Quote of the Day (Orson Welles, on Happy Endings)

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”—American actor, director, and screenwriter Orson Welles (1915-1985), quoted in Orson Welles: Interviews, edited by Mark W. Estrin (2002)

Joke of the Day (Bill Hicks, Comparing the Intelligence of Children and Adults)

“Children are smarter than any of us. Know how I know that? I don’t know one child with a full-time job and children.”—American stand-up comic and satirist Bill Hicks (1961-1994) quoted by Brent DeBoer, “From the Desk of the Dandy Warhols’ Brent DeBoer,” Magnet Magazine, June 9, 2012 

Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Flattery, the One Industry Unaffected by Technology)

“The flattery industry remains old-fashioned, its work not yet disintermediated by tech. The wealthiest people can afford to surround themselves with actual bodies, who supply live flattery. Brooke Harrington writes in Capital without Borders, her study of wealth managers and their relationships with the super-rich, that some practitioners even attend their clients’ deathbeds. In flattery jobs, people skills usually trump technical competence.”— “World View” columnist Simon Kuper, “How Flattery Became a Big, Beautiful Industry,” The Financial Times, Nov. 29-30, 2025

For years, the dubious honor of being the most outrageous sycophant belonged to villainous Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, played by Roland Young (right, with Frank Lawton as the adult title character in the 1935 film adaptation) in the attached image.

But Simon Kuper is right to focus on actual, more current examples. I had always thought, from reading Cary Reich’s marvelous 1996 biography of Nelson Rockefeller, that, in his early rise as a midlevel Washington bureaucrat, the future New York governor had perfected the art of governmental brown-nosing.

Then I found out that Rocky had his own Mini-Me, albeit with a Teutonic accent, in foreign-policy adviser Henry Kissinger, who then turned around and performed the same function for Richard Nixon.

But the true horror, as Kuper notes, lies in the current group of advisers now surrounding Donald Trump. Their sole qualification for high office is not competence but absolute shamelessness in stroking their boss’s tender ego.

More than ever this week, Trump needs his own personal Uriah Heeps in the wake of public appearances on Greenland that were so unfocused, rambling and dangerous that they sparked renewed, urgent calls for invoking the 25^th Amendment to stop his insanity.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Irish Ice-Cutters in New England Winters)

“A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ‘cradle–holes’ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty–five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss–grown and hoary ruin, built of azure–tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty–five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

One of those jobs that despised immigrants performed years ago...

The image accompanying this post, showing ice-harvesting in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, appeared first in Gleason's Drawing Room Companion (1852), p. 37.

Quote of the Day (John Heisman, on a Grave Football Sin)

“What is this?  It is a prolate spheroid, an elongated sphere in which the outer leather casing is drawn tightly over a somewhat smaller rubber tubing.  Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football."—American football coach, writer, and actor John Heisman (1869-1936), in his annual preseason speech to his squads, quoted by Samuel T. Pees, “John Heisman, Football Coach,” www.OilHistory.com , 2004

After this weekend, I have concluded that pro football is proof positive that Darwin’s theory of evolution was incorrect—human beings regress rather than evolve into a higher form.

When John Heisman said that line about “a prolate spheroid” over a century ago, I wonder how many of his players knew what he was talking about?

At the start of the 1961 preseason, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi was more direct than Heisman: “Gentlemen, this is a football."

Packers wide receiver Max McGee raised his hand and cracked, “Um, Coach, you’re going a little too fast!”

To their credit, Lombardi’s squad eventually absorbed this elementary lesson.

This past weekend, it looks like the survivors of the National Football League’s latest brutal season experienced the professional counterpart of the death that hyperbolic Coach Heisman warned about.

In the latest round of the playoffs, here’s how it broke down, with fumbles counted along with interceptions (which, perhaps, Heisman didn’t worry much at the start of his career, before the widespread adoption of the forward pass) and the winners in each contest listed second:

AFC:

Buffalo Bills: 5 fumbles, 2 interceptions; Denver Broncos: 1 fumble, 1 interception

Houston Texans: 2 fumbles, 4 interceptions; New England Patriots: 4 fumbles, 1 interception

NFC:

San Francisco 49ers: 2 fumbles, 1 interception; Seattle Seahawks: 0 fumbles, 0 interceptions

Chicago Bears: 0 fumbles, 3 interceptions; Los Angeles Rams: 0 fumbles, 0 interceptions

Notice a pattern here? The team with fewer mistakes ended up winning.

The agony in Buffalo since Saturday (exacerbated by controversial officiating) made me think that more than a few people are taking Heisman’s claim—well, almost literally. 

Quarterback Josh Allen was in tears over his subpar performance, and the team’s owner decided to part ways with head coach Sean McDermott after nine seasons, perhaps on the questionable premise that his replacement can help the Bills take the Super Bowl at last.

As for that Texans-Patriots game: well, I couldn’t believe what I was watching in that first half, with the four interceptions by Texans’ quarterback C.J. Stroud.

Players, coaches, and owners may have taken all these mistakes seriously, but I’ll tell you about another group that probably has, maybe to the point of heart attacks: those who bet on the game. 

“Prop bets” are facilitating so many more varieties of gambling than before, and anybody following the pregame odds here are likely to have lost their shirts by now.

Quote of the Day (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on Non-Violence and Oppressors)

“The non-violent way does not bring about miracles in a few hours, in a few days, in a few years, for that matter. I think the first reaction of the oppressor when oppressed people rise up against the system of injustice is an attitude of bitterness. But I do believe that if the non-violent resisters continue to follow the way of non-violence, they eventually get over to the hearts and souls of the oppressors, and I think it eventually brings about that redemption that we dream of. Of course, I can’t estimate how many people we’ve touched so far; this is impossible because it’s an inner process. But I’m sure something is stirring in the minds and souls of people and I’m sure people are thinking anew on this basic problem of human relations.”—American minister, civil-rights advocate, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), “Meet the Press” appearance transcript, Apr. 17, 1960, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Injustice and Loving Our Enemies)

“To love our enemies cannot mean that we must connive with their injustice. It does mean that beyond all moral distinctions of history we must know ourselves one with our enemies not only in the bonds of common humanity but also in the bonds of common guilt by which that humanity has become corrupted.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Our Responsibilities in 1942,” Christianity and Crisis, Jan. 12, 1942