"... and to kill St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson — the Post-Dispatch has learned."

In that light, consider the new New Yorker cover:

In the case of that last post, it was: worms.

I have 31 posts with the tag "worms." Isn't that wonderful — the wonderful world of blog worms? For example, back in July 2013, I was (for some reason) interested in the question whether the word "hello" appears in the Bible, and I found:

Job 17:14 Then I could greet the grave as my father and say to the worms, "Hello, mother and sisters!"

There was the line from the "Ode to Joy": "even to the worm ecstasy is given."

And "Paragordius obamai — a parasitic worm" (named to honor Obama).

And the Jack Handey deep thought: "The other day I got out my can opener and was opening a can of worms when I thought, 'What am I doing?!'"

There was my favorite page from my old "Amsterdam Notebooks," page 21, with a worm in the apple:


(Enlarge.)

There was that time back in 2005 when I was blogging and: "As I write this, the little kid across the street is screaming: 'A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah! A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah!'"

And that's me now, when something so specifically taggable comes up:  A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah! A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah! 

Or... there are so many exquisite little tags... I'm always exclaiming...  

Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Oh! Ah! Nothing/nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nunsneckties! Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Oh! Ah!

I love the variety here. In the center column, Harry Reid has a seeming halo above him, and one frame down is the halo of streetlight over the snow in Ferguson. In the left column, the 2-headed Schumer looks devilish, and below him, Putin bows his head down and lifts up his champagne glass. Putin senses victory, while over in the right column, RG3 bows in the defeat of having "Played last game."

At the top of the page is a pumpjack, photographed to look like a hellish robot...



... and the headlines at the top of the columns reinforce a dread of encroaching robots: "Flying robots to start serving in restaurants by end of '15...," and "Scientists on brink of creating artificial life.../Digitize brain of WORM and place inside ROBOT!"

As explained here, I rediscovered my 2002 notebook that extracts simple rules from individual works of art by Paul Klee. I've found images of the works where I can, and these appear above the relevant transcription from the notebook. At the bottom are the scans from my notebooks. The idea is to enhance perception of the original, but also to give anyone a way to get going into a drawing/painting that would have value on its own.



• Oil transfer method on watercolor ground — "The Great Emperor Rides to War." Bands of horizontal lines — less straight — one band is the lines of his smile lips — Architectural & symbolic shapes built into the figure. One central man.



• Horizontal pen lines. Dots, circles or crescents on the lines. Then vertically connect the shapes — okay to angle & curve on the vertical way down. "Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net" (Musical notation)
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"... I could see the strain on everyone. Older parents with new partners means that not all parties are thrilled to be spending Thanksgiving in the company of that person's family rather than their own.... And even if everyone is willing to look past broken relationships and accept the emerging new ones across all generations, it doesn't mean that this unity of purpose — a meal together at Thanksgiving — is necessarily a good thing. There are, for one thing, too many people now. Too many families. Because if my girls want to include mom and dad and their partners, what of the families of their husbands?... This year, I understand that my kids are bearing the burden of a family holiday together. They're trying too hard to be with everyone in some fashion over a period of very few days allotted to that purpose. It seems to me that the kindest parents are the ones who stay to the side and let the ball fall away from their court sometimes. Maybe even oftentimes. And so this year, I tossed the bird out the window, so to speak..."

Writes Nina Camic (my colleague) in the NYT.

ADDED: I love when doing nothing — especially when it avoids a lot of effort — amounts to the higher path. Virtue in not acting. That applies to a lot more than Thanksgiving. As for Thanksgiving, I always appreciated it when my sons' father wanted them over. Thanksgiving is the last weekend of the semester, and there follows a lovely, long winter break. Thanksgiving is precisely the weekend when I am not looking for more of a workload. So I was glad to step back and let the ex-husband have the boys over. If I got extra points — kindness credit — for letting go, that was nice, but I was always openly grateful for the relief. I was glad to do nothing. It's Thanksgiving, and as they say — and I truly mean it: Thanks for nothing!

I read this entire article trying to understand a headline I misread. Somehow the word I didn't see — which belongs at the ellipsis — is "sex." The topic of too much makeup interests me, so I see those 3 words together, and they make a set.

Maybe others look at that headline — "Too much makeup sex led to millionaire's restraining order" — and go right to the word "sex," then group it with "makeup," and immediately realize the makeup is not mascara and lipstick and so forth but the relationship stage, and perhaps the subject of "makeup sex" seems compelling. To me, it's one of those old Seinfeld memes.

Jerry: Well, at least you probably had some, uh, pretty good make-up sex afterwards.

George: I didn't have any sex.

Jerry: You didn't have make-up sex? How could you not have make-up sex? That's the best feature of the heavy relationship.

George: I missed out on the make-up sex.

Jerry: In your situation the only sex you're going to have better than make-up sex is if you're sent to prison and you have a conjugal visit.

By the way, I love the title of that YouTube: "Sexo de reconciliacion."

I'm still interested in the fantastic scenario in which a woman's wearing too much makeup led to a millionaire — a man, one presumes — getting a restraining order. What exactly would have had to happen? But it didn't happen, so it's absurd to... make up that story.

... time, once again, to fire up the old blog.

"They say that [Dorian Johnson] made up the claim that Brown had his hands up which kickstarted the 'Hands up, don't shoot' protest movement."

In his TV interviews Johnson said that Wilson shot Brown in the back at which point he turned round with his hands up saying: 'I don't have a gun, stop shooting!'...

If Johnson lied, he did horrible damage. What is the (nonpatronizing) argument for not holding him accountable?

"... I always get squicked out hearing about MFA programs and writer's colonies. Like, I dunno. How can you make Real Art when you're enjoying a free vacation and a kindly old man is leaving treat baskets outside of your door. You should be writing in your underwear in a filthy apartment with roaches crawling up your walls and nothing to eat but cigarettes and bottom-shelf whiskey. Bah, I'm romanticizing."

(A commenter on a Metafilter post.)

Says Ta-Nehisi Coates in "Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid":

Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."...

Creedal... chastener... yeeesh....

I expect to read the genre of reading the genre of Obama race speeches for the rest of my life. I only wish my friend Barack Obama could go meta and talk about the talking about what he has to say about race. If only — if only! — Obama — when he's out of office — would bust loose and tell us everything he really thinks, transcend this sententiousness, and tell us the truth... as it looks to him.

I retreat, white-ladylike, into the OED and look up "creedal." "Of, relating to, or characterized by a creed." I bounce straight to the relevant Obama speech:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can....

Remember how beautiful that once was?