“Thumbs-Up”

A New Yorker cover: “Thumbs-Up,” by Barry Blitt.

Norman, Norway, Linie, lake

When our friend Norman visited from Norway, he brought us a great gift — the gift of his friendship. And for the second time, he brought us a bottle of aquavit. I can’t remember the name on the first bottle, which is long gone, and was our introduction to aquavit. The new bottle is Linie, an extraordinary Norwegian aquavit. By strange coincidence, we had been drinking aquavit recently (a Danish brand — sorry, Norman), after finding some at a recently opened “beverage depot.” And by stranger coincidence, I had recently heard a passing reference to Linie in a podcast. So Linie was in the air, or on the water: it is aged in sherry casks on ships that cross the equator twice, with changing climate and the motion of the ocean playing their parts in producing a distinctive flavor. The flavor is delightful, with lots of caraway and anise, and an herbal aftertaste that moves around the mouth hitting tastebuds, one after another. (Think pinball.) But aquavit is not to be trifled with: this one is 83 proof. Wonderful after dinner or later in the evening.

Thank you, Norman. Remember the lake!

Soil as a verb

[Henry, July 19, 2018.]

Soil is a verb you don’t hear much these days. It’s one dowdy verb. See also darn.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

A clarification

A friend speaks: “I’m not happy to be retired. I’m damn happy to be retired.”

Information overload

[“Photograph shows a postal worker carrying a bag of mail and a bundle of the magazine The Literary Digest dated May 22, 1920.” From the George Grantham Bain Collection of the Library of Congress. Click for a slightly larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA mail posts (Pinboard)

Meddling

A column in The Washington Post says, “Stop calling it ‘meddling.’” I’m there. Or was there and am there. Here’s a post from February 2018: Needed: a word other than meddle.

A mystery of the deep

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Do you know what you’re seeing here?

“Thus the world was lost”

A chemical engineer, working in a “defense plant” (“a war plant, of course”), tells Milton Mayer that the world was lost on a day in 1935. The engineer was required to take an “oath of fidelity,” refused, and was given twenty-four hours to reconsider. The next day, he took the oath:

“There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”

Quoted in Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

Also from this book
Principiis obsta and finem respice

Kubrick–Zweig

Found: a nearly complete screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Calder Willingham for an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella Burning Secret.

Related reading
All OCA Zweig posts (Pinboard)

“Wake up”

Representative Adam Schiff (D, California-28), characterizing Donald Trump’s performance in Helsinki:

President Trump’s performance today was the most damaging and shameful surrender of American values and interests in modern history.

I say again to my Republican colleagues: Wake up.