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User ID: 3534
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1d ago
It’s the skilled expression of the author’s own voice. I can’t be of much help, in the same way Potter Stewart’s 1964 definition of obscenity — "I know it when I see it." — doesn’t help anyone who isn’t Potter Stewart.
Stephen Fry recounted heavily cribbing, paradoxically, from Hemingway and Wilde, and being worried he had no real style of his own. He was then delighted when a classmate sussed out Fry had written an unsigned editorial in the school paper, telling Fry there wasn’t anyone else who could have written it.
Wolfe has a section early in Back to Blood where the slapping of a boat’s hull on waves rhythmically and unrelentingly interrupts his prose. It, specifically, was panned in a couple reviews I encountered. It made me nauseous to read; I thought it wonderful. It works for Wolfe, or it works from him.
In my own writing, elsewhere, I definitely suffer from imposter’s syndrome. Dorothy Parker, in her short story The Custard Heart compares a woman to a painting that looks impressive at a distance but less so upon close inspection. Parker does this in the same paragraph where she employs what starts out as a quatrain, but continues on for a line too long and unravels. It was delightful to read. If I had typed it out myself, I would dismiss it as a cheap gimmick.
And, what works for Fry, Wolfe and Parker is not entirely interchangeable.
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3d ago
Blazing Saddles, by Mel Brooks, 0. I guess I operate on a different frequency than Mel Brooks, but I've never found his movies funny. Maybe the movie was funnier and more original fifty years ago and this is the O.Henry effect in action, but Gene Wilders and Slim Pickens couldn't save this snoozefest.
I find Brooks very inconsistent but enjoy the bits that land. I’m also not enamored with Blazing Saddles, but I do love when the film spills out onto adjacent Hollywood sets.
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3d ago
Tangentially Eagles related, McCord at 181 seems a tidy piece of business. I enjoyed his brief sit down with Bootleg.
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3d ago
Hard Knocks to Cleveland? Are they eligible based on the rules? Can the NFL resist?
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3d ago
Devil’s advocate, we’re now in the fifth round. Is that still applicable now? Teams are now picking guys with injury concerns. Guys who had unimpressive production and teams gamble if they think those players were in the wrong college offense or defense for their talent. Fifth rounders don’t really have leverage like a high draft pick does.
A fifth round QB’s slot bonus this year is $384,680 and decreases with each pick. That is a guy you can cut or trade.
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3d ago
Dolphins as an insurance policy on Tua at 116? Nope, traded down with Houston.
Steelers at 123? Saints at 129? Raiders again at 135?
Did the Sanders family inadvertently build the first custom UDFA room, instead of a custom draft room? The hater in me finds this all delightful.
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3d ago
The Shedeur Sanders slide has been very entertaining. Could even reach culture-war post worthiness if looking at the various media reactions. New Orleans is on the clock so maybe posting this jinxes it, and he finally gets taken. I was a bit surprised Vegas just passed on him at 108, with Smith being 34 years of age.
He’s a decently athletic quarterback with NFL-caliber zip on short-to-intermediate throws and very, very good accuracy. Is just a touch undersized for a guy who will need to stay in the pocket in the pros. He’s going to need to learn to play within the pocket more, and to work through his progressions much faster. But ordinarily the above is a profile that gets a quarterback taken before Day 3.
And… the Saints just passed. His interviews must have been terrible. Teams do not want to deal with the circus in exchange for a prospect without elite arm talent.
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3d ago
He and his wife joined me and mine on vacation. We were all staying on the coast and the other three of us wanted to go to a seafood restaurant for dinner one night. He asked that he not drive, consumed a gummy, and joined us.
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3d ago
Sorry to hear about your loss of smell, sincerely.
If it’s any consolation, one of my good friends lost his sense of smell and taste for around six months in 2020. He ate skinless chicken breasts and steamed vegetables for every meal and got into the best shape of his life.
I hope you eventually recover your olfactory prowess.
Seconding what a few others have said. This was a fun read, and, was so because of your knowledge and interest in the subject.
When I was single I used to wear Creed’s Bois du Portugal in fall and winter. It had the most longevity of anything I’ve ever worn (not that the list is too long). I’d get hit with a big whiff of it again, the following morning in the shower, from the previous morning’s spritz.
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3d ago
In a ludicrously-narrow application, I have a friend who can only tolerate eating fish after utilizing THC.
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4d ago
What’s the practical difference between a significant advantage and a requirement in a lucrative and competitive industry? Sure, we can go back up thread and parse “have to”. I fully concede there is no law mandating it.
Public subsidy is a funny charge. Typically after all fuel taxes from every level of government are accounted for, it adds up to a quarter of the budget for road construction and maintenance in America. Tolls, registration and other fees only provide another 10 percent. 65% of funding is unrelated to usage. Which, this is typically how subsidy is defined when applied to rail networks.
“Same place” is one heck of a strawman. It really depends on the transit network. The rail lines that reach out into the suburbs around Munich, that lots of people in my wife’s extended family use to commute, as an example, are great. And Munich, with comparatively less of its streets dedicated to cars, is pretty great, too.
Mass transit is so much more efficient at moving people through dense areas. There is certainly demand for transit, but in a healthier society it does not have to be by car. The original plans for federal interstates accounted for this and were supposed to be bypass routes. You are correct about a potential lack of reduction in congestion, only because public transit in NYC is so off-putting an experience. There are no strangers having dissociative episodes in one’s car. Europe and Asia’s more successful mass transit systems absolutely have resulted in less urban congestion than our car culture.
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5d ago
This is leaves out its genuine major benefit. Most urban planning studies show that people will adapt to whatever transit conditions are present, and the impact of induced demand is quite real. Freeway lane expansion in the long term, counterintuitively, doesn’t much reduce congestion and usually slightly increases vehicle miles traveled. Congestion pricing could* be a wonderful tool to help steer more people to mass transit, which is more than sensible in the single-most population dense city in America.
*The problem with this in NYC (and other Democrat-run large cities) is that a number of liberal policies spanning decades, from the courts banning involuntary commitment in all but the most severe cases, to more-recently a pronounced aversion to policing quality of life violations in public spaces, has made public transit deeply unpleasant.
Wherever the hub for an industry is, is the place to be, for networking, available talent pool, etc. JPMC has 300,000 employees and it’s absolutely fine that they don’t keep their mortgage division on the isle of Manhattan. But as long as NYC is America’s financial hub, they’ll miss out on talent and all sorts of other opportunities that are downstream of networking if they move their investment banking out of the city while Goldman, BoA ML, MS, etc. don’t. It doesn’t matter that it is NYC specifically, but it is NYC, practically.
Maybe TXSE takes off, maybe ICE moving some operations to Texas is part of that same migration. But it’s a huge risk to pull out of NYC too soon. If the financial industry ever actually picks a new hub, it’ll be a gradual shift.
There are all sorts of smaller businesses around the financial industry that have significant presences in NYC as well. How many of you are familiar with what Topan Merrill and RRD’s financial print divisions do? When Latham is working on a company’s IPO or merger they can set up shop in one of the former’s conference rooms, etc.
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5d ago
As an aside, William F. Buckley Jr. ran a spoiler campaign against George Lindsey for NYC mayor. Post-Goldwater’s defeat, WFB was worried about the Conservative wing of the Republican Party not being seen as a contender to its Liberal wing, with Lindsey being of the latter. Most of Buckley’s support came from the outer boroughs. And among his positions were the construction of dedicated bike lanes, reduced public transit fares based on income, and congestion pricing.
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6d ago
Do you make any distinctions between Germany, Austria, the 17 Germanophone Swiss cantons, the Alto Adige, etc.?
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6d ago
The left has won for a century pushing things that nobody wanted, because they've discovered an entire strategy based around an ideological vanguard pushing insane things on the masses.
Like an end to segregation? The pro-segregationists oft spoke of outside agitators.
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6d ago
All-male solidarity sounds hella-gay; there’s no problem with it because why would anyone want it?
Mencken preemptively dismissed the incels and feminists when he noted there would never be a winner in the battle of the sexes, as there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
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18d ago
Why is the assumption that these DOGE cuts are intelligent? From what I’ve seen the better argument is that it’s a shoot-first-and-let-God-sort-them-out blitz on the bureaucracy?
Clinton, and before him Reagan, both cut back parts of the bureaucracy, but worked with experienced administrators who better knew what they were looking for and via a more considered process. Musk is employing 20-something sperges who can run SQL queries, if I’m not missing much more?
My favorite two examples of the latter are canceling government contracts because the payees were Politico and a Thomson Reuters, thinking the federal government was subsidizing journalism that wasn’t sufficiently MAGA.
Rather, Politico owns and operates Politico Pro, and Thomson Reuters does the same for Westlaw. Politico Pro is used to track the progress of legislation. Even Republicans commonly use it. Depending on your subscription, the $7,000 or $11,000 annual fee is going to do the job much better and cheaper than a staffer hired at minimum wage ever could.
And asking regulators and government lawyers to do without Westlaw access is even more stupid. Any lawyers they would be facing as counter-parties will be using it.
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20d ago
Well, even among those examples, drill-baby-drill was about energy-independence and autarky. Cheap Canadian fossil fuels delivered efficiently by pipeline wasn’t harming our economy.
Wine I know a fair amount about and at the highest end it doesn’t matter that much. Mouton Rothschild won’t have any trouble selling their next vintage, they’ll just send more of it to the rest of the EU, Asia (and very, very quietly as always) the gulf oil states. Neither will any luxury brand selling conspicuous consumption from Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux, Tuscany or the Piedmont. The American rich here will pivot a bit and pick up some of the slack on the decreased sales that will hit Nappa and the Willamette downstream of the trade war. RIP the middle class prices for Eola-Amity Pinot Noir, as the vineyards are younger and word hasn’t reached foreign markets.
You mentioned cutlery. We’re upper middle class. We already have Wüsthof for our kitchen and Zwilling for our table, and we’re done for life. No tariff on dropping them off for sharpening. The same for our Le Crueset and Staub cookware. Clean any carbon deposits on the enamel with baking soda, keep the cast iron properly seasoned, and we’re set until we die.
Tariffs are a consumption tax, pain is relative, retail consumption accounts for a larger percentage of working and middle class income, and the working class buys cheap crap they need to replace on the regular.
There’s no tariff on first and second mortgages; country club, dining club and town club memberships; summer homes; private school tuition; season tickets to sports and the arts; and vacations.
And all of this is moot since as of yet none of the tariffs are targeted.
I think draft coverage can often underplay how much destination matters.* He’s got his work cut out for him amid the mess that is Cleveland. Though, the current reporting suggests Watson has likely played his last snap for the Browns. Flacco is 40. And, if Sanders is, as his boosters suggest, much better than Gabriel, then there is as clear a path for him as any fifth round pick could hope.
*How good is Sam Darnold? I know KOC has friends in San Fran from the same coaching family-tree that spoke highly of Darnold’s growth while backing up Purdy in 2023. But Minnesota is about as ideal a situation as any quarterback could hope with Jefferson, Addison and Hockenson as it’s top three targets, an above average line, one of the best left tackles (though injury cut short Darrisaw’s season), and a head coach that ascended the quarterbacks coach->passing game coordinator->offensive coordinator ladder. Cousins looked terrible his first year removed. Interested to see how Darnold does in Seattle. With JSN’s breakout last year, Darnold has a legit no. 1. Hopefully Kupp can stay on the field. After that the targets look serviceable…
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