I’ll don a tie when the war’s over. Maybe. Occasionally…

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George Will can harrumph better than anybody, so I enjoyed his latest piece harrumphing about “egalitarian shabbiness.” He was in such a state of elevated dudgeon that he pronounced the preppy look he once condemned as preferable. The column ended like this:

Jonathan Clarke, writing in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, of which he is a contributing editor, said the “democratization of dress” in recent decades has produced “the rapid casualization of American life.” But this has calcified into an unattractive norm. Is there a more obvious contemporary ostentation than tech billionaires conducting business wearing T-shirts to advertise that they are too rich to have sartorial concerns?

Clarke, who confesses a “slightly antique sense of propriety,” writes “few things are more heartening than to see a man or woman of advanced age very well dressed.” Such muted rebellion against what Clarke calls the “dubious new catechism of perpetual leisure” is not, as some might censoriously insist, the sin of asserting “privilege” in violation of the ethic of “inclusiveness.” Rather, it is a way to quietly assert that attention to one’s presentation is a form of respect for those to whom one is presented. And it is a way to acknowledge this: Because not all occasions are created equal, not all ways of dressing are equally appropriate.

In this column’s first 50 years, the strongest reaction it elicited was a tornado of fury in 2009 when the column disparaged American adults’ infantile manner of dress: everyone everywhere wearing denim — a democratic conformity to egalitarian shabbiness. J. Crew, J. Press, J. Almost Anything would be an improvement.

I had lunch once with Will — his wife is from these parts — a long while back. It was a perfectly normal lunch, at the Cap City Club, and we dressed in the perfectly normal way that was habitual to us at the time.

So I’m glad he isn’t privy to the Zoom meetings in which I participate these days. I look a bit… different. Since COVID, and particularly since my stroke, I don’t go to an office. So I see little reason to dress as though I were going to an office. Oh, if I’m going to meet with a client for the first time, I might shave and put on a button-down shirt, but that’s about it.

But I seldom do that. All I can say in defense of the way I dress the rest of the time is that the president of Ukraine dresses the same way, and we all respect him, don’t we? I’m sometimes particularly struck by that when I see myself on a Zoom screen, as in the screenshot below from a February meeting. He has his reasons to dress the way he does, and I have mine — although I’ll admit that mine are less compelling.

How about this? I’ll start shaving and putting on a coat and tie every day again when the war’s over. Maybe…

Stop trying to oversimplify things, people! It doesn’t help.

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Above, you see my results from an exercise offered today by The Washington Post that promised to show me “what kind of budgeter you are.” It was offered, of course, within the context of the debt ceiling “debate” going on in Washington.

It is laughable. Apparently, since I’m not, I don’t know, a member of AOC’s “squad” or something, I “believe that the national debt is the foremost crisis.”

It says that, even though I said a flat no to “Cut Defense Spending.” So go figure. I also, by the way, said no to “Enact House GOP debt ceiling bill.”

“Play our budget game,” the headline that led to the above brilliant conclusion. As though I were a child to be entertained. But at least they admitted that it was a game, and didn’t claim it bore any resemblance to real budgeting on the federal level — which, like everything else in government, is a tangled web of conflicting priorities.

Bottom line, as a more-or-less rational person, I believe we should reduce the debt. And I don’t see any way we get there without doing both of the following:

  1. Cutting some spending.
  2. Raising some taxes.

In fact, it will involve both cutting more spending, and raising more taxes, than most people even want to think about. Still, note the “some” in each case. Only a fool would cut all spending in sight or raise every tax suggested. The decisions to be made along the way are staggeringly complicated, and neither ideology nor simple rule of thumb will not guide you to anything that could remotely be recognized as wise governance. The process requires discernment and deliberation.

And putting silly labels on yourself or others — especially simplistic ones assigned by such a “game” as this — doesn’t help you acquire those qualities…

The Kamala Harris problem

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Doug Ross, earlier today, put it more harshly than I would have. But yeah, having Kamala Harris in line for the presidency is not a pleasant thought. I mean, it’s light years better than having a Donald Trump, but it’s still far from being a good thing.

It’s about… I guess it’s about in the same ballpark as having Nikki Haley as president, in terms of qualifications, temperament and so forth.

Which is not a pleasant thought, as I said. You know me. I’ve got this thing about qualifications. A bit of a fetish, really. And neither of these ladies has them at the level I expect for this particular job. Unless you call “being a woman” or “being black” to be qualifications, which I don’t, any more than I would consider being a man or white to be relevant credentials. I mean, let’s face it: Most white guys don’t measure up to this job. Most other people don’t, either. And Nikki and Kamala are in the “most people” category.

Before I abandon my Kamala/Nikki comparison, though, I will say this in the veep’s favor: She’d probably retain a huge portion of Joe’s administration if he were gone, whereas I have no confidence at all in the random newbies Nikki would be likely to bring in. If you doubt me, ask Darla Moore about Nikki’s judgment on appointments.

Anyway, Matt Bai came closer than Doug to my view on Kamala Harris, in a column the other day headlined, “How Joe Biden should solve the Kamala Harris Conundrum.” It was a good piece, and I wish you could read it without a subscription. Here’s an excerpt… he said Joe’s biggest handicap is “the uncomfortable question of whether voters can get their heads around Biden’s vice president as a potential president — a question that is probably more pressing for Biden, who would be 82 if he takes the oath for a second time, than it has been for any nominee since Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a fourth term.”

And it’s a tough topic, especially for Democrats…

Because to understand the root of Biden’s Kamala Harris Conundrum now, you have to understand his thinking in 2020 — which means touching on fraught subjects of race and gender. (This is a thankless task in the current environment, but let’s do it anyway.)

Having publicly promised to choose a woman during his primary campaign with Bernie Sanders, and then wanting to hold his party together during an agonizing summer of racial unrest, Biden determined that his running mate should be a Black woman. It was the right call at the time, morally and politically — although I would argue that by publicly crowing about his criteria, Biden’s campaign did his eventual running mate a disservice, ensuring that whomever he chose would be seen as the best Black female candidate rather than the best candidate, period.

Given the country’s long struggle with inclusivity at the highest levels of politics, however, the list of Black women with obvious credentials wasn’t long, and most of the candidates were untested….

That’s probably all I dare lift directly from the column, but it’s all very much on point, in my view.

Y’all know I really like Joe, but that doesn’t mean I always think he does the right thing (abortion, Afghanistan, just to talk about the A’s). And I don’t think he should have promised to pick a woman, for the reasons Bai points out.

Of course, once he did, I didn’t think it was too bad, since I thought Amy Klobuchar was the best of his rivals during the primaries. Although, she deserved to be seen as the best candidate, not merely, as Bai points out, the best of a certain gender.

I was a lot more concerned when he said she also had to be black, because as Bai is also correct in noting, while we have more black women in politics than we used to, there’s a great lack of black women with “obvious” presidential credentials.

But I kept my eyes peeled, and ended up praising Karen Bass, who is now mayor of Los Angeles. (See “I think I like Karen Bass. As always, I’d like to know more.“)

But Joe went with the black woman who was one of the three black women I would least have wanted him to pick. Obviously, I think he was looking at different things from what I was looking at. And no, I don’t mean what President Obama was looking at in 2013 (although it was hard to argue with the president at the time, unless you were an ardent feminist).

I think he saw her as politically helpful, perhaps even politically necessary. And maybe he was right. Maybe it was close enough that he’d have lost without whatever portion of the electorate she helped turn out. And that would have been disastrous for the country. So Joe picked her, despite the way she had unforgettably stabbed him in the back the year before. He didn’t care about that as much as I did.

Anyway, he picked her, and I tried to be optimistic. But I have to say that in the last three years, I haven’t seen her take on any qualities that would increase my confidence in her. Of course, admittedly, I don’t spend a lot of time scrutinizing what veeps do.

And now, Joe’s stuck with her. And while Matt Bai’s diagnosis of the problem was really good, he didn’t really come up with what I would call a solution to the conundrum.

What he suggested seemed kind of fatalistic, really. But I admit I don’t have any better ideas. And neither does anyone else. As long as there are no acceptable alternatives to my man Joe for the top job — and there aren’t ANY — it may just be a problem we have to live with. Which is kind of what Bai said…

Somebody fetch the sheriff, quick!

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This morning, the national papers to which I subscribe were topping their apps and browser sites with the apparently stupendous news that that twit George Santos was under arrest for at least some of his nonsense.

My first reaction was, why did this take so long? I thought, wouldn’t it be great if these things worked like in an old Western movie? It would go like this:

  • The doofus rides into Washington.
  • He enters the House chamber through the swinging doors (you know, like in a saloon in a Western town).
  • Someone — preferably a House member who looks like this — would shout, “It’s that no-‘count hornswagglin’ George Santos! He’s got no bidness bein’ here! Somebody fetch the sheriff!”
  • A kid who sweeps the place would drop his broom and go tearing out through the swinging doors, leaving them flapping.
  • The sheriff would come, and throw George into the hoosegow.
  • The story — about something more interesting, one would hope — would resume…

All of that would take about 30 seconds of screen time, if properly edited.

Yeah, I know why it took more time in real life. We have this thing called the Rule of Law, and our latter-day sheriffs needed to come up with something more substantive than bein’ a lyin’ doofus before tossing him into the hoosegow. Which is a good thing, if often unsatisfying.

But of course, none of this solves the problem. The problem is that he was there because some people in a district in New York voted for him.

Which brings us to the more substantive story, which had just happened a few hours before, but inexplicably got pushed way down on the page because of the stupid Santos thing. I mean this:

Donald Trump Sexually Abused and Defamed E. Jean Carroll, Jury Finds

Which is gratifying to see. Of course, I’d like to see something done — something effective, that would assure us it won’t happen again — about the greater crime, which is the fact that this slimeball was actually, once upon a time, president of the United States.

Of course, the guilty parties in that case are the people who voted for the slimeball, and would do it again whatever happens. Because we live in a post-truth world, one in which people are easily duped into voting for a Santos, or much worse, a Trump.

So what are we going to do about that? Somebody fetch the sheriff…

Remember Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr.?

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This is how time gets wasted. And consequently, why I post so seldom, among other derelictions of duty.

The other day I had an earworm, and I was trying to figure out what it was. You know how those torment me. Rather than a pop song, it was an instrumental piece, of the grandiose sort. I decided it was the theme music from one of those blockbuster war movies from the 1960s or ’70s, with every actor from the A list, but apparently no writers, and no directors capable of demanding decent acting. You know, like “The Longest Day.”

But it wasn’t that one. No play on Beethoven’s 5th. For a moment, I reached into the ’70s, deciding it might be “A Bridge Too Far.” I went to YouTube to check the theory, but before the first notes sounded, I stopped the video. I had realized it was from “The Battle of the Bulge.” And, as I clicked around trying to confirm, I became unsure it was actually the theme. It was an instrumental version of the “Panzerlied” — which does crop up in the theme, briefly (go to the 29-second mark in this), and is the only memorable tune that emerges. It’s the song those young officers sing while stamping their feet to prove to Robert Shaw vat gut little Nazis zey all vere.

That made me start thinking about what an abominably disappointing film it was. It wasn’t quite the greatest insult Hollywood has ever flung at my late father-in-law’s war service. That distinction belongs to “Hogan’s Heroes.” (My father-in-law was captured in the Ardennes, and spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp. A real one. There was nothing cute or amusing about it.)

But it was pretty bad. I got to pondering what made it so bad. Was it Henry Fonda? Of course not. How could I be critical of Mister Roberts (although don’t get me started on how he was more than 20 years too old for that role)? Although the prig colonel played by Dana Andrews, whose job it was to scoff at Henry’s premonitions, was pretty insufferable. Telly Savalas? Well, the cuteness of the black marketeer’s relationship with the impossibly pretty Belgian girl (yeah, like she’d go for Kojak) was utterly absurd. Both he and Robert Ryan were more fun in “The Dirty Dozen” (of course, as much as I loved that one as a kid, I assure you it didn’t hold up well over the years, either).

As I ran through the cast, trying to thing of the scene or role or actor that best exemplified how little the filmmakers cared, I settled on the guy who played the leader of one of Otto Skorzeny’s units of German soldiers disguised as Americans during the battle. The guy who looked like he’d be equally at home playing one of the non-speaking surfers standing behind Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in one of those beach movies with Eric Von Zipper. I seemed to recall the same guy appearing in “P.T. 109,” with his hair dyed blond, as JFK’s XO Leonard Thom.

Yep. Ty Hardin. He had also starred in one of the less-well-remembered Warner Brothers TV westerns. To check this (as I do everything, all day long), I looked to Wikipedia. Yep, he starred in “Bronco.”

But that’s not the good part of what I read in Wikipedia. The good part was that his real name (you already realize it wasn’t really “Ty Hardin,” of course) was Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr.

No, not making it up.

I’ve always taken something of a dim view of people changing their names, which I see as sort of disrespectful to their parents — especially if they are “juniors.”

But I think I might give ol’ Ty a pass on this one. He had a career to think of, such as it was.

OK, I’ll go do some work now…

Open Thread for Friday, Cinco de Mayo, 2023

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My experience over the years has taught me that nobody reads blogs on Fridays, especially not late on Fridays. So that makes this the perfect time to try to slip a few things by you:

  1. What to expect at the coronation of King Charles III — and how to watch it. — Um, let me guess — we should expect a guy to put on a fancy hat, right? Oh, and I saw a picture of the Stone of Destiny this morning, and there was no sword stuck in it! Who overlooked that? I don’t mean to commit lèse-majesté or anything, but these kinds of “guides for the breathless” headlines irritate me. The only ones I hate more are the ones that go, “What you need to know about…” This is a close relative. I reassure myself that the reporters who have to write these hate them as much as I do…
  2. Too many tattoos in Five Points? — Yes, absolutely! In fact, I see too many tattoos pretty much everywhere I go. It’s like every street in America has become the red light district near Subic Bay, circa 1971. But that’s not exactly what you were asking, was it?
  3. The Next Fear on A.I.: Hollywood’s Killer Robots Become the Military’s Tools — Hey, A.I. offers enough things to worry about, and I’ve been meaning to right a post about it. But this consideration alone is bad enough. Like, nightmarish.
  4. WHO declares covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency — Hey, great! So what does that mean? By the way, you know what my eldest daughter had last week, for the second time? Yeah, COVID! Meanwhile, this is also being reported today: “Disease experts warn White House of potential for omicron-like wave of illness.” Oh, and before y’all make me out to be some obsessed COVID alarmist — that’s not what’s happening here. I don’t go around wearing masks anymore, except maybe on airliners (and I often forget there, too). I’m just saying this is not 2019 again, or anything stupid like that. Hey, but if we do get to do a year over, how about 1971? I really enjoyed that one..
  5. Man who died in Spartanburg jail was ignored for hours, records show — Folks, if we’re going to keep locking people up — and that’s a very popular thing to do here in South Carolina — we’re going to have to spend some money to make these places safe for humans! This is obscene…
  6. Yevgeny Prigozhin: Wagner Group boss says he will pull fighters out of Bakhmut — This is the oligarch who runs the big mercenary operation that’s been fighting for Putin, and getting a lot of its guys killed, in Ukraine. It’s not that he’s against killing innocent Ukrainians, it’s just that he doesn’t want his guys doing it without ammunition, so he’s ticked at the Russian supply people. (There’s something kind of oxymoronic about the phrase, “Russian supply people,” isn’t there? I mean, what’s the last government in the world you would rely on to keep you supplied when your life depended on it?) Finally, check out his picture: If you were trying to find a guy to play a Russian oligarch who runs a mercenary operation, this is pretty much the face you would cast, right? This is like Dr. Evil’s way scarier twin brother…

 

I liked one thing Nikki said the other day

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This story, by our own Meg Kinnard, was one of several that featured the word…

The day that I posted that item about Joe Biden, I had meant also to post a good word about Nikki Haley. Or to be more specific, a good word about an even better word she used.

Having anyone use such a word, especially in such a context, is a rare thing, and one that deserves to be encouraged when such an occasion arises.

So, a few days late, here you go. I’m referring to something she had to say on the subject of abortion. See if you can find the word:

Haley said Tuesday that she does “believe there is a federal role on abortion.” She added: “I want to save as many babies and help as many moms as possible. That is my goal. To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus.”…

Yeah, the word is “consensus.” I would fully explain why that word is key if I had time. And it would take a lot of time, because the reasons it appeals to me are so alien in this ones-and-zeroes age in which we live. It would take so many words that lately I’ve been thinking about writing a book about it. But if I were a betting man, I’d lay heavy odds against that book being written. I don’t know when I’d find the time, between the commitments I have at the moment. Especially since I have another book sketched out in my head that I would write first. I don’t know when I’m going to get to that one, much less the consensus one, which is far less fully formed.

But it’s there. And I thank Nikki for reminding me of it.

Perhaps I should explain that I don’t see consensus as key to solving our abortion problem alone. Consensus is something we need on many, many issues, from guns to the national debt limit.

But abortion does provide a particularly stark example. The challenge is, how on Earth do we get from this small thing of an otherwise unimpressive candidate using the word in a speech — in this case, to try to recapture some of the moderate appeal that taking down the flag won her several years ago — to the point at which we have the consensus to which she refers?

I don’t know. Which is a good reason why if I get time to write a book, the other one is coming first. I’ve got that other one pretty well mapped out.

But I’m increasingly sure it’s what we need. And abortion is a good example of why we need it. I don’t see any other way of approaching it that gets us to where that issue — and others — stop tearing our country apart.

I don’t know how else even I, personally, can get to where I feel that we’re on the right track.

You folks who’ve argued vehemently with me over the abortion issue for years probably think ol’ Brad is pretty pleased now that Roe is gone. But I’m not. You see, while I am most definitely and clearly opposed to legalized abortion on demand — to human lives being made subordinate to other individuals’ “personal autonomy” — I’ve never been able to feel at home with the way folks on “my side” approach the issue, either.

And I’ve always seen it as destructive to think of the issue in the terms in which it has been framed in our politics for the last five decades, with both sides embracing the notion that “if we can just elect a president who will change the court so that a majority of justices vote our way, the problem is solved because then we can just cram it down the throats of those bastards on the other side.” Excuse the language, but a big part of the problem is that too many of us now view those who disagree with us in that way.

Consequently, I’ve never made an electoral decision based on such thinking, but millions of others have, and I’ve watched our representative democracy — which is supposed to be based on the deliberative process — crumble away as they have done so.

So what do I mean by “consensus?” Well, that’s hard to explain, especially since most people who read my words have been conditioned to think in ways that preclude understanding it. One thing it is not is numbers. You don’t think in terms of, If I can get five votes for my side and the other side only has four, I win. Consensus is about getting the group to think, Is this something all of us can live with?

It’s the way we got through our morning meetings every day when I editorial page editor at The State. My goal was always to guide discussion of each issue to a position that respected, to varying degrees, the views of everyone in the room. That may sound like a recipe for incoherence, but it wasn’t. We took very clear and strong positions. We just didn’t leave dissenters figuratively bleeding on the floor in defeat. The advantages of this approach ranged from enabling us to move on amicably to the next difficult issue — not a small thing when you have so many issues to consider — to helping us arrive at solutions that were more practical because they might appeal to a broader range of readers.

I didn’t invent this approach. I had actually first encountered it when I served on the parish council of the church we were attending in Tennessee in the early 80s. Our priest didn’t want us to vote on issues. He urged us to seek consensus instead. A lot of us thought this was kind of nuts, but I ended up being impressed with how well it worked.

This idea will engender all kinds of strong objections, and I’ve heard most of them thousands of times. Hearing them again will likely just persuade me even more that I’m on the right track here. Most of the objections — such as, “You just want to force everyone to think just like you!” — will be wildly off-base. But I know what I’m saying is a little hard to follow, in the America of the 21st century. Which is why so many people will reject the premise of this post entirely. Not everyone, but probably most people.

I grew up in what was probably the most consensus-rich time in American history. My favorite examples, which I often cite, tend to include that stunning series of accomplishments when LBJ was president — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and so forth. Sure, LBJ was a masterful politician, but he was blessed with a country that, for all its differences, was open to a good argument.

There were still vestiges of this in evidence in the later decades of the century, showing up in Reagan’s amnesty on immigration, and the all-too-temporary banning of assault weapons. But try accomplishing such things in an era in which, for far too many in our country, “amnesty” is a cussword.

Of course, it’s more than a process or a strategy. It’s more an attitude among the population involved in the process. And how do you get people to have that attitude? How do we get from here to there?

Well, I don’t know. And Nikki Haley doesn’t know, either, which I suppose is why she didn’t take questions after that speech. But I appreciate her using the word…

What do these ‘reluctant’ Democrats want?

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Hey, y’all, I’m back — again. Remember how I told you I’d been on the island of Dominica, and that I would tell you all about it, but didn’t? That’s because I left town again for a few days, to accompany my wife to Memphis for her 50th high school reunion. I try to never miss a chance to go to Memphis. (And yeah, we made it to Pete & Sam’s.)

But before I start sharing travelogues, I thought I’d try to get some basic, everyday posts up. I’ve had several on my mind the last three days, but have been too busy trying to catch up with work (still not there) and emails (about 2,600 waiting, still unread).

So let’s start with this:

If you go to that on Twitter, you’ll see I got some likes, but also some new things to think about from our good friend Phillip Bush. He wrote:

‘Reluctance’ probably isn’t the right word. There’s no single word I can think of for this, but ‘being disheartened that we have no other choice’ probably covers it for many people.

I responded that “disheartened” is hard for me to understand as well. For my part, I’m deeply grateful that Joe is willing to do this. I think he sees, just as I do, that there’s no one else available right now.

But Phillip wasn’t done:

But Joe bears some responsibility for there being “no one else available” on the D side. And, will you still be grateful to Joe when he loses to DeSantis?

I’m not sure how Joe is responsible for the lack of other suitable candidates. That’s a problem that already existed, to which he responded by stepping up himself. (Maybe Phillip can elaborate on that point here.) And I’ll always be grateful to him for stepping forward when his country needed him — whether he succeeds or not.

This leads to my original concern about this “reluctance” I keep hearing about, which I continue to see as irrational and counterproductive.

Irrational because, what is it these people want? Who is it they see out there who could carry the banner better? Who do they think is MORE likely to beat DeSantis, or anyone else? I’m not seeing anybody. And Joe didn’t cause that problem. He stepped forward to offer himself to fill the void.

And it’s counterproductive because if Democrats don’t enthusiastically back Joe — their only option — this nation will plunge back into the steep decline we experienced starting in 2016. And it’s likely to be worse this time around.

So what’s your problem with Joe? His age? Hey, I’d love it if Joe was 20 years younger — he would, too, I’m sure. But that’s not being offered as an option. We’ve got the Joe we’ve got. And I like him…

NYT needs to expand its English vocabulary a bit

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At the beginning of the Wordle craze I found it mildly irritating to see social media references to what people were encountering on the game on a given day. I was all like, “Keep your diversions to yourselves, people!”

That was before I tried the game myself, and became addicted. I’m now on a 94-day streak, but I must confess to having cheated one day back in the low 60s.

I didn’t mean to cheat — or at least, not to the extent that I did. I wasn’t actually looking for the answer. I was going to spend a turn on a throwaway word, just to try out certain letters that might be helpful in getting me toward the answer. But I couldn’t think of one. So I searched for five-letter words with this or that letter in a certain position, and it gave me a list, and my eye scanned the list, and landed on a word that was obviously the answer. And it was.

So really, I’m only on about a 30-day streak. The app just doesn’t know it.

Now I have confessed to the world, and you need not assign me any penance; I assure you I have beaten myself up thoroughly over it.

But I am here today not to speak of my own sins, but to condemn The New York Times, which owns and operates Wordle, for its trespasses. Not particularly grievous sins, but sins nonetheless.

Actually, this list I’m about to share is only partly from Wordle. I’ve also gotten hooked on the NYT’s Spelling Bee, an even greater time waster. And since you end up entering far more words playing that game, most of the words on this list are now from that.

The problem is, I keep entering perfectly good, long-established English words, and they get rejected as “Not in word list.”

Well, I don’t know where they’re getting their “word list,” but the source is obviously not the OED or any other major English dictionary. Here are words that one of these games has recently rejected:

 

  • luff — Oh, don’t ask me what it precisely means, but it’s something sailors used to do with sails. As in, “Luff and touch her!” It also has a noun form.
  • bole — A tree trunk.
  • dibble — Have you never planted a garden?
  • midden — This is a refuse heap.
  • mort — A note played on a hunting horn when a deer is killed.
  • potto — It’s a primate, and to my knowledge, it’s the only word for this species in the English language. OK, I looked it up, and some call it a “softly-softly.” I’m not making this up.
  • nappy — Means a number of things, from being fuzzy to something babies wear.
  • cavitate — Obviously, no one at the NYT has ever read The Hunt for Red October. Probably don’t know what a Crazy Ivan is, either.
  • motte — It’s the hilly part of a fortress, as in “motte and bailey.”
  • clew — To repeat myself: Don’t ask me what it precisely means, but it’s something sailors used to do with sails. As in, “Clew up, mate!” (I’m not trying to be creative here. I’m trying to sound like a foremast jack, not a poet.) It also has a noun form.
  • whinge — Surely you’ve seen this. It’s another form of the word “whine.”
  • coney — Don’t the NYT folk have any alternative ways of saying “bunny?”
  • conn — Again, go read The Hunt for Red October. Or just about any books that involve maneuvering ships on the sea.
  • trull — Don’t call a lady this, because it has a rather specific meaning, and not many would consider it a compliment.
  • wold — I’ll just quote the dictionary: “a usually upland area of open country.”
  • limey — Mind you, this one isn’t a British term. It’s a term Americans use to describe Brits.
  • telly — OK, definitely from across the pond. But we all understand it, don’t we? Just today, Spelling Bee refused it.

Note that each is linked to its dictionary definition.

OK, admittedly a lot of these words are British, and quite a few are nautical. But they are long-established words with definite meanings in English, and should never be rejected. They should be perfectly legitimate by the rules of the games. They’re not proper nouns or anything.

Yeah, I think there’s some sort of mechanism for appealing, or at least reporting, such errata (oh, and notice I haven’t included any words such as “errata,” accepting them as still pretty firmly identified as Latin — my list is purely English). But I couldn’t find it this morning, and I thought I’d just go ahead and complain here.

I left one word off my list. I had originally saved “droog,” but decided that being a Nadsat word disqualified it. But mind you, Nadsat was invented by an English writer. And I, for one, prefer it to Tolkien’s Elvish…

We’ve been in Dominica. More to come…

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Our first glimpse of the island, approaching from the air on April 5. More to come…

Yeah, I know you haven’t heard from me in two weeks. Sorry about that.

We’ve been on the Caribbean island of Dominica, where my youngest daughter lives. Not the whole time. We didn’t leave until April 4, but we were extremely busy getting ready in the days before that. We got back yesterday.

We had a great time, and I plan to tell you about it, but that will probably take me the rest of the weekend, at least. When we came back from Boston last summer, it took me eight days to pull the pieces together and summarize it for y’all. I’ll try to be faster this time.

I’ve found that waiting until a trip is over and trying to put it all in one post works better than trying to tell the story in bits and pieces while in-country. I tried doing it that way in England years ago, and it proved impossible to find the time to sit down with reliable wifi and tell you anything in depth, so on that one I just gave you an occasional hasty tidbit about something I saw in a newspaper or whatever. Not very satisfying.

It takes hours of concentration and selection (the pictures alone take a lot of that time) to tell it all at once — which I do in a few minutes here, a few there while doing the many other things I have to do in catching up from a trip. But in the end I find it a more satisfying form of storytelling….

Moments later, we had arrived…

 

April Fool to all you dweebs out there!

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My mention of “subsidiarity” last night reminded me of the most elaborate April Fool’s joke every played on me, which I told about here a few years back:

In the years after I first read about it, I was enough of a bore about the concept in the editorial suite of The State that one April 1st, at the instigation of then-Publisher Ann Caulkins, my colleagues played a truly elaborate April Fool’s prank on me that was entirely based on some supposed new research debunking subsidiarity. It was probably the most esoteric, nerdy prank ever played on anyone in South Carolina history. The sort of thing the geeks on “The Big Bang” might play on each other, only with them it would be about physics instead of political philosophy — some knee-slapper having to do with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, perhaps….

In the end, the joke didn’t work out, because I was too impatient to play along. It went like this: We gathered for our morning (or perhaps it was the weekly, since the publisher was there, eager to participate in the gag) editorial board meeting, a session in which all sorts of issues were thrown onto the table for discussion so we could discuss and arrive at positions for editorials.

As we started, Cindi Scoppe produced a long, dry-looking document, bound in the kind of folder we used in school for term papers, that she said contained some important new findings that completely debunked the validity of subsidiarity. She said they were all sure I’d be interested. She urged me to read it immediately.

I got irritated instead of interested. We had a lot of issues to talk about, things we needed to write about. And they wanted to sit there and watch me read something and have my mind magically changed on something this complex? It was absurd anyway; there was no way this could, in a few minutes’ reading, disprove something like that.

But they urged me, “Just look over it!” and “Just scan it briefly!” Which was even more ridiculous, because a mere scan would never convince me of such a thing. I kept putting it down and trying to move on, but finally Cindi said something like, “Just look at the last page!”

So, in order to end it, I did. And of course, it said, “April Fool’s.”

Yeah, OK. Ha, and also ha.

I feel a bit bad for ruining my friends’ fun, but there it was. It had probably been funny when they first thought of it. And it was nice that it was so personalized, so esoteric, so very much something that would appeal only to the kind of dweeb who is on an editorial board. It was, in its way, thoughtful towards me and who I was.

Which reminds me of an old poster I found in my closet while cleaning up the other day. I didn’t go to the conference, but I liked the poster. I’ll see if I can roll it out and take a picture of it…

 

 

 

 

Coinherence

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Detail from the Book of Kells.

I have another another word to try to learn about more deeply, the way I did more than 30 years ago with “subsidiarity,” before driving my friends nuts over it.

It’s “coinherence.” I learned it today — or began learning it today — from Bishop Barron‘s reflection on the Gospel reading of 3/31/23:

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares, “The Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Charles Williams stated that the master idea of Christianity is “coinherence,” mutual indwelling. If you want to see this idea concretely displayed, look to the pages of the Book of Kells, that masterpiece of early Christian illumination. Lines interwoven, designs turning in and around on each other, plays of plants, animals, planets, human beings, angels, and saints. The Germans call it Ineinander (one in the other).

How do we identify ourselves? Almost exclusively through the naming of relationships: we are sons, brothers, daughters, mothers, fathers, members of organizations, members of the Church, etc. We might want to be alone, but no one and nothing is finally an island. Coinherence is indeed the name of the game, at all levels of reality.

And God—the ultimate reality—is a family of coinherent relations, each marked by the capacity for self-emptying. Though Father and Son are really distinct, they are utterly implicated in each other by a mutual act of love.

The impossibly good news is that Jesus and the Father have invited us to enter fully into their divine coinherence. The love between the Father and the Son—which is called “the Holy Spirit”—can be participated in.

I suspect that there’s a simpler way to say it, just as I keep saying the Church should go back to “one in being with the Father” in the Nicene Creed, rather than the new phrase adopted in 2011 — “consubstantial with the Father” — which, as much as I love and respect Latin-derived terms, was not a good move.

But while there may be better words for getting the concept across, there’s nothing simple about the idea itself. I really need to understand it better.

But it appeals to me greatly so far, “at all levels of reality” as the bishop says, for a wide variety of reasons, including:

  • I believe salvation (if even that is the right term, given the way so many use it), is achieved with and through others. It’s not about the I; it’s about the we. (Which is another problem with the new version of the Creed). It’s why there’s a Church. It’s why there are families. It’s why there is such a thing as love.
  • I believe in communitarianism, and most assuredly not libertarianism.
  • I love John Donne’s most famous work, to which the bishop alludes.
  • One of my favorite clichés is, “We’re all in this together.” I mean, if we must have clichés, and apparently we must.
  • It’s a big reason I’m Catholic.
  • It’s why I’ve confused so many people when they ask why I’m Catholic, and I refer them to the last sentence of Joyce’s masterpiece “The Dead.” But read the rest of it first. If it’s still not clear, and I admit it may not be, I’ll try to explain further. Maybe I’ll work in “coinherence.”
  • It’s why, back in my newsroom days, I used to talk about my dream of someday putting out a newspaper that is just one story that has everything that happened in it. Because it’s all connected, and there’s something deeply artificial about presenting the news as separate stories with different headlines. Of course, it might take a year — or at least a week — to write such a “daily” newspaper, but it would be worth it, if the laws of space and time could be suspended.

Now I realize that, except for the Donne reference, the bishop didn’t say exactly any of those things, and I may be mistaking the meaning of coinherence entirely. But it made me think of all those things, and I like thinking about those things.

And I’m just getting started with trying to understand it…

Living the fantasy…

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If only this creature could evolve a LOT more quickly…

No, this isn’t about something starring Stormy Daniels. (That would be the grand jury case I haven’t bothered to comment on this far…)

No, this fantasy is less lurid, but probably more important in the long run. Basically, this post was originally a comment I wrote in reaction to one of bud and Doug’s usual arguments over public vs. private.

Then I started riffing a bit, and it led to something that was really more involved than a comment should be, so I’m raising it to post level.

Here’s what I wrote, in response to this and previous comments:

Well, bud already cited ONE example of something that was done right. I’ll leave it to him to answer your question further. I’m not going to take a couple of years off from life to become someone capable of parsing road contracts and passing judgment on their efficacy.

It’s a silly argument, anyway, talking public vs. private on a function that will only EVER be undertaken by government. The private sector isn’t going to build highways — except as contractors working for the government. That’s the way it is. I’d be fascinated to hear your alternative plan for providing the infrastructure that makes it possible to have an economy in which private businesses can thrive WITHOUT these danged, pesky governments….

It raises some interesting dystopian scenarios. If we ever do get to a scenario in which it economically feasible for a private entity to provide general infrastructure, that private entity will essentially BE the government, at least within that area. You know, like in the Middle Ages, when the local lord of the manor was over everything. The society in which we live is the product of several centuries of Europeans striving to disengage from that sort of system, and try to build a system in which the things upon which we all depend are controlled, at least indirectly, by all citizens.

Not that we haven’t moved that way a number of times as technology has progressed. In the 19th century, it was the railroads. And eventually, government stepped in to control the freewheeling mastery of the environment that the railroad barons wielded. Over time, other technologies have asserted similar societal dominance. (Anyone ever see “The President’s Analyst,” in which — SPOILER ALERT — the power behind everything was the Phone Company?)

Today, we’re engaged in debates about technology that plays a bigger, wider role in our lives than railroads ever did — dominating and reshaping not only how we communicate, but how we think (ones and zeroes). And of course, all that’s in private hands.

So maybe I should take back my comment about it being dystopian fantasy. We’re dealing with the fantasy now…

I was teetering there on the cusp of busting out on a bunch of topics that are as habitual to me as public vs. private are to bud and Doug, things that are all affected profoundly by the things that have been coming out of Silicon Valley:

  • The Rabbit Hole.
  • The way technology has exponentially increased the problem of political polarization in our society. It had been a problem for decades, but in the years since the development of “social” media and broader technology that makes everyone on the planet more powerful (in terms of ability to instantly communicate with every other person on the planet, without editors or fact checkers or any other sort of mediation) than any newspaper publisher in history ever dreamed of being, humans have been trained to think like computers, in binary terms — ones and zeroes. Everything is black and white (words that newspapers now capitalize, by the way). There are no degrees of gray; there are no subtleties or nuances. There is no tolerance of those who disagree.
  • Of course, I include traditional media in this failure to cope with the problem. The new technology, having reshaped brains, distorts political events so that this madness is what the MSM have to cover, and tragically, they fall back on their old, comfortable love of conflict, covering politics like sports. And I don’t mean multilateral sports like golf or marathon running. I mean contests in which there are only two teams, and therefore only two ways of looking at anything. The deepest questions that get asked are: Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Which is profoundly tragic.
  • The inability of Western-style liberal democracies to deal with such polarizing forces, causing elements of the public to turn, over and over, to more oppressive, far less liberal, figures and imagined solutions. (The latest victim being Israel, trailing behind the U.S., of course.)
  • On a much deeper level than any of the above, the inability of Homo Sapiens to effectively cope with the change, since evolution takes millions of years longer than technological development.
  • That last point alone, of course, is one we could worry over for the rest of our lives, and still not get anywhere close to a helpful answer.

Seeing all of it as too much for a comment, I brought it here…

In “The President’s Analyst,” The Phone Company was Behind It All…

This does not inspire confidence, people!

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As y’all may have noticed that I haven’t had any bad words to say lately about SC DOT’s ginormous, biggest-ever, construction project, which they call — hang on, I’ve got to go look that up, because nobody but DOT calls it that — the Carolina Crossroads Project.

It’s what everyone else calls “the project to fix Malfunction Junction.”

To resume, I haven’t had anything bad to say about it, even as it’s finally gotten visibly under way, because they decided back in 2017 not to run it through my house. I thought that was nice of them. But mainly, I’ve lost interest, so that’s why I seem to have held back.

But I’ve got to show you the sign that I pass pretty much every day on my way to visit my mother.

This does not inspire confidence.

And if you don’t see what’s wrong, look again. It’s been there, spelled like that, for at least a month or two. Does DOT have hundreds of other signs like that, or is this one unique? I hope it’s unique, although I’m not sure how that would happen, unless they make them by hand in a shack back behind DOT HQ.

And maybe it doesn’t bother normal people. Normal people’s brains probably automatically fix the spelling as they read it, and they don’t notice, and they go on with their lives. But it certainly bothers those of us who have been editors for so many decades…

See? It’s still like that.

 

Hey, Hollywood! Have I got a pitch for you, baby…

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Michael Jayston as Peter Guillam in 1979.

OK, admittedly it’s not boffo in, say, Marvel Universe terms, or last year’s “Top Gun” sequel. We’re talking more of a niche thing here. In fact, few of my readers here will take interest, unless they are avid Le Carré fans. (Which they should be.)

There’d be nothing blowing up, or people flying about under their own power in colorful tights, or other improbable things. In fact, maybe this idea might not be right for you, Hollywood, in your current state. Can we book Shepperton?

But it would be good. I’m excited about it. Just as I was excited last year, when I read one of Mr. Le Carré’s last efforts, A Legacy of Spies. It was such a gift to those of us to whom Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opened such a wonderful world half a century ago.

It’s at this point I will lose you, dear reader, if you’re not into Le Carré….

Basically, Legacy plunged back through the decades to resurrect favorite characters from Tinker, and from the earlier masterpiece, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. It was better than a high school reunion, way better. (At least, I assume that. I didn’t go to my 50th reunion; I’m not even sure that there was one. I had only been in touch with one of my 600 classmates — our good friend Burl — and he died two years before such a gathering would have taken place.)

Better in the sense that it wasn’t just wandering about glancing at name tags and trying to figure out who these old fogeys were back in your heyday. This book took one of our very best friends from those days and plunged him back into the events of that intense time, in a way that was immediately relevant to all concerned.

To set the scene — Peter Guillam, George Smiley’s long-ago protégé, is in retirement on a farm in France. Out of nowhere, present officials of the Circus (or former Circus) descend on him from their garish new building on the Thames, requiring that he come to London and dive into the records and explain to them what happened to Alec Leamas — and to what extent Control, and Smiley, and Peter himself are responsible for those shocking Cold War goings-on.

You know how tediously judgmental these young folks can be about such things — come back, old man, and justify yourself.

I’m not going to tell you any more, except to say that as Peter endures their interrogations and immerses himself in the official, and unofficial, records, much of the novel takes place in his flashbacks, and the past comes very much to life.

I really enjoyed reading it last year.

So imagine how pleased I was to see Peter Guillam himself appear before me just last night, much older but still the same former head of Scalphunters.

OK, not the fictional character himself, but the next best thing: It was Michael Jayston, who portrayed him so perfectly in the 1979 Tinker Tailer TV series (possibly the best TV show in history), alongside Alex Guinness as Smiley. He was Guillam. Sorry, Michael Byrne and Benedict Cumberbatch, but he was, and you were not — especially not you, Benedict.

Here’s how it happened — I had just come in last night from a late-evening walk, finishing up my 10,000 steps for the day. My wife was watching the very last episode of “Murder in Suburbia” (an underrated ITV cops programme that only lasted two “seasons,” as the Americans call them) on Britbox, and she called my attention to the screen and said, “Look who it is!” She was talking about Olivia Coleman. But a couple of seconds later, someone else showed up.

It was Michael Jayston. It was Peter! Much older and greyer, of course, but unmistakably the same guy. He even had the same hair cut, and the same expression he wore when listening to Ricki Tarr tell his tale about the mole.

Of course, this had first been aired in… July 2005, shortly after I started this blog. And while he looked perfect for the part on the screen, he’s now, um… 87. Oh. Dang….

But so what? 2005 was just minutes ago, and this is Peter Bloody Guillam! Certainly he’s stayed in shape! But let’s get moving. I’m envisioning a high-quality TV-series rendition of A Legacy of Spies here, and I can’t wait to see it! And no one else (especially not you, Mr. Cumberbatch) could play the main protagonist.

I stand ready to help in this noble endeavor. Writing, casting, whatever you need done.

In fact, it occurs to me that Alex Guinness is no longer available, and here I am. Of course, I’m somewhat young for the role, unless you want me for the flashback scenes.

But I’ll do anything you need. Be the third assistant gofer to the gaffer, whatever. Let’s just get started…

And suddenly, there he was — Peter Guillam, much older! (The guy in the middle. Duh…(

I’d forgotten Adolf Hitler was ‘woke’

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McMaster et al applauding the Scout deal. Photo from Henry’s Twitter feed.

If I ever knew it, that is. Guess I need to go back and read my history some more, after reading this this morning:

Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday defended South Carolina’s $1.3 billion incentive deal with Volkswagen subsidiary Scout Motors after a group of conservative lawmakers this month criticized the company as “woke.”

Woke? Scout Motors? The subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group? Here’s how that company got started:

Volkswagen (meaning ‘People’s car’ in German) was founded in Berlin as the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (‘Limited Liability Company for the preparation of the German People’s Car’, abbreviated to Gezuvor) by the National Socialist Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front) and incorporated on 28 May 1937.[14][15][16] The purpose of the company was to manufacture the Volkswagen car, originally referred to as the Porsche Type 60, then the Volkswagen Type 1, and commonly called the Volkswagen Beetle.[17] This vehicle was designed by Ferdinand Porsche‘s consulting firm, and the company was backed by the support of Adolf Hitler.[18]

Whatever der Führer‘s role (and see the photo below), if you say a company got started in Berlin in 1937, the last word I think of is “woke.” Although there was, to be sure, an element of populism in the production of an affordable “People’s Car.” But as we all know, populism is a persistent feature of both the left and the right.

Folks, I can think of reasons to oppose this Scout deal, if you press me. But I can also think of a number of reasons to support it, and I suppose those win out.

But this “woke” business?

You learn something new every day. Or at least  I do…

1938: Hitler lays the foundation stone of the first Volkswagen plant…

Three approaches to a new Second Amendment

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I was intrigued when I saw this headline this morning in The Washington Post: “What a new 2nd Amendment could look like.”

But then, I was disappointed that Paul Waldman didn’t get into the actual wording of such an amended amendment. Fortunately, he told us where to look for one — or rather, for three:

The National Constitution Center made an attempt to rewrite the Constitution some time ago. Their conservative, liberal and libertarian experts came up with dramatically different answers on what a new Second Amendment would look like. Yet only the libertarians wanted virtually unlimited gun rights of the kind the courts are now creating; even the conservatives’ version made room for restrictions….

So I followed the link, and looked at the three different versions. Actually, there are three whole, separate constitutions there. If you have the time, you might want to peruse them. But in my renewed effort to keep posts brief, I just focused on the Second Amendment.

And as he said, the Libertarians looked at the mess that is our present amendment, and challenged themselves: How can we make this even crazier? I know! Remove any reference to a “well regulated Militia!” Libertarians, you know, hate to see anything be regulated. In fact, I’m a bit surprised to see them deigning to participate in drafting a constitution. Here’s their version:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Of course, the Progressive Constitution was all about some regulation, first and foremost:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms is subject to reasonable regulation by the United States and by the States.

And now, a drumroll for the Conservative Constitution, which says… hang on, I’m having trouble finding the Bill of Rights… OK, this is weird. The amendments we know are not presented as a Bill of Rights, and in fact are not presented as amendments (which I guess sort of makes sense, if you’re sort of starting over). They’re just blended in, awkwardly, in Section 12 of Article I:

Neither the States nor the United State shall make or enforce any law infringing the right to keep and bear arms of the sort ordinarily used for self-defense or recreational purposes, provided that States, and the United States in places subject to its general regulatory authority, may enact and enforce reasonable regulations on the bearing of arms, and the keeping of arms by persons determined, with due process, to be dangerous to themselves or others.

Whoa! And I thought the old one was hard to read, with the random commas scattered here and there. Good luck to any court trying to parse this baby. If we go for that one, we’re going to have to set up a bunch of new law schools.

Anyway, I just thought I’d throw those ideas out for discussion…

And if they all worked like this, even “progressives” would see little reason to regulate them.

Well, I hope you’re properly attired today

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I met my daughter for lunch at Whole Foods, where she took this…

Well, I remembered just as I was going out the door for a rare trip downtown, and grabbed and donned the hat I’ve been after savin’ for this day.

As you know, since we went to Boston over the summer, my regular everyday hat (or one of them) is the one you see below, photographed in its natural habitat.

But later in the trip I popped into a shop in the downtown area and picked up the green one as well, but I haven’t worn it in public until now.

Here’s hoping you remembered, too. Happy St. Patrick’s Day…

The regular version in it’s natural habitat — or rather at the Charlestown Navy Yahd, with Boston in the background.

Images of USC campus as pandemic closed things down back in March 2020

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Four days ago, my phone invited me to look back on pictures from that date — March 11 — in years past. So I did, and saw some pictures taken on what I suspect was my last walk around the USC campus and downtown Columbia in 2020, before we closed down the office for the duration of the pandemic.

Of course, I stayed home, but ADCO eventually ended up opening another office downtown, and some of my colleagues actually go there, but not every day. Sometimes we have our weekly meeting on Zoom and I see everyone’s there in the conference room; other times everyone’s at home like me.

I do my walking around my neighborhood, and on the elliptical, which is satisfactory to me.

But I did like walking around the campus, especially during summer and spring break when there weren’t all those people about. I felt a bit like a landed lord taking a turn through my private park. It was peaceful, and healthy.

But this day things were so peaceful, they were starting to feel a bit weird…

Below, you see:

  1. The Horseshoe.
  2. A copy of The Washington Post in Thomas Cooper library. Note that six were dead in the U.S. at that point. As you are probably aware, that number is now at 1,117,856. Or at least, it was on March 3. There was some cheery news, though, with other Dems lining up behind my man Joe.
  3. A sign on a rest room in Thomas Cooper library. Nothing like a dose of British pluck to help a chap deal with adversity, what?
  4. The seating area — or what normally would have been the seating area — in the food court area of the Russell House.
  5. Greene Street in front of the Russell House. Not really bustling that day.

Good thing we’ve got these smartphones, huh?

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OK, technically this image is from my PC, not my phone, but you get the idea…

That’s that I said to my wife this morning: Good thing we’ve got these smartphones! Or pretty much any device with Google. (Or Microsoft’s Sydney, if you’re the adventurous type.)

This morning, after my shower (sure, I work from home now, but occasionally I do still take a shower), I was drying off and for the life of me, could not remember how many guitar pickers there were in Nashville. I was thinking it was 1,552, but I kept running it through my head, and I wasn’t at all sure about it.

Fortunately, my iPhone was right there on the cabinet where we keep the towels, so I didn’t have to wait until getting dressed and leaving the room to get my answer. Before I started shaving, I Googled it:

Nashville cats, play clean as country water
Nashville cats, play wild as mountain dew
Nashville cats, been playin’ since they’s babies
Nashville cats, get work before they’re two

Well, there’s thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee ant hill…

And so forth. So I was like 200 git-tar pickers off. No telling what would have happened if I couldn’t have found out right away. My head might have exploded or something.

I don’t know what we did before having these phones, and Google. Well, I sort of know. I had a dictionary on my desk at the paper. I tried to avoid looking at it, and fortunately I’m good at spelling so I seldom had to. But occasionally I would think, “Is that really the word I want in this context?” and open it.

Well, that would be it for awhile. I’d look up that word, and the definition would contain another word that I just had to look up or bust. And something about that word would remind me of another one I hadn’t run into in awhile, and this suggested fond memories, and couldn’t resist looking that one up too for old times’ sake, and before you knew it, I’d have been darting here and there in that volume for 15 or 20 minutes, with deadline bearing down on me.

Of course, today we have Google and HTML links, which are among the most wonderful inventions in human history, and the problems I had back in the day with a mere dead-tree dictionary look pretty pitiful. Or at least quaint.

But it’s fun. Anyway, after looking up the Lovin’ Spoonful, I thought about taking a crack at Wordle, but resisted the temptation and went ahead and shaved. Discipline, baby, discipline.

Managing one’s time takes more willpower than our fathers e’er dreamed of…