Stuff Off-White* People Like Friday, or, Under the Mistle D’oh!, or, Could I Speak With Your Manger, Please?

*Because whatever our Scandinavigational predominance, we are 1/32 Chippewa, so said a tireless family-tree climber a decade ago, making us good to the last One-Drop Rule, Kaw-Liga
Don’t all crush each other in the mad 6am rush to buy the things we’ve assembled this past year for our first annual Christmas Shopping Guide:

Books
Speaking of which, if [...]

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Bach to the Children Are Our Future

One of the loveliest works in the classical repertoire is the Prelude No. 1 in C Major, BVW 846, from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, that series of 24 pairs of preludes and fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach:
The best-known piece from either book is the first prelude of Book I, [...]

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Biblioveralls

It’s that time of year, when the US and UK books pages post the “Books of the Year” choices of their divers galaxies of leading reviewers (e.g., The Spectator’s Christmas Books I and II). THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT publishes tomorrow its roundup of lit-picks courtesy of a panel of regulars from literature, the arts and [...]

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Bloom in Offal, or, Liffey Ways to Love Your Liver

Various offal delicacies (heads, brains, trotters and tripe) for sale in an Istanbul meat market. (Wikipedia)
Since we go out of our way to include, within the modest meat portion of our diet, regular servings of chicken liver and pork liver (chicken and turkey giblets and gizzards, too), sold for around a dollar a pound and [...]

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“You must be ‘physic’”

*Lew Harper (Paul Newman) to bartender, early scene in Harper (1966)
Shortly after installing today Google Desktop, which enables pop-up news alerts, we were reading this passage about Kurt Vonnegut in an article “Writing about Writers” in The American Scholar -
as a German prisoner of war, he survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden by huddling in [...]

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The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams

One of the most beloved of 20th-century classical compositions, The Lark Ascending, by one of its most beloved composers, England’s Ralph Vaughan Williams. We may have first heard the work just over ten years ago by chance early one quiet morning on Maine Public Radio, and were [...]

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Baruch/Benedict de Spinoza, Happy 377th

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. – Spinoza, The Ethics, closing line
Spinoza (1634–77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a [...]

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Chekhov, Vidal, Swift

Literary peanuts from The Spectator:
British novelist Anita Brookner in “Christmas Books: I” in The Spectator:
My absolute favourite is a reprint: Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov. A Critical Journey (Granta, £8.99) which comes prefaced with a memorable Chekhovian observation: ‘What torture it is to cut the nails on your right hand!’

Surprising literary ventures
Wednesday, 7th October 2009
Gary Dexter
Death [...]

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Ad ‘em an Eve

Ah, yes, works a charm – a hot blast hard to her mug of 4000 polysyllabic compounds, with delicate orchardine undertones untouched by migrant labor save that tasked with picking glass vials, and you too, Harvey, will be In Like Flynn in a Vienna minute – all in a vintage copy-writer’s day’s work from the [...]

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Mannequin Those Guys Play

Jack’s Mannequin performed its song “Swim” on The Daily Show last night: “Andrew McMahon of Jack’s Mannequin describes his battle with leukemia before performing ‘Swim.’”

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The Ice, Man, Always Wants Rings, or, Kiss Me Skate

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Yeeeesssss? Man

We just caught Frank Nelson on a Sanford and Son episode, “The Engagement Man Always Rings Twice“:
Nelson typically portrayed a sales clerk or customer service worker. For example, needing airline tickets, [Jack] Benny would call the ticket agent, “Oh Mister? Mister?” Nelson’s appearance began with his catchphrase, a bellowed “Yeeeesssss?”. The two men would [...]

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Man de Poutine kin

Montreal poutine from La Banquise in Montreal
Calvin Trillin (audio; abstract of article in The New Yorker not online) samples a signature French-Canadian dish known to some as a “heart attack on a plate”.

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I made a new blog-

It’s called Adventures in Desperation. It’s an account of my busking experiment. (Don’t worry, I haven’t given up on finding more secure employment, but I still have some time on my hands and I might as well spend it outside.)

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Coffee table Clint

Go ahead, make my coffee (table): new book collects a Fistful of Posters.

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Will strip for cache

From the incomparable Early Comics Archive, among other treasures, see the 1848 English edition of Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann (think Edward Scissorhands 150 years avant la topiaire de M. Burton et M. Depp); Rowlandson’s Doctor Syntax (a full-scan must-see);

and the final Max Ernst-like engraving (below), from 1847, by the French caricaturist “Grandville”, whose satiric animal-headed [...]

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Fishbowl Saints

From a Sunday Times (UK) profile of Christian Lander, creator of the popular social-satire site Stuff White People* Like:
*Affluent, upper-middle-class, “independent”, guilt-ridden, ethically exhibitonist left-liberal White People
Body Shop, Burt’s Bees, Innocent smoothies; these are WP [White People] companies that all started out ethical and then sort of became distracted by turning rather a neat profit. [...]

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The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn

One of the finest comedies ever shown on English-language television, The Norman Conquests (1978; 1973 pub.) by Alan Ayckbourn, England’s most renowned comic playwright of the last forty years, is yours in part for the viewing at YouTube, in the form of Part Two of three, Living Together, in ten segments [...]

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“Would It Kill You to Be Nice to Me?” and Other Links, Mostly on Health Care Reform

A song about a mad scientist “in love”:

I’ve been trying to get a little more information about what’s going on with the Stupak Amendment. Amid wildly varying accounts of what the amendment would do, Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo tackles the question of Who Would Be Most Impacted By [...]

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♫I’ve gotta lose me to find you…♫

From a Rolling Stone review of Who’s Next, some familiar admirers’ chuckles:

Such dynamics! The beautiful quietly lyrical moments of such selections as “The Song Is Over,” “Gettin’ In Tune,” and “Behind Blue Eyes” are juxtaposed with the thundering rock that is the marrow of those songs so that each is rendered even more poignant.
To further [...]

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“Bagpipe Music” redux

This is kind of cool. While listening to Live Ireland radio, I heard familiar words set to an unfamiliar beat. Sean Tyrrell sings Louis MacNeice’s poem, “Bagpipe Music,” under the title, “No-Go,” on his album, Cry of a Dreamer. I suspect some readers here would enjoy “Bagpipe Music,” if you haven’t read it already.
It’s no [...]

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Words and tropes that piss me off, #1

SPOILER WARNING-
OPTIMUS PRIME DIES. AND THEN HE IS MAGICALLY RESURRECTED.
I didn’t have any new insights into the healthcare debate, so I thought I’d bitch about the word ‘cheesy’ instead.
“Cheesy.”
I don’t object to all uses of this term, certainly not the ones that are actually listed on dictionary.com:
“–adjective, chees⋅i⋅er, chees⋅i⋅est.
1. of or like cheese: a cheesy [...]

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Ad-Tie Anti-Snuggie Buggy, or, Chaise-in’ Crowbars

As seen on our cable system on the Francophone Radio-Canada station CKSH.

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Salt mystery

This article, about the upcoming Angelina Jolie movie, Salt, says

The film stars Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Andre Braugher and was directed by Phillip Noyce (Clear and Present Danger, Dead Calm) . “Salt” is slated to hit theaters on July 23rd, 2010.

but the IMDB listing for the movie doesn’t actually list Andre Braugher [...]

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Deputy Dogs

Baker had allowed deputies and their search dogs into her home… -  Fla. baby missing for 5 days found alive under bed

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