Are you irked at the existence of a restaurant that serves excellent pasta on high tables where everyone must stand?

I'm reading "A restaurant with no chairs? This tiny pasta spot is worth standing for/Gemini in Dupont Circle is a wonderfully strange home for handmade pasta, natural wine and some of the best ice cream in the United States" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can see all the irked readers in the comments and some pictures of the food).

Sample comments:

1. "One thing about which I have not yet been 'disenchanted' in fine dining restaurants is a seat."

2. "I use a walker and anyplace I go must be accessible. This is a huge nope. Next."

3. "That's one way to ensure a young clientele...." 

4. "That might be a violation of the ADA...." 

5. "Wow. This business seem to have a lot of contempt for its customers. No chairs? Restrictive hours? No pasta outside??? No pasta for TAKE OUT? Good grief. I would never go there."

I'd say as long as people have a lot of choices of places to go, it's good to experiment, and I think it's nice to make a thing out of getting excellent pasta and moving along quickly, not sitting around. For people who want something else, there are all the other restaurants. 

"[A]n Idaho man was on his rural property in October 2024 when a skunk approached him and scratched him on the shin."

"About five weeks later, the man started to hallucinate, have trouble walking and swallowing, and had a stiff neck.... Two days after his symptoms started, he collapsed of what was presumed to be a heart attack, the report said. The man was unresponsive and taken to a hospital, where he died. Several of his organs were donated.... A Michigan man received the donated kidney. Five weeks after the transplant, he started to experience tremors, weakness, confusion and urinary incontinence, the report said...."

From "Kidney Recipient Dies After Transplant From Organ Donor Who Had Rabies/Only four donors have transmitted rabies to organ transplant recipients since 1978, according to federal officials" (NYT).

"As a young staff member in the Reagan administration, John G. Roberts Jr. was part of a group of lawyers who pushed for more White House control over independent government agencies."

"The 'time may be ripe to reconsider the existence of such entities, and take action to bring them back within the executive branch,' the future chief justice of the United States advised the White House counsel in a 1983 memo. Independent agencies, he wrote, were a 'Constitutional anomaly.' Once he ascended to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts joined other conservatives on the bench in a series of rulings that have chipped away at Congress’s power to constrain the president’s authority to fire independent regulators...."

From "Conservative Project at Supreme Court Meets Trump’s Push to Oust Officials/President Trump has repeatedly ousted leaders of independent agencies despite federal laws meant to shield those regulators from politics" (NYT).

The case — to be argued tomorrow — is Trump v. Slaughter.

The case to be overruled is Humphrey's Executor, discussed in this NYT article, "For Landmark Test of Executive Power, Echoes of a 1930s Supreme Court Battle/Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to oust a Federal Trade Commission leader offer parallels to the current fight over President Trump’s actions" — showing various letters from FDR to Humphrey, saying things like "You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence."

"It sounds so beautiful I want to give all the glory to God we were never supposed to be in this position but by the glory of God" the Hoosiers beat the Buckeyes.

𝗧𝗥𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚: Indiana superstar QB Fernando Mendoza's post-game interview has gone viral 😭😭

One of the greatest interviews you will ever see.pic.twitter.com/1Gcp3AE7XU

— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) December 7, 2025

"It’s certainly a conspicuous choice following a year in which D.E.I. programs have been dismantled and the party in power..."

"... has been debating how friendly to be with a white nationalist. That may not be what Pantone means by 'peace, unity and cohesiveness,' but I have to imagine it will come up for some viewers.... This white, in particular, strikes me as a little flavorless. It’s the color of cottage cheese and dental floss, of marshmallows and AirPods."

Said Callie Holtermann, participating in a NYT conversation titled "Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year Is ‘Cloud Dancer’/A shade of white will be the defining color of the next year..." (NYT).

"It reminds me of the clothes I put on when I’m in a rush and the foods I eat when I have a stomach ache.... Personally, I miss Viva Magenta from 2023. An insane choice, but at least it was a choice. Cloud Dancer feels like a product of being too tentative to make a statement in any direction. Which is, of course, its own kind of statement."

Here's how Pantone presents its color:

"The famous party slogan in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'"

"Orwell’s proposal that totalitarianism demands the rejection of objective truth and the alteration of the past is perhaps the most original idea in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.'... 'The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc [English socialism]. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts, the world is either standing still or going backwards.' And the very medium of thought, in Orwell’s reckoning, language, would be crippled. Winston’s co-worker, employed in the project, explains: 'Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? … In the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.' What actually happened?... This logarithmic graph shows that in 1948, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was about 29,000 pages. Its final printed edition, in 2010, had 33,000. Today most of us rely on Wikipedia (despite its occasional errors and editing wars), which as of last year had the equivalent of 3.2 million Britannica pages, a hundredfold increase...."

Writes Steven Pinker, in "1984 revisited: George Orwell would be relieved at how we’ve done/It’s common to suggest the great dystopian novel was full of warnings that have largely come true. But the evidence shows otherwise" (London Times).

"People often ask her how, as a famous person, she still takes the Tube, but the reason why is simple — nobody is looking up from their phones."

"'It’s heartbreaking,' she says. 'Nobody’s looking into the f***ing world any more.'"

From "Kate Winslet: ‘Young women have no concept of what being beautiful is’/At 50, the actress doesn’t care what people think of her any more. She lets rip about social media, weight-loss drugs — and why it has taken her so long to become a director" (London Times).

I don't like the expression "let rip." It's too reminiscent of "rip one." But let's read this OED entry for "to let rip." which is defined as "to act or proceed without restraint; (also) to speak violently," which I don't for one minute believe that Kate Winslet did, even as she chided women for — whatever — lip injections and Ozempic. 

The first of the historical quotes comes from California in 1857 and gives some insight into the court system:

"It amounts to an updated Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 declaration telling Europe to look after itself and leave the US to manage the Americas."

"'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,' it says. There are echoes of a speech by JD Vance, the vice-president, in Munich in February that stunned European leaders by warning that the continent’s greatest danger came not from Russian aggression but from within, with the erosion of traditional values. 'Economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure' in Europe, it states, targeting the 'European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence...."

From "Europe facing ‘civilisational erasure’, warns Trump/A new US security plan warns European allies may falter in Nato, urging nationalist renewal as Washington positions itself between the continent and Moscow" (London Times).

"New music's cool, but have you ever heard old music?"

"Have you ever heard 'You Don't Have to Say You Love Me' by Dusty Springfield?"

I know you have, but have you truly experienced its depth and grandeur? Let Owen Cutts demonstrate:

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