Game on

  I always know a game
  is interesting, if I 
  do not care who wins
  or know their names.

Suppose it were Friday clxxix: People are going to ask

People are going to ask, of course,
if I had been an American when the
President declared it to be a great
day for civilization, saving millions
of lives, to be banished from every
progressive movement in the Middle 
East at the expense of embedding Rus-
sia and stateless terrorism in a piv-
otal dynastic state in the region, in
league with Iran and in a new axis of
convenience with the sole Asian member
of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance.

I suppose I can finagle a letter from
my doctor, excusing me from vigilance.

Origins of Wednesday ci: Show me our progress

    I bet it's glorious.

Dartmouth Hall
Hanover

Search engine

  It just seems to me that a search

  engine is defined as much by dis-

  position as by denomination. Any-

  one thinking to sacrifice October

  to the misdirections of our head-

  lines has already chosen to watch

  but not to find the season's arc.

Triumph Scrambler

Origins of Wednesday c: It's OK to ask

   The Nobel Prize season is upon us
   again, and the chemists and phys-
   icists have already been identif-
   ied. The American President warns
   that the Prizes are rigged, or he
   would surely be getting one. What
   for, has not been discovered yet.

   Can't we study something simpler?

James Peebles

Albert Einstein Professor

  Emeritus

Princeton, New Jersey

October 8, 2019

A little monumental, savage treachery, anyone?

The New American Government has waived
its long-standing strategic fastidious-
ness of opposition toward the Turks'
long-standing genocidal disdain toward
Kurdistan, with a more immaculate per-
fection than ever of strongman fury a-
gainst creeping cultural pluralism. If
the unintended consequence is the be-
trayal of three national interests in
a single gesture of savagery, who will
be the one to protest the abandonment
of anti-terrorist allies, of a critic-
al component of Iraqi territorial in-
tegrity, and of this nation's reliab-
ility in international commitments,
for who could ever dream of refusing
the affections of a vicious tyrant?

Eric Schmitt and

  Maggie Haberman

Trump endorses Turkish

  military operation ...

The New York Times

October 7, 2019

Saturday commute clxxvi: Carbon footprints we have known

I guess the implications of the ex-
tinction now being foretold are that
when our mesquite smokers and grills
are discovered, centuries after this
next Pompeii, they'll be exhumed by
some unprecedented species, at best,
and not just by some unforetold it-
eration of our own. This is almost
too troubling to contemplate, for
fear that our cauldrons and metals
and igneous kettles may, unlike the
classical crockery entombed by Vesu-
vius, in all their decorative narra-
tive, be doomed to inscrutability,
a testament of Usage, untranslated.

Maynard Dixon
No Place to Go
1935

Order to dazzle

New York's Museum of Modern Art,
having made itself great again,
is readying a reception for the
flag of Jasper Johns (1954-55).
Advance publicity suggests that
the curators have entertained
themselves no end, with the de-
light of proposing new juxtapo-
sitions of the wittiest impli-
cations of the age. Now, it is
difficult to suppress a slight
anticipatory squeal of one's
own, at such innocent reshuf-
fling of familiar iconography,
at the very moment when the
playful American President is
outdoing himself with novel
rearrangements in the separa-
tion of powers by a similarly
coy curatorship. Readers, too,
should one have a flag to sus-
pend, or a President, are ad-
vised to extend an experiment-
al sense of play to their own
re-conceptions of order.

i  Jeenah Moon, photography
   The New York Times©