Suppose it were Friday clxxviii: And one forgot to go to the bank

    That's not so bad.
    There's always the
    movie.

      



    
















Anthony Perkins
  and Janet Leigh
Shamley Productions
  at Universal Studios
Alfred Hitchcock
  producer-director
Psycho
1960

Šli and the family stone

The upper Adriatic is not the most

fertile setting for dreaming up a

tease for the American president,

but that's where the esteemed col-

umnist for The New York Times, by

way of the internet, found one at

an hour I will not mention. Still,

to read Gail Collins by the dawn's

early light would be such a tonic

for those who stay up in the dark

to cavort in her latest fantasy, I

feel others may follow one's lead.

Her latest foray into presidential

interaction is so promising in its

particulars, and flawless in expres-

sion, that I commend it without a

single excerpt to spoil a delicious

sequencing of inspired irritants. If

you are not too elderly to withstand

the occasional ribald allusion, the

whole tenor of the thing encourages

being read to the tides, high or low.

Gail Collins
How to torture Trump
  Who's less popular than
  Elton John?
The New York Times
August 14, 2019

Sunday nibbled sleeve xi: Frank Bruni and vituperation

Columnists seem to be writing much
more about their personal lives and
their families these days, than be-
fore. I mean, I know that like Frank
Bruni, Liebling liked to eat, but in
skewering a hypocrite I'd say their
difference is telling. In his col-
umn of this weekend, Bruni defends
the sovereignty of his sexuality
without failing to touch upon fear
for a remaining eye and love for his 
mother. I don't know about Liebling,
but I think hypocrisy fared no bet-
ter for his omission of these facts.

Their difference must be found in
triumphs Bruni has achieved, to ad-
dress hypocrisy with pitilessness.
He gives it the grammatically pre-
carious term, hate, but it's plain-
ly a failure of faith that he means.

Shakespeare avoided this confusion
with Caesar, and Liebling with Long.
His are insights of a double-edged 
kind. But who doesn't need to work
on the precariousness of the senses
when the passions are their author?

Frank Bruni
Hate is so much big-
  ger than Trump
The New York Times
August 10, 2019

Farrow & Ball
Picture Gallery Red
  and Mahogany No. 36
Dorset, England