Owl Chatter is deliriously happy to welcome the newest member of our staff: Former Congressman George Santos!! What an honor and privilege. With our focus on moronic nonsense and lack of any moral compass whatsoever, it was (literally) a no-brainer to bring GS on board once he was ig-no-minniemouse-ly booted from the House. George tells us he’s already established an excellent rapport with staff photographer Phil. (Phil says he’s never met Santos.)
Here’s our man in drag. Lookin’ good, Babe!
Owl Chatter is not alone is appreciating all that GS has to offer.
House Republican leadership, including Speaker Mike Johnson; Majority Leader Steve Scalise; GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, and Majority Whip Tom Emmer all voted to keep him in Congress. Similarly, many archconservative Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry, and Tim Burchett of Tennessee voted to keep him in office. (Burchett is still recovering from burn wounds suffered when former-Speaker McCarthy rigged his office door to dump hot coals onto his head.)
Some constituents gathered at his district office in NY to offer Santos an unfond farewell. One fellow, 60-year-old John Johnson, yelled out of his car window: “Good riddance, you piece of crap.”
Don’t you listen to those meanies! You’re safe with us, George.
In other news, Speaker Mike Johnson said he thinks House Republicans have the votes to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden, insisting that such a move has “become a necessary step.” Absolutely!
“Elise [Stefanik] and I served on the impeachment defense team of Donald Trump twice, when the Democrats used it for brazen, partisan political purposes. We decried that use of it. This is very different. Remember, we are the rule-of-law team. We have to do it very methodically,” he said.
I did not make that up — it’s an actual quote. Could you plotz?
From today’s Met Diary, from Ana Cristina dos Santos Morais:
My husband and I got married at City Hall in Manhattan on a morning in 2009. A few people had to go to work after the ceremony. The rest of us, feeling hungry, went to a Belgian restaurant on West Broadway that has since closed.
The place wasn’t really set up for a party of 10, but the staff made do and pushed together a bunch of tables to accommodate us.
There was only one small table that we didn’t end up using. A man who appeared to be in his 30s was sitting at it working on a laptop.
We placed our orders and started to take photos of one another. The man working at his laptop asked if we would like a picture of the whole group.
We thanked him for his offer, and he took a couple of pictures. Then we went back to celebrating, and he turned back to his computer.
He left at some point after our food arrived, and I can’t remember if we said goodbye.
When we were finished, and my father asked for the check, the waitress said not to worry. The man with the laptop had already paid the bill.
Phil wanted us to know that one of his heroes, one of his favorite photographers, died last Wednesday, at his home in Manhattan at age 95: Elliott Erwitt. He lived on the Upper West Side for sixty years.
Apart from his very-well-respected serious work, Erwitt was known for seeking out silliness. Here’s a self portrait he took himself of himself in 1976. That’s him in the photo, you know, himself.
This famous photo he took of Nixon fingering Nikki K back in 1959 was used by Nixon in his 1960 Presidential campaign. Erwitt was angry — he hated Nixon, but couldn’t prevent its use by him.
Last, Philly wants me to include this fave of his. Here’s what the NYT says about it:
Another memorable photograph of Erwitt’s, from Edward Steichen’s landmark photo exhibition “The Family of Man” (and subsequent book) at the MOMA in New York, was titled “Mother and Child.” Taken in 1953, it shows a woman on a bed looking into her baby’s eyes while a cat coolly surveys the scene. The baby was Mr. Erwitt’s daughter, Ellen, and the woman was his first wife, Lucienne Matthews, who died in 2011.
Erwitt was married and divorced four times, and is survived by four daughters, two sons, ten grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, all wallet-sized.
Jeez Louise, if you can’t get a few good hours of sleep at the opera, what’s the point? Much of Joshua Barone’s review of The Met’s production of Wagner’s “Tannhauser” in the Times today was devoted to climate protesters who effectively stopped the show during Act 2, amid a description by the character Wolfram of love as a miraculous spring. “Wolfram, wake up — the spring is tainted!,” a protester yelled, and unfurled a banner that said: “No Opera on a Dead Planet.” Other voices were raised and other banners unfurled. It was orchestrated by a group going by the name Extinction Rebellion.
The performers froze (ironic, in light of global warming) and the curtain came down. Some members of the audience left. Others expressed anger at the protesters. Security cleared the protesters, although the police said they made no arrests. After about 20 minutes, the performance continued, albeit with the house lights on so security could keep an eye on the audience.
Barone said he was unable to engage with the show again, although he gave the production a very favorable review.
Here’s one of the protesters. [No it isn’t.]
This poem from today’s Writer’s Almanac is by Robert Hayden and is called “Those Winter Sundays.”
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
My dad was a doctor. So he never did any of that stuff. But, yeah, — what he said.
The puzzle today fell to my relentless attack, but there were some hard, weird words in it. RATINE: “Rough fabric with a loose weave.” MULCTS: “Compulsory payments of old.” RIFFLES: “Leafs,” like to leaf through a book. MASERS: “Acronymic devices in atomic clocks and radio telescopes.” The acronym is from: Microwave Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Of course!
And did you know there was a pre-cursor to Mickey Mouse? It was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Boy, you can sure see the resemblance.
We’re giving the last word today to Michelle Goldberg of the NYT, who wrote this today in her farewell to Owl Chatter’s new staff member, George Santos:
The MAGA movement is multifaceted, and different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz. But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness.
Michigan 26, Iowa 0. Hail to the Victors!
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 