Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I don’t understand all the outrage about the flag at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house. If the flag had not flown, would you have thought that Alito’s rulings are any less partisan?

Oscar Levant to George Gershwin: “Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?”

When we have visited a continuing care retirement community or a life plan estate or what I refer to as a place to die, a person showing us around always points out at least one library to us. However, on our last two visits, our marketing person referred to them as “libaries.” Should that affect our decision about whether we want to move there?

“Her brain is a cage of canaries.” Virginia Woolf referring to a Russian ballerina.

We had dinner with a couple who lived in a place to die. They were charming. One had been a hairdresser who was an expert in sign language for the deaf. She signed for Red Skelton shows at Atlantic City. She told us that the comedian had a following among the deaf because he did much pantomime and included a sign language “translator” for his stage shows. I found this interesting, but I also found it unsettling that our dinner companion referred to the performer as Red Skeleton.

Conservatives say that if Trump is elected, Democrats should be criminally prosecuted. I agree. If a Democrat falsifies records about hush money payments to an adult film actress to affect an election, those Democrats should be prosecuted.

“The nail that sticks up will be hammered down. Japanese Proverb.” Nami Hirahara, Snakeskin Shamisen: A Mas Arai Mystery.

A friend whom I am sure thought he knew the answer asked if anyone besides Trump had been prosecuted for falsifying business records as a felony. I did a little internet search. I quickly found one site that reported, “New York state has arraigned almost 9,800 cases involving the same charge since 2015.” Another site stated that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had filed 120 cases of falsified business records in the several years before Trump was indicted, all of them felonies based on the concealment or commission of other crimes. A third site concluded, “Prosecution of falsifying business records in the first degree is commonplace and has been used by New York district attorneys’ offices to hold to account a breadth of criminal behavior from the more petty to simple to the more serious and highly organized. We reach this conclusion after surveying the past decade and a half of criminal cases across all the New York district attorneys’ offices.”

Stephen Colbert in his role as a right-wing blowhard said, “I don’t believe in the facts. The facts are liberal.”

I did an internet search for how to pronounce Swiatek. I still don’t know how.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house.” Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth.

“Sir or Lady (as I shall call him) sits on the promontory in our village, deep in movie love.” Hilton Als, White Girls.

“It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more years as the dean of the faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college.” Philip Roth, The Human Stain.

“The crowd began to cluster at the corner of Hoffman and Bolton, near the entrance to the Armory, in the late afternoon—a quiet, orderly crowd, more women than men.” Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.

“The open door was only yards away, and beyond it lay the outside world, eerily unaffected by anything happening inside the abandoned snooker hall.” Ian Rankin, Doors Open.

“The scientists of the Simulmatics Corporation spent the summer of 1961 on a beach on Long Island beneath a geodesic dome that looked as if it had landed there, amid the dunes, a spaceship gone to ground.” Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.

“He—for there could be no doubt of 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 that swung from the rafters.” Virginia Woolf, Orlando.

“The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.” Robert Macfarlane, Underworld: A Deep Time Journey

“You now have one choice.” Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y.

“Subrata Roy was reclining on a sofa in a pink shirt, orange pocket square, and plaid blazer, his outfit contrasting sharply with the spare, all-white living room.” Julie Satow, The Plaza: The Secret Life of America’s Most Famous Hotel.

“The discourse which follows may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerized by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed.” Thomas E. Lumas, The End of Mr. Y.

“Laura Glass was thirteen years old and entering the eighth grade at Jefferson Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when she looked over her father’s shoulder to see what he was working on.” Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.