Free-enterprise doctrinaires and dogmatics love to extol competition. What if a crew of capable, public-spirited professionals, with the support and resources of the US government, were to go about nationalizing any pieces of our balky private health system that are collapsing, and gave a good example by offering better care for less money? That would be worth trying, say I from my temporary perch in a country where the single-payer system, seconded by mutual insurance coops, does quite well. And take a look at this snapshot from Haiti seven months after the earthquake.

Nice little piece about cargo bikes in Manhattan. But scroll down to see the mixture of resentment and anticipatory Schadenfreude with which the NYT commenters show their moral superiority to people who are doing something helpful, healthy and fun. You go, whiners!

“A free people is one that can still imagine things to be different than they are.”
(Raymond Ruyer, L'Utopie et les utopies [1989]).

-- which is not to say, “not cricket.” Rather the contrary, or the contradictory, or anyway, here it is back by what I hope is popular demand, one of my favorite documentaries ever: TC, an ingenious response to colonialism. (No, it will not clear your guilty conscience.)

Probably through not paying attention, I always thought Léo Ferré had (a) a funny name for his grandmother (“Pépée,” a feminine form of “pépé” or “little old guy”?). That made sense because, as far as I could tell, Léo had (b) an odd granny, whose hands were like tennis rackets and whose ears stuck out like Serge Gainsbourg's but were never tamed with bits of scotch tape. But now, looking for something else, I stumble across this and all my questions are answered.

A salute to the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (= Li Bo, Rihaku) by Charles Cros in 1873.

“Eheu,” said the baby, recapitulating philology.

The six degrees of separation at work: two boys were born this morning within an hour of each other, in different towns, to parents who are both friends of mine, but in contexts that may or may not intersect, depending on how the great Narrator weaves the rest of the story. Welcome, babies, mutual strangers but not quite strangers to me! I'm tuned into your story: What will happen next?

I've scanned thousands of things in my life, so I guess it's only fair that I should be scanned in my turn.