Howelings
A giraffe sleeps by sitting on its rear quarters, back legs and front legs facing forward, then laying its head sideways on the ground between the front legs while curving down the entire neck into an inverted C, making a pile a mere four feet high.
The Coalition for the Homeless in New York City estimates the number of homeless people in the city would fill Yankee Stadium (which seats 50,287) with several thousand having to stand.
The coalition claims that such numbers of homeless have not been seen in New York since the Depression.
Conrad Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, Officer of the Order of Canada and Knight of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great, who spent time in jail for defrauding his company’s shareholders of $30 million and whom we remember well from our publishing stint in Toronto (his wife is the columnist Barbara Amiel), has taken umbrage at a new book, “Merger of the Century,” that suggests Canada should become part of the United States.
“The idea makes me tremble with patriotic loathing,” writes the baron. “Over the past decade, the U.S. has debased its currency and destabilized the world financial system thanks to venal and incompetent Wall Street tycoons. Its foreign policy has lost its way in two costly wars that have made the world less safe, not more. American education and health care are both outrageously expensive and deliver relatively poor outcomes, while its once admired justice system has become a conveyor belt into a bloated and corrupt prison system.”
Since 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the First World War, expect a groaning shelf of volumes on the subject over the coming months.
Six of them are featured in this month’s New York Review of Books, framed by reviewer R.J.W. Evans in the context of a “calamitous conflict that, more than any other series of events, has shaped the world ever since; without it we can doubt that communism would have taken hold in Russia, fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, or that global empires would have disintegrated so rapidly and so chaotically.”
Without the assassination of the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, clumsily executed in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student dropout, the development of tanks and mustard gas and air bombardments would have been delayed or prevented; there’d have been no massacre of Armenians by Turks and no Arab uprisings; no battles of the Somme and Verdun; no Alpine “white war” on the most merciless of all fronts once Italy entered the fray; no German U-boats taking hostilities to the U.S. and all that that led to; no African and Asian fronts and, above all, no 16 million dead or 20 million wounded.
Comedian Lenny Bruce was pardoned —posthumously — by the governor of New York four decades after his conviction for saying bad things in a stand-up routine at Greenwich Village nightclub.
One of his quips at that club back in 1964 was:
“Did you see my New York Post review? It said ‘His regulars consist of mainlining musicians, call girls and their business managers.’ Isn’t that a little bit libelous?”
Quote for the Week:
“The only real music is when a baby first cries. Then the baby knows Mom will come running so it’s all show business after that.”
— Keith Urban
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