John Baxindine

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(Sorry, misread the title. It's Erbe *des* Drachen—singular dragon, thus The Dragon's Heir in English.)

Pumping, pumping, pumping.

YouTube video by SonyPicturesGermany Die drei ??? – Erbe des Drachen - Offizieller Trailer Deutsch (Kinostart 26.1.2023)

Here's the trailer for the first of the films (Erbe der Drachen—The Dragons' Heir). Jupiter becomes Justus Jonas in German but Bob and Pete keep their original names:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fagp...

That series remains hugely popular in Germany, to the point that new volumes were written for the German market after the series ended here. It just spawned a new series of film adaptations. Google "Die drei Fragezeichen" (The Three Question Marks, styled "Die drei ???").

It's a proper short story already. It needs nothing else.

A journalist asks the essential question of our time:

My instinct is to distinguish "back seat" as a noun from "backseat" as an adjective (as in "backseat driver"). Did I just make that up?

That's because it's not in the mix. Watch the documentary: Everyone is grouped around a couple of mics, with Stritch right in front. It couldn't be camouflaged with the technology of the period. You might be able to do it today; I'm not sure.

Yup!

YouTube video by Darling of the Day Orchestra - Topic Overture

If you listen closely to the overture of Darling of the Day, you may notice that the bass drops out unexpectedly for four seconds (1:52–1:56). The bassist's part fell off the music stand.

Listen with headphones. The bass is panned hard right:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zoB...

No. People would still be tempted to view these inherently manipulable engines as arbiters of truth, AI would still threaten the development of human capacity, and C work from an AI would still eventually become cheap enough to render B or A work from humans impractically expensive.

No. What I thought it meant is what it means, so I've presumably encountered it before, but I couldn't tell you where.(Doyle? Dickens? Austen?)

That's some defibrillator you got there.

"Histrionics!"

In the novel the character is called Miss Ramsbottom, which elicited much laughter in my family, particularly from my father. I eventually learned, long after he died, that Ramsbottom is a town in Lancashire not far from Baxenden, whence cometh our surname.

I didn't understand it properly until I read Russell Baker's The Good Times, where he describes the first meal he ate in London in 1952—a steak that he subsequently learned was horse. You couldn't get beef in London in 1952.

Which is to say, Blacklock got butter and chocolate on the black market.

I think that series, and that episode in particular, holds up the best among the 1980s "heritage" programs. It matters that the director and the lead actors were all old enough to have lived through postwar rationing as adults. "Butter, sugar, chocolate, raisins" was a big deal.

My one night on Broadway was an Actors Fund concert where I reduced the orchestration of that song for Liz Larsen and John Bolton. Bolton's mic died before he'd sung a note. He blasted "Neiman Marcus" to the back of the house the hard way. I was in the second balcony. It was impressive.

And then of course there's "Mrs. Beane (The First Class Roster)" from Titanic:

"Aren't they modest?
You'd never think by looking at them
That he and his brother own Macy's department store..."

That's according to the script I received from the Kurt Weill Foundation in 2013, at any rate. I can't vouch for how well the script matches the original staging.

One Touch of Venus is not set in a department store. It has a single scene (Act I Scene 4) set in "Arcade of NBC Building—Radio City," in which a department store's window display plays a role in the action. But the only part of the store we see is the window, from outside.

No one seems to have mentioned "Charity's Soliloquy" yet: "He said, 'I'm going to Bloomingdale's,'" etc.

Re footnote 5: Yes, it is A Murder Is Announced. It's one of the few books for which Christie's manuscript survives—along with a note to her publisher in which she points out how important the apparent errors are. (See Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, by John Curran.)

Theft of the golden Leibniz cookie - Wikipedia

This needs to be a movie: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_o...

DNI Carmen Sandiego.

Sorry, but when I see "divide your empire" and "Chaucer" next to each other, all I can think of is the squire's proposal at the end of the Summoner's Tale.

The article says nothing about whether permission was sought or received, which may well mean that the producers are going rogue. If permission had been granted, there would usually be a statement from the authors' estates.

Apparently I used the wrong term. A ligature is two or more letters combined into a single symbol; a digraph is a pair of letters that combine to represent a distinct phoneme.

I was misled on this point in childhood by a character map that listed "Œ" as "OE digraph."

It makes sense if you think about it: "Hors d'œuvre" is a prepositional phrase meaning, roughly, "apart from the work"—i.e., that which is not the main course. You can't pluralize "apart from the work" by making it "apart from the works."

English Translation of “HORS-D’ŒUVRE” | Collins French-English Dictionary English Translation of “HORS-D’ŒUVRE” | The official Collins French-English Dictionary online. Over 100,000 English translations of French words and phrases.

According to Collins, it's the other way around: "hors-d'œuvre" never takes an S. Also, note the digraph.

www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/f...