Monday, October 2, 2017

Thoughts 'n' Prayers Day

The Classics IV in 1968.

Happy Thoughts 'n' Prayers Day, folks! Today's the day we have thoughts 'n' prayers, because it's Too Soon to have anything else.

While


Howard doesn't have a word to say to those guys. I guess because they're not doing anything radical like proposing some kind of policy. I saw the tidal effects of that on Twitter, just horrible.


I really hate that guy. Lives in England and won't even leave his mom's basement for fear the house might turn out to be in a Muslim no-go zone, and tries to tell us in America—well, tries to tell the audience of his employer, Alex Jones—what to think.

Turns out of course that Nevada gun laws are super-weak anyway.


Even President Obama came out with the thoughts 'n' prayers, meanwhile, or praying (using a nice lively verb instead of a static noun) and thoughts.

I'll leave your prayers to you, but I'm feeling like what kind of thoughts should we be having, actually? What should we be thinking about? If Howard Kurtz thinks thoughts about gun control are out of order, what thoughts would he recommend? (Just read—this is going to sound unbelievably irrelevant—a story about the German harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm, 1914-95, who was at some point in the 1930s in a hotel in Salzburg having breakfast with Richard Strauss, who would later, in 1944, compose a big piece for her, and some unnamed older gentleman who insisted on having deep philosophical talk. Ahlgrimm, being young and easily annoyed, and distracted by the beautiful weather, said, "I hate philosophy," and Strauss smiled and said, "That's one thing you and I have in common with Goethe." Which putdown of that older gentleman is one of the greatest putdowns I have ever seen.)

I was planning to write something about Catalunya this morning, but everything got crowded out. The funniest moment of the day was also the most frightening in a way, when Emperor Trump thought the suffering people of Puerto Rico would get a nice lift, when he was briefly forced by the exigencies of office to relocate briefly from his own golf course in Bedminster, NJ, to somebody else's golf course in Jersey City, where they were holding the annual President's Club team tournamen if he dedicated the trophy, duly won by the US team, to the victims of all three hurricanes, Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Like a late-night radio jock, "And for those who've been experiencing a lot of wind in their lives, here's Dennis Yost with The Classics IV and 'Stormy'."

(That's a parody account, right? But a really pitch-perfect one.)

No YouTube of Ahlgrimm playing the Strauss piece (a suite from the opera Capriccio, dated 1944), but Bach is always the closest to prayer I get.

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