Cooper-Moore on the air

From the podcast The Checkout, “The Irrepressible Ingenuity of Cooper-Moore.” Cooper-Moore is honored tonight with a Lifetime of Achievement award at the Vision 22 Festival in Manhattan. All best wishes to him.

A related post
Cooper-Moore in Illinois

Trump trumps Integritas

The New York Times reports on the Trump Organization’s “coat of arms”:

It was granted by British authorities in 1939 to Joseph Edward Davies, the third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the socialite who built the Mar-a-Lago resort that is now Mr. Trump’s cherished getaway.

The Trump Organization made one change in the design it appropriated: the name Trump replaced the Latin Integritas. So now the shoe, or coat, fits.

As the Times notes, “the British are known to take matters of heraldry seriously.” The Trump Organization has to use a different coat of arms for its golf course in Scotland.

#FakeCoats!

On Independent Lens

Farmer/Veteran: “Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on forty-three acres in rural North Carolina.” Tonight on PBS.

Memorial Day

[“Ashland, Aroostook County, Maine. Even with gasoline rationed, many people attended the Memorial Day ceremonies in cars.” Photograph by John Collier. May 1943. From the Library of Congress.]

Ashland was and is one small town among others small or smaller. The drive must have cost some drivers a good part of their weekly gasoline ration.

Representative Adrian Smith on “the necessity of nutrition”

On Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, Scott Simon asked Representative Adrian Smith (R, Nebraska-3) whether he would vote for a budget that eliminated SNAP (food stamps). Smith, who supports farm subsidies, dodged the question:

SS: “Well, let me ask you this bluntly: is every American entitled to eat?”

AS: “Well [laughing], nutrition, obviously, we know, is very important, and I would hope that we can look to — ”

SS: “Well, not just important; it’s essential for life. Is every American entitled to eat?”

AS: “It is essential. It is essential.”

SS: “So is every American entitled to eat, and is food stamps something that ought to be that ultimate guarantor?”

AS: “I think that we know that given the necessity of nutrition, there could be a number of ways that we can address that.”

Perhaps he’s thinking of nutraloaf?

Smith might have had a career as a character in a Dickens novel. Say, Hard Times.

Seth Godin’s “I don’t care”

From a Design Matters interview with Seth Godin. Godin notes that his blog’s readership is half what it was five years ago:

“Is my blog half as good as it was five years ago? I don’t think so. So what does it mean? It means that consumption trends have changed. Fine. I don’t care.”

I like this guy’s attitude. Godin has also said that even if no one were to read his blog, he’d still write it. Seth’s Blog began in January 2002.

[“Five years ago”: that’d be before the disappearance of Google Reader.]

Veterans read from Sophocles

United States veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq read from Sophocles’s tragedies Ajax and Philoctetes: “U.S. Veterans Use Greek Tragedy to Tell Us About War” (The New York Times).

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard)
Theater of War (“Presents readings of Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes to military and civilian communities across the United States and Europe”)

Iambic beer?

For the splittest of seconds, I misread a word in the definition for Kriek, the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day: “A style of Belgian beer with a distinctive sour cherry flavour, traditionally made by slowly fermenting lambic beer with morello cherries.”

Iambic beer! Offhand, I can think of only beer that is even faintly iambic: Beerlao, from Laos, which I know from Thai restaurants. A quick scan of a list of beer names brought me just one true iambic beer: Prestige, brewed in Haiti. My favorite beer is, like Haiti, trochaic: Dogfish. Cheers.

*

12:36 p.m.: Another iambic beer: Labatt.

1:43 p.m.: One more: Phuket. (Not a trochee. Not.)

“Gardening is the new stationery”

In other words, there will be supplies. Seen here, the Fiskars Softgrip Micro-Tip Pruning Snip. Why use scissors to cut lettuce leaves when you can use the Fiskars Softgrip Micro-Tip Pruning Snip?

Thanks to Elaine for her y-is-the-new-x observation.

Gmail: “Mark as read”

Did you know that it’s possible to add a “Mark as read” button to Gmail? Click the cog in the upper right corner, choose Settings, choose Labs, and scroll down. The “Mark as read” button is the seventh option. After you enable it, the button will appear when you click on a message’s checkbox.

I find this button useful for archiving blog comments. Over weeks and months, the “Mark as read” button is likely to save me whole seconds of archiving time. Yes, I’m being facetious, but still, seconds are seconds.