Unity Day

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Today is Unity Day, an anti-bullying initiative. Its color is orange. Its focus is on kindness, acceptance, and inclusion.

[Insert dark memories of middle school and high school here.]

I read the papers (as people used to say) and watch the news. But I learned of Unity Day, only this morning, from Zippy and Zits.


[Zippy, October 24, 2018.]

Recently updated

Earl Greyer, correcter The story has a good ending.

John Gruber reviews the iPhone XR

John Gruber, in a lengthy review: “The iPhone XR is everything Apple says it is, and it’s the new iPhone most people should buy.” And: “The sweet spot for most people in 2018, in my opinion, is one tier above 64 GB [that is, 128 GB].” And: “Dollar for dollar, the XR is almost certainly the best iPhone Apple has ever made.”

Holy cow — I chose well. (I hope.)

Hot-dog stands and poetry

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).

Elaine and I just finished re-reading Lolita. As we discovered, we each marked this passage while reading. Elaine has already posted her transcription on her blog.

Humbert Humbert’s observations (and the first-person plural pronoun) remind me of what Proust’s narrator says about the “contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory.” More than coincidence, I think.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

MSNBC, sheesh

On MSNBC this afternoon, someone, I wish I knew who, suggested to Nicole Wallace that television talkers stop calling Mohammed bin Salman “MBS.” I have had the same thought. As the commentator pointed out, Prince Mohammed is not a Marvel Comics villain. Nor, I would add, is he a rapper or Supreme Court justice. Prince Mohammed is, as the commentator put it, “an autocratic thug.” The last thing our public discourse needs is another trivializing nickname.

And soon enough, Katy Tur was on the air, speaking of “MBS.”

Related reading All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

“Scroll. Like. Move on.”

“Scroll. Like. Move on. Scroll. Like. Move on. Comment. Move on. Feel disconnected. Try again. Try again later. Feel hopeful that someone will engage. Move on. Feel foolish. Feel disconnected. Rinse and repeat”: Elaine Fine writes about the illusion of social media. Her perspective: that of a veteran of the classical-music blogosphere.

Rolling back existence

From The New York Times:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

If, as Wittgenstein suggests, the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world, this initiative goes beyond rolling back recognition and legal protections. Recognition presumes the existence of that which is recognized. This initiative seeks to roll back existence, erasing identities and insisting that persons are who the government says they are. I think of Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”

[Ludwig Wittgenstein describes solipsism in the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus 5.62: : “The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”]

Sinatra’s “Lush Life”

From Variety: Frank Sinatra tried Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” for the 1958 album Only the Lonely — and gave up. The outtakes are powerful reminders of how difficult it must be to sing “Lush Life” to one’s satisfaction (if, that is, one is a singer).

The Variety article mentions many other singers of “Lush Life” but makes no mention of Johnny Hartman’s 1963 recording of the song with John Coltrane. For many listeners that’s the “Lush Life.”

“Some apples”

Elaine and I are fortunate to live about seventeen miles from an orchard. Store-bought apples and peaches cannot compare to apples and peaches from the orchard — especially because we buy apples and peaches only from the orchard and have no basis for comparison. Yesterday the orchard had an Applefest, with cider, apple crisp, and thirty-four varieties of apples to taste. George Washington’s favorite: the Newtown Pippin. The orchardist’s favorite: Etter’s Gold. I especially liked the Calville Blanc d’hiver, a French apple grown by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Uncooked, the apple already tasted like pie. My favorite was the crisp, fragrant Ambrosia, though I am disappointed to know that it has much less history behind it, as it dates from the 1990s.

When we traipsed through the orchard, I was on the lookout for “some apples.” And I found them, arranged by nature’s hand.



“Some,” as in “some rocks,” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

*

12:57 p.m.: Wait a minute — was Ambrosia my favorite? The ones we now have at home seem bland by comparison to whatever I liked best at the orchard.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, was not especially difficult, not especially tricky. A great big giveaway straight down the middle breaks open the puzzle: 6-Down, fifteen letters, “Reference standby since 1852.” But I found some pleasant surprises here and there.

1-Down, eight letters, “Bad-weather wear,” yields an answer of surprising dowdiness. Another favorite: 26-Across, five letters, “They take long naps.” And 64-Across, six letters, “Story arcs.” (Huh?)

I was not happy to see 44-Down, six letters, “Silents’ scene-starting shot,” a dubious clue. “Silent-film effect” or “silent-film transition” would be better.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.