My daughter and Sansa played hard on Christmas morning, and then CRASHED OUT. I hope you had a pleasant Christmas and Boxing Day and The Sunday Post-Boxing Day, should you celebrate one or all of the aforementioned days, and are ready to gird your loins for the year to come. I welcome pictures of your holiday meals at the current time.
This new Chicago police shooting is unbelievably tragic and terrible, and has left a mentally-ill teen and a female bystander dead. The Washington Post did an excellent year-end summary of their police shooting coverage.
This story about the IRS agent who figured out who Dread Pirate Roberts was is so fascinating (he used GOOGLE, it was OBVIOUSLY the right guy, no one LISTENED to him, and also COME THE FUCK ON, your tax dollars at work):
Mr. Alford grew up in the Marlboro public housing projects of Brooklyn in the 1980s, a short, half-black, half-Filipino kid in a tough neighborhood. His father, a math teacher, would cite the power of the subject to teach his son how to prevail over difficulties. “If you get the right answer, the teacher can’t tell you anything,” Mr. Alford remembers his father saying. That attitude led Mr. Alford to study accounting at Baruch College and then to the I.R.S., where his skeptical, lone-wolf approach worked well.
Our own Gretchen McCulloch on the singular “they”:
Let’s clear something up right away. Using “they” to refer to a single person isn’t new, but words of the year rarely are. Rather, this usage has been simmering for many years, finally bursting onto the scene this year with a newfound prominence. And just in time, too. Language can and should keep up with cultural shifts, including developments in society’s understanding of gender. While some holdout grammarians and copy editors might squirm, it’s become increasingly clear that our current pronoun palette simply isn’t sufficient. Luckily, we already have a perfectly good word at the ready.
Nikki sent me this excellent high school choir version of “Wait For It”:
All three Democratic candidates will be at the Brown & Black Presidential Forum on January 11th, which has THE BEST moderators imaginable, and you can submit your questions here, ideally by January 2nd.
Michael Caine is so charming I want to die.
An interview with a courtroom artist:
RATTER: Regarding the recent Tom Brady incident…
L.D.: I would say it would be rare to do a situation like that, ’cause what I would’ve done is draw him medium-close, then put a lot of heads and bodies around him. I might’ve done it differently. She might’ve been ordered to do it the way that she was by her reporter. I personally hate drawing crowd scenes. It’s worse than drawing juries. Juries are 12 separate little portraits, they all have to be accurate unless the judge says to obscure their faces. A crowd scene usually means drawing six people accurately and then the tops of the heads. Still, it’s really hard work, and the materials come out of my pocket, too. All of us. Sometimes, it’s like giving up your blood when you have to draw sixty people and color them.
You know what’s hardest to draw? Beautiful people. Reproducing beauty is hard. Beauty is usually based on very fine, careful proportions with no irregularities. There are a couple judges who are just too handsome or too pretty. It’s a challenge going in to draw them. It’s a challenge to get a good likeness of them. A lot of beautiful people are just bland. That’s how I like or dislike people in court, based on how easy they are to draw. [He points to my shirt, which has blue and white stripes.] Don’t wear that shirt in court, man, I’ll make you ugly. Don’t wear plaids, don’t wear paisleys. I’ll make you fat, I’ll make you old, I’ll make you ugly. If you wear pinstripes I’m gonna take it out on you.
I grew up reading My Family and Other Animals, and here is a lovely tribute to Gerald Durrell on its sixtieth anniversary (his brother, who wrote The Alexandria Quartet, is the Serious Author in the family, but the impishness of Gerald is forever):
It was the great American scientist and science writer Edward O Wilson who coined the term biophilia: for the human affinity, the human need for non-human life. Everyone who has ever patted a dog or smelled a rose understands that. My Family and Other Animals is the greatest expression of biophilia in literature. Here is a boy in paradise, surrounded by an eccentric loving family and by the wonderful beasts of the Mediterranean islands. Here the young Gerry kept owls and pigeons and tortoises, witnessed a battle between a praying mantis and a gecko – above, on, and finally in his bed. One day his magpies – the Magenpies – got loose and trashed Larry’s room and all those pages full of deathless prose.
Joy is at the heart of everything that Durrell wrote, but most especially it is at the heart of My Family and Other Animals. Here is a book that celebrates the wild world more thoroughly and more vividly than anything else ever written. It is at the same time funny and deeply serious; and it is a poor person who believes that humour compromises seriousness. It has reached people and moved them to laughter and other emotions, all them deep, powerful and packed with meaning. It has been a set book for exams and it has taught the joys of reading along with all the other joys. The book tells us that we humans are not complete alone: that without the wild world we are less than ourselves.
What it’s like to drive tourists around the Australian outback:
You have to start early in the mornings. If you let the tourists sleep in and start the walks too late in the day, it will take them a whole day to recover from that heat. The desert is alive in the early mornings, more alive than most can imagine. As the morning goes on, the shadows shorten and the sun drains the colour from the trees. 11 am brings the death of hope. There’s no more birdsong, just the sounds of buzzing flies and sobbing. You explain this to your passengers well in advance; you want them to feel like they have made the choice (though there is no choice), so they feel like mavericks in the early morning, and not like suckers.
The other thing to do in the summertime is sneak people into a five-star hotel, and its pool. Shady trees, deckchairs, and waiters delivering poolside cocktails – luxuries like that are wasted on the rich. I used to explain the layout of the place to my crew and arm everyone with elaborate backstories to explain how such a ragtag bunch had come into enough money to afford a five-star hotel. Then I would drop them off in groups of twos and threes at various locations and staggered intervals. I’m not sure any of this was entirely necessary, but it helped with the sense of occasion.
I feel badly for this deleted commenter that they wanted to correct everyone on an old post and will never get to do so (but not badly enough to approve their numerous comments, of course):
