Public Official A

A new podcast series from WBEZ, Chicago: Public Official A, the rise and fall of the now-imprisoned Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois.

Blagojevich has been the object of infrequent but spirited mockery in these pages. Don’t miss Blagojevich taking the yearly ethics test for state employees!

It’s National Handwriting Day

[It’s National Handwriting Day. Click for a larger view.]

Yes, and for the third time, or fourth, if you count the post title, “It’s National Handwriting Day.” I’ve done my bit, in SchoolHouse Cursive B.

But handwriting need not mean cursive. Only paper, pen, pencil — or other tools. I thought about that last night while waiting at a railroad crossing and looking at the freight cars’ graffiti. That too is handwriting.

Defunding public higher education

The American Federation of Teachers examines the result of cuts to higher education in Illinois (41% since FY 2000): layoffs, program elimination, increased tuition, lower enrollments. The state’s recent manufactured budget crisis has greatly intensified the damage. As The Daily Show suggested in 2016, the message to young people is “Get the fuck out of Illinois.”

Manufactured budget crises can produce deep and lasting damage. Sometimes that seems to be the point.

⌘-V

In setting up my new Mac, I had to remember an improvement I haven’t thought about since 2011 (the last time I set up a new Mac): change Command-V, ⌘-V, to “Paste and Match Style.” The change greatly simplifies to work of copying and pasting.

And here’s how to type ⌘, ⌥, and other symbols available from Emoji & Symbols. It’s telling, I think, that Apple makes silly emoji front and center but hides the basic stuff of the Mac keyboard from view.

[Is it ⌘V or ⌘-V? Mojave menus say ⌘V. But Apple’s December 2018 page about keyboard shortcuts uses hyphens.]

Giuliani interviewed

This New Yorker interview with Rudy Giuliani is worth reading.

This bit leaves me speechless. Giuliani is speaking about Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Oh, my goodness, yes, he was a great hero of mine. I believe he taught me, like he did all of us, how bad segregation was. Those of us in the North wouldn’t have known that without him.”

A related post
Fools (Giuliani, not a Shakespearean one)

Two minutes

Donald President Trump spent two minutes at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington today. From The New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s stop by the memorial — to observe a moment of silence without extended public remarks — appeared to be a last-minute addition to his calendar. The president’s schedule listed no public events to mark the federal holiday honoring King’s life, which had drawn criticism from civil rights activists.

You can follow Trump’s public schedule at Factbase.

MLK

Colbert I. King (no relation), writing in The Washington Post:

The greatest contrast between the time King led the struggle for America’s legal and social transformation and now is a White House occupied by Donald Trump.

The federal government, once a powerful legal and moral force to make real the promise of democracy, is in the hands of adversaries who seek to restore a hierarchy in which the interests of the bigoted, the xenophobic, the sexist and the defender of white male privilege always come out on top. . . .

How far have we traveled?

From the promise of guaranteed rights to a return to the insecurity of injustice. A pluralistic America is being cynically drawn along racial lines by a president who is as far from the civility of his predecessors Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama as the charter of the Confederacy was from the Constitution.

King, and the movement he led, would be outraged. The rest of us should be, too.

Fools

I watched a bit of Rudy Giuliani’s performance on CNN this morning and thought again of how much he reminds me of a Shakespearean fool. The Shakespearean fool serves a king. Giuliani serves a would-be king. The Shakespearean fool speaks whatever comes into his head. Giuliani — yes, the same.

The great difference: the Shakespearean fool speaks truth to power. He speaks wisdom in the form of deeply sensical nonsense. Giuliani speaks mere nonsense, a fast-paced double-talk whose purpose is to befuddle. He’s really no Shakespearean fool at all, though he does play a fool on TV.

Domestic comedy

“I only know Ben Mankiewicz. Everyone else is Not Ben Mankiewicz.”

See also Buz and Not Buz.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Nancy

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy is a special treat today: familiar props (cookie jar, means to it) and lots of meta.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Lots of meta: I read the differing page layouts as the difference between life and art.]