John McIntyre

A National Grammar Day idyll.

This is a supposedly edited book, and I’m sitting here—I’M SITTING HERE—reading about a character arriving at “4:00 p.m. in the afternoon.” Blessed Henry Watson Fowler, is there no one out there paying any attention?

A small personal matter: Yesterday a surgeon removed my cancerous prostate in what he described as a clean excision with “nothing funky.” I expect to be released from the hospital sometime this afternoon to return home for a leisurely convalescence.

A loss chronicled.

He himself has said it ...

Yes, I am seventy-five today.

The far-right hates liberalism in part because liberalism empowered women socially, politically, and economically, and so made them less dependent on settling for a mediocre man to provide for them. So they want to destroy liberalism to return women to a state of powerlessness and dependence.

Why Trump might be reluctant to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell: Once she cannot be prosecuted for the crimes for which she was pardoned, the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination will not apply and she can be compelled to testify about them.

My record is unblemished.

Preparing myself to ignore my sixtieth Super Bowl.

It’s just racism. There’s no immigration problem

worth noting that the second rich people stopped being afraid of mobs tearing them limb from limb, they stopped building libraries and opera houses and stuff and started ripping the copper wiring out of the walls of society instead

I worked for Sam Zell and for Tronc, but I have never seen a newspaper accomplish as much self-inflicted damage as The Washington Post over the past year.

Reading Cheever’s “Wapshot Chronicles” again after more than fifty years, and there is delight in every page.

These are the days in February that I mark.

You have crotchets but I have judgments.

I'm reading language boffin Ben Yagoda's "Gobsmacked!" about Brit speak in America that some people whinge over. But unless you're a numpty, you'll want to get hold of it straightaway and give it a go.

I am thinking of a paper modeled on Waugh’s “Scoop.”

In The Baltimore Sun, Armstrong Williams calls Melania Trump “the most maligned and misunderstood first lady in modern history,” a timely reminder of why I canceled my subscription to The Sun a year ago.

Jeff Bezos Should Donate the Washington Post to a Charity His conflicts of interests are insurmountable. He can take a heroic path to strengthen journalism.

Jeff Bezos should be a hero and donate the Washington Post to a charity. Bezos would get a big charitable deduction; the rest of us would get a newspaper dedicated to the public interest. This post from Steven Waldman is from a year ago but it's still a great idea. www.cjr.org/opinion/wald...

I believe another round of toddies is called for.

Short stints with rest and hydration.

Now for a toddy.

Come tomorrow, the Prius.

Feel free to share my scorn for Target.

Indeed.

Be advised, people, that there are bartenders out there who will put brine, unasked, in your martinis. Beware.

Off to church.

“I have asked the clergy of the diocese to make sure their affairs are in order and they have written their wills.,not the time for statements. It is time to put our bodies between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable”. Rob Hirschfeld, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire

We are all heirs to what Wolcott Gibbs said 90 years ago: “Always respect an author’s style, if he is an author and has a style.”