Imaginary Bedminster

It’s been many hours without a presidential tweet. I shall imagine the scene at Bedminster after yesterday’s NYT-North Korea-Maher-China-Clinton-Epstein-conspiracy-Biden-Mooch frenzy. A doctor (straight from central casting) turns to the First Lady:

“I’ve given him something that will help him sleep.”

The doctor picks up the presidential phone, walks to the far end of the bedroom, removes a decorative book or two from a shelf, places the phone in the gap, and returns the books to their places.

“He’ll never find it there.”

Klean Kanteens and denture tablets

We stood in the store looking at our phones, trying to figure out how to get the coffee stains out of our Klean Kanteens. Elaine had tried the official vinegar-and-baking-soda with no luck. I thought of denture tablets.

We bought three-minute store-brand tablets. Two tablets per Kanteen, warm water, an hour-long soak, and the stains were gone.

There is, of course, a body of lore concerning household uses for denture tablets. This use is the one I thought of and the one I can vouch for.

Today’s Nancy

The pareidolic face in today’s Nancy is thoroughly in the Bushmiller tradition. Nancy remains in good hands with Olivia Jaimes.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Andrew Bell Lewis, was, for me, an adventure in scanning the grid, over and over, for something, anything, that might yield an answer, It was a very difficult puzzle, forty minutes of difficulty. It was the Jillian Michaels workout of Saturday Stumpers.

I began with 1-A, nine letters, “Flash stash.” But no. I-D, four letters, “Britannic forebear,” meant that my clever answer couldn’t be right. Apt clues: 34-A, three letters, “Evince antsiness.” Yes. 39-D, “End up off.” Yes. I did.

Three clue and answer pairs I especially liked: 8-D, five letters, “Verbal slip cover.” 12-D, ten letters, “Exceed what’s deemed to be possible.” And 13-D, ten letters, “Unrealistic.” 12-D and 13-D are worth the price of admission.

A clue that taught me something: 61-A, nine letters, “Traffic flow facilitator.” Does everybody but me know that already?

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Bob Wilber (1928–2019)

Bob Wilber, clarinetist and saxophonist — soprano saxophonist par excellence — has died at the age of ninety-one. The New York Times has an obituary.

Here are just two samples of Wilber’s art: “Nagasaki” (Harry Warren–Mort Dixon) and “Some of These Days” (Shelton Brooks), both recorded in 1976 with Soprano Summit: Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern, soprano saxes; Marty Grosz, guitar; George Duvivier, bass; Fred Stoll, drums. I just looked at my LP, thinking that the liner notes might tell me who’s doing what, but no dice. Fair to say though that the more Bechet-like horn is Wilber’s. If “Bechet-like” means nothing to you, no matter: just listen for instant joy.

“It was an intelligent country”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

The country is “Kakania,” a name of Musil’s devising. From the novel: “On paper it was called the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but in conversation it was called Austria.” “Everything and every person in it . . . bore the label of kaiserlich-königlich (Imperial-Royal) or kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial and Royal), abbreviated as “k.k.” or “k.&k.” Yes, suggesting kaka.

Related reading
All OCA Musil posts (Pinboard)

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, hosted by our son Ben. Be sure to pause to read the full text of Julia Child‘s letters.

Saving Barnes & Noble

The New York Times profiles James Daunt, founder of Daunt Books and managing director of the Waterstones bookstore chain. Daunt is soon to leave London for New York to serve as the new chief executive at Barnes & Noble:

His guiding assumption is that the only point of a bookstore is to provide a rich experience in contrast to a quick online transaction. And for now, the experience at Barnes & Noble isn’t good enough.

“Frankly, at the moment you want to love Barnes & Noble, but when you leave the store you feel mildly betrayed,” Mr. Daunt said over lunch at a Japanese restaurant near his office in Piccadilly Circus. “Not massively, but mildly. It’s a bit ugly — there’s piles of crap around the place. It all feels a bit unloved, the booksellers look a bit miserable, it’s all a bit run down.

“And every year, fewer people come in, or people come in less often. That has to turn around. Otherwise . . .”

The opening anecdote in this Times piece — three degrees? four? — suggests that Daunt brings to his work a Steve Jobs-like intensity of attention to detail.

Related posts
Whither Barnes & Noble? : A as in Dante : Barnes & Noble & the future : Barnes & Noble, “final bastion of hope”?

“Our civilization”

The narrator speaks of what he calls “our civilization”:


Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Can you see why I love this novel?

Related reading
All OCA Musil posts (Pinboard)

James D. Wallace (1937–2019)

James D. Wallace, professor of moral philosophy, has died at the age of eighty-two. This obituary, which appears to have been written by his family, has a detail that would be very much at home in his son David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest:

When Mr. Wallace was a brand new professor, students actually threw rocks at him, mistaking him for a fellow student sufficiently geeky to carry a briefcase.

James Wallace’s mentor in grad school days was the philosopher Norman Malcolm. Malcolm had been Ludwig Wittgenstein’s student. Wittgenstein–Malcolm–Wallace: two degrees of separation.

I remember once roaming the hallway of the University of Illinois philosophy department with my son Ben. We passed James Wallace’s office. I had read both father (Virtues and Vices) and son, and wondered what, if anything, I might have said had the door opened.