Excerpt, but read the whole thing.
Louise Callaghan in the (London) Sunday Times
If they manage this, Bannon tells me more than once, the Maga Republicans can rule for half a century. “If we deliver now, it’s upon us. They’ve given President Trump that. If he delivers on the economics of this … we’re going to govern for 50 years. It’s all there for us to lose.”
IF. IF.
Well worth reading, from The Catholic Thing.
An excerpt:
I was about to begin my doctrinal studies at King’s College, and it was dark when I arrived at our Capuchin friary in the borough of Peckham in southeast London. When I was shown my room, I immediately looked out the window to see my view over the next three years. Across the way, was a pub. Blazing above its door, in big red neon letters, was the phrase: “Take Courage.”
If there are any Tatler readers in the city just trashed by him, this looks like a sure bet.
There is a fine review of this event by Sun critic, A. R. Hoffman.
The misguided fools at Ferrari S.p.A. have chosen to take the blue pill and are now in a merry chase with Jaguar® to bankruptcy.
It’s a mystery to your Tatler how the woke can be so asleep.
h/t Not the Bee
Bickerstaff, now far from the mayhem, still cannot help noting with sorrow the City’s collapse. Below, see a story from the New York Post, which is one of many in today’s police blotter, but representative of them all.
The Upper West Side has devolved into a Wild West atmosphere where anything goes, terrified crime victims and neighbors begging for more cops told The Post.
Criminals are more emboldened than ever in the ritzy nabe — with robberies soaring over 30% compared to last year — and carjackers so brazen they flashed their guns without concern on consecutive Sundays in broad daylight.
‘I have never felt so scared in this neighborhood the way I feel now, one of the carjacking victims told The Post this week.
And so it goes. Keep in mind this is just Manhattan. There are a plethora of stories like this in the outer boroughs too, but they usually receive less attention since they occur outside the City.
Bickerstaff’s family, with a few exceptions over the years, has had a presence in the City for well over three centuries, back to when it was called New Amsterdam. The first of us to arrive was a Huguenot seeking religious freedom. Bickerstaff was the last of his line to be that presence, but witnessing the swift decline, began entertaining the notion of leaving. The final provocation was the City’s leftwing voters (which is most of them) re-electing a bloody fool socialist, who in his first term substantially cut the police budget, favored slap-on-the-wrist penalties for hardened criminals and a host of other asinine acts. Enough was enough. It was time to go.
Bickerstaff has no regrets leaving New York, but still feels a twinge of sadness when reading, albeit from afar, the City he still loves descending into bedlam.
This sort of nonsense must stop.
BREAKING: Republican Senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins vote “Yes” and confirm another Far-Left Judical Nominee from the Biden Administration.
Bickerstaff has long wondered why certain elected officials like the above insist on calling themselves Republicans when they consistently vote Democratic. The only possible explanation which comes to mind is, like bratty children they enjoy being contrarians, and causing upset among their peers.
It was tolerable, barely, in the past. Now however, there is an existential choice what direction we ought be headed, either toward the restoration and maintenance of the freedoms we have enjoyed in this nation, as stated in our Constitution, or the continued journey toward the hell hole of socialism.
Our newly elected president will need every genuine Republican vote (and those of the few Democrats still possessing an iota of sense) that can be mustered in the House and Senate. With the next up elections facing these pretend Republicans, they must be vigorously primaried and ousted, for the future of our country.
With thanks to Ian Jaeger on X.
Your Tatler took the day off from blogging today, but as recompense (over?), is posting a piece from the New Liturgical Movement on a subject that some might say is more than a little esoteric (therefore, right up Bickerstaff’s alley). Titled The Power of Prepositions. It is written by the distinguished scholar Michael P. Foley,
Esoteric though it may seem, the piece is a fascinating exegesis on the difficulties of translating from the Latin into the vernacular those pesky little prepositions.
An excerpt:
De and Ex
The verse concerning the Incarnation has two prepositions denoting the relationship between Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The original Greek is:
σαρκωθέντα ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς παρθένου καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα,
And the Latin translation is:
Et incarnátus est de Spíritu Sancto ex María Vírgine: et homo factus est.
Which I translate as:
And He was incarnated by the Holy Ghost from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
Highly readable, Bickerstaff urges you to read it all.
In your Tatler’s youth, long, long ago, it was the tradition of the family to alternate yearly the locales where Thanksgiving was celebrated; in CT where we lived, and NY where relations lived. At either locale, it was also the tradition after Thanksgiving Supper to play Handel’s Messiah, the version you see above.
There were precious few recordings of Messiah available where we lived back then, only two coming to mind: Sir Thomas Beecham’s glorious extravaganza, with its wholesale re-orchestrations of it, with huge forces, and Eugene Ormandy’s relatively conservative approach to it, the one preferred by the grownups in the family.
Listening to it today for the first time since youth, it sounds remarkably good for its time. Ormandy, as was his wont, made the work his own, with additional instrumentation and large cuts, but to these ears it holds up just fine. The yearly tradition of listening to it on this most American holiday may just have been revived.
Who knew, there are multiple pronunciations of this most American of holidays, though we big-hearted Americans also permit our Canadian neighbors to celebrate it, but on a different date (25 October in ’25). The New York Post, as is its wont, decided to look into the matter of pronunciation of the word and turned up some surprising results, at least to this dyed-in-the-wool easterner, even though he lives in the West now.
While a great majority of Americans, 74%, pronounce it Thanks-GIV-ing, a sizable minority, 16%, mostly living in the South, pronounce it THANKS-giv-ing. There is also a small number of lazy folk who cannot be bothered to pronounce the “K” sound and pronounce it THANGS-giv-ing (members of that group are obviously communists and should be driven from our shores posthaste).
However you pronounce it, this blogger wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. Whatever problems we face in our country, we are still blessed to be living here and have much to be thankful for.
From the Daily Signal,”As part of mandatory diversity training, NYC firefighters are lectured about ‘The Genderbread Person’—a cartoon that explains the ‘spectrum of countless identities’ people can have.”
This fireman hits it on the nose: “The Genderbread Person looks like the FDNY got a contract with some activist group who specializes in children’s propaganda.”
The only possible correction your Tatler would make to the fireman’s statement is, while the figure indeed looks if it were intended for children, to the woke left, all of us are regarded as children, no matter what age, and recalcitrant children at that, requiring constant monitoring to ensure we are towing the line of woke correctness.
THE TAOS TATLER. 