“he was the very personification of the cad who haunts the racecourse and who lives not so much by his own wits as by the lack of them in others.”
Baroness Orczy “The York Mystery” in Alan K. Russell, ed., Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
“Man arrested, accused of trespassing naked in Disneyland”
Headline in San Bernardino Sun April 14, 2025 [which offers the comfort that someone’s always having a worse day than you are but also the caution that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.]
“The inclination here was to regard the war as a form of art, as a superior representation of life: only when mankind recognized that salvation lay in aesthetic values, in the symbolism of life and death, and not in sterile social norms, would the horror and sadness have meaning and be overcome. As evocation, as an instrument of change, the war had a positive purpose – that was the judgment of many artists, at least early on. The most radical artistic response to the war came from a group of people who made a complete break with traditional loyalties and gathered in neutral Zürich in 1915 to found there the Dada idea – if one can speak of this nihilistic manifestation as an idea. The cohort had an international flavor but its core was German.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The BBC reports that the North Hertfordshire Museum will now refer to Roman emperor Elagabalus with the female pronounces of she and her.”
Mark Pilon in “News with Views” “Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“it isn’t oratory that is wanted in this racket. The William Jennings Bryan stunt languishes in wartime.”
John Blenkiron in John Buchan Greenmantle
“When I was growing up, I had no idea what Black Sabbath was, but you better believe I knew about Ozzy Osbourne. That’s because he and his family were a part of mine. In the early 2000s, around when my dad started calling the TV the ‘idiot box,’ the early reality show The Osbournes was often on in our den. Watching that show was like peering into a portal into an alternate universe where dads had tattoos and daughters might decide to give themselves a pink mohawk on a Tuesday morning before school. Dinner guests might include Courtney Love or Marilyn Manson. The only rule in the Osbourne house was: No rules allowed.”
Suzy Weiss on The Free Press July 26, 2025 [but of course “No rules allowed” is a rule, if a feebly self-annihilating one].
“From an early age, then, Hitler certainly had the temperament, exacerbated by his social circumstances, to become an artist of the ‘adversary culture.’ What he lacked was any exceptional talent as a painter or draughtsman.... Yet in spirit an artist was what he was and, as he would insist to the end, what he always remained.... He would, so he claimed, turn politics and life into art. It was the war, the Great War, that broadened his canvas so immeasurably. Like many in the artistic, intellectual, and radical community, he saw the outbreak of the war in August 1914 as a sudden liberation from stultifying bourgeois constraints, as an opportunity for a new beginning, as a means of bringing about a revolution of one sort or turn another. The remarkable picture we have of Hitler as a part of the crowd in the Odeonsplatz in Munich cheering the announcement of war speaks volumes. He is standing in one of the front rows, this misfit, without friends, without women in his life, without a job, without a future. And yet his face is ecstatic, radiant. The eyes seemed to sparkle. He looked as if – suddenly and as a complete surprise – he had just been informed that all those rejections from the Vienna Academy of arts have been a terrible mistake, and that he, Adolf Hitler, has in fact submitted, with his applications, the finest samples of work the academy has ever received. ‘To me those hours,’ he declared later, ‘seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by a mighty enthusiasm, I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time.’.... ‘It was,’ he said, ‘with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“Il y a des folies qui se prennent comme les maladies contagieuses.”
La Rochefoucauld Maximes [Réflexions morales #300]