In a café

I was sitting in a far corner of a vast Old World café. A waiter came to my table to tell me that two men were waiting to see me. I walked to the front of the café and found them standing inside the entrance wearing overcoats and broad smiles. They told me that they wanted to participate in my oil business. I told them that I wasn’t taking in any new people. They persisted in asking, and I persisted in turning them down. Then I moved past them and walked down an interior stone staircase — to a basement?

I don’t think this dream took place in Ukraine, but I suspect it’s the product of current events.

The oldest working barber

Anthony Mancinelli, the world’s oldest working barber, has died at the age of 108. He retired just a few weeks ago. The New York Times has an obituary.

I liked this joke in a 2018 Times article about Mr. Mancinelli: “I eat thin spaghetti, so I don’t get fat.” The joke reappears in the obituary.

“In the old days”

Donald Trump spoke this morning at an event to honor the staff of the United States Mission to the United Nations:

Mr. Trump repeatedly referred to the whistle-blower and condemned the news media reporting on the complaint as “crooked.” He then said the whistle-blower never heard the call in question.

“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Mr. Trump said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now. . . .”

Some in the crowd laughed, the person briefed on what took place said. The event was closed to reporters, and during his remarks, the president called the news media “scum” in addition to labeling them as crooked.

Projection, projection.

*

5:34 p.m.: Now there’s a partial transcript.

Others

What most strikes me in reading the whistle-blower’s complaint is how many other people were aware of the actions that the whistle-blower has reported to Congress. One person spoke out. May others follow.

[The complaint, by the way, is exceedingly well-written.]

Plaids and rainbows

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (New York: New York Review Books, 2007).

Robert Kirk (1641?–1692) was a Scottish minister and folklorist. The manuscript of The Secret Commonwealth was left unpublished at the time of his death. Kirk goes to remarkable lengths to place brownies and fairies and the gift of second sight within a Christian worldview. Highly ecumenical.

This extraordinary passage makes me think of lines from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning,” as the poet imagines paradise: “Alas, that they should wear our colors there, / The silken weavings of our afternoons.” In other words, when we imagine an alternative reality, we cast it in terms of the world we know. Thus plaids and suanochs. But then again, there are those “curious cobwebs” and “impalpable rainbows.” How do those creatures make their clothes anyway?

Related posts, sort of
Is plaid really warmer? : Orange Crate tArtan

[Kirk’s appendix to his work, “An Exposition of the Difficult Words in the Foregoing Treatises,” defines suanoch as “mantle or cloak.”]

Queeg

Donald Trump’s press conference (happening now) is turning into the courtroom scene from The Caine Mutiny. I hope there’ll be a transcript.

A related post
#strawberries

“Though” and “the other thing”

From a Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation:

Zelensky: We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.

Trump: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike . . . I guess you have one of your wealthy people . . . The server, they say Ukraine has it.

And so on. So the favor, at least at first, is about a search for a server. If you’re puzzled, as I am, by “Crowdstrike,” here’s an explanation. Trump seems to be laboring under the delusion that a server belonging to the Democratic National Committee is hiding in Ukraine. From there the conversation shifts to William Barr’s participation in the search, a visit by Rudolph Giuliani to Ukraine (no question that Zelensky is to welcome that visit), and an investigation of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden:

The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . . . It sounds horrible to me.

The talking heads on cable news are quoting “I would like you to do us a favor,” which looks bad enough as is. But we would do well not to overlook the word that follows: “though.” You need money for military equipment. But Trump needs something too.

And — if we read carefully — it becomes clear that the favor has several parts: a search for a mythical server, receptiveness to overtures from Barr and Giuliani, and an investigation (with Barr) into the Bidens. The words “the other thing” tie the parts together and point back to “I would like you to do us a favor though.”

If the Trump administration thought that putting this document out would help their case, I can only imagine what’s in the whistle-blower’s complaint that they’re not revealing.

[This document is not a transcript. It is identified as a reconstruction made from “notes and recollections” of those who “assigned to listen and memorialize.” The Associated Press cites “senior White House officials” as saying that the reconstruction “was prepared using voice recognition software, along with note takers and experts listening in.” All infelicities of punctuation and spelling are as in the original.]

Jack Elrod coloring books

Matthew Schmeer let me know of two items available as PDFs from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service: Fish, Wildlife and People: A Mark Trail Coloring Book (1987) and Wetlands Coloring Book (1999). Both are by Jack Elrod, who succeeded Ed Dodd as the artist and writer of Mark Trail. Elrod clearly brought his best stuff to the pages of these coloring books.

Thanks, Matthew.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

[The USFWS doesn’t identify Elrod as the author of Wetlands Coloring Book, but the WorldCat does.]

Mondays and Saturdays

News from joecab: Stan Newman, puzzle editor for Newsday, is posting old Monday (easy) and Saturday (hard) puzzles daily at GameLab. Stop me before I solve again!

In truth though, I haven’t solved at all — yet. GameLab requires that ad-blockers be disabled, and I’m happy to oblige, but navigating a puzzle once ads kick in, at least with Safari, at least on my Mac, too often feels like the olden days of dial-up. (And the ads, always changing, are mighty distracting.) Printing — at 90% — is a better option, with the grid and clues fitting on a single page.

Solve we must. Thanks, joecab.

Impeachment

In The New York Times, minutes ago:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to announce on Tuesday that the House will begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Democrats close to her said, taking decisive action in response to startling allegations that the president sought to enlist a foreign power for his own political gain.