I am a huge fan of the lunch-size brown paper bag. (And not merely because of its contents, though they often also are worthy of praise.)

My mom died September 1, 2022: 4 months and 4 days shy of her 99th birthday.
I think of her and Dad all the time.
The best is when they're in my dreams.

The Finder Found | Edwin Muir Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground, Catch sight some ordinary month or week Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought— The gatherer gathered and the finder found, The buyer who would buy all himself... orangejeep.org

More Mysterious “By never trusting, cynics never lose. They also never win. Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins…. The cynical voice … claims that we already know everything about people. But humanity is far more beautiful and complex than a cynic imagine... orangejeep.org

I am so lucky to have the world's greatest brother-in-law.

Tradition is a good thing. It is traditionalism that is bad. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.

—Jaroslav Pelikan

(h/t blog.angloromanticism.org - btw, my new band name)

Jim Schutze:

... his entire industry is on pins and needles, terribly anxious about a Trump victory. I asked him if it’s because Trump is opposed to his industry on specific policy issues. He said no.

“That’s not it. It’s that Trump is crazy. That’s what we worry about.”

My friend’s business involves putting big chunks of money into long-range investments that already involve plenty of risk. The added risk of wild wombats in the White House with regulatory power over their deal is way too much.

RIP, Duane Thomas, one of the greatest runners in Cowboys history. When an interviewer referred to the Superbowl as "the ultimate game," Thomas' never-to-be-forgotten response was, "If it's the ultimate, why are they playing it again next year?"

Leah Bayans:

When I first sat with Wendell [Berry] to talk about educating farmers as farmers, he started by turning to the idea of love—in the fullness of the term, not sentimentalized but fully rounded, with the joyful and the difficult joined through membership in a place and with its people.

He then asked a question that I try to answer every day: what works does this love propose?

Start with love, then see what works that love proposes. (H/T: @ajay)

Public Work is an image search engine that boasts 100,000 “copyright-free” images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface and uses AI to auto-categorize and suggest possibly related images (both visually and content-wise). And it’s fun to just visually click around on related images. On the downside, their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons.

Capers are white people's fish sauce. Briny and salty and umamiful. -- my daughter

California Hills in August | Dana Gioia I can imagine someone who found these fields unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade. An Easterner especially, who would scorn the meagerness of summer,... orangejeep.org

Yes, please. Some of that.

David Brooks, quoting Michael Strain

A Trump win would play into the narrative of Americans as helpless victims. The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive, and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less. Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort, and dynamism.

The late, great Kinky Friedman:

I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.

Hate the Sinner, Hate the Sin / David Frum, via Nick Cataggio: > Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of... orangejeep.org

Hate the sin; loathe the sinner / orangejeep.org

I guess it’s ALMOST coming home.

Photo: Constance Jaeggi (a tip of the Hatlo Hat to @ayjay)