My team never sleeps pic.twitter.com/THH4MiMMMI

— Nicole Shanahan (@NicoleShanahan) August 29, 2024

Memorial Day, 2020. Joe Biden posted this campaign ad featuring himself standing over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

If you have been trash-talking Trump the last two days for supporting a family and claiming he was campaigning. I expect you to share this video. pic.twitter.com/Mxq1tUHsYd

— Matt Tardio (@angertab) August 29, 2024

Now adversaries, Robert DePalma and Melanie During once dug fossils together.

Sayre’s Law contends that: “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

New York Magazine has an interesting, gossipy story about academics feuding over competition for credit for a new theory of the cause of dinosaur extinction.

The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. Among the subfields, nastiness correlates with the size and carnivorousness of the creature under study, the comity possible among those who study ammonites being unlikely among those who study T. rex. A “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism” is how his biographer describes Sir Richard Owen, the man who coined the term dinosaur. The first two famous American paleontologists, the prickly academic Othniel Marsh and the gentleman naturalist Edward Cope, savaged each other in print, hired spies and counterspies, destroyed fossils, and generally worked harder to humiliate each other than to describe the boxes and boxes and boxes of remains they pulled from the extraordinarily rich fossil beds of the American West.

It would take years for the ten days During and DePalma spent together to spin into a scandal that consumed both of them. She would accuse him of research misconduct and fabricating data. He would accuse her of plagiarism and defamation.

RTWT

Ernest Hemingway with Wyoming trout.

Of Hemingway books,there are no end.

I picked up recently a new one describing in detail his sporting activities and writing during summer sojourns in Wyoming after he left his first wife Hadley for the slimmer, sexier, and richer Pauline Pfeifer, whose family money financed a grand new life style that included multiple new cars, an African safari, and the custom fishing boat Pilar.

Thus copiously funded, Ernest Hemingway fished and hunted in Wyoming during six summers between 1928 and 1939.

His eldest son, Jack (by Hadley) joined him in the Summer of 1929, and received an introduction to the field sports that made him a life-long fly fisherman.

Jack had watched his father all summer from the sidelines, learning about casting and playing fish — not rushing a fish but not playing it too long either. He’d learned how to clean fish, and to place fish in a creel with fresh leaves, keeping them damp and cool. He’d even learned how to cook a fish; his father suggested leaving the lungs inside for better flavor and cooking with salt, pepper, and lemon.”

–Darla Worden, Cockeyed Happy, 2021.

Lungs? Lungs?? Trout haven’t got lungs. I suppose the author must mean gills, but gills are not exactly “inside” the fish, and how on earth would they add flavor?

It’s nice to see Bill Clinton up there speaking and not some impeached, womanizing rapist. #DNC2024

— Hollaria Briden, Esq. (@HollyBriden) August 22, 2024

This brutal ad against Kamala Harris is going up in the swing states.

Extremely effective. pic.twitter.com/6xTtEAkotG

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 26, 2024

Eight days after our satellite internet connection went down, Viasat got a technician out to the Central Pennsylvania farm to deal with the problem. We pay hundreds and hundreds per month for “business” level services and this is what support service is like.

But, don’t worry! Viasat will cancel charges for the days our connection was down. Of course, the service call results in a $200 extra charge.

For the benefit of commenters: Starlink is not available for my location. Our alternative is Hughesnet, which is not really any better.

This kind of thing, a vital system component wearing out and expiring, does happen every four or five years, and repair servics are always excruciatingly slow.

Our rural internet connection has been down since Tuesday, 8/20.

Anticipated return: Tuesday afternoon, 8/27.

I was determined to locate the phrase’s origin, and I did find it in a lengthy 1996 essay in American Heritage by Keegan on his relationship with, and perspective upon America, as a Briton.

The quote:

“Britain’s glory time, between Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, when Hitler’s army stood on the French coast and only a filigree of Spitfires hung between my unthinking self and invasion.”

It’s a fine essay.

In honor of the Feast of St. Grouse, here’s a link to an ebook version of J.K. Stanford’s hilarious The Twelfth.