From The Guardian:
Pro-choice users on TikTok and Reddit have launched a guerrilla effort to thwart Texas’s extreme new abortion law, flooding an online tip website that encourages people to report violators of the law with false reports, Shrek memes, and porn.Last night the form for anonymous tips was down. This morning it’s back up.
A localite persists in adding COVID disinformation to the posts from our county health department. The department eventually removes her comments. But there they are, until they’re removed.
Her latest: coughing up mucus and taking cough medicine are defenses against COVID. You can cough in your backyard or in the shower, she explains. And she closes with what she must think is a witty turn: “Some of us refuse to live in fear. Pass me the Robitussin DM, please.”
If it doesn’t go without saying: she won’t get vaccinated.
I was on a long-distance bus trip from ____ to ____. The bus was packed. I stood up to stretch in the aisle and saw the Imperial Margarine king several rows back. He too was standing up to stretch. The king was wearing a red-velvet crown and a dark T-shirt and slacks. He had two tiny scabs on the side of his nose, near his left eye. He looked like Norman Fell.
“You look just like the Imperial Margarine king,” I said. “Are you him?”
“Yes, I am.”
I asked him if I could take a picture. He nodded yes. But when I tried to use the camera on my phone, all I could see were maps of Bristol, England, and streaming video of soccer hooligans. No camera.
The bus stopped for a short break. The king walked across the street and through an open garage door into an enormous produce store. I waited beside the bus and tried restarting my phone. No improvement. I noticed my daughter standing nearby and asked if she had any idea what was wrong. No, she didn’t. I waited for the king’s return.
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All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)
[Possible sources: thinking yesterday about Nabokov’s Pale Fire and its king or pseudo-king, and later making a U-turn in front of a huge garage door for a heating and air-conditioning company. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Norman Fell appeared in an Imperial commercial. But here’s one with Charles Kimbrough.]
From the PBS NewsHour:
Designer Ed Welburn’s passion developed early, as a small child.The problem is the dangling modifier “as a small child.” I think of the passion sitting quietly in a corner, reading or drawing. Better:
Ed Welburn has been passionate about design since early childhood.But I’m not crazy about passion or passionate. My preference:
Ed Welburn has been interested in design since early childhood.Or more simply:
Ed Welburn became interested in design in early childhood.From at least the age of eight.
Mr. Thorpe, do you really think that Mr. Morland’s gig will break down? From Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818):
"Break down! Oh! Lord! Did you ever see such a little tittuppy thing in your life? There is not a sound piece of iron about it.”And he goes on and on about the danger it presents. “Good heavens!” cries James Morland’s sister Catherine. And I am already imagining a Clueless-style adaptation, with James Morland driving a “ricketty” old compact, and John Thorpe, a shiny new SUV. “Ricketty” is another of Thorpe’s disses.
To walk or move with an up-and-down or jerky movement; to move in an exaggerated or affected manner. Also (of a horse, etc.) to move with short up-and-down strides in a prancing fashion; (of a rider) to guide a horse in this way. Usually with adverbial of direction.”The verb is still in use. The Oxford English Dictionary has a 2003 citation: “A bizarre figure — is it a man or a woman? — tittups towards them.” Tittup also had life as an adverb — “with a tittup; at a canter” — also obsolete.
[Hi and Lois, September 2, 2021.]
Wrong-way swodniw are a fact of life in Hi and Lois. Though that’s not necessarily a wrong-way window. Lois and Trixie could be dining al fresco in today’s Hi and Lois. But it sure don’t look it.
More troubling than the window: the menu has a picture of a juice box. Jeez.
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[Yes, swodniw is a plural.]
An Illinois woman has been arrested for entering Hawaii with a fake COVID-19 vaccination card. It showed her as having received the Maderna vaccine.
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In The New York Times, the lives of fake works of art:
Works declared to be fake often enjoy diverse afterlives, according to law enforcement officials, academic scholars and art market veterans. Some are retained by universities as study instruments, some as the legacies of well-intentioned donors who lacked an expert eye. Some were used in a sting by an undercover agent who hoped the sense of wealth created by fancy paintings on a yacht would be a persuasive part of his pose.[See also the great documentary Art and Craft (dir. Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, 2014).]
But many of the works, experts say, have second lives that very much resemble their first: as fakes recycled to unsuspecting buyers.
An odd headline in The Washington Post: “Four conservative radio talk-show hosts bashed coronavirus vaccines. Then they got sick.”
More accurately: “Four conservative radio talk-show hosts bashed coronavirus vaccines. Then they got sick and died.”
From “How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?,” the third episode of the new Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin) is conferring with Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) on how best to get in touch with their neighbor Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez).
“Let’s see if Mabel's free. I’ll call her. Or should I text?”And then: “Hey, I figured out the perfect greeting for the text.”
“Calls bother them for some reason.”
“Yeah. I think it’s a text. What sounds more casual? ‘Dear Mabel,’ or ‘Greetings, Mabel’?”
[Click any image for a larger view.]
