“Coming back as a cat”
A gravedigger speaks, from Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield.
Orange Crate Art
A pencil truck
In Somerville, Massachusetts, a giant (non-working) pencil atop a truck.
Another vote from Mary Miller
My (nominal) representative in Congress, Mary Miller (R, IL-15), was one of fifty-seven House Republicans to vote yesterday against additional emergency appropriations for Ukraine. There’s something about Mary.
Heather Cox Richardson’s latest
“Socialism — it starts with democracy”: so says a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan.
Lou’s who
A security guard corrects Lou Grant.
Mystery actor
Who?
Word Matters on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”
Scrupulous or even cursory reading of “Politics and the English Language” reveals, again and again, that the Merriam-Webster editors’ criticisms of the essay have no basis in the essay. Orwell deserves better than he got in the podcast Word Matters.
Timothy Snyder, from “9 Theses”
As the Kremlin has made clear, “denazification” means “deukrainization,” which is nothing other than the aspiration to genocide.
Pinboard is down
And up.
Seven channels
In today’s Zippy, Zippy and Zerbina are watching television, warming themselves with old reruns. They have seven channels, which anyone from the New York metropolitan area will be able to figure out.
Mother’s Day
My mom, 1954.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Best alternative.”
Visitors to the newsroom
Watching Lou Grant, I have sometimes imagined what it might be like if the old gang from WJM-TV were to show up.
Squareword
It’s like Wordle times five, or ten.
Mary Miller in the news
Uh-oh.
Eleven movies, one season
Mona Lisa and others.
“Chopped prose”
the New York Times poetry columnist thinks that Ezra Pound and Marjorie Perloff think that nonmetrical poetry is “chopped prose.”
A Chock-centric post
A flower grew in a Chock full o’Nuts can, in a painting from Page Morton Black’s house.
Maureen O’Hara for Lipton Tea
A 1946 ad.
Rights and wrongs, old and new
Neal Katyal and Amanda Marcotte on Samuel Alito’s thinking.
Harry Carney’s baritone
From WBUR, a nice feature on Harry Carney and the whereabouts of his baritone saxophone.
Roe
To characterize a decision that affirms an individual freedom as the imposition of a “highly restrictive regime” suggests to me the “Freedom Is Slavery” logic of 1984. Access to abortion does nothing to restrict anyone’s right not to have an abortion.
Space hotel
The future future looks so much like the future past.
Mystery actor
I think he’s instantly recognizable, even through a wet windshield.
Donald Evans’s stamps
“Watercolor stamps of imaginary countries”: Donald Evans: Philatelic Counter, an exhibit at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
Outtakes (12)
Two shots of the WPA tax photographers and clerks.
In Our Time : Antigone
The BBC’s In Our Time takes up Sophocles’s Antigone in an episode that makes an excellent introduction to the play.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“SOS, for instance.”
Block that metaphor
Toeing the DeSantis mantra.
Who was Jack the Bear?
I may have located his tailor shop.