Carol Moore passes along a column by Harvey Wasserman which contains this:

Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman has played the holocaust card for the Republicans, saying “It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party’s tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party.”

Because no republic could ever be corrupted, or because the scapegoats this time around are not Jews or Communists?

The yellow star lobby’s moral standing is based on having suffered an uniquely gross crime; it is thus motivated to oppose any dilution of that uniqueness, including any observation of warning signs that anything remotely similar could happen again.

Ever wonder about the use of the word liquidation as euphemism for political murder? It’s not in Webster’s New International, 2d ed. of 1952.

I wonder whether any entity in Holstein uses a symbol like this. The coat of arms of the former Counts is usually described as a white nettle-leaf (nesselblatt) on a red field, but has also been seen as a white field with a red indented border.

Twenty years ago I sometimes played cards with a deck of six suits: the extras (both blue) were boat-wheels and pairs of tennis racquets. Recently I thought, if I were designing a deck with new suits, they’d be heraldic favorites – crescents, stars, fleurs-de-lis – to go with the lozenges, trefoils and hearts that also appear often in armory: all more recognizable than those blue thingies.

And that in turn reminded me of Saturday morning advertisements for Lucky Charms breakfast cereal: “pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers.” Today at the grocery barn I looked for a box of Lucky Charms to check my memory, and found the stars and shamrocks replaced by rainbows and – oh come now – green leprechaun hats. How long has this been going on?!

In Fractured Fairy Tales: The Three Little Piggs (1960 Oct 09), the wolf when first seen is reading Gay Boy magazine.

It is credibly reported that Frank Kelly Freas, eminent fantasy illustrator and a very pleasant fellow, died this morning. There will probably be a memorial next Sunday at the LASFS clubhouse.

Later: No, it’s at something called the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center & Manor Hotel, in Hollywood.

My contemporary Jim Henley (alternate archive) reminisces:

Dammit, when I was a boy we had to work at atheism and agnosticism. We walked uphill in the snow – both ways! – to doubt the cogito! Nobody handed us disbelief on an hors d’oeuvre tray like these lazy brats you see nowadays, with their video games and their piercings!

This comes in the middle of some musings on the effects of Santa Clausery.