"They planned to make 'black-bear pastrami'.... 'We were really diligent,' he said. 'We made sure we did everything by the book. We knew we’d be under scrutiny.'"

"As Mr. Chin and his friend carved up the bear in the first-floor kitchen [of the Cornell dorm], some of their peers were studying at nearby tables. Other students walked by and took pictures. 'Most people were really curious,” he said. 'Like, "Hey, we’d love to try some." We were just explaining, like, "Hey, none of this goes to waste,"' Mr. Chin said."

From "Students Skinned a Bear in a Dorm. Cornell Realized It Should Ban That. After two Cornell University students skinned a black bear in a communal kitchen last year to make a meal, the school changed the rules" (NYT gift link).

From the comments: "Not the first time students and bears have resulted in a college needing to change its rules. Lord Byron famously kept a pet bear in his Cambridge dorm after he learned that pet dogs were not allowed."

Really?

I see that Byron wrote this in a letter dated 1807: "I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear." He is said to have walked it about on a chain. 

Key evidence includes Byron’s letter of 26 October 1807 to Elizabeth Pigot: “I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what to do with him, and my reply was, ‘he should sit for a fellowship.’” The University of Cambridge and Trinity College itself reference the story as historical fact (or well-attested report), noting he is said to have acquired the bear (possibly at Stourbridge Fair) specifically because of the dog ban. He reportedly walked it on a chain, and the authorities could not easily prohibit it under the existing rules.

Key evidence includes Byron’s letter of 26 October 1807 to Elizabeth Pigot: “I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what to do with him, and my reply was, ‘he should sit for a fellowship.’” The University of Cambridge and Trinity College itself reference the story as historical fact (or well-attested report), noting he is said to have acquired the bear (possibly at Stourbridge Fair) specifically because of the dog ban. He reportedly walked it on a chain, and the authorities could not easily prohibit it under the existing rules.

Bedeviled.

 

This is found art — wordplay that appears by chance.

I was doing a word search in the OED, looking up "bedevil," because it had come up in an article I just blogged. The NYT writer crafted this sentence: "Was [Trump] upset that [Melania] had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?" (Don't get me started on "thrust" and "globe.")

That blog post ends with a quote from Lord Byron, and I see the OED entry for "bedevil" also has a quote from Lord Byron — worrying about critics of "my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry."

I like the word bedevil. It's vivid, perhaps too vivid. Are we to picture devils? Does anyone think of Jeffrey Epstein as literally The Devil? I know JD Vance seems to think the UFOs are devils — "I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion."

Have I been casually summoning up The Devil over the years by using this word that I like? Checking the 22-year blog archive, I see I've quoted it a few times and I've used it twice. Both times came in 2014. Once, in July, on the topic of ObamaCare:

"Mr. Trump projected sang-froid about it all on Friday. 'I don’t mind anything having to do with Epstein,'"

"But he was talking about it again because of something his wife chose to do. Was he upset that she had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe? 'No,' he said. 'I never get upset.' He said that after he watched Mrs. Trump’s statement, he thought to himself: 'She had a right to talk about it, because the fake news covers her so inaccurately. Would I have done it that way?' the president mused. 'Perhaps not, perhaps, I don’t know.'"

Writes Shawn McCreesh, in "Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein/President Trump said in an interview that he had known his wife wanted to address rumors about the late sex offender at some point, but that he had not known exactly what she would say" (NYT).

My search of the NYT archive included a term that wasn't in the article: Ungaro. I was looking, as I usually do, for elite media coverage of a story I am seeing in lowlier media, which I generally eschew. In this case, that would be things like "Amanda Ungaro Arrived in the U.S. on Jeffrey Epstein's Plane at 17 — Now She's Going After Melania Trump From Brazil" (Yahoo!news). I guess you can say I'm just seeing one of those things the NYT deems not "fit to print."

Anyway... I enjoy Shawn McCreesh's writing at the NYT. I love the coverage of Trump's enigmatic responses. "I never get upset" — what a perfect answer to the question whether you are upset. It can't be true, but one appreciates the sang-froid.

Great word, sang-froid. Lord Byron used it in Don Juan:

In the mean time, cross-legg'd, with great sang-froid,

     Among the scorching ruins he sat smoking
Tobacco on a little carpet....

"The anti [Obergefell] forces will get Thomas and probably Alito. Roberts was strongly against at the time but..."

"...has been careful to treat it as legitimate precedent since. Gorsuch usually sides with religious litigants but also wrote Bostock, the most important gay rights decision in years, and Roberts raised eyebrows by joining him. Most people who know Barrett and Kavanaugh believe them to have zero appetite for reopening this issue. Trump isn't pushing for it. Granting cert takes four votes, overturning a case five. I don't see [Kim] Davis getting up even to three on the question of whether to overturn Obergefell. Each time I write a version of this prediction I get called rude names, as if I were consciously misleading people for some fell purpose. But as someone with real rights of my own at stake, I'm just trying to give you my honest reading. We'll probably know within three months whether the Court will hear Davis's case and if so on what question presented. Save your anger till then."

Walter Olson, quoted by Ilya Somin, in "Why the Supreme Court is Highly Unlikely to Overturn Obergefell in the Kim Davis Case/My Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson explains" (Reason).

Should we "save [our] anger" if we don't want Obergefell overruled? Even if that's unlikely, now might be a good time to demonstrate how much it would hurt, before things escalate.

Meanwhile, I'm interested in Olson's dipping into the archaic to write "I get called rude names, as if I were consciously misleading people for some fell purpose." Fell! Why not "evil" or "nefarious"?

One answer is that he was influenced by the last syllable of "Obergefell." I don't think one would do that consciously. 

I'd guess Olson felt motivated to sound deeply literary. Some historical examples of the adjectival "fell" from the OED):

1747 I will risque all consequences, said the fell wretch. S. Richardson, Clarissa

1812 And earth from fellest foemen purge. Lord Byron, Childe Harold

1813 His fell design. W. Scott, Rokeby

1847 Even the fell Furies are appeased. R. W. Emerson, Poems

An update on Valerie.

You remember Valerie, the miniature dachshund who escaped into the wilds of Kangaroo Island, blogged here.

Today, I see "Valerie the dachshund rescued after 17 months in Australian wilderness/The eight-pound miniature dachshund had transformed from an 'absolute princess' into a rugged survivor" (WaPo).

I had to blog that... in case you were on tenterhooks.

What are tenterhooks anyway?

"Of the so-called Big Six Romantics, he’s the hardest to place. The hikers and the introverts read Wordsworth..."

"... the hippies love Blake, Keats is for the purists, Shelley for the political dreamers … and Byron? In spite of his fame, he lacks brand recognition. That’s partly because, halfway through his career, he decided to change the brand. 'If I am sincere with myself,' he once wrote, '(but I fear one lies more to one’s self than to any one else), every page should confute, refute and utterly abjure its predecessor.'"

From "Lord Byron Was Hard to Pin Down. That’s What Made Him Great. Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading" (WaP0).

"She had been a village beauty before marriage, noted for her skill at dancing the bolero and rattling the castanets..."

"... and she still retained her early propensities, spending the hard earnings of honest Peregil in frippery, and laying the very donkey under requisition for junketing parties into the country on Sundays, and saints’ days, and those innumerable holidays which are rather more numerous in Spain than the days of the week. With all this she was a little of a slattern, something more of a lie-abed, and, above all, a gossip of the first water; neglecting house, household, and everything else, to loiter slipshod in the houses of her gossip neighbors. He, however, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, accommodates the yoke of matrimony to the submissive neck." 

Wrote Washington Irving in "The Alhambra" (Gutenberg).

I found that via the OED entry for "lie-abed," which means "One who lies late in bed; a late riser; a sluggard."

"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress..."

The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more. (via @RpwWilliams)https://t.co/k9X3u4Suas pic.twitter.com/gWYOeEh4vu

— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 15, 2020

ADDED: Titania McGrath comments:

According to the @NMAAHC, white culture is defined by independence, rational thought, hard work, respect for authority and politeness.

To emulate black culture we therefore need to be more subservient, irrational, lazy, disrespectful and rude.

THAT’S how you defeat racism. 👏

AND: There's also this:

I see a lot of people sharing that "White Culture" slide. Well, here's what New York City is teaching schoolteachers about how to spot "White Supremacy Culture." pic.twitter.com/Dpy4idF6s2

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) July 15, 2020

"Well, I think one can be more male and keep the vagina."

"More appealing to me than making any kind of permanent decision would be if you could kind of lean this way and then lean that way and have gender be a kind of vacationing."

From "Eileen Myles Wants Men to Take a Hike" — a NYT interview conducted by Ana Marie Cox. Myles is a poet, and somehow the very first question brings one the subject of that personage that nobody can stop talking about:

Our national political conversation has recently seen some rather unpoetic lurches to the right. How do you make sense of that? 

Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. It’s like the un-Trump: The poet is the charismatic loser. You’re the fool in Shakespeare; you’re the loose cannon...

I wonder if Cox thinks lurches to the left are poetic? This made me look up the word "lurch." I was surprised to see 3 separate entries, the first of which was a game similar to backgammon and the state in various games in which one player is way ahead of the other, which is where you get "to leave in the lurch." The second was the opportunity to keep someone else from getting his fair share of food, which is the basis of the phrase "to lie at the lurch." The third one is what Cox meant, "A sudden leaning over to one side," originally nautical. We see that in Byron:

 "A mind diseased no remedy can physic." 
(Here the ship gave a lurch and he grew sea-sick.)

But I did like that idea of a gender vacation — "if you could kind of lean this way and then lean that way." Lean... or, presumably, lurch. 

"I know that 2 and 2 make 4 - and should be glad to prove it too if I could..."

"... though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into 5 it would give me much greater pleasure."

Said Lord Byron.

"Friends and major donors insist that Mrs. Clinton is sincere in expressing ambivalence about seeking the presidency again..."

"... and they go so far as to assert that she is simply happy to have time to clean out her closets for the first time in decades."

Sincere... Clinton sincere... depends on what the meaning of sincere is.

The releveant OED definition of "sincere" is "Characterized by the absence of all dissimulation or pretence; honest, straightforward." Referring to persons, the word in English goes back to 1539, and the (unlinkable) OED has a lot of historican examples, but one stands out:

1824   Byron Don Juan: Canto XVI xcvii. 112   For surely they're sincerest, Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.

In context:

So well she acted all and every part
By turns — with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err — 't is merely what is call'd mobility,
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false — though true; for surely they're sincerest
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.

Right now, the closets are most near/To clean them must be quite sincere.

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was the first computer programmer.

The Countess of Lovelace is celebrated today on her 197th birthday with a Google doodle and blog post:

After a chance encounter when aged 17, Ada became friends with Charles Babbage and grew fascinated by his idea to build an “Analytical Engine.”...

While Babbage saw it as a mathematical calculator, Ada understood it had much more potential. She realised it was, in essence, a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with defined rules, and—crucially—that there was no reason the symbols had to represent only numbers and equations.

“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Ada Lovelace, 1843

As Ada eloquently argued, such a device could do far more than mathematics. She even mused about its potential to compose music:

“Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

Perhaps you'd like to try the diet of the first celebrity dieter.

It's the Lord Byron diet:

... a thin slice of bread and a cup of tea for breakfast and a light vegetable dinner with a bottle or two of seltzer water tinged with Vin de Grave.

Other 19th century dieters:

Nietzsche tried a traditional restricted calorie diet and [Henry] James went in for Fletcherism, an elaborate system of chewing each morsel of food several hundred times.

Fletcherism, eh? Horace Fletcher, "The Great Masticator" said we should only eat when "Good and Hungry" and never while angry or sad.

Seeing — at the linked Wikipedia article — that Mark Twain visited Fletcher, I decided to find some searchable text and happened upon this collection of 300+ Mark Twain works in the Kindle format for $1.99. I was hoping to find something about Fletcher. I didn't. But that's a side issue. I'm absolutely delighted to have a single searchable text of 300+ Mark Twain works. For 2 dollars. What a world we live in! What would Mark Twain have thought of it? Anyway, nothing about Fletcher, but what about chewing? Any morbid fascination with chewing? There's this dialogue:

"Do you love rats?"

"I hate them!"

"Well, I do, too--LIVE ones. But I mean dead ones, to swing round your head with a string."

"No, I don't care for rats much, anyway. What I like is chewing-gum."

"Oh, I should say so! I wish I had some now."

"Do you? I've got some. I'll let you chew it awhile, but you must give it back to me."

That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about, and dangled their legs against the bench in excess of contentment.

ADDED: The 1919 NYT obituary for Fletcher:

The theory is, in brief, that everybody eats too much and that the cure is to be found in thorough mastication of food....

During [WWI] Dr. Fletcher... was given the full opportunity... to demonstrate the worth of "Fletcherism" though which he taught the 8,000,000 starving Belgians to get the full nourishment from their food. Early in 1912 he had himself subsisted on a diet of potatoes for fifty-eight days.

AND: There's also the first scene in Tennessee Williams's "Glass Menagerie," where our first glimpse of Tom's problems with his mother play out in the context of her admonitions about chewing: