year.
Treehouses
Nests in a tree, two years apart.
Domestic comedy
“Michael, we watched Gaslight just a few months ago.”
On Willa Cather’s birthday
Cather comments on an attempted dramatization of A Lost Lady.
Opening night
Neil Diamond sings.
“Their needs,” “your livelihood”
Abdulkader Sinno, professor of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, wrote a letter to graduate students explaining his decision to resign as his department’s job-placement director.
Dies mirabilis
I hope I have the Latin right.
Fifty blog-description lines
“Pflaaaap!”
Tom Phillips (1937–2022)
I am the happy possessor of the second edition of A Humument. Looking at any page is an inspiration.
Recently updated
The words of the year now include goblin mode.
The infra-red sandwich
A Life ad, 1956.
Recently updated
The New York Times now has an obituary for Bernadette Mayer.
Bob McGrath (1932–2022)
The actor and singer Bob McGrath, the Bob of Sesame Street, has died at the age of ninety.
“Business lunch”
Among today’s selections from The Far Side.
House calls
From The Family Circus: a doctor who makes house calls?