I bet he doesn’t even fucking share, does he?

I’d try to one-up you but it would only end in doxxing myself.

The first time this happened to me I knew what I wanted to order without the menu, and they still tried to make me QR code it. I think that place has since reformed but I only do takeout from them now.

They claim it’s also to replace the headsets for audio explanations, etc., but either way it’s bullshit. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/newsletter/2022-01-22/essential-arts-qr-codes-in-museums-blessing-and-curse-essential-arts

When places reopened after the first wave of the pandemic they tried to brute force it into existence. It’s faded a bit since then but I still come across it now and then. So not quite (*latest fad), but fad enough.

There are also museums that replaced the about-this-painting placards with QR codes.

Most places I can eventually manage to get a paper menu but sometimes I have to rely on the people I’m dining with to even order coffee.

Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell ya, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon . . . You know, cause I’ve worked in a lot of morgues and I tell you people do that all the time.

“Okay, okay, we lost the game, but our starters’ plus-minus in the first quarter was really great, so . . .”

Reminds me of the person on the Wikipedia talk page for the Afghanistan war saying the U.S. actually won it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)/Archive_16

To say America lost the war in Afghanistan is a huge lie because America never really tried fighting seriously after accomplishing its objective.

If streaming it suits your purposes, I like this site: https://movie4kto.net/movie/watch-chiraq-free-5137

Fiverr is an Israeli company.

This seems weird, since they’re separated by so many election cycles, but Elizabeth Warren is only one year younger than either Al Gore or Howard Dean.

Turns out David the Gnome was about David Koresh. Really makes you think.

More and more people are saying it.

(One of the Gracchi quoting Cato the Censor - horseshoe theory?)

If Ken Burns’s Jazz were made today it still wouldn’t cover any jazz from the last 50 years

Your bed is not messy if Mr. Softie is comfortable.

I have a dying relative who blocked all mention of Israel and Palestine on Twitter because they don’t want to be depressed in their final months, but they still have MSNBC on all day and are hypervigilant about whatever it is Trump is up to.

I should read the Guerney and Fusso Dead Souls, too - I read the P&V and based on that and their Master and Margarita translation I think humor is their weak point. Speaking of which, if you come across a good translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, please let me know - the one I have (the John Cournos version) sometimes betrays that a joke has been translated, but never in a way that lets you know what was funny.

Janet Malcolm demolishes (somewhat unfairly) P&V: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/ (Pevear responds)

Several years ago I developed a translation theory obsession, so a few recommendations from that binge -

• David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (the most casually readable one on this list)
• George Steiner’s After Babel (controversial but worthwhile)
• Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (I know, I know, Ezra Pound, but he and John Dryden are the godfathers of translation theory for poetry and this predates his fascism)
• Barton Raffel’s The Art of Translating Poetry
• Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

There are a lot of books that are pocket-sized, and many people carry purses. I don’t have a book every time I’m in line at the grocery store, but for the examples the author uses - “waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start” - yes, of course I’ll have a book with me.

No one’s beaten the shit out of me for it yet. (Some folk did look askance at me at a wedding once.) But we’re not even talking about “people who get angry at you for looking at your phone,” we’re talking about people who pretend they have no idea how humans ever functioned without phones.