If you’ve been pronouncing Kirsten Dunst’s name incorrectly, you’re not alone. She doesn’t care and doesn’t correct people. Still, you might as well get it right, right? I face the problem often myself (with my name: not hers), since I have an unusual name. I would go so far as to say my name is more often pronounced incorrectly than correctly. Sometimes I’ll correct the speaker, but often I don’t. If it’s Linda or a close friend or relative who gets it wrong, I’ll correct them. [That was a joke.] If it’s a stranger I have to make the calculation as to whether it’s worth the effort. Will I be dealing with them again? Will they feel bad? Intangibles related to the moment play a role too, e.g., my mood, and am I miffed?
Kirsten is pronounced Keersten. She is the actress our Zoey will most resemble when she grows up. KD was born and raised in Jersey until her folks separated when she was eleven and she moved to LA with her mom. She’s 43 and has two kids with her husband, actor Jesse Plemons.
Brandeis alum Tom Friedman has an excellent column in the NYT today on Ukraine. To stress how delusional the Trump admin is about Putin, he devotes a chunk of his space to quoting verbatim an answer special envoy Steve Witless gave to Tucker Carlson:
“I liked him [Putin]. I thought he was straight up with me. In the second visit that I had, it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It’s been reported in the paper, but it was such a gracious moment. And [Putin] told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kinds of conversations?
“And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right?”
Friedman continues: It gets worse . . .
Ya think?
He laments that the intelligence community and State Dept have been neutered and concludes eloquently:
“Who will tell him the truth? No one.
“No one but the wild earth of Ukraine. In the trenches in the Donbas, there is truth. In the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Kyiv says Putin has abducted, there is truth. In the roughly 1.4 million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded as a result of Putin’s fevered dreams of restoring Ukraine to Mother Russia, there is truth. In the Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian drones at the same time that Trump was laying out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, there is truth.”
It’s the 96th birthday of children’s poet X. J. Kennedy today. Kinehora! He’s from Dover, NJ, and went to Seton Hall for his undergrad degree, Columbia for his Masters, and spent six years at UMich failing to get a Ph.D. He was married to his wife Dorothy for 56 years, until her death in 2018, and has five kids and six grandkids. He lives in Peabody MA.
This poem of his is called “What We Might Be, What We Are” and it was in The Writer’s Almanac.
If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,
If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.
If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We’d not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,
But you’re just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I’m a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we’ll stay slightly remote.
And if you were a brand new pair of roller skates, and I were a brand new key?
[That’s Melanie’s song, of course.]
Whew. Just watched the Gnats take two out of three from the Mets. Any Gnat win is a nailbiter. Need to calm down now. The Gnats are way out of the pennant race and their manager has been fired. They play now solely out of pride and the love of the game.
Sports fans who say baseball is boring — either they don’t care, or what the hell are they watching? Roger Angell wrote about the caring. Here he is, on the Fisk home run in the New Yorker of 11/9/75:
“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
Thanks for dropping in.
The Wellington Files 