Despite her Italian Catholic background, Tomb Raider looked at the buckets of applesauce she made recently and thought, “I can use this on latkes.” So for the last night of Hanukkah, she made a PILE of them for me. And for reasons obvious, we were particularly hungry, so we ate a few too many. OK, more than a few too many, and now I’m paying for it. So these links are being written from the smallest room in the house. Max Reger would be proud.

Some days are packed with great birthdays and today is one of them. Just a sampler would include a guy whose wife scared the horses; the inspiration for Schroeder; a woman whom BBC depended on; a guy who had an effect on all of us; an anthropological fraud; the guy who was the reason I became a scientist; a guy who wrote an inordinate amount of crazy-but-influential novels; the guy who made my favorite instrument a legit choice in jazz; a guy who, in a field rife with grift, managed to outgrift everyone; an artist who delivered what Warhol only pretended to; an old friend of SP’s who set the standard for beards; a woman who took a creaky bureaucracy and turned it into an effective means of oppression; a pretty excellent comedian with a sense of humor that matched many of us; a bear of an accidental running back; and a baseball player best known as a fuckface.

And speaking of which, let’s see what those other fuckfaces are up to.

 

Fortunately, Tomb Raider’s latkes were excellent.

 

“Instead of therapy, I’ll dribble out 3000 words of self-indulgent idiocy.”

 

Watching that game was like seeing a multiple car pileup on a set of train tracks with the Acela screaming into the wreck. It was creepily entertaining.

 

Antisemitism, straight up.

 

I’m sure this is convincing everyone of the rightness of their cause.

 

It really was no miracle, what happened was just this…

 

I mean, where do you even start with this???

 

The Old Man thinks there’s only one thing better than a great jazz flutist. And that’s two great jazz flutists.