“Every morning, I put on a pair of rubber boots, and not just because they are stylish.”
Letter from Fred Olthius, a hog farmer, in Maclean’s June 24, 1996, complaining about people who consider workfare demeaning.
“Truth is not a lifestyle choice”
Me July 1, 2024 [prompted by an ICMDA email subject line that day “The Surprising rebirth of belief in God”]
“It brings to mind the P.G. Wodehouse story about a ‘confusion of ideas’ between the late A.B. Spottsworth and a lion he was hunting in Kenya. The confusion was that Spottsworth thought the lion was dead and the lion thought that it wasn’t.”
John Ivison in National Post July 12, 2024 [“It” being uncertainty whether the WestJet strike was on or off]
“According to Wattenberg [“Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Names Wizard and creator of Namerology.com”], Jason barely registered in the 1950s when parents often picked a name following family tradition. If your great-grandfather was named Clarence Leroy, odds were a piece of that name would fall to you. Then came the counterculture movements of the 1960s. For the first time, parents began straying from traditional names. With the guardrails of convention removed, people were free to make up their own minds and forge their own paths. And suddenly, by the 1970s, every other kid was named Jason. Then a funny thing happened: Names started giving way to sounds. Jason begot Mason, Jackson, Grayson, Carson and a whole family of other ‘-son’ names that together make up a major 21st-century trend for baby boys. Nowadays, Wattenberg said, people not only have access to unlimited cable channels and the internet, but those innovations have helped usher in a ‘username creation’ mentality — meaning that if someone else has the same name, it’s viewed as taken. So parents tend to tweak their baby’s name just a bit — keeping the ‘-son,’ for example, while swapping the ‘Ja-’ for ‘Car-.’ Wattenberg finds ‘an incredible irony’ in this. People think they’re choosing something unique, but they do it in a way that winds up moving with the zeitgeist. As a result, names have actually got less distinctive over time, with nearly half of all baby names now following identifiable suffix trends — a phenomenon Wattenberg calls ‘lockstep individualism.’”
Daniel Wolfe in National Post July 22, 2024 [it’s a Washington Post piece and he was expecting a baby boy who was very possibly his first kid since he only just turned his attention to the “trendy baby name trap”].
“Business is taboo at the dinner table, but crime and criminals aren’t, and the Rosenberg case hogged the conversation all through the anchovy fritters, partridge in casserole with no olives in the sauce, cucumber mousse, and Creole curds and cream. Of course it was academic, since the Rosenbergs had been dead for years, but the young princes had been dead for five centuries, and [Nero] Wolfe had once spent a week investigating that case, after which he removed More’s Utopia from his bookshelves because More had framed Richard III.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Death of a Doxy; Wolfe had been reading Invitation to an Inquest and had ordered a transcript of the trial.
“Trouble is, we’re on a dead reckoning toward an election that will be about whether it’s Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre who will destroy Canada and leave it a charred ruin full of irradiated zombie mutants. And that really, really isn’t the election we need.”
Chris Selley in National Post July 18, 2024
“Stupidity gets up early in the morning.”
Someone named Karl Kraus, quoted (apparently from a wire story) in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 # 6 (April/May 2001)
“There are certain birds, like the kite and the crow, that people disregard entirely and would never bother to criticize; it is precisely because the uguisu is usually held in such high regard that people find fault with it when they can.”
Sei Shonagon The Pillow Book