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🎵 Well, I keep on thinkin' title-bout you, brother and sister, golden Ayer sur prizefighter 🎵

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S hould the editors of the TLS publish my just-submitted latest, below, a stylishly svelte 192 words on A.J. Ayer, Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell, in their next biweekly issue (August 7), six weeks after my letter from June 26 on James Bryce*, I shall have broken my record from 2020 of eight weeks between letters. *Which latter letter has afforded us yet another reason to take Google AI Overviews with the usual crystallized sodium chloride: pace one such result from yesterday, subject to ever-revised replacement, it was not my letter on Bryce, but the one below mine, by the veteran center-right editor Daniel Johnson (son of the late author Paul Johnson) wot applied Bryce re Zionism and the Balfour Declaration to modern Israel. To the Editor: In his review of Twilight of the Dons by Colin Kidd ( July 24 ) , Richard Vinen describes the Oxford philosopher A.J. "Freddie" Ayer   as having felt aggrieved not to have found boxer Mike Tyson in prior recognition of his eminence. Bu...
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Sense in Reticence Ability

F rederic Raphael, asked which chamber in the castle of his life he kept locked and its contents safe from scrutiny, after the lead character in (and who, aided by such strategic concealment, admitted by him at the end, had led)  A Double Life , a novel by Adam Morris, lead character in Raphael's The Glittering Prizes; "I t is the very idea of being known that [Raphael] is questioning " : "Part of us is nothing to do with anyone else. That's all. There has to be something that one withholds. Reticence has a way of being very eloquent." A lbert Cossery, Egyptian-French novelist, via the two tenets of the practical joker Heykal from his novel The Jokers : "Number one is that the world we live in is governed by the most revolting bunch of crooks ever to defile the soil of this planet ... Number two is that you must never take them seriously, which is exactly what they want." G ore Vidal: "I'm exactly as I ...
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'Whatever' possessed us

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As first posted to my historic and long-deleted (though archived) blog,  SUB SPECIE  AE TERNITATIS , July 14, 2005.  For a template of my gracious way in handling situations like unto that depicted, see my mock-Nockian, lavishly illustrated ( with French postcards, even! ) and eminently unGoogleable  Me-Moeurs of a Superfluid Manhood  from June 14, 2012. Speaking of th' Goog', I note that my young benefactress - for I do not think of her as antagonist so much as catalyst and occasion for the freer play of my trained faculties, and therefore do not adopt the wounded, aggrieved stance that in our culture seems to be the default response to personal or political conflict - from 1991, whose surname, in one of the finest essays in ironic nominative undeterminism in story or song, legend or lore, in all the annals of recorded history, commences with that of the great German poet who passed many a twilit year in Gespr ä che mit Eckermann , has...
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Smoke on the Water (fire in the sky)

24 hours in Marquette Township, four events: Yesterday: 95 degrees.  c. 3pm: toilet flushes silently with no pressure: water off for c. 45m due to a hitting of a water main at a nearby apartment site under construction. Today am: average daily kWh down from 38 on July 2025 electric bill to 22 in July 2026, 42% reduction, saving c. $68. Primary: reduced A/C with thermostat at 78. pm: smell smoke, see nothing burning in kitchen, open door to hallway to stronger smell, look out windows to smoky haze, search  Marquette smoke for story: c. 830 wildfires in Canada, others in Minnesota, thence across Superior to wide band across upper Upper Yooper Peninsula. First ever emergency alert blares from Samsung Android phone: air quality health warning.
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This Month's Episode of 'WWUSB (What Would Uncle Scott Buy)?': Loco for Cocoa Nuts

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H i, D.S. "Uncle Scott" Lahti here: you may know me from Gmail, Wik ipe dia , the TLS , the USPS, or perhaps  Blair ❤️s Michael ,  whose scripts I, in my capacity as Head Senser ( all six of 'em ) at USN (The Uncle Scott Network) approve for release into human populations. I can't tell you how many times that, while browsing the virtual aisles at Walmart.com for home delivery, I have been approached via text message by one awe-struck fan and fellow shopper after another, asking, " WWUSB ( What Would  Uncle Scott Buy ) in the way of [ insert food or gadget here ]?" Many's the ...
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Beggin' yer pardon, Mr. Robbins, but didn't Harry Browne, et al, kinda get here first, second ...

M onster best seller  whose messages kind of seem more than vaguely familiar to anyone acquainted, say, with Harry's "Blue Sky and White Cloud" , &c.
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This Week's Episode of 'Jet Blasts in the News': A Rainy, Runny Night in Georgia (and Seventeen Other States)

E mail, July 3, 2026: At #2 , as it were, among the Trending Searches at th' Goog.
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