For anyone with a NYTimes subscription:

The mention of ortolan birds always reminds me of Craig Claiborne and Russell Baker. Claiborne won some sort of charity auction for a transatlantic flight to Paris for dinner at one of the most exclusive restaurants of the time, and he wrote a column describing the feast (including those birds) in excruciating detail.…

According to Wikipedia, the copyright notice did not include the word “copyright” or the (c) symbol. Today, that would not make a difference, but under the law at the time, it meant the movie was not legally copyrighted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charade_(1963_film)#Public_domain_status

Am I correct in remembering that this was one of those movies that was accidentally allowed to fall into the public domain? 

I’m surprised to see that it took place on a Wednesday. I thought the Oscars always used to take place on Monday (which the theater owners liked, because it was the slowest day of the week and so the TV show about movies wasn’t competing with *actual* movies), until ABC insisted on moving it to Sunday (which is the…

Love the photo with Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas. I actually got to interview him by telephone in the late 1980s when our small-town Wendy’s reopened under new ownership after having been closed for a while. I was a young newspaper reporter, maybe three or four years out of college, and I called Wendy’s corporate…

I live about equidistant between the George Dickel distillery, which favors the spelling “whisky,” and the Jack Daniel Distillery, which uses “whiskey.” The Nearest Green Distillery (which is still being developed) is in my county, even closer to me than the other two, and Uncle Nearest — which just yesterday won the…

I live about 20 minutes north of Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of the Jack Daniel Distillery — but, more relevant to me, home of Woodard’s Market, a very small grocery store which is nevertheless the largest grocery in Lynchburg. Their deli makes the best store-bought pimento cheese I’ve ever tasted. I was introduced to…

I tend to use mayo for most things, but there’s a particular blue cheese dressing I make where I like Miracle Whip, and I’ll buy it just for that alone. I certainly don’t object to it the way some people do.

<obligatory>Shut up, Wesley.</obligatory>

I used to occasionally go to the lunch buffet at our local, small-town Pizza Hut — but a year or two ago, they closed the stand-alone restaurant and replaced it with a storefront, delivery-and-takeout-only location on a busier street. Somewhat ironically, about six months later, our local Domino’s closed its long-time…

Composer Mark Snow used to tell people in interviews that the theme *did* have lyrics:

I still remember the first time I ever heard of this — when it was the theme ingredient on an episode of old-school Japanese “Iron Chef.” I have not had the chance to try it myself, but my recent experiments with fermented hot sauce have made me more curious about fermented food in general, so I’d like to one of these…

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Obligatory “Fightin’ ‘Round The World”:

There was an Amazon link. The title of the book is “N0 Greater Glory: The Four Immortal Chaplains and the Sinking of the Dorchester in World War II,” and the author is Dan Kurzman.

Just thinking the same thing.

A great book on the Four Chaplains: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1MDM/

For Keeping The Faith’s 20th anniversary, a bunch of real-life priests and rabbis weighed in on how much they appreciated the film’s celebration of interfaith bonds between spiritual leaders. As one rabbi put it, “It always seemed like a joke, a priest and a rabbi, but I have a daily check-in with a Jewish chaplain…