milk and honey

Audere est Facere

Micro.blogger Tottenham Hotspur fans (if any, besides @frjon and me), might take some heart from this article in the Evening Standard. COYS ⚽

It’s so fun to grow plants (in this case, Cosmos), from seed! Fun for the bees, too.

O Liverwurst, Where Art Thou?

Sad memorial in the NYT. I loved liverwurst on rye with mustard and red onion slices from the late ’70s Stanford Coffee House. I still wonder why people crossed to the other side of the street after I’d enjoyed one.

At Zabar’s, 1970 - Credit: Michael Gold/Getty Image

A Thought

Extraordinary people in arts, business, etc., can be so focused that their relationships suffer. Maybe that’s the price of excellence. But those who nurture relationships also pay a cost. They may be less successful at making money or art. Might that be a price of deeper connections?

Cahokia Jazz

Loved the audiobook of Francis Spufford’s amazing novel, read by Andy Ingalls. It’s a great listen, and Ingalls is an excellent reader. But I recommend also getting a print copy for the great maps, family trees, etc. (Check your library!) Dynamite as a pair.

I am a huge fan of the lunch-size brown paper bag. (And not merely because of its contents, though they often also are worthy of praise.)

My mom died September 1, 2022: 4 months and 4 days shy of her 99th birthday.
I think of her and Dad all the time. The best is when they're in my dreams.

Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek

Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground,

Catch sight some ordinary month or week

Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought—

The gatherer gathered and the finder found,

The buyer who would buy all himself well bought—

And perch in pride in the buyer’s hand, at home,

And there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?

“By never trusting, cynics never lose. They also never win. Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins….

The cynical voice … claims that we already know everything about people. But humanity is far more beautiful and complex than a cynic imagines, the future far more mysterious than they know.”

Jamil Zaki

(Odegaard, #5, appears to be wiping the pitch — literally — with an unfortunate Villa player. Right-click to open a bigger image in a new tab, then embiggen.) BTW, the Stinkies won. 🙁

Image: Wikimedia/Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0)

I am so lucky to have the world's greatest brother-in-law.

>Tradition is a good thing. It is traditionalism that is bad. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. > >—Jaroslav Pelikan

(h/t blog.angloromanticism.org - btw, my new band name)

Jim Schutze:

... his entire industry is on pins and needles, terribly anxious about a Trump victory. I asked him if it’s because Trump is opposed to his industry on specific policy issues. He said no.

“That’s not it. It’s that Trump is crazy. That’s what we worry about.”

My friend’s business involves putting big chunks of money into long-range investments that already involve plenty of risk. The added risk of wild wombats in the White House with regulatory power over their deal is way too much.

RIP, Duane Thomas, one of the greatest runners in Cowboys history. When an interviewer referred to the Superbowl as "the ultimate game," Thomas' never-to-be-forgotten response was, "If it's the ultimate, why are they playing it again next year?"

Leah Bayans:

When I first sat with Wendell [Berry] to talk about educating farmers as farmers, he started by turning to the idea of love—in the fullness of the term, not sentimentalized but fully rounded, with the joyful and the difficult joined through membership in a place and with its people.

He then asked a question that I try to answer every day: what works does this love propose?

Start with love, then see what works that love proposes. (H/T: @ayjay)

Public Work is an image search engine that boasts 100,000 “copyright-free” images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface and uses AI to auto-categorize and suggest possibly related images (both visually and content-wise). And it’s fun to just visually click around on related images. On the downside, their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons.

Capers are white people's fish sauce. Briny and salty and umamiful. -- my daughter

Yes, please. Some of that.

David Brooks, quoting Michael Strain

A Trump win would play into the narrative of Americans as helpless victims. The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive, and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less. Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort, and dynamism.

The late, great Kinky Friedman:

I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.

David Frum, via Nick Cataggio:

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

Photo: Constance Jaeggi (a tip of the Hatlo Hat to @ayjay)