US Attorney Jack Smith’s goal was to mete out justice, or rather “meat” out justice. This dichotomy was Harry’s biggest takeaway from yesterday’s J6 indictment hoopla. His take was that our republic is falling apart and civilization is crumbling. I’m sure that the TV talking head said mete and not meat, but Harry is quite deaf and totally reliant on the TV’s accompanying closed captioning, which read meat. He went on and on about this to such an extent that it overshadowed the monumental seriousness of the whole event and interjected some much needed levity. Not that we were not already giddy with excitement. A former Spanish teacher and a lifelong student of language, Harry was mortified by this transposition of two similar sounding words. He comes from the eras of Edward R Morrow and Walter Cronkite and these MSNBC machine generated subtitles just were not up to snuff. He eventually calmed down and we bade him goodnight. Anyway, Trump is going to jail.
While much of the Midwest is getting pummeled by winter storm Xylia, here in Saint Louis it is only a rain event. There is some flooding in the area, but thankfully none of it is occurring in our basement, at least so far. Last night, I used the drone to capture this storm generated sunset. At a hundred feet up, looking west is a nice view of the Clayton skyline, silhouetted by the angry sky.
Today, while everyone else is celebrating Pi day, here in the 314-area code, we have Saint Louis day to celebrate too. Here in the Lou, we’re not cool enough to have someone like Eminem singing the praise of our area code, but local stores are offering special deals in honor of this numerical holiday. Mainly all sorts of good things to eat, but unfortunately for me, tomorrow is weigh-in day.
We haven’t received our stimulus checks yet, but I’m already spending mine. I’m out there already, stimulating the economy. Our venerable desktop PC’s long running case of dementia had reached the tipping point. As I write Anne is rebooting it, because the Photo app stopped working. Its flaws are too numerous to count, but lately, like after this last week’s Windows update they seem to have multiplied. So, I ordered a new machine, which is due for delivery later this week. After ordering the new machine, I backed up the old one in preparation for the switch over. The price point for PCs has really dropped.
So, we have enough stimulus funds leftover to upgrade our iPhones too. Our phones are both so old that some apps have stopped working on them and new apps won’t even load. When we were at Laumeier sculpture park this last week, there was a new exhibit called Time Fork. As near as I can tell it is an augmented reality app that interfaces with the more bricks and mortar parts of the park. I’m only guessing though, because my phone is too old to support the app, but that will change soon and then we’ll be all up to date. Yeah…
Every dog has his day and mine was yesterday. The below pictured score is typical of one of our games, except for this one the names have been switched. I finally won a game. Overall exceptional letter draws and a seven-letter tray emptying play made the difference. I can see why Anne likes this game so much.
Well, she is feeling better today. She even lost a pound or two, just by lying on the couch, but I wouldn’t recommend it though. After Thursday’s mini road trip and vaccination, Friday was a pretty low-res kind of day. About the title? On the way to Columbia and back, we passed Artichoke Annie’s Antique Mall. Plus there was Auntie Annie’s bake shop in the mall. Just smelling it felt fattening.
I tried comforting her, but I only ended up annoying her. Letting her sleep all day seemed like the best medicine. That and playing sulcate¹ in Scrabble. Using all seven of my letter, letting the S do double duty and scoring a whopping 91 points. I say hit them while they’re down. This is Scrabble after all.
The photo is of a sign we saw in Boston. It was on a cul-de-sac there. It could have just said road closed to local traffic only or some such, but they had to get all fancy and use the word abutter², which is not some kind of a-hole,
Marked with parallel grooves. “the margin is often sulcate”
Holiday Place Settings—Extra Settings are for Elijah, Godot and Their Plus-Ones
‘Twas the night before… Wait, wrong holiday. Can’t go there yet. Today, on all Thanksgiving’s eve… Don’t even! Oh, well… Tomorrow is a national holiday, but I am afraid that amongst its calendar neighbors, it has become a bit lackluster of late and this year, 2020, hasn’t been particularly kind to the whole giving thanks department. Gone are the days of Pilgrim’s pride, which were vastly overrated, if you ask me, in my not quite so humble opinion. We want to change all that. Humaning you holiday is our purpose driven goal.
We here at Regenaxe, Federer & Smith would like to offer you our outstretched and sanitized hand. Sure, we hail from Madison Avenue, but we’re not going to tell you how to enjoy your Thanksgiving by dumping a whole pile of corporate jargon monoxide on top of you. We would much rather spoon feed our pabulum.
Hi, I’m Mark and I would like to be your storyteller for tonight. By storytelling, I mean story-doing. Humaning the whole hyper-telling process for you, drawing you in, making my vision yours, so that we can act out our solutioning together.
Apropos of nothing, have you ever noticed that you can create one new and really interesting word, by hyphening two rather plain and ordinary words together? Plus, the spellchecker doesn’t care that you’ve just created a new word out of thin air. I call that a win-win. Now, I’m just spit-balling here, but the game of Scrabble has these two blank tiles that until you lose a letter or two can be played as any letter that you want, but why just limit yourselves to the original twenty-six? I say let them also be hyphens. What possibilities! I hope as you scroll through this post that you find this idea as thumb-stopping as I have.
But I digress. We here at RFS want to make your holiday meal as tasty, convivial and safe as it can possibly be. Let me enumerate, first tasty. We offer a wide selection of purpose-driven lifestyle brands (Blue Apron, Chipotle, Goop, Godiva, etc.) that are prepared to lead you on a delightful customer journey to the dinner table. Just don’t eat the Goop. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is much better for you when applied externally. Think of it as an after-dinner spa treatment. There I go again, second. After you’ve first lifted that fork and taken that first bite of our truly scrumptious snackable content, wouldn’t it be so nice to be able to look around the table and see all of your friends and family smiling back at you? Let’s get Phygital! Building on current Zoom technology, we can offer you our [insert TLA² here] app. Through your phone, and with our app, you can enjoy a convivial and safe supper, with all your love-ones, virtually. Better than real life, it comes with a mute button for Uncle Fred.
This concludes my elevator pitch and just in time, because we have just arrived at your floor, the penthouse. I hope that I have been able to convey to you some of the warmth, the brand heat that we feel for you. Now enter, your party awaits you, have a nice time and have a happy and safe Thanksgiving holiday.
I like the way that these stones were laid. Their concentric-intersecting pattern reminds me of ripples on a pond after successive pebbles were thrown into the water, where newer ripples erase older ones as they all continue to arc outwards from their different origins. I can imagine some child, standing on the bank and hurling rocks that send water striders skittering from one tsunami to the next. An imaginary scene that is frozen in time, but captured by these stone’s layout.
Some might call these cobble stones, but Harry, my Father-in-Law would be quick to correct their error. These are cut stones. Their rectangular shape shows that they have been worked. A cobblestone is a rounded unworked stone, such as one plucked out of a stream bed. ‘Paving stone’ ambiguously covers both.
These stones cover a courtyard at the Greenwich observatory, where a metal bar is inlaid that signifies the Prime meridian. I was standing on that bar when I took this picture, so you can think of these ripples of stone as emanating out from it. Looking at this pattern, within that context, the phrase, a ripple in time, comes to mind. I wonder it that was the artisan’s intent?
Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe. – Zorba
Ill-Matched Lovers, Quentin Massys, 1465
As part of this year’s ‘Ignite!’ season, we went to hear a reading of the new play, “The Full Catastrophe”, by Mark Weller. Adapted from the David Carkeet novel of the same title, this is a tragicomic story of the verbally disturbed Wilsons, Dan and Beth, of Saint Louis, MO (Ladue actually) and their troubled marriage. In order to save their marriage, they hire linguist Jeremy Cook to act as a live-in marriage counselor. Cook has only recently lost his longtime gig of studying preschooler’s speech patterns and has just snagged this new job with the mysterious Pillow Agency. Roy Pillow the strange founder of the Pillow Agency, author of the Pillow Manual and creator of the Pillow Method has as his main dialog contribution the line, “The Horror. The Horror.” He repeats this line throughout the play, all Kurtz-like, as from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.
This is Jeremy’s first case. To say that Jeremy is a little off-kilter himself is a bit of an understatement. He comes to the subject of interpersonal relationships with the same understanding that a visiting space alien on his first trip to earth might have. Still, he is able to diagnose the problem with this linguistically troubled marriage right off the bat as “complementary schismogenesis” or the mutual creation of division, but once diagnosed he seems at a total lost at how to cure its woes.
Part of Jeremy’s problem is his own tortured history with love. Years ago, he let his one true love, Paula, walk out of his life and has come to regret it ever since. Tension in the Wilson household comes to a head when news arrives that the summer camp that Dan and Beth had planned on housing their son, Robbie in, has suddenly closed. They had planned on spending their summer together, jetting off to Italy, renewing their lost passion for each other and saving their marriage. Beth is heard yelling at and accusing Dan, “The summer is ruined! The summer is ruined!”
Not knowing how to relate to, let alone counsel Dan and Beth, Jeremy’s big moment comes when he helps the kid do a homework assignment that is requiring him to write a sentence ending in a preposition. The linguist tells him to imagine a little boy who is upstairs in his room waiting for his father to come read him a story. He goes to the top of the stairs and waits. He hears his father coming, but when he sees the book his father has chosen, he’s disappointed. So he says to his father, “What are you bringing that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of up for?”
