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All's Vanity Fair in the War on Love

A friend writes: I am bad at picking out boyfriends so I’ve kind of given up. I make bad choices. Whenever I give my famous talks to at-risk men and women and the women and men who put them there - the first series collected, of course, as Uncle Scott's Guide to Women for Men from Two to Six Inches  - I like to tell them that "if you had told me, all of you, that you had deliberately intended to wreck that portion of your respective lives devoted to romance, to judge by the results, I'd say I believe you. "For all of you have, since very earliest childhood, accepted from society, from your parents, teachers, friends, classmates, the media, blindly, uncritically, a whole vast network of false, vicious assumptions that lead you, time and time again, to involve yourself with the worst - and to reject the best, many of them hiding in plain sight for ages, though you in your blindness left them on the shelf till, alas, it was too late ..." To Be Continued (?) ...
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W hen visiting the Treasure Coast and its crown jewel, The 1337 Club, we invite you to stop in to the Vero Beach branch of the Lahti Library of Learned Literature - whose Chocolay Township branch, after its recent renovation, now devotes one of its three shelves right of the TV to the most concentrated assortment of classic writers east of, er ... Apartment 319 -  among whose 100+ titles are the 2001 edition, mentioned in the article below, of Jacques P é pin's Complete Techniques (Christmas 2024) and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home: A Cookbook (Christmas 2020), the latter a book version of the most inspired pairing of his-and-her immortals - not for nothing were Julia's initials ... J.C.   - since Ella and Louis took their turns cooing and belting the Great American Songbook seventy years ago. Don't miss, from Julia's Wiki page, her hair-raising shark-infested Second World War espionage, and, of course, the 1978 episode with Jacques on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, w...
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Family-ar Brew: In a White Cup with Black Coffee, Sons Shine of Their Love

L atest "Great Minds" Google deflation of my presumed originality, as I thought, What if Eric Clapton had left Cream? Would Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce restyle as ... "Half and Half?" So spring 2026, almost sixty years on, their two sons, along with Rob Johnson, calling themselves Sons of Cream, playing half songs of their eminent dads and half all their own, release a debut album called, I guessed it .
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O ne of the CDs of sacred choral music I recently bought featured this hymn , whose opening melody I from earliest early-morning childhood TV recalled at once. Do you? Probably the only show whose opening-theme composer was the one and only Martin Luther, and whose voice actors included Hal Smith (Mayberry's town drunk Otis) and Paul Frees (Boris Badenov, nemesis of squirrel and moose Rocky and Bullwinkle). Hint: clay animated boy and dog from Gumby and Pokey (autocorrect, 2x: "Pokémon") creators, homiletic in church sponsorship, named after young Israelite shepherd-cum-king and giant Philistine warrior wot he with sling slew and with sword decapped. No more phone calls ... MAJ (email): Thank you for the musical link and the ginormous old covenant hint  ! PS Director Sir John Rutter is a fine choral music composer in his own right and well worth hours of prolonged listenings.  Maj   DSL. :  Re Sir John Rutter , I also of course loved him as the Regal Beagle's favori...
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Who Read the Dogs In? A One-Man Show Starring, Featuring and Reviewed by ...

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  L atest "Mental Health Break" ( "his", not yours ) courtesy the Marquette Bureau Chief of the TLS , whose mailbox, speaking of letters of other sorts, so say Informed Delivery alerts from the usual aUSPiceS, is crammed to bursting with today's trifecta, Alan Bullock , Hitler and Stalin : Parallel Lives , Italo Calvino ,  Italian Folktales and Ferdinand Mount, Jem (and Sam) . U ncle Scott Says ™, When you bring together three of the ten best things in the world* - children, dogs and books** - the results speak bow-wo w nd volumes [2 min] . *The other seven , tied and in alphabetical order, are of course cake, cheese, ice cream, pepperoni,  (Uncle Scott's) pizza, (Uncle Scott's) root beer - - and (His) root beer floats. **Children, dogs and books  : except for that time when, in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville, c. 1972-1973, your irascible Miniature Schnauzer Tiffany followed you on  your bike ride to  the library next to  the Tom Thumb inc...
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"Power your day with women-led AI apps" - Google Play Store alert

G rr, gee, thanks, but I have other plans; is it AI-OK if I don't? Gosh, I feel so, so ... empowered , so ... nurturing , so bloody ... diverse and inclusive , even (already) ! But since my dwindling pile of virtue chips is near the vanishing point, I hope you'll help me stay on the right side of the 😇 - that's one hazard of believing, like the late great Leszek Kolakowski, that the actual devil of legend and lore, of story and song, really does exist , and always at closest range: you sometimes forget to keep a body count, and where you burned and buried all those preceding the day before yesterday - if I decide to patronize instead, oh, I don't know, a "black-owned" app or two (whatever the🔥 they  might look like), or maybe 🤔 download something from the ... "QTBIPOC" wing of the American "victim" class among the professionally "marginalized" and aggrieved, wounded "intersectional" "minorities" ...
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Of Nisbets, ISBNs and Has-Beens

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Continuing a previous post on Karl Popper that started as an email thread: O kay, just one more, which I shall great-grandfather in after having name-checked Robert Nisbet in closing my lead letter in the TLS for June 26; file the age-synced obits below under "What a difference thirty-five years do not make" or perhaps an expansion of the old Benny Hill/ pub joke ending with "twenty-two today!" by sixty more: Obituary, The New York Times , 1961:  ROBERT NISBET, 82, PAINTER, RIFLEMAN * Obituary, The New York Times , 1996:  Robert Nisbet 82, Sociologist and Conservative Champion ...
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