OK, Claudia Scheinbaum, the President of Mexico, is 5' 3". Check the horizontal lines running behind her and Trump’s head. Is he a foot taller, as he claims? Mark Carney is 5' 9".

apnews.com/article/w…

One of my former professors is called a “theatrologist” on Wikipedia.

Theatrologist???

Update: to his credit, he was surprised when he saw this on Wikipedia. Apparently, it is an Eastern European title that, here in the US, would be “Professor of Theatre Studies.”

I’m slow in observing things sometimes. It wasn’t that long ago that FOX broadcast the NFC games, and CBS did the AFC. Now, it’s like rock-paper-scizzors. When did this happen???

Tom Loughlin: We have traded the beauty and the deep silence of the winter season for noise and chaos. The way we celebrate the season now is the biggest indicator we have of how soulless modern culture has become. We cover this reality over with a thin and superficial pastiche of family, friends, and cozy warmth, but this mass-mediated pastiche can’t hide the deep emptiness lodged in a culture where the unending theme of buybuybuy is constantly drummed into us via every media outlet available. Continue reading →

To a man with a book, the whole world is about Winnie-the-Pooh. In this rerun of Ezra Klein’s 2023 podcast about what he calls the “The Quiet Catastrophe,” Klein talks about the loneliness “epidemic” with Sheila Liming, and about her book "Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time," and it just naturally dovetailed with “The House at Pooh Corner.” To be honest, what Klein and Liming consider a catastrophe I consider my happy place, but your mileage may vary. Continue reading →

Finished reading: The King of Torts by John Grisham 📚

A cautionary tale about the spiritually-corrupting effects of too much money. I like Grisham because, especially in this book, the conflict is more about moral choices than violence, and yet the I felt as if the main character didn’t really earn his redemption – it happened too easy.

Thanks to @dfte, I was referred to this interview with Josh Aronson, and this quotation, which oddly I thought connected to my reading of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, which I wrote about here. blockquote “MD: What was the starting point for this body of work? Was there a specific moment that catalyzed the project? JA: I wanted to reimagine coming-of-age from the perspective of the kids I grew up with, and from my own. Continue reading →

Finished reading: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown 📚

Wrote about it here.

A few days before Thanksgiving, I finished reading The House at Pooh Corner for the first time. I don’t remember being read to very much as a child, which may simply be a gap in my memory. My mother, who left school in 10th grade, wasn’t a big reader, so that makes sense; my father took us to the bookmobile that came to our neighborhood Monday evenings, and he’d read mostly biographies and sports books, and I inherited a few books that he owned as a child, but I just don’t remember him reading to me. Continue reading →

A lovely song by Tuck and Patti: Christmas Wish,

I just sent out a message to my Substack readers announcing I would no longer be writing there, nor on my website blog (scottwalters.net), but am moving my activity here. My previous plan was to centralize everything on my website. That website will remain as more of a static site for my books. It turned out that the blogging platform I used there was difficult to use than I anticipated, which served as a disincentive to write shorter, more casual observations. Continue reading →

This summary of Guy Debord’s analysis of our culture by Nobel prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society seems to be a fair description of our current situation.

Does anyone else find the pardoning of a turkey by the President a macabre tradition?

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all, especially my friend @apoorplayer who may or may not be buried in snow. I could spend the day thinking of all the things I’m grateful for.

(sneaking in the side door)

Shhhh. Don’t mind mind me. I’m back. Again.

Books written for K-12 teachers are mind-numbingly awful. It’s amazing anybody decides to become teachers.

Learn Like an Athlete – David Perrel. There’s nothing particularly earth-shattering about this short essay, but I have been surprised at how few people really know how to learn something in a focused, organized fashion. I think this is the result of our education system, in which teachers organize your learning for you. It’s the Mama Bird going out and finding the Worm of Knowledge and shoving it down students' only partly opened beaks. Continue reading →

RFK points at “ultraprocessed” food while ignoring what makes them necessary. Continue reading →

From Milton’s Paradise Lost – Eve’s dream of temptation: happy though thou art, Happier thou mayst be, worthier canst not be: Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods The dream is one of ambition, of dissatisfaction with mere happiness and a vision of being godlike. This is the philosophy upon which 21st century life is built. Continue reading →

“Companies lost their mojo for a combination of the following reasons: focus on cost reduction, decreased quality of the product, losing their own identity and uniqueness by mimicking others, straying from simple concepts, losing touch with the consumer, moving away from organizational strengths, trying too hard for the mass market, jumping on the bandwagon, losing innovation, becoming “greedy,” decreasing customer service, thinking more of the business than of the consumer, not paying attention to community relations, losing authenticity, and losing an open, innovative, creative culture. Continue reading →