Help wanted

Annie Karni, writing in The New York Times: “The statement released Monday by Mrs. Trump was also rife with grammatical errors and typos.” Have you read it? Jeez.

I like this sentence from the Times article: “It was not clear who helped Mrs. Trump draft the statement.” Help!

“Hmmm, hmmm”

Robert de Saint-Loup’s handshake is stiff and distant. His uncle’s handshake is more distant still. Introducing Palamède, Baron de Charlus:

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

A Q believer

“She once spent several minutes explaining how a domino-shaped ornament on the White House Christmas tree proved that Mr. Trump was sending coded messages about QAnon, because the domino had 17 dots, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet”: from a New York Times portrait of a Harvard-educated QAnon “digital soldier.”

Springfield 1908

From NBC News:

Illinois‘s two senators have called on President-elect Joe Biden to make the site of a 1908 race riot in Springfield a national monument.

Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin, both Democrats, wrote to Biden Thursday asking for the designation, citing the riot’s historic significance, especially its role in inspiring the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Wikipedia has an extensive article about the riot, which might be better described as racial terrorism.

Joanne Rogers (1928–2020)

“She was the inspiration for the puppet character Queen Sara, wife of King Friday XIII”: Joanna Rogers, Mrs. Rogers, pianist and Neighborhood advocate, has died at the age of ninety-two. The New York Times has an obituary.

Orange Crate Art is a Neighborhood-friendly zone.

Today’s Saturday somepin

Today’s Newsday crossword is not a Stumper. The Stumper is gone, replaced by somepin else, an easier themeless Saturday. Today’s puzzle is by Newsday puzzle editor Stan Newman, composing as Lester Ruff. Les Ruff, that is, easier, as every Newsday Saturday now promises to be. And this puzzle was easier, though it felt difficult. Is it a pseudo-Stumper? A semi-Stumper?

Some clue-and-answer pairs I enjoyed:

1-D, six letters, “California’s ‘Garlic Capital of the World.’” I love garlic, so I know the name. But probably anyone who’s bought garlic in an American supermarket has seen the name. The capital appears in Les Blank’s documentary Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers.

36-D, seven letters, “Papal, in Michelangelo’s day.” I learned something.

44-A, four letters, “Former Volvo alternative.” For me it signified (rightly or wrongly) Yuppie. Yuck.

67-A, six letters, “Feel like fighting.” But only because I misread the answer and felt mystified.

I didn’t find much 5-D, five letters, “Roy Lichtenstein ‘impactful’ pop-art painting” in today’s puzzle. Maybe next week’s Saturday will offer more.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Witness to the Siege

A conversation that aired last night on PBS, Witness to the Siege, with Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, and Amna Nawaz.

Not a rhetorical question: Is there any one person who has done more to damage our country than Donald Trump**? Am I missing someone?

Opportunistic

My favorite sentence (so far) from Trevor Day’s Sardine (London: Reaktion, 2018): “Sardines are opportunistic.” Which means that “they feed on phytoplankton or zooplankton, or both, depending on which is abundant at the time.” Phytoplankton are plant-like organisms. Day characterizes zooplankton as “drifting animals.”

Opportunists and drifters: it sounds like ocean noir. Sooner or later, someone will be caught in a net.

Sardine is a volume in Reaktion’s Animal series, beautifully printed, with many drawings and photographs.

Thanks, Heber, for pointing me to this book.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

His ’n’ her resignations are in order

I have learned that “my” representative in the Illinois House, Chris Miller (R-110), husband of Mary Miller, attended the Washington, D.C. rally that was the prelude to last Wednesday’s attempted coup. He was streaming from the scene:

“We’re engaged in a great cultural war to see which worldview will survive, whether we will remain a free people, under free-market capitalism, or whether they will put us into the tyranny of socialism and communism and the dangerous Democrat terrorists that are trying to destroy our country.”

Chris Miller was most recently on my radar in August, when he denied the reality of the pandemic. As a photograph in Business Insider attests, he keeps his mask under his nose. Christ, what an airhole.

There’s a petition.

Related posts
January 5 and 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller : The objectors included Mary Miller : A letter to Mary Miller : Mary Miller, with no mask : Mary Miller, still in trouble

Mary Miller, still in trouble

Representative Jan Schakowsky (D, Illinois-9) will introduce a measure to censure fellow representative Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15). On January 5 Miller told a Moms for America rally in Washington that “Hitler was right on one thing — that whoever has the youth has the future.” She’s “my” representative in Congress.

Previous Miller posts
January 5 and 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller : The objectors included Mary Miller : A letter to Mary Miller : Mary Miller, with no mask