"I ought to mention that he marked the parenthesis, in the air, with his finger. It seemed to me a very good plan."

"You know there's no sound to represent it — any more than there is for a question. Suppose you have said to your friend 'You are better to-day,' and that you want him to understand that you are asking him a question, what can be simpler than just to make a '?' in the air with your finger? He would understand you in a moment!"

Wrote Lewis Carroll in "Sylvie and Bruno," describing the gesture made while singing the words "this was their wish" in this stanza of a song:

“The Badgers did not care to talk to Fish:
They did not dote on Herrings' songs:
They never had experienced the dish
To which that name belongs:
And oh, to pinch their tails,' (this was their wish,)
'With tongs, yea, tongs, and tongs!'”

I print the entire stanza because of the badgers, of course, this being Wisconsin. But why — you might ask, marking the air with a "?" — am I fooling around inside "Sylvie and Bruno" this evening? I have an answer!

I was reading the Wikipedia article "Air quotes," which naturally traces the origin of air quotes. It gives Lewis Carroll credit for arriving at the basic idea — albeit only with parentheses and question marks — all the way back in 1889.

The oldest definite use of air quotes seems to be Glenda Farrell the 1937 screwball comedy, "Breakfast for Two":



Isn't that wonderful! But air quotes got too popular in the 1990s and became subject to derision, notably by Steve Martin, Chris Farley, and Dr. Evil. And here's George Carlin in 1996:



People got the message and restrained themselves, but air quotes were still around enough to make their appearance in the fall of 2002, in the thing I just watched that got me started on this little research project, Episode 3 of Season 9 of "Friends" — where Joey (ostensibly the dumbest person in the group) does not understand how air quotes work:

He would have been the voice of Shrek and was in talks to play Fatty Arbuckle in a biopic and Ignatius J. Reilly in a film of "A Confederacy of Dunces."

But he died. Had he lived, Chris Farley would have turned 50 today.

By the way, why has there never been a film version of "A Confederacy of Dunces"? Is it cursed? Look at the list of actors around whom projects were attempted. In addition to Chris Farley, John Belushi, John Candy, and Divine. There was another failed project, built around Will Ferrell (in 2005). At least Ferrell lived. Steven Soderbergh, who co-wrote that adaptation, said: "I think it’s cursed. I’m not prone to superstition, but that project has got bad mojo on it."

That Slate article: "The Massive Liberal Failure on Race. Affirmative action doesn’t work. It never did. It’s time for a new solution."

It's long, so you might want to read it to see why it's said that affirmative action doesn't work. You might find it helpful to know that the author, Tanner Colby, looks like this...



... and that in addition to his book "Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America," he's written biographies of 2 white male comedians, John Belushi and Chris Farley. Here's a HuffPo piece that had him going on about how he has no black friends, even though he's totally liberal and lives in NYC. He's "never even been inside a black person's house." So that's his background. Why he's the person to declare and explain the failure of affirmative action and to propose a solution, I do not know.

Does Slate know? Obviously, Slate's publishing the article boosts Colby's stature as an expert on this topic. It's why I'm reading Colby's piece. But I can see the reasons why Slate would publish this. It knows its readers are mostly white liberals, and it's easy to guess that they're susceptible to the narcissistic question: Where are my black friends? (Obama counts as one friend, but he's always so busy.) And Slate's headline is one of the most egregious pleas for traffic I have ever seen: "Massive Liberal Failure on Race: Affirmative action doesn’t work...." Massive! Liberal! Failure! Race! The righties will not be able not to link to this, I can hear them chuckling. And maybe, oozing in around their self-loving liberalism, they believe that plenty of their regular readers, the good liberals, feel secretly aggrieved about affirmative action.

Did you see Paul McCartney on "Saturday Night Live" last night?

Oh, that wasn't last night. That was back in 1993. Here's a report of last night's show, and here's the clip of him doing — of all things — "A Day in the Life." I don't think The Beatles ever did that live. It was weird having Paul sing the John part (as well as the comb-across-my-hair Paul part), and the last verse was replaced by the chorus of "Give Peace a Chance" — in case you didn't pick up on the tribute to John (a few days after the 30th anniversary of his death.)

"I wasn't really dead," says Paul, in that 1993 clip, when Chris Farley asks if the "Paul is dead" thing was a hoax. And now, Paul lives on, and poor Chris is dead. Chris was born here in Madison and is buried here, in a cemetery at the end of a street named Farley.

About those Christmas graveyard photographs.

I take fewer photographs in winter. It gets dark early, walks are shorter and quicker, and there's much less happening. I could make a practice of looking harder and forcing myself to see photographs, but mostly I don't. Sometimes, things look photographable, but I'm driving. I could stop, but maybe a dog or a man will come at me to see what trouble I'm causing. In winter, there are fewer dogs and men to worry me, but who stops the car in a snow bank? Photographs go untaken.

Yesterday I stopped. I was driving, as I often do, on the road called the Speedway, that runs between the two cemeteries, Resurrection and Forest Hill.



Was it a joke, naming the road between the cemeteries the Speedway? You are alive, but not for long. Earlier in the day, I'd driven over 100 miles on I-94, and the fog had been much worse. I think I was the only driver on the road who was constantly thinking: This is how 50-car pile-ups happen. I drove so I could stop without crashing if I saw an accident ahead, and no one else did. People are crazy. So the graveyards in the fog called out to me. I stopped and stalked through knee-deep snow to get my pictures.

What first caught my eye were all the wreaths in Resurrection Cemetery:



Resurrection is flatter and less beautiful than the historic Forest Hill on the other side of the Speedway. Perhaps you know that Chris Farley is buried there. He died 10 years ago last Tuesday.



Where are you on the Speedway?