LOL

 

My grandfather carved the beef and then a servant handed him a dish of potatoes baked in their skins. There are few things better to eat than a potato in its skin, with plenty of butter, but apparently my grandfather did not think so. He rose in his chair at the head of the table and took the potatoes out of the dish one by one and threw one at each picture on the walls.

– The Summing Up, W. Somerset Maugham

 

***

[German Foreign Minister] Maas and the ambassador appeared to make small talk at the Bild event, but even that went awry. That same evening, [US Ambassador] Grenell said that, of all people, Maas was a fan of Kid Rock … Maas had never even heard of Kid Rock.

– “German-U.S. Ties Are Breaking Down,” Spiegel Online, August 21, 2019

 

***

Standing apart, Major Jaussi said to me, “The mortar is a dangerous weapon if they don’t know where they shoot. They shoot over the troops. If you are in the troop under the fire, you must trust them. We do such exercises, and they have to work.”

“Before they shoot, what do they do to make it safe?” I asked.

Captain Rumpf said, “They go to church.”

– La Place de la Concorde Suisse, John McPhee

 

Greetings

 

There’s also a much-loved tradition of using our landing lights to greet fellow pilots in the world’s most remote skies, where we might cruise for hours without seeing another aircraft. Then, perhaps from 40 miles away or more, we spot the strobe lights of an aircraft approaching at a different altitude. I reach up and flash our landing lights and the other aircraft’s pilots do the same – one of the small, silent courtesies exchanged by pilots who will never know each other, high above the sleeping world.

– “View from the Cockpit,” Mark Vanhoenacker, Financial Times, April 10, 2019

 

I find this among the loveliest of images. It also reminds me of an early morning this past winter.

I’d taken the dog out for a walk, and there was quite a bit of snow on the ground. We were walking down the bike path, all alone. After a while I saw a solitary figure in the distance. As I approached, he began to wildly wave his arms. Gentle Reader, I confess the uncharity of my reaction: just my luck, I thought, to encounter the local lunatic.

Turns out he was trying to warn me that a snowplow was advancing behind me. I stepped to the side and the driver rolled down his window. I figured he was going to say something pithy about having flouted Darwinism; instead he showed me pictures of his dogs.

Well, folks, I’m going to take a break. Be well. Flash your landing lights and I will too.

 

Clipperton

 

I got this globe at a yard sale. Whenever I see students looking at it, I ask if they’re lost.

The other day I noticed France has an island off the coast of Mexico. This was news to me, so I looked it up.

It used to be called – ooh la la – Île de la Passion, but then somehow got named after an English pirate. Its history of human habitation is distinctly unhappy, and has evidently inspired novels. Porcine habitation fared little better; verily, The Ornithologist could be a Tarantino short (“He’s back. And this time, he’s gonna totally pig out”).

Personally, I think Clipperton would have made a good Serge Gainsbourg song.

 

 

Shamrocks and Shenanigans

 

The twins have become enamored of making slime. The other day Twin 2 looked up from hers and said: “Did the elf die yet?”

Now, the thing about Twin 2 is, she gets furious if she has to repeat herself more than once. It’s not the Achillean rage of when she was two, but it’s definitely no joke. And sure enough, my attempts to clarify met with her displeasure. I even tried patting my gut and asking if she meant “diet” – not that this would have shed much light – but it’s important to her to perceive engagement.

Finally I realized she meant not an elf but a leprechaun. At her preschool, for Saint Patrick’s Day, the kids would arrive to find chairs upside down, glitter on the floor, etc, for he had visited the night before. Twin 2 had been complaining that whatever color she’d make the slime, it would gradually fade to white overnight. So, you see, she was wondering if the leprechaun had dyed it.

 

***

This in turn reminded me of a classroom visitor about a decade ago, around the time of the previous post. An admissions officer from a college in Scotland came to talk to my 6th graders. (She’d made her pitch at the Lycée Français, where I had a friend working, and graciously agreed to swing by our school in the afternoon.)

So she began her presentation, which was a slide show dispelling myths that Scotland was all haggis and kilts and etc. The problem was, the students didn’t know much about Scotland in the first place. Finally a kid asked if “the little green guy” was from there. After ascertaining that he meant the leprechaun, she gamely flipped her script and used the slideshow to teach Scotland 101: “So, the bagpipe is one of our traditional instruments…” It was gracefully done.

 

***

Less graceful was my interaction with Twin 2 in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago. She’d asked when I’d make chicken salad again. In retrospect, obviously I should have used active listening skills to buy time (“Ah, so you have a question. And what you’re wondering is…”). Instead, I replied that I had never made chicken salad, and never would make chicken salad, because chicken salad is disgusting.

This set her off, and she became so insistent I’d made it many times that she wound up in tears. Finally I figured out she meant salad with chicken in it (one of my gourmet specialties is chicken tenders on lettuce). I tried to explain to her the difference, unsuccessfully. As far as Twin 2’s concerned, her father doesn’t know chicken salad from chicken shawarma.

 

Ned Vizzini

 

Years ago I taught in a middle school in Brooklyn. One afternoon a week the kids would read silently – well, that was the idea – from a classroom library kept in a wheeled locker.

One day a girl held up the book she was reading and said she’d emailed the author, who replied that he’d come visit. Since kids are, in my experience, second only to adults for saying obviously unbelievable stuff, I nodded and carried on. A couple weeks later we were all in the auditorium with the author up on stage.

I must tell you, Gentle Reader, that this school was not overly distinguished by civility. I figured he’d get his head handed to him. But he talked about his book Be More Chill, and the kids loved it. I was impressed.

 

***

A few years later – almost ten years ago to the day – I emailed Ned Vizzini myself. I was then still teaching in Brooklyn, but now at a less chaotic middle school. I invited him to come talk to our students. He readily agreed. When I told him I didn’t know how much we could pay him, he said just to pay whatever we could.

He gave a talk to all the students in the auditorium, then held a smaller writing workshop. The kids loved it. I gave him a check for one (1) hundred dollars. A few days later I received this:

 

Just to recap: he was paid (significantly) under the going rate, gave a talk to all the students and afterward ran a workshop, then developed and sent me pictures, and a thank-you note, and a letter to the students.

 

***

In the years that followed I’d send him stuff I’d had published. He was always very kind and encouraging. In our last exchange we shared the joke about how writing editorials is like wetting your pants in a blue serge suit (you get a nice warm feeling, and no one notices). He took his life a few months later.

Here’s his New York Times obituary.

 

***

That teenagers find Be More Chill relatable is what convinced Gerald Goehring to produce it. That, and some astonishing stats — Goehring says the cast album has received “well over” 160 million streams.

“How do you plan this?” Goehring says. “How do you market to this? You don’t.”

In fact, Goehring says the off-Broadway run sold out without a penny of traditional advertising — just a social media presence.

 

On the strength of its fans, Be More Chill has moved to Broadway.

 

 

If you’re having suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline to talk to a counselor: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

 

Cabul

 

One is reading the Bible. It’s frightfully good, you know.

-VS Naipaul

 

I’ve been reading the Bible, and doing it the way they say you shouldn’t do it, reading it straight through.

It’s tough going, and there’s a lot I don’t get. I may break down and get one of those “How to Read the Bible”-type books. I dislike the How to Read genre only slightly more than the How to Write.

I’m well into the historical books and am pretty worn out by the villainy and massacre. If you told me that reading the historical books of the Old Testament made you laugh, I would probably run for my life.

At least until the other day. For there I was, chuckling at this passage. It’s from 1 Kings, when Solomon is building the temple. He’s buddies with King Hiram of Tyre, who’s been a big help. When it was all done, Solomon wanted to say thanks:

10 Now it happened at the end of twenty years, when Solomon had built the two houses, the house of the LORD and the king’s house

11 (Hiram the king of Tyre had supplied Solomon with cedar and cypress and gold, as much as he desired), that King Solomon then gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee.

12 Then Hiram went from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had given them, but they did not please him.

13 So he said, “What kind of cities are these which you have given me, my brother?” And he called them the land of Cabul, as they are to this day.

 

The footnote says Cabul means “good for nothing.” I looked it up and, sure enough, it’s still called that. You’d think at some point there would have been a rebrand.

The other thing I like about this story is that it has a happy ending, which, believe me, doesn’t always happen in Kings:

14 Then Hiram sent the king one hundred and twenty talents of gold.

 

 

Doom! Shake the Room

 

Image result for telephone

1. Apart From That, Mr. Brzezinski


At 3a.m. on 9 November 1979, [National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski was telephoned at home by his military assistant, William Odom, who told him that he had just heard on his communications net that 200 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States … He told Odom to put Strategic Air Command on stand-by. A few seconds later, Odom called again. He now said that NORAD had reported that 2200 missiles had been launched. Brzezinski rang off, got out of bed, took a deep breath, and was just about to place his call to the sleeping President and suggest a full-scale retaliation against the Soviet Union when Odom called for a third time. This time he reported that other warning systems had not picked up the launch of any missiles.

 

That, from 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink, is an amuse-bouche for the tale of Stanislav Petrov, without whose insubordination I’d be writing on a cave wall, if at all.

 

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