Print is forever. This, not so much.

two weeks ago—June 10

This week, The Chair is bucking current food fashion trends and declaring itself 100% protein free, instead going all in on carbohydrates, mostly donuts and pasta.
Why? Just 'cuz we can.

Models for living life.

Designer Marc Jacobs, reacting to a documentary about himself: And the first time I saw the film, I said to her [Sofia Coppola], 'I didn't hate myself.' I really liked the person that I saw in that movie and that was surprising to me. Add another restatement of To A Louse to the list. Our brain selves are rarely as good as our public selves as perceiving our true worth. we see the flaws, what we didn't do, not what is. (he said, projecting).

Price Love: Your dream can be reality... believe that you can fly.

Astronauts reply, 'Can do!'

as BBC tells us Astronauts on International Space Station told to shelter as repairs under way to fix air leaks.

'Houston, is there anything else we can do, like chewing gum to stuff in cracks? We'd like to be a little more proactive with fixing this. Also, do you have any suggestions for reducing blood pressure?'

The art of the almost imperceptible bodyslam.

The WSJ has an 'events of the week' quiz. Last Saturday's quiz included this question: Though seemingly without expertise, Trump ally Bill Pulte was named to which new job?

The correct answer was 'Director of National Intelligence.' Now, the obvious bodyslam would have been 'without qualifications,' but expertise does a fine job, too.

Warning to writers.

One of the documents included in The American Yawp Reader was Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Why I wrote 'The Yellow Wall Paper.' In it, she tells of her own near breakdown and how, as part of the cure, her doctor told her never to write again, which made her crazier. Just goes to show.

I wonder how many literary classics and other works of art have been lost to 'doctor's orders.'

A new model for endorsements?

Yahoo! reports Trump Endorses Missing N.J. Congressman Who Hasn't Been Seen in 3 Months.

Step 1: Find out who's been MIA the longest. Step 2: Endorse them.

In theory,

Every school should be doing what The Royal Drawing School in London is doing. The BBC takes us Inside the school teaching students to slow down and observe.

Also students should be reminded about asking 'why' and 'how.' I was going to say 'taught to ask,' but then I remembered discussions I have had with three-year-olds, and it seems like why and how are the only two words they know, so it's just a matter of re-engaging the curiosity center of their brain again.

Local infrastructure.

Local roads come in two flavors, those:

needing repair

being repaired

repairs come in two flavors: one-two weeks, or one-two years

So much to unpack.

USA Today (and BBC) tell us about a Quadruple amputee and cornhole champion accused of fatally shooting passenger while driving.

You know what? I'm going to let you have the joy of discovery and figuring out just what is happening here, but it sounds like engineers are making great strides in multitasking assistive technology.

Discuss among yourselves.

I mentioned last week that I started reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, and stopped to contemplate a particularly toothsome passage. I gave it the thought it required, and resumed reading.

But here I am stopping again to write to you. I came upon this phrase: Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather a new chaos.

I haven't given myself enough time to process this for myself, but it raises an interesting question: how do you process/manage/deal with chaos? Do you hide it? Ignore it? Analyze it? Or invite it in and embrace it?

Anyway, I really hope Wilde stops dropping these 'some thought required' nuggets on me. At the rate, I'll never finish the book.

R.I.P.

Actress Valerie Perrine was 82 when she passed away. I can't say I was a big fan, but I remember her from what was possibly the worst train wreck of a movie in cinematic history (at least that I paid money to see), Can't Stop The Music. If Max Bialystok made a movie instead of a play, 'Can't Stop' would be the result.

Valerie was not to blame. She tried, remained professional, but the train was moving too fast for her to get out of the way.

Damn! Another opportunity missed!

According to People magazine, This Popular Food Was Found to Remove Microplastics from the Human Body in a New Study.

Outside the study, all bets are off.

3 very short careers.

American Songwriter tells us about 3 Famous Musicians Who Were Born and Died on the Same Exact Day.

Now that's real talent, being able to compose and perform and achieve celebrity all in twenty-four hours.

Write your own headline.

It's been a while since we've done 'write your own,' but BBC News lends a helping hand with the stub (or stem) Food prices likely to rise due to _________.

In this case BBC filled in with 'Iran War,' but any of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will do nicely, although 'famine' might be too cheap and easy an answer. Of course, anything could be fun, say 'TayTrav Wedding,' 'Aurora Borealis,' or 'NASCAR/PGA Mashup.'

How to tell if you're old.

Ada Limon, in her poem Calling things what they are, drops the line with so much future ahead of me.

On creating and using too-long sentences.

I've noticed that I have a growing tendency to create long, complicated sentences, elaborate, frothy constructions that twist and turn often with the only punctuation parentheses and the occasional comma, to say nothing of a glaring lack of conjunction and subordination.

'Don’t. stop. thinkin’ (about tomorrow).'

four weeks ago—May 27

I'm sorry not to have gotten this advice to you last week, but USA Today warned us Are you preparing a Memorial Day cookout? Don't risk food poisoning.
I'm posting this because it strikes me as 'good anytime' advice. Go forth, you cookers-outers, and heed this advice!

We seem to have interlocking themes going here. We apologize.

About that petard.

It seems I've been running into the phrase 'hoist on his own petard' a lot.

While it's a fun phrase to say, I have to admit I keep forgetting what a petard is (if I ever knew). So off to the dictionary I hie myself.

A petard, I discover, is a small bomb. OK, not getting the picture of being hoist by it, no wait, the petarder is blown up by his own device, as in caught in the blast.

A petard can also be a large noise. Seems appropriate somehow, although I can't picture being lifted up by one.

What about lollipops and rainbows? Don't they deserve protection too?

The bill in Congress that will make Daylight Savings Time be in effect year 'round is named the 'Sunshine Protection Act.'

I don't know exactly what this means, but I wouldn't be surprised to see enforcers in aircraft lassoing clouds and pulling them out of the projected path if the sun. Tickets might be issued, too. And how does not jiggling with our clocks protect sunshine?

Not news, WSJ!

This headline is not going to surprise anyone who knows anything about business: Rival airlines are carving up Spirit’s routes and airport slots

These headlines have greater surprise value: 'Sun to rise in East tomorrow,' 'Illegal fireworks on Fourth of July,' 'Church services held on Sunday morning!' 'Babies born yesterday.'

The AISlop cometh.

It is predicted by everybody and nobody in particular, as is the way of the social media these days, that AI is going to automate everything. I suspect that's not really true, and some people say that people who are 'creative' won't be replaced.

But in some areas of entertainment, the transformation may already be complete. I'm thinking of network situation comedies, where in the 50s you had the Stones, the Cleavers, the Nelsons, the Andersons, or the Mitchells, all working the same formula and jokes. Maybe you prefer the mid to late 90s-early 2Ks sitcoms: 'a number of attractive young people hang out in an apartment' series, like Three's Company, Seinfeld, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Will & Grace, The Drew Carey Show, and Living Single.

Maybe the question shouldn't be 'will it happen?' but 'when did it happen first?'

Names to forget.

A recent WSJ Magazine cover featured a photo of a young man with the caption, Colman Domingo, Man of the Hour.

On the plus side, '15 minutes of fame' seems to have quadrupled. On the down side, you've only got a sixty-minute period in which to make a career-extending impact.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

So when are people supposed to have their crisis?

Also in the WSJ, the editor points out that the term 'midlife' is falling into disfavor. Apparently this is another form of denial, the 'seven ages of man' is shrinking toward two—vibrant living and not living.

The editor goes on to say I see...only a feeble insecurity in the rejection of middle age. I mention that not because I agree (frankly, I'm not quite sure what it means), but because I misread it, substituting 'female' for 'feeble.' Of course, I thought, men have midlife crises and women have... menopause.

The big difference? Men have to manufacture a midlife crisis, or at best we're responding to some vague sense or feeling, while women have a clear sign that 'things are different now.' For some, it's liberating to assume their identity. For others, it's a sign that life is over. For still others, they are fortunate enough to blaze forward on the path they forged, following their life vision.

But wait, there's more.

We're seeing another handover of the generational lead (if only in the targets of up-and-comer wrath and mockery switching from OK Boomers to Gen Xers). Yeah, some of us old farts have been mucking up the works by hanging on way too long, but other signs are there. Like the WSJ Magazine I've been referencing celebrates that people in their late thirties and mid-fifties are doing things in areas they're not supposed to do them in and should be ceded to youth. Like making movies and competing in athletics.

In the past, transitions have been mostly clear. Kennedy signaled the new frontier. Clinton also symbolized a changing of the guard. It's time again.

Redefining terms.

Today we're changing older to 'projecting as my age plus.' It has nothing to do with chronology. Dick VanDyke, for example, may have a quarter century on me, but he is not older. People who have only lived 60 years or so can be older than me. 'Older' has nothing to do with age, infirmity, or activity, or health or wisdom. It has to do with attitude.

I think of my grandmother at 80, being wheeled through the activity room of her nursing home, referring to the card players (who were ten or 15 years her junior) as 'the old ladies.' I didn't understand then.

I understand better now.

And here I thought...

I used 'ditto' in a poem the other day, and wondered, in that superior, patronizing way that I have sometime when I'm alone, 'Do the yeuts of today know where the word ditto comes from, now that the Ditto machine (AKA 'purple poop,' beloved of schoolchildren everywhere) has gone the way of tail fins on DeSotos?

Wanting to know when/if the Ditto went away, I checked.

Good thing I did. Turns out 'ditto' has nothing to do with printing machines, but instead was imported from Italy in the Seventeenth Century to avoid repeating dates. It acquired its 'like before' meaning soon after.

Another thing I did not know.

The eye is the only part of the body that remains the same size all through life as it is at birth.

Fighting fire with fire.

This is one of those pieces that I'm not sure where to begin. Choice one is the original annoyance: overly long web articles where the raison d'etre is buried at the end of the article (if it appears at all). Choice two is the little boxed AI summaries that have been appearing at the top of those overly long web articles, obviating the need to read them, much less sort for substance.

Choice three is to start with the prompt for this article, which was Jeff Goins commenting that Half of these sentences [in those A.I. generated articles] don’t even need to exist.

Happy birthday?

You may have noticed an uptick in references to the works of Mark Twain. That's OK–they're mostly relevant, even though Twain died over 115 years ago.

But—is he really dead? Every time I invoke some of his work, or think about him, or read something of his, doesn't that bring him back to life? And when I mention him, doesn't that bring him to life in your head?

I ask this because a headline said something about 'Miles Davis' 100th birthday.' 'I didn't know he was still alive,' I thought.

He's not–died in 1991. But now. that I'm thinking about him, and the article writer is thinking about him, and somebody is probably playing his music somewhere, is he really dead?

Yes. And no.

Wrong verb modifier, USA Today!

In this headline, replace 'could' with 'will:'

US Postal Service says it could raise first-class stamp prices.

More language.

On a more serious note, Bradley Birzer, in a review of The Idea Machine, notes Miller loves creating, embracing, and profound tidbits of wisdom.

Thus is created confusion. I'm not sure if that's an incomplete parallel construction he's got there, or if there should be more after 'wisdom,' or some other linguistic feat of legerdemain with which I am not familiar. Any way, it's a head-scratching, 'say what?' moment.

Just a thought or two.

for writers, mostly:

The word you are writing at this very instant has the power to change the choice or the meaning of the next word you write. You're making it up as you go along.

In the same way, the word you are writing now has the power to transform the word you just wrote.

The words your audience is reading are not necessarily the same words you wrote, and are probably attached to a narrative in their head you never conceived or even know exists, much less where you were leading.