“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

“what St. John Paul II reminded us so many years ago: that ‘There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There is no cross to bear that Christ has not already borne for us … on the far side of every cross we find the newness of life in the Holy Spirit … This is our faith. This is our witness before the world.’”

Eric de Meuse in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“an earsore”

A caller to our “Thinking Aloud” radio program on CFRA in Ottawa Oct. 21, 2004 [specifically re Teresa Heinz Kerry]

In my latest Loonie Politics column, and just in time for him to become the butt of endless memes over his absurdly inflated biographical claims, I ask how Mark Carney could be seen as the Liberal party’s saviour then turn out to be so preposterously awful a candidate.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the press should try to understand the rise of populism instead of reflexively smearing parties like the AfD as “far-right” without any attention to their program, the meaning of that insult, or the nature of their appeal, as if the job of the media were to censor rather than explain.