Panthera perspecta virginiana

If you have read about the history of the pub you know that the Lens-Nosed Tiger pub is not at all like the Diogenes Club on Pall Mall in London. We, the patrons, encourage conversation at the LNT, and the conversation is often the purpose of being there. I am sure some people have become ordinary friends because of meeting at the pub, and perhaps there have been one or two romances whose geneses were here, but what we mostly do is talk to each other. ...

Richmond has had its one-every-ten-years taste of winter starting in late January, and NOAA promises it will continue for a while. Today’s high temperature was -2C at midnight, and it promises to drop to -5C at noon, and we are looking at -11C tomorrow morning. I had grand plans of going everywhere with the camera for the last few days and recording a celebration of snowfall, but we wound up with floes that were melt on the bottom, heavy snow in the middle, and a generous, sturdy layer of sleet on the top. I stayed home. Today, the roads were passable. ...

During the pandemic, we only saw masks. I have looked for an explanation by analogy for several years. If they know about prosopagnosia at all, many people have as their only exposure Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Talk about a severe case, possibly fantastic, and probably an oblique reference to Sacks’s own condition in the book’s first chapter. Prosopagnosia exists in degrees, and my experience is comparatively tame but real. After years of waiting, an example dropped into my kitchen last week. ...

My neighbor has a Hummer. It might be the H2 or the H3, but certainly not the original. His is not the first car I have seen with the bumper sticker, “I identify as a Prius,” but it might be the least clever. The stickers are increasingly common, and I have found that the cars wearing them share a single common characteristic: none is a Prius. Restated, identify as indicates that the car is distinctly not the type of car it identifies as. The relationship might be aspirational – the car’s owner wishes the car were a Prius. It might be humor, or more abrasively, ridicule. It might be projection: “If you are reading a this bumper sticker, you wish my car was a Prius.” ...

I have spent the last few days enjoying the disease making its way through the University. I either passed or failed the COVID test, which is to say it is not COVID, but it has been rough. I have so seldom been ill that I have reached the maximum accumulation of “sick leave” and can accumulate no more until I use some. Now I have. Sleep did not come easily last night, and I adjourned to the media room to rewatch a little Shakespeare and sleep on the sofa. Perhaps because of the state of the world I have been thinking about Edmund, the bastard son of King Lear. He is a man consumed with the desire to break things, to destroy. Edmund is not a ’nice guy.’ So, I watched the final act. ...

I generally visit the ABC (Virginia state-operated liquor store) on the first business day of the month. The specials change, and products that are in limited supply sometimes magically appear. The new products and the sale items are usually at the front of the store, and seeing nothing that interested me, I wandered toward the back, through the dwindling offerings from Canada, and onward to the bourbon aisle. This is Virginia, and the bourbon aisle is about one third of the flagship store in Carytown. ...