Since you’re down on the ranch in Alabama can I ask you something? What is up with Roy Moore’s hat and horse? Does that image appeal to people in Alabama? I could see this in Texas or Montana or Wyoming, but Alabama’s not ranching country, is it?

Also Rassenverrater, “race traitor,” another Third Reich term King probably trots out at the local Stormfront pancake breakfasts.

I wouldn’t order it, but have you ever had spaghetti with a sunny-side-up egg on it? One of my favorites, and it’s really the same ingredients, except the flour is in the form of spaghetti noodles, not pizza crust. It’s also very popular in France.

Northern Europeans will put anything on pizza. Often you have to specifically request that they not put corn on it. Corn. I’ve seen it with potatoes. Blue cheese. Yogurt rather than red sauce. I could go on but I just dry heaved.

There’s an old joke about driving down I-95 from the north to Florida. It gets more and more southern but then at some point in central Florida it starts to get more northern and by the time you hit Miami Beach you’re back in Brooklyn.

I wouldn’t, but Happy Holidays!

My guess is Quest has a paid circulation of about 30, with the rest of the copies being delivered gratis and unwanted to mailboxes and apartment building lobbies in affluent zip codes, where they are promptly thrown out. So the designer is paid $20/hour freelance and the printer hasn’t been paid in months, but the ad…

It would be fun to bring a friend and say, “Hello, I don’t think we’ve met! My name is Chad [or whatever] Davies and this is my wife Marion. Say, is something wrong? Your left eye just started twitching.”

I think it means the book is going to be self-published, for one thing.

Joe Arpaio, the sheriff who terrorized Arizona for decades and was recently pardoned by 45, was born in Springfield. One of my favorite pieces of Bay State trivia.

I think German is, not exactly more nuanced, but there are certain nouns and verbs you wouldn’t put together in German that might be OK in Danish, even though your handy German/English dictionary would lead you to believe that the verb should work.

Viel Glück! Let me tell you though, as someone who studied it for years and lived and went to university there for a while, if you can become somewhat fluent all the other Germanic languages will come to you. Especially Dutch, which is kind of an Anglo-German mix it seems to me, you just have to learn how the spelling…

If I’m remembering this correctly when Ferdinand and Isabella were putting “Spain” together they convened a kind of linguistic congress of scholars. They rationalized the language as much as they could so that the different parts of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon could speak to each other.

Makes a great stocking stuffer!

You are so right. I actually met him once. My husband and I are huge L&O fans and were at a diner near Chelsea Piers, where the series was shot. He took the table next to us, and it was very crowded, so he was sitting closer to me than I was to my husband across the table.

Sorry, I meant NYC.

It’s like a Walgreens. In fact it is now Walgreens, Walgreens bought them but they’ve kept the name because DR has been in New York for something like 60 years.

Very late, but I’ll chime in.

I think Prince Harry would really enjoy the cookout, he always seems so happy and relieved to be away from official stuff. I can see him hanging out with the kids and organizing the free throw shots competition (because there’s probably some kind of basketball hoop, right?) And gallantly bringing food to the aunties…

The Tupac sister-in-law angle I had to look up and while doing so learned that Quincy Jones’s father was named Quincy Delight Jones, which is excellent, and that Peggy Lipton is still alive, also excellent.