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.