Marian Robinson (1937–2024)

Marian Robinson, mother of Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, has died at the age of eighty-six. From the New York Times obituary:

Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Ms. Robinson was known as a loving, down-to-earth matriarch who became an emotional ballast for her daughter and granddaughters, Malia and Sasha, but also for Mr. Obama, who had rocketed to political superstardom and whose family, at times, had to scramble to keep up.

When Mr. Obama became the first Black man to win the presidency in November 2008, he sat and watched the returns alongside his mother-in-law. Their hands were clutched together as they watched their family’s future change alongside the course of American history.

Elaine and I met Michelle Obama when Barack Obama was running for the United States Senate. And our whole family met Barack Obama later in that campaign. I wish we could have met Marian Robinson too.

187 years

At his press conference In his Queeg-like ravings just now, Donald Trump suggested that he may be going to jail for 187 years.

Allay!

[A Glencairn Whisky Glass was sitting on the counter — might it get knocked over? They are not cheap.]

“I’ll allay your fears and wash it.”

“No, it's fine.”

“I’m gonna allay! I’ll allay!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Know the difference

[Reposted from December 8, 2018.]

I created this visual aid one day after making a post titled Felonious Trump, which began, “I’m no lawyer, but it seems clear that Individual-1 directed Michael Cohen to commit felonies.” And now Individual-1 is a felon.

Now more than ever: know the difference.

The verdict

GUILTY! On thirty-four of thirty-four felony counts.

Thank you, New Yorkers.

“Lists!!!”

From This American Life: “Lists!!!” It’s an especially good episode.

The one thing missing from this episode is the quotidian to-do list: buckle shoe, shut door, pick up sticks, &c. An Atlantic article by Amanda Mull has that covered: “Never underestimate the power of a to-do list.”

Here’s a list my daughter Rachel made (in cursive) at the age of six or seven, of supplies for an imaginary camping trip. And on a different note, a list, found in a used book, that’s puzzled me for years.

Some more OCA posts with lists
Amy Winehouse’s to-do list (“When I do recorddeal”) : John Lennon’s to-do list (“H.B.O. Guy coming between 3–5”) : Johnny Cash’s to-do list (“Kiss June”): Ralph Kramden’s list (“Basically honest when pinned down”) : Review: Liza Kirwin, Lists (A book of artists’ lists)

Cursive Peanuts

[Peanuts, June 2, 1977. Click for a larger view.]

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts.

Venn reading
All OCA handwriting posts : handwriting and Peanuts posts : Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Flooring

I clipped a small square from a New York Times photograph of the courtroom where Donald Trump’s trial is taking place. That institutional-looking floor tile — it’s the same non-descript stuff found in the building where I taught for thirty years. But the color is different: these tiles appear to be a dull brownish gold — gold-ish, befitting the defendant.

In 2012 I took a photograph of a little man in a floor tile in my office. I trust he’s still there, still smoking.

“Inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators”

From The Washington Post Tech Brief newsletter:

“All large language models, by the very nature of their architecture, are inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators,” said Grady Booch, a renowned computer scientist. At a basic level, they’re designed to generate answers that sound coherent — not answers that are true. “As such, they simply cannot be ‘fixed,’” he said, because making things up is “an inescapable property of how they work.”

Grady Booch is in Wikipedia.

Have you had your rock today?

Related posts
ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

Chekhov and Joyce

“The closest parallels to Joyce’s stories are Chekhov’s, but Joyce said he had not read Chekhov when he wrote them”: so says Richard Ellmann in the biography James Joyce, citing Herbert Gorman’s notes and papers for a Joyce biography. But try reading this passage from Chekhov without thinking of Joyce’s “Eveline.”

Anton Chekhov, Three Years, in “Peasants” and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: New York Review Books, 1999).

[Most of Chekhov was in English by 1903. Had this story been translated by then? Garnett’s translation was first published in 1916.]