Spectator A.M. #2095

Face Tattoo Update #36

Police in Oklahoma City arrested 38-year-old Alexander Emery, one of those rare members of the Face Tattoo Community (FTC) not engaged in uplift and philanthropy, for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a stranger in a wheelchair on July 2. When the victim attempted to wheel away from the conflagration, video allegedly shows Emery pushing the handicapped man back into the flames. The stupidity of the act matched its monstrous nature as it all unfolded outside of a police station. Emery boasts many tattoos, including two squiggly lines beneath his left eye. The authorities charged him with assault with intent to kill, assault and battery with a deadly weapon, and first-degree arson. One prays that this isolated incident does not besmirch the characters of the many members of the FTC pursuing charitable works in sub-Saharan Africa, conducting important research to discover a cure for cancer, and volunteering as Big Brothers.  

Postliterate

I read Don Quixote, a book about a man so obsessed with his books that he essentially remakes himself into a character from them, last week. This required up to six hours of reading each day for one week. This comes as incredibly unusual behavior in 2026. More Americans place a bet in a year than read a book. Americans increasingly look at book readers the same way fictional Spaniards looked at Don Quixote. Rose Horowich explains why we live not in an illiterate society but in a postliterate one in an article @ TheAtlantic.com. She describes reading as a workout for attention spans. It is that. It is, of course, much more than that, too. It engages an active rather than passive mind, imparts contextualized instead of decontextualized knowledge, and enables one to write better. “The written word is fundamentally different from oral language,” Horowich writes. “Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.” Read the rest of this long but valuable article here.

#6 with a Bullet

When Morrissey wrote songs that fantasized about the execution of the British prime minister (“Margaret on the Guillotine”) or the attention of handsome gentlemen (“This Charming Man”), as I detailed in this @RightWingWildnerness episode four months back, the sonic guardians loved him. “Notre-Dame,” his controversial song that seems to suggest arson as the cause of the fire at the Paris cathedral, just hit #6 on the UK charts (52 top-40 songs in the U.K., zero in the U.S.) without any real positive critical attention. And Morrissey wants to know how that can happen when state radio refuses to play his song. “The public wants to hear the song, but the BBC will not play it even though their stations are a public service duty-bound to reflect public taste,” he posted online. “Obviously not! If the song is suspected of independent thought—God forbid!, it is not played, therefore, under these circumstances, any station that pledges allegiance to diversity is lying. When people say ‘Diversity is our strength’ they fail to mention how their notion of ‘diversity’ entails very strict Third Reich regulations and punishments. I wonder why people can’t simply be honest about these things?” Full disclosure: “Notre-Dame” ranks as one of the weaker tracks on Make-up Is a Lie. Less controversial but better is “Lester Bangs.”

Why So Hard to Put a Ball 9 Inches in Diameter Into a 192-Square-Foot Net?

I enjoy the World Cup. But the quadrennial reemergence of soccer seems about right. Anything more, and I would be demanding less. The lull in the action’s habit of becoming an action in the lull provokes comparison, not always favorable, to the famous match between the philosophers of Germany and Greece depicted on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “Well, there may be no score but there is certainly no lack of excitement here,” Michael Palin narrated. “As you can see Nietzsche has just been booked for arguing with the referee. He accused Confucius of having no free will, and Confucius, he says, ‘Name go in book.’” Soccer makes baseball seem like speed metal in comparison to its “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” pace.