¶ Matins: What an upside-down world we are in, when Congressional Democrats bashfully support the Israeli attacks at Gaza but the Times dismisses them as “a dismal coda to the Bush administration’s second-term push for Middle East peace.”

¶ Lauds: Ever since Ghost Town, I’ve been a huge fan of Kristen Wiig. Knocked Up was the movie that ought to have taught me, but her role in that film — as the infamously snarky production assistant — struck me as just another Hollywood bitch. As a colonoscopist, however — well! Regular readers will know why I sat up and paid attention.

¶ Prime: Muscato strikes gold — or perhaps, since he always strikes gold, we ought to call it vermeil — with a collection of TV ads for Konsum, the konsumer emporium of the DDR. Who can resist ein tausend kleine Dinge? Don’t tune out before that starts. It could have been called New York Confidential.

¶ Tierce: How do you spell “Idiocracy”? A-r-p-a-i-o. David Carr writes about the showboating Arizona sheriff who may, one hopes, find his true calling as a reality-show fixture — and put a stop to his travesty of public service.

¶ Sext: The nice thing about the juggling LaSalle Brothers, currently wowing audiences at the Big Apple Circus, is that they give credit where credit is due.

According to Jake, the act is more about genetics than balance. “Juggling is such a difficult discipline to perfect,” he said. “You have to be so precise. There are very few good team juggling acts out there now. I think everyone has an individual internal rhythm.

“There’s a difference in internal rhythms,” he added. “With my brother, we’re exactly on the same page. When I watch other professional teams perform, it seems much more forced. There’s a fluency from our luck in being twins.”

¶ Nones: The post-mortem will be interesting, and resurrection oughtn’t to be ruled out; but Waterford Wedgwood has gone into “administration” — receivership. Among the many causes, there is a sad truth:

Waterford Wedgwood has suffered from falling demand for its high-quality crystal, china and other tableware, and has recorded a loss for the last five years.

¶ Vespers: Just when my bibliotechnical energy was failing, I encountered an encouraging entry at Anecdotal Evidence, where Patrick Kurp shares a poem by David Slavett.

“What will I re-read, or even consult?
Let us admit that, for all their heft on the shelves,
books are flighty, become souvenirs of themselves,
appealing no longer to intellect and taste
but playing to sentiment. Why else keep on hand
Look Homeward, Angel, except in the in the hope that the schoolboy
who turned its pages may show up some afternoon?”

¶ Compline: A proper dinner at our house ends not with dessert but with a reading from Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking. One or the other of us wants to know why such-and-such a thing happens in the kitchen. Our curiosities — Kathleen’s and mine — have very different motivations. I usually want to know What Went Wrong. Kathleen, in contrast, wants to know How Things Work. These are two sides of the same coin, the flip being whether or not you actually spend any time in the kitchen making meals. Tonight, in a rare congruence, we both wanted to the skinny on how something works: the substance known, very unscientifically, as “cream of tartar.”

Oremus…

§ Matins. If, as Scott Shane’s report suggests, Israel has lobbed missiles at Palestinians simply because there’s still a government in Washington that won’t complain about it, then I hope that its foolishness is totally unsuccessful. Israel has had forty-one years to show that it, and not “Palestine,” is the problem, and it has signally failed to do so.

§ Lauds. And here is one of her Suze Orman imitations, introduced by its subject, no less. A bit of Googling will Open Sesame.

§ Prime. The spots give new meaning to the whole idea of urlauf. Put pancakes in your gas tank — if you can resist eating them first! The Weihnachtswünsche ad makes you think about Ingmar Bergman’s alternative career as a Mad Man.

§ Tierce. When Sheriff Arpaio isn’t sweeping Latino neighborhoods for illegal immigrants, he can be seen arresting chuckleheaded scofflaws who have been led to believe that they’ve won a prize.

The Goldwater report suggests that the trade-off for the letting the sheriff do his thing may not benefit his constituents. Although his department was “adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably ‘tough’ law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions.”

Homicides in the county were up 167 percent in the three-year period ending in 2007 and the report stated that the budget for the department, excluding corrections, had doubled since 2001.

But voters love the guy. That’s how we get to I-d-i-o-c-r-a-c-y.

§ Sext. From Joe Brescia’s story: “LaVenia J. LaVelle of Columbia’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs said that although the university did not keep records of its graduates’ occupations, the LaSalles ‘are the only jugglers, as far as we can tell’.”

§ Nones. The firm may still be turning out goblets and platters, but it is certainly not following in the path of Josiah Wedgwood, who transformed crockery into the affordable “must have” of the early bourgeois period. He’d be making perfumes and totes today. I’m second to none in my fondness for beautiful porcelain, but you’ve got to admit that its cachet is strictly caché.

My favorite story about china concerned a Rothschild grande dame who bought a pied-à-terre at the Albany in London. Endowed with about one hundred fifty different services (patterns) at her chateau in France, she allowed herself only one for the flat. (As I recall, it was one of those blue-onion designs.) The allure, as Diana Vreeland would put it, of refusal.

§ Vespers. How frighteningly exact. What are the books that I’m holding on to only because of an occult belief that the self who long ago read and liked them will come knocking?

§ Compline. If I have an unblemished record of risen soufflés, it must be because I read long ago that adding cream of tartar to beating egg whites strengthens the surface of the bubbles that beaten eggs whites form and that rise into such triumphs as angel food cake and, even  more improbably, soufflés. But how it works remains a mystery to me. At least I know now to call it potassium bitartrate. Who knew it was a byproduct of wine fermentation!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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