(Roughly) Daily

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Lest readers’ lights be inappropriately hidden under bushels:  “Don’t Be So Modest“– a “humblebrag generator.”

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As we tune the horns that we’re about to blow, we might send curmudgeonly birthday greetings to Alexander Humphreys Woollcott; he was born on this date in 1887.  A critic and columnist, Woollcott was well known in his time as a radio commentator, a contributor to The New Yorker, and a member of the Algonquin Round Table.  These days, he may be better recognized as the model for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for Waldo Lydecker in the 1944 film Laura.  (Woollcott himself believed that he was the model for Rex Stout’s famous detective, Nero Wolfe; but Stout suggested that his friend was flattering himself.)

The two oldest professions in the world — ruined by amateurs

– On actors and prostitutes, from his column, as republished in Shouts and Murmurs: Echoes of a Thousand and One First Nights (1922)

All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.

– “The Knock at the Stage Door” in Reader’s Digest (December 1933)

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