The piano (cont.); World Cup notes

The piano has been moved to the kitchen, its likely resting-place for as long as we live in this house.

Now we must learn to play the thing.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

What follows is highly selective.

Ivory Coast 1, Ecuador 0: An even, chaotic contest decided by an 89th-minute goal. Chaos doesn’t favor Ecuador. Our strength is tidy defending.

Piero Hincapié had trouble marking 19-year-old Yan Diomande. The goal came from an attack down that flank.

Thrice we hit woodwork. Our attacking woes continue. I will say, it’s hard when foulers aren’t penalized. The Ivorians were spared a couple of second yellow cards.

Brazil 1, Morocco 1: Has-been vs. emerging superpower. The same is true of their respective continents. The Moroccans were breathtaking in the first half; having established their superiority, they ceded the initiative. Brazil had a single brilliant moment.

Australia 2, Türkiye 0: The most entertaining game so far.

(Some would choose the Netherlands vs. Japan [2–2].)

I love watching the Turks. They attack at breakneck pace, slickly, all game long. But the Australians defended stoutly and landed two counter-punches.

USA 4, Paraguay 1; Germany 7, Curaçao 1; and Sweden 5, Tunisia 1: Three blowouts that tell little about the winners (and not much more about the Tunisians, who fell apart late but weren’t consistently bad).

Mid-half hydration breaks, twice per game: I am sick of them.

Mexico 2, South Africa 0; South Korea 2, Czechia 1

Karin came home from the office.

John-Paul: “So, are your colleagues excited that the World Cup is about to begin?”

Karin: “Oh, yes, it has been mentioned many times.”

John-Paul: “Really?”

Karin: “No, it hasn’t been mentioned at all. HA, HA, HA, HA, HA …”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

However competently the New York Times might report on the logistics, economics, and politics of the World Cup, I’m afraid the journal doesn’t credibly judge how well or poorly the sport is played.

How could any reader take seriously an article titled, “Re-ranking the 48 World Cup Teams after Day One of the Tournament”?

(As if two matches involving four also-rans warranted a comprehensive re-think.)

It’s the praise for Mexico’s curtain-raiser, however, that’s just bonkers:

An accomplished, drama-free opening victory against South Africa was pretty much everything Mexico hoped it would be. The excellent Julian Quinones’ early goal settled any nerves[,] and then came the emotive, heart-rending second from talisman Raul Jimenez in the second half. With potentially more to come from Edson Alvarez (left out as he builds up his fitness) and wonderkid Gilberto Mora, Mexico may feel the benefit of home advantage more than anyone, what with that unbelievably passionate Azteca crowd.

accomplished: Hardly.

drama-free: Nope. His side having assured victory, César Montes, Mexico’s captain, needlessly got himself ejected.

pretty much everything Mexico hoped it would be: I don’t know what Mexicans hoped for, but see the previous comments.

excellent Julian Quinones: (Is basic Spanish orthography too much to ask for? His name is Julián Quiñones.) He was decent, not excellent.

emotive, heart-rending second [Mexican goal] from talisman Raul Jimenez: (Ditto: it’s Raúl Jiménez.) These sentiments aren’t relevant to ranking teams.

with potentially more to come: Ditto. Not relevant.

The Mexicans then were catapulted up six places in the NYT’s rankings. If such effusion is lavished on the USA’s co-hosts, I shudder to think what will be written about the USA.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Koreans and Czechs then staged a much better contest. Neither side oozes talent, but both at least operate with clarity, and each managed one rather clever goal last night. The pressure is now on the Czechs to make up ground against the Mexicans. Neither Czechs nor Koreans should have trouble with the South Africans, who are out of their depth.

June’s poem

Wilfred Owen’s:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. –

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Better to chase glory in the World Cup than in war.

It’s Iran’s privilege to do both. The soccer team will be forced to fly into and out of the United States, each game day, to keep appointments.

Africa’s top-rated referee – a Somali – has been refused entry by the U.S. government.

The piano (cont.); bridging; teething

The good news is, we won’t have to keep our new piano in the garage, even if we’re never able to fit it through our front door. We’ve agreed on a “Plan B” destination for it.

The bad news is, that destination is the kitchen.

The other bad news is, we would have to clear a path through the garage and “mud” room to get the piano into the kitchen. A monumental task.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel completed Kindergarten. We attended his “bridging” ceremony. (“Bridging” is Montessori lingo for graduating.) During the ceremony, students crossed an actual bridge which had been set up in the gymnasium. This symbolized the passage from Kindergarten to the first grade. A first-grader greeted each graduate on the far side of the bridge.

Then the students sang two songs and their parents shot video.

One of the parents I spotted was R., with whom I’d gone to college. “Hi, R.,” I said, “remember me? I’m John-⁠Paul.” “Yeah,” he said, and walked away. A shrinking violet, R.

The next day, Samuel nonchalantly lost a tooth – his first. It lies among his Lego bricks somewhere. Already, a new tooth emerges from his gum.

He has been listening to Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

The piano; the sports

We’re not a musical family. Karin plays her clarinet sometimes, and a smidgeon of guitar. The children strum on toy ukeleles. That’s all.

BUT today we acquired a piano from my cousin, Annie, and her husband, Johnny, who are moving out of their house and distributing their possessions.

(I’ve long dreamed of learning to play the Rach. 3.)

Alas, we couldn’t fit the piano into our house. Our entrance is too small. We had to leave the piano in our already-too-cluttered garage.

This story isn’t over. (It had better not be.)

STAY TUNED.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This morning, I wore my Chicago Bears t-shirt to a medical appointment and then endured a barrage of small-talk on that subject.

Caleb Williams is on the cover of this year’s Madden, said the doctor.

I did see that, I acknowledged.

Do you believe in the Madden curse?, said the doctor.

I told him I did not.

(We returned to the reception area.)

Don’t let Andrew know you’re a Bears fan, the doctor said in a loud voice, tilting his head toward one of his half-dozen flunkies.

Yes, the Bears are very bad, I said, attempting to nip the issue in the bud. (Actually, the Bears weren’t bad last year.)

But you’re loyal, right?, they all insisted.

I gave them a woeful look, to convince them of my bonafides.

(I am loyal to the Bears, but I do not respect them.)

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 99: The castle

(Not based on Kafka’s novel.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Seldom viewed outside of Australia, The Castle (1997) is revered in that country. Wikipedia tells us that this movie

can be seen as a social study [of] the lives and aspirations of the inhabitants of suburban Australia. The central character, Darryl Kerrigan, ties into the stereotypical depiction of an “Aussie battler,” a man who will protect and serve his family through bold and sometimes ruthless assertion.

I’ve not observed Australians in their natural habitat. Doubtless, there’s much about this movie that I don’t understand.

Even so, I love The Castle.

One begins by snickering at the protagonists – Greater Melburnians pursuing the Australian Dream in their dismal, airport-adjacent cul-de-sac. But in the end, one is touched by these people. One wishes they were one’s neighbors.

(It’s gratifying when one well-heeled outsider – a broadminded constitutional lawyer, played by the grave but twinkling Charles “Bud” Tingwell – is admitted into their circle.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton), patriarch and hero, is lovable because there is so much that he loves: his family, his dogs, his tchotchkes, his boat, his garden, his pre-fab country house on a nondescript lake, and of course his family’s suburban home (his “castle”). Not to mention his neighbors and his lawyers. Having thrown in his lot with X, Darryl loves X proudly and unconditionally. We hear him declare, in a wedding speech, his family’s love for the new son-in-law; and what goes for that adoptee goes for every animal, vegetable, and mineral that Darryl claims as his own (or as his own’s own). It doesn’t matter that Darryl’s wife and children are pitifully ordinary, or that one son – in what I believe to be a reference to Australia’s colonial origin – is in prison. Darryl treats each family member with something approaching veneration. And each of them responds in kind.

Darryl is not a rich man. He earns his living towing cars (i.e., clearing away others’ property). His boat, house, house-extensions, holiday house, and dogs – purebred racing Greyhounds – have been accumulated opportunistically. The Kerrigans scour the trade papers for bargains. Once acquired, each purchase is accorded quasi-heraldic status. Non-purchases too: witness how the household acquires its front gates.

The Kerrigans are consummate appropriators. It is a sly irony. The movie recounts their struggle against appropriation by outsiders.

One day, the Kerrigans receive notice that their house is to be compulsorily acquired by the airport, so that the runway might be extended. The Kerrigans and their neighbors oppose this order in the courts. But their lawyer is out of his depth, and the airport is backed by powerful business interests.

“I’m starting to understand how the Aborigines feel,” mutters Darryl.

(It’s a sign of comedic deftness that this low-key political statement produces one of the movie’s biggest laughs.)

It isn’t hard to guess that the Kerrigans’ misfortunes will be reversed. In time, the lawsuit is heard by Australia’s highest court. The judgment favors the Kerrigans, and the “castle”-dwellers end up better off than before. The legal aspect of the story is, I suspect, sheer fantasy. The movie’s really interesting questions aren’t about law; they’re about value. There are questions about ownership and appropriation, and there are aesthetic questions. Can a life of utter tastelessness be good? How important is the aesthetic component, comparatively speaking?

Proverbs 15:17 says: “Better a vegetable dinner with love than a stall-fattened ox with hate.” The movie illustrates this principle.

For it leaves us in no doubt that the Kerrigans’ aesthetic capacity is very, very poor. Indeed, it’s their utter non-descrimination, their determination to embrace absolutely every piece of kitsch, that enables them to love each other as they do. This is made clear from the beginning, in brilliant faux-naïf voiceover, by Darryl’s youngest son, Dale (Stephen Curry):

I believe the movie is responding to a particular book – a classic Australian work of architectural and social criticism – The Australian Ugliness (1960), by Robin Boyd. (See the book’s Wikipedia article, and its Text Classics webpage.) Images of jet planes, electrical wires, and large TV antennae feature prominently in both works. It can’t just be a coincidence.

Some day, I’ll read the book, and then I’ll understand The Castle better. As funny, touching, and socially observant as it is, it’s an “ideas” movie, really.

A public service

I hope this is useful: a document listing the World Cup match times.

(They’re all set to the time zone in which I reside. If you’d like a list of match times set to a different time zone, let me know, and I’ll make one for you.)

The document can be printed on two sides of one sheet. I intend to fold up my printout, and to carry it in my pocket. I don’t want to always have to fire up the Internet to find out when the next game is.

The games will be played at different times every day.

(Why so?

This wasn’t always the case.)

The crash; Should I marry a murderer?

Karin returned to the office after a week’s vacation. I am at home with the boys – including Samuel, who has been puking – and with the three cats.

“School of Hard Knocks” Dory still fights with Ziva and Jasper. We worry for her permanency in our house.

She is gentle with humans, only occasionally biting them (in self-defense).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Two noteworthy Netflix docs:

(a) The Crash

(b) Should I Marry a Murderer?

I don’t often look at Instagram or TikTok, so these two shows were something of a revelation for me.

Text messaging has for some time been a staple exhibit of the true-crime genre. (See, e.g., Lover Stalker Killer.) But, to my knowledge, only in the last year or so have documentarians made much of compulsive video posting.

The first show’s protagonist is a villain. The other show’s protagonist is a victim/​witness. The former is a teenager just out of school; the latter is a thirty-ish professional – a forensic pathologist (!).

It’s the teen who’s coldly calculating. The corpse dissector is warm-hearted, loyalty-torn, and ultimately heroic.

What they have in common is, they’re always posting video.

And, in the footage they post, using drugs.

(Each program goes to some length to explain that its protagonist’s drug use doesn’t affect the outcome.)

Both protagonists have unconditionally supportive parents, for better or for worse.

One show is as chilling as can be; the other is almost heartwarming. I recommend them both.

Body-text fonts, pt. 51: De Vinne

Our ten-year anniversary festivities continue. On the day itself – Thursday – we took Daniel and Abel to the beach; Samuel was in school, but Karin’s mom joined us. Then, today, Karin & I left all three children with Karin’s dad and traveled to Niles. We watched The Sheep Detectives and ate cheap hot dogs at the cinema, strolled through the park, bought books and fancy candy, and dined on pizza. It was very “us.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Penguin typeset a 1988 edition of The Virginian (1902) in De Vinne, a font from the late nineteenth century …

… only to re-set and reissue the book in Stempel Garamond, a little later. I guess the initial nod to quaintness was regretted.

Time was, this book was taught in schools.

On holiday in the “Region” (Northwest Indiana)

Karin & I will soon have been married ten years.

To celebrate, we dropped off Jasper, Ziva, and Dory at a cats’ hotel and headed west with our three little sons.

Not very far west.

Not as far as Illinois. Not even as far as Gary, Indiana. We did cross over into the Central Time Zone.

Our activities in the “Region” were zoological, botanical, athletic, culinary (White Castle), and commercial.

We toured: Michigan City, Valparaiso, Merrillville, Hobart, and – unpremeditatedly – Beverly Shores.

Beverly Shores is a beach town next to the Indiana Dunes National Park. Our phone GPS took us there because we asked it to find a playground. But we couldn’t park the car without a city-issued permit, so we didn’t play in Beverly Shores.

Instead, we drove and gawked. We could see Chicago across the lake, and there were spectacular houses that looked out in that direction. Some had been built for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 and then transported east, by boat.

I hadn’t known that there was such glamor in the “Region.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our hotel was in Portage. It had a breakfast buffet and an indoor swimming pool. We used those conveniences daily.

It took all our effort to keep the children from destroying our suite. Abel, in particular, was a menace.

Samuel asked to go home and, the first night, was physically ill. He improved.

It was Daniel who took to the holiday with especial keenness. We hardly could coax him out of the pool.

One night, our family was bathing when a man and a woman came into the pool area. They looked very sheepish (they had come in and gone out once before). They disrobed, got into the hot tub, worked up some courage, and, I daresay, proceeded to do the deed while we were across the room. You’d think it was their honeymoon or anniversary; such was their involvement. But I suspect they were adulterers who had come to the “Region” to escape detection.

Come on, Hearts

As I type, the most important Scottish club match of the last forty years is being played at Celtic Park, where the hosts must defeat league leaders Hearts to retain the title. Only Celtic and Rangers have won the title since Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen did so, in 1985.

It’s almost halftime, and the score is 0–0.

I watched Celtic and Hearts play other teams earlier this week. Hearts looked the better side. But Celtic are at home.

I can’t stream the match. The browser won’t load. It must be that so many people are watching, Paramount+ can’t handle the volume.

That can’t be right. Paramount+ broadcasts the Champions League.

Well, some things are bigger than the Champions League.

Update: Hearts have scored.

Update: Celtic have equalized. Halftime.

Update: Celtic scored two late goals.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Disheartening: publishing a book with Oxford (!) now involves negotiating with robots.

Pacho vs. Piero

Happy birthday to Mary.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Some old-ish news:

For the second straight year, an Ecuadorian will win the UEFA Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain (the holders) and Arsenal will contest the final. Willian Pacho plays for PSG, and Piero Hincapié plays for Arsenal.

Both play for the national team, and they used to be teammates at Independiente del Valle.

I don’t care which club wins the Champions League. Arsenal once were purists; now they’re pragmatists. PSG are delightful to watch, but one can muster only so much enthusiasm for a propaganda arm of the Qatari state.

What about the players? Should I cheer more for Pacho or for Piero? Pacho won last year, and Piero hasn’t won. (Advantage: Piero.) But Pacho is likelier to play more minutes. (Advantage: Pacho.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Recent news:

CR7’s club failed to clinch the Saudi league title because of this very late “own” goal:

May’s poem

… is from Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (the poem, “The Grumbling Hive,” was first published in 1705).

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The worst of all the multitude

Did something for the common good.

This was the state’s craft, that maintain’d

The whole of which each part complain’d:

This, as in music harmony

Made jarrings in the main agree,

Parties directly opposite,

Assist each other, as ’twere for spite;

And temp’rance with sobriety,

Serve drunkenness and gluttony.

The root of evil, avarice,

That damn’d ill-natur’d baneful vice,

Was slave to prodigality,

That noble sin; whilst luxury

Employ’d a million of the poor,

And odious pride a million more:

Envy itself, and vanity,

Were ministers of industry;

Their darling folly, fickleness,

In diet, furniture, and dress,

That strange ridic’lous vice, was made

The very wheel that turn’d the trade.

Their laws and clothes were equally

Objects of mutability!

For, what was well done for a time,

In half a year became a crime;

Yet while they altered thus their laws,

Still finding and correcting flaws,

They mended by inconstancy

Faults, which no prudence could foresee.

Thus vice nurs’d ingenuity,

Which join’d the time and industry,

Had carry’d life’s conveniences,

Its real pleasures, comforts, ease,

To such a height, the very poor

Liv’d better than the rich before.

And nothing could be added more.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Lines 167–203)

Speaking of changes in fashion: time was, there was a market for satirical political philosophy written in verse, and now there is none.

Dory

The kitten – now named Dory – is still with us. She came through her surgery just fine.

She’s a sweetheart. The children love her.

This photo is cute, but it doesn’t show how long-bodied and scrawny Dory is.

We mostly confine her to the bathroom. We’re introducing her to the house and to the other cats a little at a time, as advised in books. We’ll keep her if: (a) she and Jasper and Ziva get along, and (b) we don’t find anyone else who would like a cat.

A photo of Karin and Dory:

As you can tell, Dory already has ruined some of our blinds.

Cat people

My 2025–2026 reading cycle has ended. On the last day, I finished reading six books. I came up three books short. (The final tally was fifty-seven.)

I thank Karin for her tolerance.

I caught Samuel trying to put one of my books on its shelf. He couldn’t slide it into the space; he was jamming it in. I stopped him before he could wrinkle the cover.

He’d brought the book downstairs from his play-room.

“Why did you take my book upstairs?” I asked.

He said: “I just wanted to copy out some of the text.”

I didn’t object to that answer. Indeed, I was rather pleased.

We have a new cat in our house: a young “queen” that Karin rescued from a gang of “toms.” We’re keeping her in our bathroom. The plan is to get her spayed ASAP; we’ll then consider whether to give her up or keep her. She’s starved but friendly, a year or so old. She may be the offspring of the winsome, irresponsible cat that lives across the street.

The “toms” have been prowling outside our house all day. I just saw them have their way with another “queen.” One can’t save them all.

Jasper and Ziva are none too pleased, perhaps because a new cat is in the house, perhaps because Karin medicated all three cats against fleas.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 98: When it rains; The final insult

I saw Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) almost twenty years ago. I gained little from it, which was my fault. Roger Ebert’s review should have prepared me for what the movie was like and for what it was trying to say.

It also would’ve helped to have been familiar with two of Burnett’s later, smaller pictures: When It Rains (1995; 13 m.) and The Final Insult (1997; 55 m.). The lead actor in both short movies is Ayuko Babu. Los Angeles is the setting.

Here is the IMDb’s description of Killer of Sheep:

Set in the Watts area of Los Angeles, a slaughterhouse worker must suspend his emotions to continue working at a job he finds repugnant, and then he finds he has little sensitivity for the family he works so hard to support.

Worth noting: the episodic nature of the storytelling, the judicious use of music, and the blending of “acted” and “candid” footage. These elements are present, to a greater or lesser degree, in the shorter movies.

When It Rains is the most accessible of the three movies. The plot is simple. A woman and her daughter are evicted from their apartment. The woman tracks down a jazz musician (Babu) and asks for help. The jazz musician talks to the landlord, who refuses to budge. (He is “crazed,” the jazz musician mutters, perhaps a little unreasonably.) The jazz musician goes around to various acquaintances to raise funds “for a Sister.” Most refuse. A kindly scrapyard worker gives a few dollars. This money is subsequently – and humorously – lost. Reconciliation with the landlord, when achieved, is not financial; it occurs because the jazz musician is able to find common cultural ground with the landlord. It’s not enough that all of the characters are Black; they have to like the same music. The jazz musician reflects that he was fortunate not to have been seen carrying a hip-hop record.

In The Final Insult, Babu plays a banker who advises business owners to hire temporary workers in order to avoid paying taxes and employee benefits. At the end of his shift, the banker goes to his car. This is where he resides. He may have a job and wear a white shirt and a tie, but he is homeless (or quasi-homeless). The car is not in good shape. The banker is one breakdown from disaster.

Blended with this story are interviews with and “candid” footage of real homeless people of various racial and class backgrounds. The point of these grueling passages, I guess, is to show that homelessness is no joke.

When It Rains is about the threat of homelessness, but it’s easy to watch because it’s funny. On the other hand, while The Final Insult contains passages of poetry and piquant irony, these are swamped by the prosaic bitterness of real people’s sufferings.

The banker is not a real person, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out. His misadventures become more and more artificial as the movie goes on. I don’t believe the banker is meant to invoke our sympathy. He is “most of us” – but we are unlikely to admit it. He symbolizes a transitional status. He is a prosperous person fallen on hard times who retains a bourgeois attitude. An automobile dweller, he is mostly insulated from the horror of forced pedestrianism in a traffic-heavy society. Other homeless people react angrily when, at last, he calls for revolution.

Intriguingly, the theme of finding common ground through music is revisited. Another homeless character – a (possibly educated) white man – sings Korean ballads at a bus stop to a group of Korean women. They are charmed. How do you know this music?, they ask. From listening to records, he says. The man also sings Italian opera songs, and he can speak Spanish.

But although the man’s encounters are uniformly positive, they provide no lasting material relief. He remains homeless. The question is whether positivity and human connection can be enough. The movie doesn’t say.

Open-ended and loosely structured, the two short movies do manage to say a good deal. One is pleasing; the other is a downright slog. Considering them together is more enlightening than considering them apart.

Glorious mysteries

We attended a funeral for J., Karin’s kindly old colleague.

“J. and I used to talk hockey,” said the priest. “Sometimes joyfully, sometimes with a little griping.”

That was about it for reminiscing about J. (Reminiscing is done at the wake, apparently.) The priest and mourners then prayed the Glorious Mysteries, in which are included:

• one Apostle’s Creed
• six Our Fathers
• six Glory Bes
• five Oh My Jesuses
• fifty-three Hail Marys
• other formulae

My heart sank around the thirtieth Hail Mary. Was the priest shooting for one hundred? Mercifully, no.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I finished reading the Adrian Mole series. It gave me much pleasure.

I’ve begun reading The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. It features Miss Jane Marple and is set in the classic murder-village of St. Mary Mead. When I finish, I’ll’ve read all sixty-six of Dame Agatha’s crime novels.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Daniel, somehow, is learning to speak in French.

Bonjour, Daddy, he grins. Ça va.

Not bad for not having been taught. And his accent is spot-on.

How to beat the ads

My brown dress shoes didn’t quite survive the wedding we attended a few weeks ago. So, I’ve been glued to the computer, looking at new shoes.

I haven’t bought any. But the happy result is that now, all of my browser’s banner ads show pictures of elegant, brown, leather or faux-leather shoes. This is more pleasing to have in the background than the usual eye-popping fare.

It also has sparked an idea for making the web advertisements on one’s computer less painful to view – assuming, of course, that one’s ad-blocker doesn’t already keep everything out.

(1) One should choose something nice to look at.

(2) It has to be something one could buy (not, e.g., a fawn or Mt. Fuji).

But:

(3) It should be something that one has almost no desire to buy, so that it won’t distract one (much).

(4) Any specimen should look like any other.

(5) Corollary: the object should come in a standard color. And this color must be muted, not garish.

(6) Ideally, it should be a natural object. (Not a box of Brillo pads. Not a jug of laundry detergent. A transparent, full milk jug is better but not ideal; see, above, the third point.)

(This sixth point will be qualified later.)

(7) One should visit lots of merchant’s websites and click on pictures of the object. One should do this for several days.

(8) Voilà. This pleasant object, and nothing else, will appear where garish things once did.

I suggest looking at lots of merchant’s pictures of unadorned blue spruce Christmas trees. After a few days, your screen will be flanked by a lovely forest rather than by the Las Vegas Strip. If you can’t stomach anything to do with Christmas, browse cacti or cilantro or firewood instead. You get the idea.

Now I’ll qualify (6). You can get away with looking at artificial Christmas trees because they resemble the natural ones. Not all merchandise has this characteristic, however.

Canadiana

The dandelions have returned. Fewer lawns are infested this year. Ours is one.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

More reading:

• Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End (her novel set in *ancient* Egypt)
• Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (supplement to MacIntyre’s book)
• George Grant, Lament for a Nation (see discussion, below)
• Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (for the group)
• Stefan Zweig, novellas: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, and Journey into the Past (they’re great)

Grant’s 1965 book, summarized here, deserves some comment. What is Canadianness? North American Britishness, is the core of Grant’s answer. That is, Britishness nurtured as a tradition of political distinctiveness from the USA, featuring, e.g., a more serious commitment to federalism, as involving better treatment of and greater autonomy for minorities. Alas, when Britain itself was pulled into the U.S.’s military-economic orbit, Canada was pulled in, too. Canadian businessmen sold out first. Politicians followed. Nuclear weapons were brought to Canadian soil. Canada effectively gave up its nationhood and became a satellite.

(Lately, of course, the pendulum has swung the other way.)

A Canadian’s capsule summary, written two decades ago (scroll down the list to book no. 41):

Well, Canada is still here, but what, pray, is it? Grant wrote this brilliant, deep essay on the question in the early 1960s, in the aftermath of Diefenbaker’s political downfall. He wrote of a small “c” conservative society, respectful of tradition, that was disappearing under the pressure of continentalism. Forty years have passed, but Lament still speaks to us directly of important issues. It is a must-read for anyone interested in what might define a nation called Canada – especially given that the formula of “medicare with peacekeeping” is more glib than inspiring, and factually shaky as well.

Who in the U.S. knows about Prime Minister Diefenbaker? I’d guess less than one tenth of one percent (Canadian expats excepted). So, next month, I’ll read Desmond Morton’s Short History of Canada, which purports to make “acute observations on the Diefenbaker era.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Another item of Canadiana: The Peanut Butter Solution (1985). It includes music by teenaged Céline Dion. We watched this bizarre movie as a family. I won’t say I didn’t like it – I did! – but it fed my suspicion that our admirable northern neighbors are, in fact, deranged.

April’s poem

Whenever we open the front door, Daniel – clothed or unclothed – runs outside and hollers:

Owwweee-ah-ee-oh! Owwweee-ah-ee-oh!

I was puzzled for weeks but finally came across the source: a scene from Peppa Pig. Peppa, her schoolmates, and their teacher, Madame Gazelle, travel to the Swiss Alps; Peppa’s voice echoes off the mountains; Madame Gazelle demonstrates yodeling to her charges. Later, they pitch their tents and sing campfire songs.

Daniel loves this sort of thing. He also enjoys Story Hour at the library. He’s ripe for pre-K.

He’s fairly advanced, mathematically, too.

If only he’d behave.

This month’s poem is from Peppa Pig.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace

And harmony

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I’m glad that Daniel watches Peppa Pig, a calming influence.

Markup

From the New York Times:

“Train Tickets to 2026 World Cup at MetLife Stadium from NYC to Cost More than $100”

You’re free to stay home, I imagine free-market diehards retorting.

I’m also free to register my disgust.

🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮

One thing I like about Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? – Michael J. Sandel’s opinionated and popular introduction to political philosophy – is that it opens with a discussion of price gouging.

Not with such classic questions as:

Is there a duty to obey the law?

and

Can the state be justified?

– asked from a libertarian-friendly starting-point –

but rather with:

If a storm has cut off the electrical supply for many people, is it moral for merchants to double (triple, quadruple, etc.) the price of a bag of ice?

Unlike the classic questions, this one puts libertarians on the back foot.

Of course, there are differences between the scenario discussed in the book and the stadium-transport markup scenario.

(1) The exploitees in the latter scenario are pleasure seekers, not hurricane sufferers.

(2) They’re exploited by NJ Transit – a governmental agency – not by private merchants.

(3) They’re (mostly) foreign tourists, not members of the polis.

Sandel wants us to conclude that price gouging is wrong because it’s uncivil, or because it’s bad for the polis, or for some such community-based reason. (I’m pretty sure he wants us to conclude that. I haven’t read the end of the book.)

But in the World Cup transport scenario, price gouging (of foreigners, mostly) might actually be good for the community.

I leave it as a reader’s exercise to explain whether these differences matter morally and whether marking up the price is wrong.

Death on the Nile

Once I finish this, I’ll have read every novel by Christie that features Hercule Poirot.

It’s a long book with a large cast and much stage-setting. After almost two hundred pages, no one has been murdered.

But it’s an interesting book. I like it when Christie goes biblical. Overt sermonizing in literature is unfashionable, but Christie can’t help herself, and it’s refreshing.

“You are of the Church of England, I presume?”

“Yes.” Linnet looked slightly bewildered.

“Then you have heard portions of the Bible read aloud in church. You have heard of King David and of the rich man who had many flocks and herds and the poor man who had one ewe lamb – and of how the rich man took the poor man’s one ewe lamb. That was something that happened, Madame.”

Linnet sat up. Her eyes flashed angrily.

“I see perfectly what you are driving at, Monsieur Poirot! You think, to put it vulgarly, that I stole my friend’s young man. Looking at the matter sentimentally – which is, I suppose, the way people of your generation cannot help looking at things – that is possibly true. But the real hard truth is different. I don’t deny that Jackie was passionately in love with Simon, but I don’t think you take into account that he may not have been equally devoted to her. … What is he to do? Be heroically noble and marry a woman he does not care for – and thereby probably ruin three lives – for it is doubtful whether he could make Jackie happy under those circumstances? If he were actually married to her when he met me I agree that it might be his duty to stick to her – though I’m not really sure of that. If one person is unhappy the other suffers too. But an engagement is not really binding. If a mistake has been made, then surely it is better to face the fact before it is too late. I admit that it was very hard on Jackie, and I’m very sorry about it – but there it is. It was inevitable.”

“I wonder.”

She stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“It is very sensible, very logical – all that you say! But it does not explain one thing.”

“What is that?”

“Your own attitude, Madame. … To you this persecution [by Jackie] is intolerable – and why? It can be for one reason only – that you feel a sense of guilt.”

Linnet sprang to her feet.

“How dare you? Really, Monsieur Poirot, this is going too far.”

“But I do dare, Madame! I am going to speak to you quite frankly. I suggest to you that, although you may have endeavoured to gloss over the fact to yourself, you did deliberately set about taking your husband from your friend. … You are beautiful, Madame; you are rich; you are clever; intelligent – and you have charm. You could have exercised that charm or you could have restrained it. You had everything, Madame, that life can offer. Your friend’s life was bound up in one person. You knew that, but, though you hesitated, you did not hold your hand. You stretched it out and, like the rich man in the Bible, you took the poor man’s one ewe lamb.” …

“She threatened to – well – kill us both. Jackie can be rather – Latin sometimes.”

“I see.” Poirot’s tone was grave.

Linnet turned to him appealingly.

“You will act for me?”

“No, Madame.” His tone was firm. “I will not accept a commission from you. I will do what I can in the interests of humanity. That, yes. There is here a situation that is full of difficulty and danger. I will do what I can to clear it up – but I am not very sanguine as to my chance of success.”

Linnet Doyle said slowly: “But you will not act for me?”

“No, Madame,” said Hercule Poirot.

Body-text fonts, pt. 50: Baskerville (metal type, mid-20th c.); Baskerville 10 (digitization)

My favorite Baskerville specimens from the previous century are in Charles Williams’s novels (e.g., War in Heaven [1930]).

This, too, is representative:

Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

From the 2003 NYRB Classics introduction by Jan Morris:

There was a time when the opening line of this book entered the common parlance of educated English and American people. Nearly everyone I knew could quote it, and “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot” became a commonplace of badinage or social pleasantry. The line still gets into dictionaries of quotations, but it is years since I have heard it used in conversation.

It’s too bad that we’ve moved from the gracious “Take my camel, dear” to the boorish “Hold my beer.”

(František Štorm’s Baskerville 10 is the font’s closest digital approximation.)

Too many Easter baskets

By church’s end, each of my children had received three baskets. Here I’ve arrayed some of our Jesuses and sheep:

We have to keep Abel from swallowing these toys. He also steals his brothers’ chocolates and dissolves them in his mouth – still wrapped.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Will Michigan win the championship? As I type, the Wolverines lead UConn by nine points. The Big Ten has gone uncrowned for roughly a quarter-century. Michigan State won in 2000; Maryland, not yet a conference member, won in 2002. Each one of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, MSU, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Purdue – every turn-of-the-century conference member, that is, except Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern, and Penn State – has lost in the championship game at least once since MSU’s victory.

UConn first won in 1999 and went on to claim five more titles.

There are eighteen Big Ten members now. Loyal to the region, I penciled in Nebraska and Purdue as finalists. It was a bold but not outrageous prediction. Purdue unsurprisingly reached the Elite Eight; Nebraska advanced to the Sweet Sixteen having never previously won a tournament game. Had the Huskers gone far enough, I surely would have claimed Yahoo!’s $25,000 prize. (But it was the Huskies who reached the final.)

(A couple of years ago, I picked Creighton to reach the Final Four. I figure, the state is due.)

I did predict that Michigan would reach the semifinal. I achieved 60th-percentile staus this year, which is much better than usual. Yahoo! graded my bracket as “fine.”

Peanuts PDFs; UK map; Midwestern wedding

All of the Peanuts strips, PDF format, $25. Offer ends in 12 days.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My UK wall map – a Christmas gift from my father-in-law – has been framed at last in a heavy, wooden contraption from Goodwill. Karin, the handy one, did the framing. My idea is to hang the map next to the TV so that we can check it when we watch homicidal/​agricultural/​veterinary programs, e.g. our latest, The Highland Vet.

Current reading: François Mauriac, Genetrix; Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the last book in the series). And lots of other books.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I should describe the wedding we attended on Sunday. Samuel bore the rings with aplomb. The much younger flower girl lagged behind, so Samuel retraced his steps, grabbed some petals, and strewed them for her. All else went according to the script: the brief vowing ceremony; the post-vowing, pre-dining interlude for photos; the popcorn and donut tables; the soda and liquor booths; the dinner rolls, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes; the couple’s dance, the bride’s dance with her father, and the groom’s with his mother; and the Cha-Cha Slide. There was no removal of the garter with teeth – none we stayed for, anyway. When we left, I was dead-tired. I’d held squirmy Abel several hours. It was as wearying as if I’d spent the day moving house.

Samuel and Daniel loved the Cha-Cha Slide; their grandpa danced it with them. That ex-DJ was in his element. I’ve not met a more ardent ritual-relisher.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 97: Casper

… “the first feature film to have a fully computer-generated … character in a leading role,” according to the IMDb.

Indeed, when ghostly young Casper is granted a few hours of re-embodiment, his human portrayer is less winsome than the computer-generated spirit. This is less a mark of human failure than of technical virtuosity.

Along with Casper, there are three other principal ghosts: “Fatso,” “Stretch,” and “Stinkie,” Casper’s loutish uncles. Physically, they’re overgrown soap bubbles. They’re corporeal, but just barely. You can see them – and see through them. If you touch them, they dissipate. (No harm is done; they easily re-form.) Fat or thin, they’re rounded: there’s little angularity, and no severity, in their faces.

The uncles are malicious but jovial. Casper himself would be cuddly were he more than minimally solid. Such is his plight: he can love, but he can’t be embraced by his beloved.

The movie is a child-friendly version of the classic story of a romantic encounter between a human and a god (an angel, a sprite, a space alien, etc.). The themes are inaccessibility and yearning.

The girl is played by 1990s “child scare-queen” Christina Ricci (The Addams Family; Sleepy Hollow). Casper sees her and falls in love. (That’s also how I felt about her in the mid-nineties.) Ricci is Kat, the daughter of Dr. Harvey (Bill Pullman), a psychologist who specializes in therapy for the dead – or, as he calls them, the “living impaired.” He explains that ghosts are people who fail to fully “cross over” because of “unresolved issues.” Dr. Harvey has an unresolved issue of his own, which is that his wife’s death has left him griefstricken and dialed up his eccentricity to eleven. He drags Kat across the country so that he can talk to ghosts and track down his wife’s spirit.

Dr. Harvey and Kat end up in Maine, in the run-down, Gothic dwelling of Casper and his uncles, at the behest of treasure-hunters played by Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Cathy Moriarty (most famous as Robert De Niro’s chilly wife in Raging Bull). Idle and Moriarty are involved in the movie’s funniest scenes, some of which also benefit from cameos by Saturday Night Live icons – a conceit repeated by director Brad Silberling in his Land of the Lost (2009).

For example:

The uncles like to frighten people. Casper tries to befriend people. The effect is the same: the living flee in terror. Until the Harveys arrive, that is. They weather the initial storm. Soon, Casper is cooking Kat’s breakfast, and the uncles are taking a shine to the Doctor – so much so, in fact, that they plot for him to die so that he can join their posse.

Kat, meanwhile, is grateful for Casper’s attention, although she’d rather be with the local flesh-and-blood heart-throb (cue Carrie references). Will Casper win her over? In the spirit of Ray Bradbury, yes and no. Carefully attend to Casper’s re-embodiment scene. It becomes clear that Kat would accept him only under conditions that he couldn’t permanently satisfy; and, perhaps, rightly so. The movie is bittersweet.

It also has more swearing and gross-out humor than your average children’s movie. (Again, see Silberling’s Land of the Lost, which, wisely, targets an older audience.) Casper’s plight might be at the movie’s center, but the tone is set by those hedonistic vulgarians, the uncles. Which is just as well: the core is perhaps too sad.

I liked the set design best of all. The run-down mansion is exquisite. There are lots of visual references to old movies – to Oz, especially. Afterward, I wanted to watch Casper again, to see how many references I could count; Land of the Lost, too.

An entry, posted late, requiring every ounce of strength to type

Notable World Cup “tuneup” results:

• Ecuador 1, Morocco 1 (cracker of a game)
• Brazil 1, France 2 (France dominant)
• England 1, Uruguay 1 (tedious)
• Colombia 1, Croatia 2 (dunno)
• South Korea 0, Ivory Coast 4 (look out for the “Elephants”)
• USA 2, Belgium 5 (too soon to gloat, alas)

Tomorrow promises to be grueling; today already was. Lily, Karin’s sister, will be married tomorrow afternoon. It’s the childcare that vexes. Samuel, at least, is accounted for: he’ll bear the rings. He successfully brought the cushion down the aisle during today’s rehearsal.

Abel and Daniel are another matter. The last thing the ceremony needs is a chorus of squawking. I scouted the building today for possible retreating-places. There aren’t many.

Today, before I chased around and, ocassionally, strong-armed Abel and Daniel, I’d already tired myself loading a humungous, old brush pile – which had plagued our backyard since we bought the property in 2021 – into our pastor’s trailer. Pastor Josh and I took the debris to the church and tossed it into the forest next to the parking lot. It’s not every day you get to dump stuff in a forest.

This has been a grueling entry to type, too, because my “shift” key has been sticking.

Preview: Irish reading

Here is my list of Irish people to read in 2026–2027. (And afterward.)

Who’m I overlooking?

• John Banville, a.k.a. Benjamin Black
• Samuel Beckett
• Elizabeth Bowen
• Anna Burns
• Joyce Cary
• Erskine Childers (Mayfair-born)
• Roddy Doyle
• Maria Edgeworth
• J. G. Farrell
• Tara French
• Seamus Heaney
• James Joyce
• Claire Keegan
• C. S. Lewis
• Brian Moore
• Iris Murdoch
• Edna O’Brien
• Flann O’Brien
• Sally Rooney
• George Bernard Shaw
• Jonathan Swift
• J. M. Synge
• William Trevor
• Oscar Wilde
• Cecil Woodham-Smith (Welsh-born, Irish-sired)
• William Butler Yeats

I’ve read, or at least tried to read, all of these people but Bowen, Cary, Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Synge, and Trevor. I wouldn’t mind trying out everybody on the list.

I’m leaving Franks McCourt and O’Connor off the list. For now.

I also want to read a history book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. (Woodham-Smith’s Great Famine also is a work of history.)

My mother-in-law also has scheduled various Irish books to read this year. Amazingly, nothing on her list is on mine.

The idea for this project came from viewing Atom Egoyan’s excellent, unsettling Felicia’s Journey (1999) and reflecting that the source novel’s author, William Trevor, has been pretty well off my radar all my life.

Prolongation of woe

I.e., puking. Only Abel has been spared. We’ve brought the TV upstairs so as to get to the toilet promptly. Karin gallantly has been letting the children use the toilet first. She makes due in the hallway with her bucket.

Daniel, poor boy, is on his second cycle with this bug, having been symptomless one glorious week.

I’m well enough right now. I dread the second cycle.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m teaching Samuel how footnotes work, using Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs. He’ll grow up thinking that studying history is fun.

Other reading:

• François Mauriac, A Kiss for the Leper (a mini-book)
• Voltaire, Candide (a re-read; a mini-book)
• N. T. Wright, God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. Chuck Norris, aged eighty-six. And Robert Mueller.

Body-text fonts, pt. 49: ITC Garamond

The Iranians are trying to have their World Cup games moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

Good. Luck.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Six-year-old Samuel, whom we don’t allow to use social media, has been talking about giving up social media for a week. 🙄

Not for Lent’s sake. For a Klondike bar. (“What would you do for a Klondike bar?”)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Chubby ITC Garamond is this month’s typeface. (This link is to the darker version, and this link is to the lighter version.)

My children are less “Charlie Bucket,” more “Mike Teavee.”

Oscars

Viewing the ceremony – not comprehensively – after a multi-year hiatus. (Oscar-cast doubles as storm alerter tonight.)

I’m old enough now to be less concerned with the living than with the honored dead:

• Robert Duvall
• Graham Greene
• Diane Keaton
• Val Kilmer
• Robert Redford
• Rob Reiner
• Terence Stamp, etc.

(Some heavy hitters.)

Of the nominated movies, I’ve seen Sinners. Delroy Lindo, who plays a tragicomical virtuouso drunk (Cat Ballou’s Lee Marvin, anyone?), lost his contest to Sean Penn but would have been a worthy laureate.

And I’ve seen KPop Demon Hunters: unworthy but, tonight, triumphant.

Paul Thomas Anderson will win, one year or another (probably this year); and so will Jessie Buckley, who’s too good to feature in what gets made nowadays. She’s acted with Olivia Colman, which yields dividends, Oscar-wise. I’d like to see Jessie win for something schlocky like Beast or Men. (Or for a Richard Linklater adaptation of Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man.) Not for a prestige picture about one of Shakespeare’s love interests (everybody wins for that).

It’s been a grueling weekend. Daniel puked, I puked, and now Samuel has just puked. Three of us down, two of us to go.

Paul’s bedtime reading

Iran’s team has withdrawn from the World Cup. The newspapers are taking it in stride.

Surely, I’m not the only dismayed soccer follower in the West?

Update (March 13): The team has not withdrawn (or been ousted).

I’ll let you know when I know what I’m talking about.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The war’s death toll has risen. And it’s beyond doubt that the U.S. killed those schoolchildren.

Update: I really hope the news about something so important is beyond doubt.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve also updated my unchangeable and definite reading list of the next two months. I’ll try to finish not five, not ten, but twenty-four more books before the late-April conclusion of my 2025–2026 cycle. And so it’s particularly cruel of the Web bots to pepper me with ads for the new John Galsworthy PBS show. I just can’t fit all nine of those novels into the schedule. If only Abel didn’t cling to me all day long.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness – he had read a rather daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject – but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.

Frankly, Paul Pennyfeather’s life sounds lovely (except for that ominous bit about “incalculable consequences”).

The good news is, the Forsyte show looks missable.

March’s poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A song the whilst
BASSANIO
comments
on
the caskets
to
himself

Tell me where is fancy [love based only on the senses, especially the sight] bred,

Or in the heart, or in the head?

How begot, how nourishèd?

Reply, reply.

It is engend’red in the eyes,

With gazing fed, and fancy dies

In the cradle where it lies.

Let us all ring fancy’s knell.

I’ll begin it. – Ding, dong, bell.

ALL

Ding, dong, bell.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The Merchant of Venice III.ii 63–72. Text and note from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare.

Springtime (pre-equinox)

Loud t-storm; air so warm, we have windows open. Earlier, when Samuel’s school bus arrived, he paced the aisle, unwilling to disembark in what was then a light rain. I had to climb aboard to coax him out. And earlier still, I’d gone with Karin, Abel, and Daniel to meet the boys’ new doctor (the previous one, a Seventh-day Adventist, has moved to Guam for a three-year religious sojourn). Upon our return to Toad Hall, the alarm was blaring. It took us an age to turn it off. Daniel ran down the block, did a round of hopscotch, and ran back.

I’m tempted to try reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando but the schedule is just too packed.

“He – for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

(The opening lines.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, set just before Britain’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Adrian is a die-hard Blair supporter. He believes there will be no war because that’s what Blair tells Britain. Adrian’s 17-year-old son Glenn has joined up and trains in Aldershot, running in full battle-dress on builder’s sand. Adrian has just used a Barclaycard blank check (29% interest) to obtain down payment funds (I forget how many thousands of pounds) for his trendy canalside loft, which he is furnishing on store credit (almost £10,000 at 20% interest). Moreover, his parents have sold their house to a developer and bought a pig-sty to convert, by “DIY” methods, into their new dwelling (“The Piggeries”). Meanwhile they live in a tent.

It’s a cheap trick, relaying what’s in other people’s books, but this stuff is too good to keep quiet about.

Iran at the World Cup?

“Trump to POLITICO: ‘I Really Don’t Care’ if Iran Plays in World Cup”

Again, I wish FIFA would choose a host that did care.

Iran’s withdrawal is likely. Maybe we’ll know more after the U.S. completes the expected four-to-five weeks of bombardment. Because then the war’ll be done-and-dusted, won’t it? Because, as Trump himself professes, Iran already “is a very badly defeated country.”

If Iran does play in the World Cup, this eye-popping scenario will be possible:

Iran is currently scheduled to play New Zealand in Los Angeles on June 15, Belgium in Los Angeles on June 21 and Egypt in Seattle on June 26. If both the U.S. and Iran finish second in their respective groups, the two countries could face off in a July 3 elimination match in Dallas.

The two countries played what were, in effect, elimination matches (in the group stage) in 1998 and 2022. Iran won the first meeting; the U.S. won the second one.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 96: Wag the dog

What with the ongoing sex scandal and, now, a war, Wag the Dog (1997) is the obvious choice for this month. (Well, either it or Canadian Bacon [1995].)

Actors:

• De Niro
• Dunst
• Harrelson
• Heche
• Hoffman
• Macy
  

and

• Willie Nelson (who, in scenes reminiscent of Nashville, directs a studio choir that records patriotic music)

Wag the Dog is funny. It ticks a lot of boxes, satire-wise.

Trouble is, it’s not cynical enough.

Nowadays, this is a quaint, almost feel-good movie.

The country, nowadays, is that much worse.

The nineties were a gentler time.

More trouble for the World Cup

Some dozens of recent killings in Mexico have stirred up anxiety about that country’s ability to safely co-host the World Cup.

The U.S. has safety worries, too. E.g., who will pay for the extra stadium guards and police in little Foxborough, Mass.? Not the 18,000 townspeople, who are threatening to deny FIFA the use of their locality.

Good for them.

See this New York Times article.

“We may get a little more [than usual] in meals tax and hotel tax,” a local official explains:

But this is not a moneymaker for this town. In fact, it’s probably more of a headache than it’s worth.

This is nothing more than seven events up there. If [the] World Cup wasn’t coming, we’d probably have seven concerts in that time. We’re not gaining much of anything by hosting this event.

So it goes when a country that doesn’t really care about soccer – or about, you know, the world – is awarded World Cup hosting rights. You run up against locals who refuse to sacrifice. Which is what hosting these games is. FIFA always has made money for the rich and compensated the masses with an experiential high. But these particular masses don’t care about soccer or foreign visitors, so they aren’t going to get that high.

FIFA should give more games – or all of the games – to Canada. I’m curious what the people of, e.g., Edmonton or Regina would say. Those cities have pretty stadiums; I’ve looked at them on Wikipedia.

Body-text fonts, pt. 48: Simoncini Garamond

Perhaps my favorite Garamond. The happy average of Garamonds “Monotype” and “ITC”: not too twiggy, not too fat. Spiky serifs; short descenders.

Sample 1: Mary Westmacott, i.e. Agatha Christie, Absent in the Spring (in an omnibus):

Sample 2: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed:

If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what would.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy Paw Patrol-themed birthday, yesterday, to Daniel. We invited his cousins over to help him to empty his piñata.

It has become customary among our families to offer a piñata whenever a child turns a year older. Our boys had accumulated enough candy to fill a kitchen cabinet. So, we recycled as much of it as we could into yesterday’s piñata.

We told the other parents to put their children’s gleanings into the next piñata, then into the next one, and so on.

Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators:

• article behind paywall (BBC)
• same article – gratis (Yahoo!)

For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Current reading (books):

• W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
• Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
• Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
• E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
• C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
• François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
• Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
• John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)

A long-awaited stroll; a latitude, hydrological divides, and other fancies

Snow: mostly melted. Temperatures: in the fifties (F); sixties tomorrow. I take Abel and Daniel strolling. Daniel jumps in all the puddles. He soaks the insides of his boots. I don’t know what he’ll wear if we go out again very soon.

Abel, in the stroller, leans forward, his head as near to the ground as he can get it, as if he were peering into tidal pools.

I halt to check if he’s all right; Daniel races ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Fun fact I just learned: Canada’s lowest latitude passes through South Bend just a few blocks north of Toad Hall.

(Toad Hall is our house.)

I could pinpoint the location, stroll there, and hop back and forth over the line. “Now I’m south of all of Canada. Now I’m north of a little of Canada.”

I suppose the urge is due to having grown up near the equator.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I could do this with the nearby drainage divide, too. “Now I’m daining into the Great Lakes. Now I’m draining into the Gulf of Mexico, I mean the Gulf of America.”

It seems a less arbitrary line since it has a basis in physical rather than political reality – until I remember that the Great Lakes drain into the St. Lawrence River and thence into the Atlantic, which encompasses the Gulf of Mexico (I mean, America). So that, ultimately, the distinction between these drainage basins is artificial.

Of course there’s a physical difference between draining one way and draining the other, but if you mark all such differences you end up with insignificant, postage stamp-sized drainage basins.

Artifice – human purposiveness – seems inescapable if much geography is to be done at all.

I remember checking out geography Ph.D. programs when I was very young. There was the respectable but daunting meteorology specialization; all else seemed postmodern free-for-all. A bitter disappointment to someone who’d vaguely entertained the thought that his vocation might consist of memorizing picturesque but unimpeachable facts, e.g. that Czechoslovakia’s capital is Prague.

Valentine’s

Abel has cabin fever now. He points at the stroller, squawks, climbs onto my chest, and beats it. Soon, Abel, soon.

Like his brothers before him, he attacks my face and snatches at my glasses when I put them on at night. His little nails must have cut inside my eyelid. When I fold it back I find the scab. It has been chafing my eyeball.

Happy Valentine’s (this time, on the day itself). No celebration for Karin & me tonight. We’ll go out later this week.

I did put on Sleepless in Seattle for the family. There aren’t a lot of Valentine’s Day movies. I’ve seen these others:

My Bloody Valentine and the excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock – two for the horror aisle;

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;

and:

Some Like It Hot.

Irrespective of overall merit or demerit, only Sleepless preserves the spirit of, and does justice to, the holiday. (I’ve not seen An Affair to Remember.)

Happy birthday to my long-dead Great Grandad Valentine, my father’s mother’s father.

February’s poem

Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

Massive Attack, “One Love”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

It’s you I love

And not another

And I know our love

Will last forever

You I love

And not another

And I know we’ll always

Be together

Some men have one love

Two and three love

Four and five

And six love

But I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Some men don’t feel secure

Unless they have a woman on each arm

They have to play the field

Prove they have charm

They say, Don’t lay your eggs in one basket

If the basket should fall, all your eggs’ll be broken

But I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

It’s not the everyday you find the woman of your dreams

Who will always be there – no matter how bad things seems

Ever so faithful

Ever so sure

No man could ever

Ax for more

I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

I believe

In one love …

I believe …

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Vocalist: Horace Andy.