“A striking reflection”

The New York Times (gift link) has a long article about the blue and the green: “How the Reflecting Pool Came to Mirror Trump’s Washington.” An excerpt:

Many of the details of the saga are reported in this article for the first time. They show that the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.

Domestic comedy

“Is this the same morning, or a different morning?”

“A different morning, several months later. You were asleep for a couple of months.”

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[Context: I fell asleep during one morning scene in the pleasantly dreadful movie Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and woke up during another.]

Periwinkle blues

[Zits, August 6, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

From today’s Zits. Jeremy’s “blues” (modeled on Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”) begins

I got a comfortable suburban home, baby.
Daa-daa-da-dumm!
Food in the fridge!
Daa-daa-da-dumm!
My parents are loving and reasonably supportive
    of me, honey.

And so on. Sometimes it’s better to just play.

Related reading
All OCA blues posts (Pinboard)

Poor moon, “Poor Moon”

From The New York Times (gift link):

A discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the surface of the moon around 2:35 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday at a speed of 5,400 miles per hour.

Cue Canned Heat’s “Poor Moon”:

Oh well, they might test some bomb
Oh well, and scar your skin
Oh well, I don’t think they care
So I wonder when they’re going to destroy your
    face

Related reading
All OCA Canned Heat posts (Pinboard)

[Some background about the song.]

Take that, Sam Altman

[Click for a larger view.]

What a sad picture of a parent–child relationship. There is nothing cool about it at all.

See those numbers? The term, which I may never have occasion to use again, is ratioed .

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[Alex Hirsch is the creator of the animated series Gravity Falls.]

Dictation at work?

A New York Times correction:

An article on Page 18 this weekend about the novelist Colson Whitehead misstates the title of one of Whitehead’s novels. It is “Apex Hides the Hurt,” not “Apex Hides the Heart.”

Granted, someone could have misremembered or misheard the title. But I wonder if that mistake could be a sign of dictation at work. How does a record store become a liquor store? How does a Moleskine become a muleskinner? That’s Apple Dictation for you, or for me.

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All OCA dictation posts (Pinboard)

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

Here, from the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald recording of music from Porgy and Bess (1959), is “Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess?”, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Du Bose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, with an orchestra conducted by Russell Garcia.

From the Verve LP liner notes: “When Ira Gershwin heard Louis Armstrong’s rendition of this song, he found it most touching and poignant.”

Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

[Why not embed the YouTube video? Not all videos allow it. And if they do embed, they almost always do so with ads. Use a browser extension or two to block ads in YouTube itself.]

Graffiti Moe

Brett Terpstra’s Graffiti Moe is a free service that appends a random quotation to a Mac Terminal window.

I rarely use the Mac Terminal, but I couldn’t resist contributing a couple of quotations.

One, from an informal list of rules for a college art department, found in Learning by Heart, a book by the artist Corita Kent:

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

I shared Rule 7 on syllabi for many years and wrote a post about it in 2005. (And note: the list of rules is not the work of John Cage.)

Two, a lyric that appears in the OCA sidebar:

I'm not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it one more try

Sufjan Stevens, "Jacksonville"

I’m a Sufjan fan, and I’m especially a fan of this song (another version), which our fambly performed at a local coffeehouse some years ago.

So far there are 129 contributions. If I were using the Terminal, I’d be happy to have any one of them brighten the day. You can see the most recent ones and add one or more of your own at graffiti.moe/add. (Why not?)

A Seminary Co-op postcard

[The small print: “‘Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.’ (Motto over the entrance to Epicurus’ Garden.)” Context here.]

I’ve had this postcard for many years. Notice the opening time: you could get there before a 9:00 class. Times change: these days the Seminary Co-op is open M-F 11-6, S 10-5, and closed on the other S.

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Three packs

I was preparing to drive to a southern state to buy three packs of cigarettes — they’re so much cheaper there. I was torn between Camels and Pall Malls: should I get three packs of the one, or the other? Or one pack of one and two of the other? And which of which? And yes, yes, I was going to quit, eventually, but I wanted to have some packs to keep around.

Now I’m puzzled that Lucky Strikes weren’t part of my purchasing dilemma.

The likely inspirations for this dream: watching A Private Life (dir. Rebecca Zlotowski, 2025), in which a psychoanalyst’s patient stops smoking after hypnosis but takes up the habit again, and looking at a photograph of J.D. Salinger and trying to figure out the identity of the pack on his desk. Nearly thirty-seven years after I stopped smoking (October 8, 1989), cigarettes still turn up in my dreams. But I’ve never smoked there.

This dream happened before I watched I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Related reading
All OCA cigarette dreams (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). ]