James and Nora, Sitting in a Tree/If You See Kay, I an' G 💌
As emailed July 8, 2026:
Effective at once - "and not a moment too soon", as so say all a' youse - I shall crank up what H.L. Mencken would call "the old wheezing of the melodeon" and commence posting to my antique blog my formerly Gmailed jeux d'esprit.*
*Merriam-Webster, fittingly enough (highlighter added): A jeu d'esprit (literally "play of the spirit" or "play of the mind") is a French phrase used in English to describe a witty, light-hearted, or clever piece of writing, artwork, or spoken remark. It showcases intellectual agility and humor rather than deep, serious substance.**
**("His talents are of such delicacy they can scarce be discerned by the human eye ..." - My Ideal Reviewer., to which I would add, "... save for the infinitely indulgent editors of the TLS and National Review, the stern black-robed [in more ways than one, soon after, alas] judges of the Unz Historical Research Contest[s] - and Viewers of Gmail Like You")
James and Nora, Sitting in a Tree/If You See Kay, Eye an' Gee
The things we hear about, in every life, are as specks of primordial dust compared to the things we shall never hear about - and, trust "us" ("everyone", as Tiny Tim would say), for good reason. - Front cover, Uncle Scott Talks to At-Risk Youth and the Parents and Teachers Who Put Them There; back cover, Uncle Scott's Guide to Women for Men from 2 to 6 (Inches)
And my response, these last two-hundred fifty years, as I mop my glistening prow, I mean brow, is always "that is indeed quite ... humid, [late Uncle Blank/still-with-us-or-is-she-Auntie Question Mark] - but still, you're no J.J.!"
I refer, of course, not to J.J. "Kid Dyn-O-MITE!" Evans from Good Times, but to him who holds pride of place in these precincts, that titan of 20th-century world, including not least, (love's labours:) lust, letters, James "Ulysses/A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man/Dubliners/Finnegans Wake" Joyce, the I(rish)-man with the eyepatch, whose Mr.'s missives (autocorrect: "missiles"; those, too) to his Mrs.-to-be ("to be", as it happened, "much later", as Paul "Jet" McCartney would say: they Declared their In[terde]pendence on July 4, 1931, twenty-seven years after setting up housekeeping, scorching mail-slots an' all), Nora Barnacle - who fastened to him like one - set the NSFW standard in such matters.
"You mean like when he called her 'blank' a 'blank blank'?"
Yes, Gene "Match Game" Rugburn, I mean Rayburn ... Richard Dawson ... Charles Nelson Reilly ... (and, speaking of being spoiled for Joyce, let's not forget Elaine "ah-OO-gah!/Mrs. Bobby Van/later Mrs. Neil Simon" Joyce) - you can take that to the ... 'blank': just watch out for that Substantial Penalty - or is it Reward? - for Early Withdrawal ...
Home, James, and don't spare the horses (I'm ruined as ruined can be) ...
Tempting topics for future posts at Apartment319.blogspot.com:
The inverted Marxism, spilt religion, messianic delusions, and Python-worthy authoritarianism and cults of personality at the black heart of all the post-1945 "conservative", "libertarian" and adjacent "movements", by one whose every "friendship", online or off, dependent upon ongoing avowals of fealty to such "spooks in the head" (thank you, Max Stirner) died a death among the most deserved in all the annals of human history
Favorite quotes on the virtue of skeptical detachment from all forms of the herd mentality/morality, emotional reticence, indifference to the "burning issues" of the day, and on the impossibility of really knowing a person, yourself not least, from, e.g., Goethe, Colonel Sanders, Gore Vidal, Frederic Raphael and Bob Dylan
How to fall deeply and forever in love, seven months after her death at 85 and in the wake of reading her dot-connecting obituary, with a long-divorced friend of your parents - and a schoolteacher at that, dear gods in heaven, your occupational strike zone among the females of the species! - you had known since you were seven and she was thirty, about whose periodic flirtations with you across the 1990s you had been in denial due to your age-and-generation gap, her legacy "auntie" status and your own misguided, inherited ideas about love, fortifying, were it needed, your lifelong tragic sense of life and triggering a Niagara of tears over a hundred days in mid-2025 that seemed like a hundred times that many ... "or so I have read" ...
A 1967-1972 Moody Blues playlist (far deeper than your oldies station with "Nights in White Satin")
The power of sacred choral music, smooth jazz and relaxation music via ClassicalRadio.com/JazzRadio.com/and ZenRadio.com
If Not for Bob Dylan
Your holy-grail used books for $6 postpaid: the glories of Abebooks, Biblio, and eBay
The glories or otherwise, at the ripe age of 63+, of both-eyes cataract surgery, colonoscopy and Type 2 diabetes (only for DSL. Platinum Members - an Uncle Scott Extrusive!)
A Kate and Anna McGarrigle playlist
The glories of The Lark Ascending (Ralph Vaughan Williams), the "Flower Duet" from Lakmé (Léo Delibes) and the "Méditation" from Thaïs (Jules Massenet)
The glory of Thunderclap "Something in the Air" Newman
The foundation stones of the novel, east and west: the glories of The Tale of Genji and Don Quixote
The glories of the Icelandic sagas, the Kalevala of Finland and Kristin Lavransdatter by Norway's Nobelist novelist, Sigrid Undset
War and Peace as wisdom literature
Italo Calvino, 20th century Italian literature's answer to The Arabian Nights
The Glories of the Norton Anthologies of World Literature, English Literature and American Literature
AliExpress, China's candy-coated gadget store for the ages, home of my new favorite 4.9/5.0 kitchen cleaver and 11-13 day tracking from warehouse to U.S. Customs to you
The glories of Brazilian and Portuguese literature: Joaquin Maria Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Fernando Pessoa and José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
The glories of Walmart.com and the art of playing the 5-star review tally
Bruschetta Jack for $1.49/lb. and roast beef likewise: the glories of the Wisconsin Mennonite salvage-grocery country store
The glories of BestBuy.com
The glory of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams
Canada's most winsome lesbian twin-sister musicians of whom I bet you've probably never heard: the glory of Tegan and Sara
From Tube Bar to The Jerky Boys and the Cambodian Refugee Child: the art of the prank call
Clamping the Snamp: Doug Kahn's sound collage "Reagan Speaks for Himself" 46 years on
Where Faust meets Long John Silver: Goethe, Robert Louis Stevenson and the lost art of lifelong optimism
The glories of the pre-WWII, smaller circulation Reader's Digest
Consisting entirely of reader submissions of 250 words or less: my ideal magazine
When world literature met the CIA: the glory of Encounter magazine in its first fifteen years, 1953-1967
William James, Theodore Roosevelt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Hazlitt and the lost habits of self-discipline and the second wind
The glories of the silent cinema
Gunfight at the KFC Corral: Colonel Sanders After Dark, in broad daylight
The glories of cold showers and even colder baths
The glory of Home Run Inn pizza
The dirt-cheap glory of Gochujang red pepper paste from O'Foods, and Yellow curry paste from Mae Ploy
Your missing kitchen gadgets: the rubber mallet, starfish masher, infrared laser thermometer, &c.
The lost art of "killing" your "enemies" with kindness
The glory of You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx
The Ego and My One: Uncle Scott, a legend in (and especially out of) his own mind: a tale, as Sherlock Holmes said of that of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, "for which the world is not yet prepared."
Alice Munro, the Chekhov of Canadian letters
Sitting on a park bench in the COLOSSEVM, I, CLAVDIVS-ing little vestal virgins with bad intent: AQVALVNG by JETHRO CATVLLVS
Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian Euripides
Collect 'em and trade 'em all!
"So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?" - the "PUNCH LINE" closing Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
"That ought to hold the little bastards." - Urban legend (FALSE) re 1928-1948 kiddie host Uncle Don, closing an episode with the mike still live; as with, also, those falsely presuming Groucho Marx to have compared a female guest on You Bet Your Life with many children to himself were he to forget to remove his cigar from his mouth, or Soupy Sales to have dropped a disguised f-bomb with his canine sidekick White Fang
Reviewing my list of blog-post desiderata above, I think of the critic George Steiner, with whom I admit to a docu[de]mented obsession since the late 1970s, who responded to a c. 1974 invitation to write for the inaugural issue of Ian Hamilton's New Review with a letter of demurral of length, ideational amplitude and characteristically bewitching pungency sufficient to publish in its own right, which the editors then did.
Your now post-Inbox avuncular influencer,
D.S. "Uncle Scott" Lahti
Author, Have a Baby, My Cigar Just Had a Wife
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