It seems that the sycamore has been granted a reprieve. For now. The great and awful tree had been destined to attain horizontality as soon as I could find someone who would do it. That was necessary to give my cool new satellite dish a clear view of the sky. The tree is still under a death sentence, but the latest and most urgent reason for sending the thing to the wood-chip pile seems not to have existed at all.
A few hours away from me you can visit Silver Dollar City — a scenic, wooded theme park in the Ozark Mountains where craftspeople blow glass and mill flour 19th-century style. It’s charming and memorable. It’s also not the way I buy glassware or food normally.
If only I can get the dish on top of the stick!
As I wrote that I was suddenly reminded that a few decades ago it was popular for performers on variety shows to spin dishes on the tips of what looked like pool cues, the trick being to get many dishes spinning on many pool cues at once. At some point the studio audience would applaud. We were more easily pleased in those simpler times.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick once again give us compelling entry into one of the makers of the American century in the documentary Hemingway. The writer Ernest Hemingway lived alongside the avatar of the same, through some of the most consequential times in history.
Okay, yes, it was my fault that the propane ran out before I ordered a refill. It was not my fault, though, that the internet went down, forcing me to watch a bit of the Olympics.
People love this year’s Budweiser commercial. I get it: it’s beautifully filmed and feels good when so much is angry, ugly or both. It is also real to a surprising degree: the commercial was filmed with cameras, not constructed with computers.
As it turns out, if it snows a lot, then rains a little on top of it, it won’t go away until things get warmer.
That’s my theory, anyway. I won’t be able to say for sure until things get warmer, if they ever do. Hope is found in it always having gotten warmer before. But we live in strange and troubling times.
The gala which precedes the tournament is not a ball, but exhibition tennis, which featured legends Roger Federer, Andre Agassi, Patrick Rafter, and 2022 women’s champion Ashleigh Barty. Long-time OFB readers will know how much seeing Federer again means to me.
So far, 2026 brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s legendary sigh, “What fresh hell is this?” It’s said to have been uttered when her doorbell rang, but it has other uses. Applied to our current year it makes Parker seem a prophet (though her politics and choices of friends tended to be terrible).
The political forces tell us we must choose. Either the “ICEstapo” executed a heroic nurse this weekend as a precursor of the new holocaust or ICE is the most elite law enforcement agency ever assembled and anyone who dies had it coming. Mercifully, more of us are refusing these absurdities, but there aren’t yet enough of us.