Baby enjoying a Vietnamese meal tonight in central Vermont, hotbed of Southeast Asian cuisine. pic.twitter.com/n7r6Huk0Qv
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Save Me For a Rainy Day
Spotify has suggested this song to me week after week and it has finally grown on me. I like her voice. Reminds me of the first time I heard Madeleine Peyroux channeling Billie Holiday. Kat is like Twiggy meets Blossom Dearie?
No Sense of Coherence
From James MacGregor Burns' appearance on Booknotes in 1989:
"LAMB: [In your book you write] 'In the late 20th century, many Americans sense an intellectual, cultural, and political fragmentation and trivialization that pervades our public and private lives.' ... Is it in fact true that we're getting this?
BURNS: Yes. I think we're trivialized and fragmentized first of all governmentally and politically. We have that kind of system. But secondly our thinking tends to be, again as I was saying a moment ago, very specialized. We don't seem to have today the kinds of broad thinkers in so many different fields. You take a Walter Lippmann. I often disagreed with the guy, but you had a sense of a man who was thinking across a great body of thought. And some of the great philosophers of earlier days. To put this more broadly, Brian, I like to play a kind of a parlor game with people and that is to ask them if they are in a particular specialty -- whom do you remember? ... whom do you think will be remembered from this era 50 years from now in your field as we remember people from say 50 years back? As we remember, say, Lippmann, John Dewey in philosophy and architecture Frank Lloyd Wright; in musical comedy some of the great music ... you can go right across the board. It's quite fascinating and it's very hard to think of the people who will stand that test of time today."
Alan Greenspan's Happy Ending
From Nathaniel Branden's (Blumenthal's) appearance on Booknotes in 1989:
"[Alan Greenspan] was a member of our circle brought in by another member of our circle. He was reading 'Atlas Shrugged' as it was being written. I kind of love the story of Alan because it was -- all in its own terms -- a happy story. Because what made it interesting is that when Ayn first met him in an elevator, or met him through this other person, she was kind of negatively impressed. I liked him initially a good deal more than she did. There were reasons she didn't like some of his ideas. He was a Keynesian economically. He wasn't what he is today politically or economically. And he also at that time was a supporter of a then fashionable philosophy called 'logical positivism,' which taught that you can be certain of nothing. You can know nothing for sure. You can't even be certain that you existed.
So he and I would have rather hilarious conversations in which he would try to convince me that one couldn't know for a certainty that one existed. And my task was to see how irrational this was and to prove philosophically that one could have such knowledge for a certainty. Ayn thought I was quite mad to even waste my time talking to a person who would be saying he doesn't know if he exists or not. I kept saying -- listen, this is a very intelligent man. He is a good guy. You're going to see this story is going to have a very happy ending. And eventually he did change his ideas on these various subjects. He did become a very close friend of Ayn Rand. I think that she really cared for him a lot. And they were devoted until Ayn Rand died in 1982."
Viacom Drop, 1 Minute View
Apparently negotiations with Dish are going poorly ... if you were lucky, your scanner might have picked this up at 12:33, but every day trader on planet earth saw it at 12:34 ... these intraday pop and drop plays are not super common, and you'd have to be in front of the screen all day to catch them, which I don't like to do in my dotage, but if you're a youngster....
click to enlarge, get a big monitor