“The Case of the Purloined Prairie”

Here is a fifth (and almost certainly final) piece of Lassie fan-fiction. I’m thinking of it as distraction, diversion, respite. Click on each image for a slightly larger page. Enjoy.













All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

Four more Lassie stories
“The ’Clipse” : “The Poet” (with Robert Frost) : “Bon Appétit!” (with Julia Child) : “On the Road” (with Tod and Buz from Route 66)

[The odd naming conventions for the Masonic characters — Mason, Paul Drake, Della — are my invention. “California”: wherever Calverton is, it’s not in California. “Statues of elimination”: not a typo. The “Juliett” of the NATO phonetic alphabet puzzles me too.]

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

[“Musician Louis Armstrong with neighborhood kids.” Photograph by John Loengard. Queens, New York, 1965. From the Life Photo Archive.]

From “Our Neighborhood” (c. 1970):

When my wife Lucille + I moved into this neighborhood there were mostly white people. A few Colored families. Just think — through the (29) years that we′ve been living in this house′ we have seen just about (3) generations come up on this particular block — 107 Street between 34th + 37th Ave. Lots of them have grown up — Married′ had Children. Their Children + they still come and visit — Aunt Lucille + Uncle Louis.

Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words, ed. Thomas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901. Columbia University’s WKCR is playing Armstrong today.

In light of current events, I’ll borrow from something I said I said to my students when I played a recording in class not long after a 2013 mass killing: There are people whose work is to perpetrate suffering, and there are people whose work is to create joy. Musicians engage in that second endeavor.

Nobody more so than Louis Armstrong.

Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve followed the editor’s use of the prime for the apostrophe, a mark Armstrong used to convey emphasis.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, broke into four pieces for me: two easier (top-right and bottom-left), two more difficult. The easy pieces each had a fairly blatant giveaway: 17-A, nine letters, “World’s highest paid actress in 2017”; 59-A, eight letters, “Notable who cofounded Cynicism.” A more difficult name, which I’ve heard but don’t think I’ve ever seen in print: 27-D, seven letters, “Axel’s cousin.”

Clue and answer pairs that I especially liked: 32-D, nine letters, “Swell to the max.” 33-D, nine letters, “Mediterranean Diet fare.” 12-D, five letters, “p as in Portsmouth or Plymouth.” Especially nice, that last one.

A clue I consider ill-considered: 14-A, nine letters, “Minor bump in the road.” No, not necessarily, not at all.

And a clue that taught me something: 28-A, fourteen letters, “Billionaires, collectively.” I suppose that clue is a giveaway if you’re a billionaire. Not that billionaires need a giveaway.

No giveaways here for anyone: the answers are in the comments.

“‘Old Town Road’ Hebrew Remix”

The a capella group Listen Up! mixes Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” with the tenth- and eleventh-century prayers “Dror Yikra” and “Yom Shabbaton”: “Old Town Road” Hebrew remix.

Earlier this evening I was singing Thomas Campion’s “There Is a Garden in Her Face” to the tune of “Old Town Road.” Sort of. If the shoe fits, &c.

Recently updated

Things my children no longer say Cold cream got away from me.

Back to church

Ben and I walked up the steps to a church. The service had already begun. We slid into two seats in the last pew. “Please turn to something-something, verse something,” the minister said, too fast for the words to register. I looked at the pew rack and picked up what I thought might be a Bible. It was, sort of: a small, thick looseleaf binder, with typed passages laminated in hard plastic. Each “page” had countless vinyl-covered paper clips stuck to the side — a colorful display.

The minister was walking up and down the center aisle, looking at his congregants. When he got to our row, he stopped. “You should be a fine student of Scripture,” he said to me. “But you’re a class clown.” “Actually,” I said, “I’m a pretty serious person. But I try to add a certain lightness.” I was in trouble because the day before I had devised a mnemonic to remember the name of a battle — something to do with a tank wearing a petticoat.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[I suspect that Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities has something to do with this dream. At least the blue, pink, and green Post-its running down the side of my copy do. The petticoat-wearing tank seems to me related to the increasingly military cast of the novel’s salon-based Parallel Campaign.]

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, hosted by our son Ben. With 1990 footage of Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and “an unaired introduction from a familiar face.”

[The circle of life: in 2004 our fambly met the person who introduced Bell. And Ben went on to earn a graduate degree from Harvard.]

Multitasking

Writing a letter while boiling potatoes for potato salad.

But I know that’s not what “the age” demands.

Epstein and Pinker again

Two more thoughts about this exchange between Jeffrey Epstein and Steven Pinker, reported in The New York Times:

At one session at Harvard, Mr. Epstein criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who was there. Mr. Pinker said he had rebutted the argument, citing research showing that high rates of infant mortality simply caused people to have more children. Mr. Epstein seemed annoyed, and a Harvard colleague later told Mr. Pinker that he had been “voted off the island” and was no longer welcome at Mr. Epstein’s gatherings.

The Survivor metaphor is either decidedly careless or decidedly purposeful, given that Epstein owns an island, Little St. James Island, that’s prominent in his career of exploitation and trafficking. But also, though I might be stating the obvious: according to the account in the Times, it was Epstein who walked away from Pinker, not Pinker who walked away from Epstein.

A related post
Epstein and Pinker

[For clarity: I mean walking away metaphorically.]

A debate review

Hank Stuever, television critic, writing in The Washington Post:

Having subjected us to two nights of garishly adorned, overproduced, conflict-obsessed live “debates” among a field of 20 Democratic hopefuls (its own delusional gridlock of egos), CNN and the Democratic National Committee summoned the worst aspects of some of TV’s most popular genres and visual tropes.

The overall tone, of course, was cable-news alarmism, but the debates also resembled those celebrity-packed, prime-time game shows that litter the schedule all summer. One also got wafts of the blaring bombast of professional football broadcasts, and, yes, the stage-managed awkwardness of the lesser styles of reality TV.

Yes.