OMGiraffe

At Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, NY, a giraffe is about to be born. Like, soon.

“Spare the finger-bowls!”

Wycliffe “Wick” Cutter is a member of the “fast set” in Black Hawk, Nebraska: gambler, money-lender, ruiner of hired girls. Mrs. Cutter (no first name) has other interests:


Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918).

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All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

“This is the truth”

Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918).

There’s a similar but much bleaker passage in the third part of Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925). There, Godfrey St. Peter is the voice of the darkest, deepest truth: ”Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths.“ As St. Peter observes the setting sun or a tree root or the changing leaves, he says, “merely,” “That is right” or “That is it” or “That is true; it is time.”

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All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Plagues

I went to a seder the other night. (I’m a non-believer among friends.) A passage from the Haggadah, listing contemporary plagues, “the plagues that threaten everyone everywhere they are found, beginning in our own hearts,” resonated strongly with me, so strongly that I took out my phone to take a picture so that I could share the words here:

The making of war,
the teaching of hate and violence,
despoliation of the earth,
perversion of justice and of government,
fomenting of vice and crime,
neglect of human needs,
oppression of nations and peoples,
corruption of culture,
subjugation of science, learning, and human
    discourse,
the erosion of freedoms.

From A Passover Haggadah, ed. Herbert Bronstein (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1982).

And now it’s thirty-five years later.

Hours of outage

Our cable and wireless were out for many hours today. The outage was widespread. Instead of switching the box back on (again and again), I called the tech-support number (again and again) to check if the problem had been solved. And each time, before I could hear the recorded report that the outage continued: “Please enter the ten-digit telephone number you are calling in reference to.”

So highfalutin. Better: “Please enter the ten-digit telephone number you’re calling about.”

Does anyone else remember when people on the telephone used to ask, “May I ask what this is in reference to?” And “Whom should I say is calling?”

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[Yes, that should be who.]

Aah, incompetence

John Dean, former White House Counsel, talking to The New York Times about the Trump administration: “The incompetence is the only thing giving me comfort at the moment.”

A related post
“If Trump were more rational and more competent”

Nebraska all day long

Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918).

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All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

The Los Angeles Times on Trump

The Los Angeles Times recently published an extended editorial feature on Donald Trump’s presidency, in six parts, with a explanatory coda: “Our Dishonest President,” “Why Trump Lies,” “Trump’s Authoritarian Vision,” “Trump’s War on Journalism,” “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” “California Fights Back,” and “Why We Took a Stand.” It’s all worth reading, as both a reminder of past outrages and a spur to vigilance about what’s to come.

I’ll quote just one passage from “Our Dishonest President” concerning what the Times calls Trump‘s “utter lack of regard for truth”:

Whether it is the easily disprovable boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd or his unsubstantiated assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower, the new president regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction. It’s difficult to know whether he actually can’t distinguish the real from the unreal — or whether he intentionally conflates the two to befuddle voters, deflect criticism and undermine the very idea of objective truth. Whatever the explanation, he is encouraging Americans to reject facts, to disrespect science, documents, nonpartisanship and the mainstream media — and instead to simply take positions on the basis of ideology and preconceived notions. This is a recipe for a divided country in which differences grow deeper and rational compromise becomes impossible.

What I find most dangerous about Trump and those around him, beyond any particular executive order or policy position, is that “utter lack of regard for truth.” See, for instance, Sean Spicer’s most recent performance.

Hallmark is a bleep

It was late. Frasier was on. Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and Susanna (Allison Janney) have been arguing the merits of an imaginary painter. And now Susanna is about to storm out. From the episode “Three Blind Dates” (March 5, 2002), her parting shot:

“For your information, Benjamin Locklear is as overrated as your [   ].”

The Hallmark Channel bleeped the word: ass. Hallmark censors its reruns.

It’s Frasier, for Pete’s sake. Grown-Up City. Innuendoville. Sexytown. Let us hear the words.

“мы веселиться еще?”

[Zippy, April 12, 2017.]

More Russian hijinks. “мы веселиться еще?” is the Zippy catchphrase “Are we having fun yet?”

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