David Sewell

Lowriders Stamps Stamp | USPS.com Celebrate a culture that originated in the working-class Mexican American/Chicano communities throughout the American Southwest with the Lowriders stamps.

If you're in the US and still use snail mail, this is day of issue for Lowriders Forever stamps. A fun set.

store.usps.com/store/produc...

I really don’t think enough is being made of the fact that it’s a three supposedly do-nothing toothless scholarly organizations—the AHA, the MLA, and the ACLS— who are directly responsible for one of the clearest and most damning exposures of this administration’s stupidity and malfeasance.

“Only” 750K displaced in Lebanon. But as a percentage of population that’s 3 1/2 times Iranian displacement. 🙁

Pope Leo expresses sorrow over death of Maronite priest in Israeli bombing Father Pierre El Raii, a Maronite parish priest, was a revered leader among Christians in the area.

The priest was killed as the result of an Israeli double-tap strike. His village is Christian but supposedly Hezbollah had moved assets to the area.
www.ewtnnews.com/world/middle...

L'Orient Today has just reported this also. This is the Raouche Ramada, on the Corniche in NW Beirut, one of the city's fanciest areas. Unless I've missed something it's the first strike in Beirut proper since the start of the Iran war.

My goodness, I didn’t know you were on Bluesky. (If she were still with us, I wonder what she would say about social media?)

Cover of the British first edition of "The Unicorn", with an illustration of a unicorn inside a small hexagonal pen.

In the middle of reading a lot of Iris Murdoch. Currently this one. By way of an antidote to the times we live in among other things.

The only building letter with an ornament? That would suggest guerilla art (of a good kind).

Devastating. This war can't end too soon.

Mostly in a side room that is easy to miss

Don't forget the SPCA thrift shop. Which is also a pretty good source for music, hundreds of CDs.

Thus Gabriel Grub, the misanthropic Christmas-loathing, child-detesting sexton beset by goblins in an inset tale in Charles Dickens's "The Pickwick Papers". I'll bet you can guess which member of the Trump administration I immediately thought of as I read that.

Line drawing of a sexton in old-fashioned garb, carrying a lantern in his right hand and a spade over his left shoulder.

"When groups of children bounded out of the houses, Gabriel smiled grimly, and clutched the handle of his spade with a firmer grasp, as he thought of measles, scarlet fever, thrush, whooping-cough, and a good many other sources of consolation besides."

NPR and local affiliates like Virginia Public Media have really stepped up their investigative reporting in the past year. A silver lining to the loss of federal funding, maybe.

Cognitive dissonance reigns. Here in Virginia I have a congressman who, during Black History Month, gave a pious nod to the Underground Railroad, and whose stands on immigration, etc., leave no doubt that if he had been around in 1850 he would have voted for the Fugitive Slave Act.

I think it was built on the wishful thinking that everyone in Cville would soon be driving Mini Coopers.

True. Though XKCD-style alt text and alt text for accessibility is usually a binary choice

Not just Black and white JESSE JACKSON| 1941-2026

When Jesse Jackson delivered a sermon at the UU church in Charlottesville in 2017:
dailyprogress.com/article_f9aa...

King Arthur being arrested (from the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

You can’t make this stuff up.

Screenshot of email not addressed to me, subject "Settlement Confirmed – Receipt Issued" with text reading "Earnest Client, Our records exhibit associate in nursing rudimentary defrayment connected your chronicle. Delight resolve it quick. Defrayment Character: IB0ADAI3NU6C33~4ACXB"

This is the most incomprehensible phishing email I've ever received. With all the translation apps out there, inexcusable for a scammer to produce something so unlikely to fleece the recipient! (The attachment was a PDF of a supposed Paypal receipt for $460 with a number to call "if it wasn't you".)

So many ridiculous ironies in this story. A widow of a Cuban dissident, threatened with deportation at the precise time the U.S. is making life in Cuba intolerable with an eye to regime change. Not a flight risk. Textbook case for humanitarian release.

The father then makes a paste of the ground bones and blood of the slain men, and in that paste bakes their two heads, and serving them up at a feast, causes their mother to eat of the dish. Iago seems a gentleman beside the hellish Moor, Aaron, of this blood-soaked tragedy."

Titus Andronicus, a Roman noble, in revenge for the ravishing of his daughter Lavinia and the cutting off of her hands and tongue, cuts the throats of the two ravishers, while his daughter holds between the stumps of her arms a basin to catch the blood.

TITUS ANDRONICUS (1593)--"A repulsive drama of bloodshed and unnatural crimes, now believed to have been written by Shakespeare, since it often is included in the original Folio Edition of 1623. No one who has once supped on its horrors will care to read it. Here is a specimen of them:

I had always remembered as a boy reading a horrified synopsis of Titus Andronicus by Helen Keller. A bit of searching just now tells me it was by Helen REX Keller, author of the 1922 "Reader's Digest of Books". That Keller's review is still worth sharing:

The "we" referred to here is the Center for Biological Diversity--well worth supporting for their commitment and experience in conservation litigation.

Sorry if this is sacrilegious, but I'm smiling at the thought of the Walk for Peace monks on their bus ride back to Texas all singing "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" for hours on end 🍻🍻🍻

Age verification: one of my early TV memories is watching a news story showing razor wire going up where the Berlin Wall would soon be built. Young enough to be clueless about what was going on, old enough to know my mother was upset at what we were seeing.