Abject fealty.

Don’t miss the inside scoop on Tim Michels’s abject fealty to Donald Trump election denialism—to the point of declaring his interest in overturning the LAST election—in this brilliant investigation https://t.co/60TMEu1egG

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) October 14, 2022

"Abject" means "of low repute; despicable, wretched; self-abasing, servile, obsequious" — according to the OED, which gives this example of the usage of the word from 1579:

1579 G. Harvey Let.-bk. (1884) 87 Lerned philosophers..are the dryest, leanist, ill-favoriddist, abiectist, base-mind[e]dist carrions.

And I like this Tobias Smollett's "Humphry Clinker":

I know nothing so abject as the behaviour of a man canvassing for a seat in parliament.

Yes, everyone running for everything is abject. 

Here's Samuel Beckett (from "No's Knife," 1967):

The aversion my person inspired even in its most abject and obsequious attitudes.

Now, "fealty" is "The obligation of fidelity on the part of a feudal tenant or vassal to his lord" (OED). It's also used figuratively, which how Wikler — the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin — is using it. 

He's not quite saying that Michels is acting like a vassal to Lord Trump. The accusation of fealty is not to Trump the man, but to Trump's idea that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected. 

When is the dedication to an idea low, despicable, and wretched or self-abasing, servile, and obsequious?

"If you can’t annoy somebody … there’s little point in writing" —Kingsley Amis/"Whatever they criticize you for, intensify it" —Jean Cocteau.

A couple quotes that jumped out at me from "Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany," a book I'm enjoying immensely. Garner is Dwight Garner, a NYT book critic. It's a very smart sequence of quotations. 

Just a few more:

"I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."—William S. Burroughs 

"Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation" —W. H. Auden 

"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane" —H. P. Lovecraft 

"A monster is a person who has stopped pretending" —Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”

"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split" —Raymond Chandler

"If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal" —Fran Lebowitz, in The New York Times 

"Don’t own anything you wouldn’t leave out in the rain" —Gary Snyder 

"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante"—Samuel Beckett 

I hope that annoyed some of you or what's the point?

"In 1988, he stunned Joyce scholars... by revealing that he had destroyed about a thousand letters he had received from his Aunt Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter..."

"... who spent decades in mental institutions; even more, he said, he had discarded correspondence that she had received from the Irish expatriate playwright Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s onetime secretary, with whom Lucia had fallen in love. 'No one was going to set their eyes on them and re-psychoanalyze my poor aunt,” [Stephen] Joyce told The New York Times that year. 'She went through enough of that when she was alive.... I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them. My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.... Where do you draw the line? Do you have any right to privacy?... What are people going to do to stop me?'... His refusals to grant access to the Joyce archive could seem arbitrary. He rejected the request of one author whose work was being published by Purdue University because he deemed the nickname of Purdue’s sports teams, the Boilermakers, to be vulgar."

From "Stephen Joyce Dies at 87; Guarded Grandfather’s Literary Legacy/The last direct descendant of the author of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' was a fierce protector of James Joyce’s estate, to the frustration of scholars" (NYT).

I'm just trying to understand why David Crosby liked it.

I'm only seeing this because I follow David Crosby and he liked this:

This has been the news, from Samuel Beckett. https://t.co/RWyz5vcrGI

— Eric Rauchway (@rauchway) February 23, 2019

I can't not look at a tweet involving David Crosby, Dan Rather, and Samuel Beckett. But let me get back to my reading....

"Well, now, there’s Buster Keaton. I thought he was visually thrilling, and very sophisticated: more about women than about men. He lets you read a lot into things."

"You’re left with so much to decide. And then there was a woman in Santa Ana, an incredible woman, an artist. She was mysterious. She loved a lot of things that weren’t yet open to me. And then, gosh, a woman I met once when I was looking for an apartment who claimed that her husband had invented the tea bag. . . Well. And then my family. We’re very close to each other. My sister Dorrie looks like an Eskimo. And then Woody, of course."

So said Diane Keaton, in 1978, when The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt asked her to name 3 people who have influenced her the most in life.

Why am I reading that this morning? I was having a conversation about an old episode of "Friends" ("The One Where Monica and Richard Are Friends") and — because there's a scene in a video store — I got to thinking about a scene in a bookstore in "Annie Hall":



A scene in a bookstore (or a video store, if the show is set in the fleeting video-store era) can take advantage of the books (or movies) at hand to develop the characters. Looking for that bookstore scene, I was googling for "Annie Hall" and "cats" (because I remembered that Allen's character disapproves of her interest in a book about cats and insists on buying her the first of many books he would buy her with the word "death" in the title).

The old New Yorker article happened to contain the word "cats" (because Gilliatt describes Keaton's NYC apartment, replete with cats). Not what I was looking for, but I got interested in reading Gilliatt, whose articles I loved reading in the 70s. Imagine encountering a paragraph like this today:

"My mother always called me plain. She saw this as a flaw to be corrected. She wanted the whole world dressed in dazzling color—even me."

"I never quite complied. I have the fashion sense of Vladimir and Estragon and the panache of my New England nana. When left to my devices, I choose to be unobtrusive. I choose gray. It suits my diffidence and soothes my extroversion. It is the color, rather than the sound, of silence. It sits with monkish, folded hands and asks for nothing. It never shouts. It never pushes.... A color psychology article on Bustle tells me that I fear commitment. 'Grey is emotionless,' it says, 'boring, detached, and indecisive. Those who say their favorite color is grey don’t tend to have any major likes or dislikes.'... Lovers of gray 'lack the passion that comes with loving a real color.' And yet I yearn for it. I fill my drawers with gray brassieres. I dress my bed in sheets and duvets like a day with all the blue drained out of it. The tidiness, the monochrome inspire peace.... As the black-and-white photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said to the color photographer William Eggleston: 'You know, William, color is bullshit.'... Dorothy may tumble, tornadic, into Technicolor, but still she always wishes to go home.... I sometimes drive an hour to the ocean, hoping I will find it thoroughly obscured by fog. I am not a melancholic or a bore, but I want a break from all the rainbow violence in the world...."

From "Ode to Gray" by Meghan Flaherty (in The Paris Review).



You know, William, color is bullshit.

"Can you hear that?... Neither can I."

I never noticed this particular YouTube star until a few days ago when I got carried away researching the term "thought experiment" and this video of his turned up. I didn't watch it, but I left it open in a tab while I was reading things in other tabs, for example, "9 Philosophical Thought Experiments That Will Keep You Up at Night" (Gizmodo) and "The impossible barber and other bizarre thought experiments" (New Scientist). I'd opened all those tabs after pondering the difference between "experience" and "experiment" (and had learned that the oldest meaning of "experience" is "experiment"). Anyway, the point is, I'd left that video open in a tab but had not watched it. It was Meade — he'd sat down at my computer to do some comment moderation — who played the video and — like anyone else — became engrossed and fascinated. So if you're wondering what we watch at Meadhouse, this is it.

ADDED: The quote that I made the post title — it reminded me of something. I think it's this, from "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett.

HAMM Open the window.

CLOV What for?

HAMM I want to hear the sea.

CLOV You wouldn’t hear it.

HAMM Even if you opened the window?

CLOV No.

HAMM Then it’s not worthwhile opening it?

CLOV No.

HAMM [violently] Then open it! [Clov gets up on the ladder, opens the window. Pause.] Have you opened it?

CLOV Yes. [Pause.]

HAMM You swear you’ve opened it?

CLOV Yes. [Pause.]

HAMM Well . . . ! [Pause.] It must be very calm. [Pause. Violently.] I’m asking you is it very calm!

"Was this meant for a comment on the GOP? It sounds like talk to text gone wild"/"Love this--reminds me of Waiting for Godot! Truly, we live in absurd times!"

Comments on a comment that's rated #1 on a NYT article titled "As G.O.P. Bends Toward Trump, Critics Either Give In or Give Up."

Here's the comment that's delighting everyone:

Zero optimism that the Democrats can ever regain hello hi oh you’re there are you outside oh well let me come to the door I’m icing my knee and I’m hard boiling some eggs I’ll turn them off and then will do our meeting yet out that that will be fine I’m Normans out doing some errands and he knows you’re coming so he’ll just go down to the cave I was down in the Cape myself this morning by getting so let me get up because I’m right now sort of trapped in my chair and then I’ll put the ice pack back on when you get here OK thanks bye-bye

New York Magazine highlights the comment and the later comment explaining it:

“I was composing a message using the autospeak, and a friend arrived early to my house,” she wrote in a reply further down the thread. “I had no idea all that drivel was being recorded — there are even errors in the drivel! And then to be a pick, with about 15 emails announcing such, meant that my email went rogue. Yes, folks,” she added. “I guess I do sound like Sarah Palin here!”

Oh, a gratuitous swipe at Palin. She needs to go back on autospeak, where she was charming as hell. And maybe give a little thought to why (some) people like Sarah Palin so much. It's the freedom, the spriteliness. Maybe try it on purpose some time.

By the way, "I’m right now sort of trapped in my chair..." is more "Endgame" than "Godot"...

Was that a "racist" costume at the University of Wisconsin football game last night?

Here's the tweet that got it started:

At the @UWBadgers game and there is a man with a mask of President Obama and a noose. This is racism, why was this allowed into the stadium? pic.twitter.com/zKEqhdDYny

— 😏 (@woahohkatie) October 29, 2016

And I see the UW twitter feed immediately responded: "Thanks for letting us know— Can you tell us what section you took this photo in?" and "We don't support offensive image of a noose, but this is a form of free speech. Guest Services asked them to remove & they did."

And the UW quickly put out this statement:



It was the night of Freakfest, Madison's Halloween revelry downtown, and the early evening football game — a few blocks away from the Freakfest location — was part of a huge social occasion yesterday. (Meade and I holed up inside, watched the game on TV, and went to bed early as the sound of screaming revelers moved farther away from the stadium area to State Street.) So there were some costumes at the game, and as you can see from the statement, the rules were that you could wear a mask once you got inside the stadium.

I don't like depictions of lynching political figures. Here's an old post of mine expressing dismay over a sign picturing the lynching of Scott Walker. And later, I linked back to that post, saying "I said imagine how Democrats would react if Tea Partiers had... depict[ed] a Democratic Party politician as Hitler or with his head in a noose."

And I agree that there is a special problem with showing a black person with his head in a noose, given the history of lynching in America.

But take a closer look at that tweeted picture. See the hand with the peace sign? The person is facing away from the camera. The Obama mask is on the back of the head. We see the shape of a larger mask in front. And if you look closely at the pink sign, the words are Hillary Clinton's: "What difference at this point does it make?" I assume the mask on the front-side of the head depicts Hillary Clinton. And yes, poking around, I see this view of the front of the person. It is a big Hillary Clinton face, and there's another person with a big Trump mask and he's holding the other end of the rope. The rope-holding Trump is walking the noosed Hillary in the manner of Pozzo leading Lucky in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot":



I have no idea if the costumed football fans intended to allude to the Nobelist's great play in which no one gets lynched: 2 characters — Lucky and Pozzo — are connected by a noose that works as a leash, and the other 2 characters — Vladimir and Estragon — consider hanging themselves:

ESTRAGON: What about hanging ourselves?
VLADIMIR: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
ESTRAGON: (highly excited). An erection!
VLADIMIR: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
ESTRAGON: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

But I think the political theater in the football stadium was intended to express Hillary's criminality and/or Trump's use of the idea that Hillary is a criminal. It could simply be that Hillary and Trump are bound together in a horrible drama that's scaring us, Halloween style.

What, then, of the Obama mask on the back of the head? What a distraction! What does a mask on the back of the head mean? I see that a mask worn on the back of the head may be a device to ward off predators while your back is turned:

Arguing that [the Bengal tiger] only attacks people from behind, workers in the mangrove forests started wearing face masks on the backs of their heads. Thus far the trick appears to have worked.

Mandrakes, mangroves... don't think too hard. It's only Halloween. What is the meaning of the costumes? If you have a nonracist message, take the trouble to edit out the part that will allow viewers to say "That's racist" or they'll never hear whatever it is you are trying to say.

Or do you want to talk about freedom of speech law? I'll take the position that UW handled it pretty well. They conveyed the importance of free-speech values and stressed that they merely asked the person to remove the mask. They reasoned with him and he accepted their point of view — don't make other people feel afraid or disrespected — and he removed "the offensive parts of the costume." That is, he accepted the argument that parts of the costume were offensive and that it would be better not to offend. He bought what the university was selling in the marketplace of ideas. Or that's my working theory until somebody gives me reason to think he was coerced.

IN THE COMMENTS: 2 excellent corrections:

Gahrie said:

Not all lynching was racial. While the Democrats in the South did concentrate on lynching Black people during the Jim Crow era, in the Old West and historically, it was mainly White people who were lynched. 

Grimson said:

AA: 2 characters — Lucky and Pozzo — are connected by a noose that works as a leash

The text mentions only a rope, not a noose, so clearly these are not a couple of Beckett devotees.

Beckett: Enter Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed round his neck. . .

Thanks for both of those. Just to rebalance a little, I'll say: 1. In the mind of present-day Americans, lynching is most likely to be associated with the history of racial injustices, and 2. In the photograph of the "Godot" production I've used and in other productions I've seen pictures of, the rope was tied in the classic "hangman's noose" knot. But I can see, with further research, that the rope isn't always tied that way in productions of "Godot" and also see that in real life, nooses don't always have the "hangman's noose" knot and that a rope with a knot put around a man's neck is perhaps fairly called a noose even when the text omits that explicit characterization of the rope.

"Better than nothing! Is it possible?"

At the theater last night. I was stunned to hear the line "Better than nothing is impossible" — so close to my oft-re-self-quoted "Better than nothing is a high standard." Had I nicked my line from Samuel Beckett?

In the cold light of morning, I buy the text on Kindle, do a search, and find that the line is: "Better than nothing! Is it possible?" That is, to one way of looking, farther from my line. The structure is different. 2 sentences. An exclamation and then a question. No flat assertion. But from another point of view, it's closer. It's got hope — hope for better things than nothing.

In spite of everything you were able to get on with it!

Oh not very far, you know, not very far, but nevertheless, better than nothing.

Better than nothing! Is it possible?

"I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers."

"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and an adventure."

From "4 Oliver Sacks Quotes on Gratitude," which extracts quotes from a new Oliver Sacks book — just right for Thanksgiving — titled "Gratitude."

It contains the quotes of others, such as Samuel Beckett saying "I wouldn’t go as far as that" when somebody said "Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?"

Those terrible mountebanks.

I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive — all the way back to 1852 — and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").

Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank — a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."

I see that future President Woodrow Wilson — upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 — said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"

A propos of the Lois Lerner spoliation: Spooooooool!

"On the Road," "Atlas Shrugged," "Endgame," and "The Cat in the Hat" would all come into the public domain in 2014...

... if the copyright law were what it was before the 1976 Copyright Act. As it is, you need to wait until 2053.

As for music, beginning today, you could put out recordings of "That’ll Be the Day," "Peggy Sue," "Great Balls of Fire," and "Wake Up, Little Susie," with the kind of freedom that you have with an ancient folk song.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who also links to this list of artists whose works do hit the public domain, including Beatrix Potter, so here you go...

Krapp's Last Webdesign.

Ah, well!

ADDED: I arrived at that very retro site because I wanted a link for the "Yesterday!" in the previous post. I felt like I remembered Krapp exclaiming "Yesterday!," But the Beckett play with all the "yesterdays" — though not quite the exclamation I feel I remember — is "Waiting For Godot," which I figured out after buying, in Kindle, "The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett," and doing a search.

VLADIMIR: We met yesterday. (Silence.) Do you not remember?

POZZO: I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday. But to-morrow I won’t remember having met anyone to-day. So don’t count on me to enlighten you.

"Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin..."

"... only to realize it is almost over," writes Oliver Sacks.

At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”)

"RAT is an anagram of ART. Do you think that inspired them, perhaps subconsciously?"

Asks Dr Weevil.

"A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than 6 millimetres... and herbivorous." Sounds delicious!

Dr Weevil. A nice portmanteau pseudonym. Combines Dr. Evil with our theme-of-the-day: pests.

Let's listen to Tex Ritter and Mantan Moreland:



10 things I judge to be interesting:

1. The term "portmanteau" originated in "Through the Looking-Glass," as Humpty Dumpty explains "Jabberwocky," within which, for example, "slithy" combines "lithe and slimy" and "mimsy" combines "flimsy and miserable." "You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." (The word "portmanteau" already meant suitcase.)

2. "Portmanteau" comes from French — combining words for "carry" and "coat" — but the French don't say "portmanteau" to refer to "suitcase words." They say mot-valise — which they came up with by making a literal translation of the English term "suitcase word." That makes "portmanteau" something that's called a "false friend" (a term I did not know).

3. Tex Ritter's real name was Woodward Maurice Ritter. You'd think if he needed a nickname, Woody would have popped up. Think of all the Woodys that that had to stretch to get to "Woody." Woody Allen, for example, was named Allan Stewart Konigsberg. I can't discern how he got to Woody from his Wikipedia entry, which says: "It the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen." That sounds like he was setting up a knock-knock joke: "Heywood who?"

4. Now Woody Guthrie got to Woody quite directly. He was named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Born in 1912. You might say: Woodrow Wilson! Woodrow Wilson didn't even become President of the United States until 1913. Yes, but he was Governor of New Jersey. No matter that Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. It would be like somebody today living in some state that's not New Jersey naming their new baby Chris Christie Smith or Chris Christie Jones or whatever.

5. Back to Mantan Moreland, the other guy in the Tex Ritter "Boll Weevil" video. Looking at his Wikipedia page, I see he was in a surprising number of movies, including many movies I'd never heard of like "Freckles Comes Home" (1942) and "King of the Zombies" (1941). "He is perhaps best known for his role as chauffeur Birmingham Brown in Monogram's Charlie Chan series. (The lyrics of The Coasters' 1963 song 'Bad Detective' are sung from the first-person perspective of Birmingham Brown, Mantan Moreland's character in the Charlie Chan movie series.)" There's some very heavy racial context here. Spike Lee's movie "Bamboozled" appropriates some things about Moreland. And the Beastie Boys sampled something of his about mashed potatoes, and you can listen to the original (NSFW) here.

6. Moreland "was briefly considered as a possible addition to the Three Stooges when Shemp Howard died in 1955." And he was in the 1957 Broadway stage production of "Waiting For Godot." He played Estragon, the role played by Bert Lahr in the original production of the play.



7. In the "Waiting for Godot" with Moreland, Geoffrey Holder played the character Lucky.



8. You may remember Geoffrey Holder from 1970s-era 7-Up commercials.

9. The New York Dolls recorded "Bad Detective" — replete with the opening notes that you may well recognize as the music that was always used in the past to signify: This is Chinese.

10. Mantan Moreland was known for his "Incomplete Sentences" comic routines. They went like this (from some Charlie Chan movies):

The man who published all those dirty books... and turned down "Lord of the Rings" because he "couldn’t understand a word."

Barney Rosset, of Grove Press and Evergreen Review, dead now at 89.

Besides publishing [Samuel] Beckett, he brought early exposure to European writers like Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet and gave intellectual ammunition to the New Left by publishing Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”...

He defied censors in the 1960s by publishing D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer," ultimately winning legal victories that opened the door to sexually provocative language and subject matter in literature published in the United States. He did the same thing on movie screens by importing the sexually frank Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow).”

Grove Press also published "Naked Lunch" and "The Story of O." And Evergreen Review published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

What a great free speech hero! Thanks, Barney! RIP.

"If you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech," he said.

"Fatwa banning Muslim women from touching bananas and other penis-shaped foods makes Internet rounds."

"Unconfirmed religious order says the phallic foods may spark sexy thoughts."

Hmmm. Emphasis on "unconfirmed." I don't believe it, and I've passed up on writing about this story because I think propagating rumors about a religion is a very bad practice.

"If women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve," the cleric supposedly dictated.

Carrots and zucchinis pose a similar threat, according to the Muslim decree.

I'm writing about this now, not because I want to amuse you — though, admittedly, it's amusing — but because I'm acknowledging that this is now a meme. Memes about religion penetrate deeply. Use protection.

But... why am I resisting this? Phallic symbols are a long — really long — -term topic on this blog. And if the Muslim cleric thinks women ought to refrain from touching carrots, I'd like to caution the men about fingering onion rings. Remember? Old times on the Althouse blog: "Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring."

And, by the way, I say that cleric — if he really exists — is bragging: Even a vague reminder of the shape — and size! — of our turgid man-parts sends our women swooning with desire.

ADDED: Literary reference:

He turns, advances to edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he bites off the end, turns aside and begins pacing to and fro at edge of stage, in the light, i.e. not more than four or five paces either way, meditatively eating banana. He treads on skin, slips, nearly falls, recovers himself, stoops and peers at skin and finally pushes it, still stooping, with his foot over the edge of the stage into pit. He resumes his pacing, finishes banana, returns to table, sits down, remains a moment motionless, heaves a great sigh, takes keys from his pockets, raises them to his eyes, chooses key, gets up and moves to front of table, unlocks second drawer, takes out a second large banana, peers at it, locks drawer, puts back his keys in his pocket, turns, advances to the edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, tosses skin into pit, puts an end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he has an idea, puts banana in his waistcoat pocket, the end emerging, and goes with all the speed he can muster backstage into darkness. Ten seconds. Loud pop of cork. Fifteen seconds. He comes back into light carrying an old ledger and sits down at table. He lays ledger on table, wipes his mouth, wipes his hands on the front of his waistcoat, brings them smartly together and rubs them....

Good to be back in my den in my old rags. Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty restrained a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition.

"19-year-old man... was buried in sand up to his neck for two hours..."

... after he dug a 7-foot deep hole and — as a joke — jumped into it. It took 60 rescue workers to dig him out.

ADDED: Reminds me of the Beckett play: