While the right covers this, that, and the other thing, the MSM and the left is obsessed with the NY Times’ report that Trump tried to fire Mueller and was talked out of it. Go to memeorandum and you’ll see what I mean.

Once again, they seem to think this is some sort of smoking gun that will sink Trump. And they are waiting with bated breath, of course, for Mueller’s report. Meanwhile, Trump calls it “fake news.”

The problem for the Times at this point is that, even though Trump is certainly capable of lying through his teeth about whether or not he seriously considered firing Mueller, the Times may have even less credibility. That’s what happens when you cry “wolf” over and over and over.

This particular story is just the latest iteration of a long series of stories saying the same thing (you can read about some of the history here). I am virtually certain that most of my liberal friends believe the stories are all true (if they follow them at all, that is).

I do not believe they are true, although they certainly might be true, and I do not believe that they are not true. There is simply no way to know. But the MSM’s track record on this sort of thing is bad. Their undisguised and virulent animus towards Trump, and the number of their previous Trump-critical stories that have never been confirmed or have turned out to be flat wrong, make it difficult for people who are not already on the left to believe them.

But I have an additional question. Let’s say that the Times report is true. Let’s say that Trump wanted to fire Mueller last June and was talked out of it by, among other things, his counsel’s threat to resign. What is the news here? The idea that Trump might have some autocratic impulses isn’t news. The idea that he might be enraged that Mueller was investigating him isn’t news, either; I’m hard-pressed to come up with any president I can think of who would take it with equanimity and a smile. The fact that Trump was talked out of that autocratic impulse makes it seem (to me, at least) as though his desire to fire Mueller either wasn’t incredibly strong to begin with and/or that he realized the repercussions would be worse than the problem. That latter possibility makes him sound reasonable, or at least amenable to persuasion/reason on a practical basis.

And that’s if you believe the Times’ story.

I’ve written before about my problem with cartoons.

But I have a similar problem with graphics. The other day while working on the new blog site I noticed that my dashboard was one of those streamlined things so popular today—mostly because of the popularity of cellphones—where little symbols have totally replaced words. The dashboard has at least twenty symbols running along the side, and they all are about the same size and give few clues as to what they mean, which (for me, at least) makes it hard to differentiate among them.

The graphics for “links” and “comments” are so ubiquitous—a chain for links, and a sort of cartoon bubble for comments—that even I, with my graphics dyslexia, know what they mean. But the rest are not the least bit intuitive and I have no interest in learning them. What’s wrong with words, good old-fashioned words?

Luckily, there’s a way to make the words reappear on the dashboard. But of course, in order to do that you have to search the symbols-only version and find it. It’s a tiny little triangle/arrow at the bottom, and once you click on it up spring the missing words and all’s well. But the default position is now the graphics one.

Perhaps I’m revealing my advanced age by saying all of this. But I also sometimes have a problem with the graphics on containers. You know, the things that tell you how to open them. Sometimes words are even included and it still can be confusing.

For example, I was making a smoothie today. I always put frozen fruit in them and then blend the whole thing up. Today I was opening a large new package of frozen fruit and encountered this graphic. I only took the photo after I had opened it, so the little tear there makes it obvious how it’s done. But try to imagine it without the tear to guide you; try to imagine the oval with the arrow is whole. What would you do?

I’ll tell you what I did. I assumed that the arrow pointed to something below the oval. Perhaps that little thing that looked like a string, that might be sort of embedded in the packaging and that you need to pull? I’ve encountered packaging like that before. But no, the string stubbornly defied my best efforts to pry it loose.

Perhaps that’s because it wasn’t a string, but a drawing of a cherry stem, cleverly placed to fool the graphically challenged like me.

It turns out that the thing to pull was a hidden tab above the arrow—yes, above the arrow that pointed down. The arrow apparently meant “look above this arrow that’s pointing down and pull the thing above the arrow down.”

Now I ask you, does that make sense?

Those texts from Strzok and Page that had gotten lost?

They’ve been found!:

Here’s how:

In a letter sent to congressional committees, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his office “succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices, including text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page that were sent or received between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.”

Ah, so the DOJ managed to use forensic tools to find some text messages the FBI couldn’t seem to recover. What a novel idea! I guess we can’t expect the FBI to know what forensic tools are, can we?

And have all the texts been recovered, or some of them are still missing?:

“Our effort to recover any additional text messages is ongoing,” Horowitz said. “We will provide copies of the text messages that we recover from these devices to the Department so that the Department’s leadership can take any management action it deems appropriate.”

Fox News has learned from U.S. government officials that the inspector general recovered the texts by taking possession of “at least four” phones belonging to Strzok and Page.

They were busy little beavers, weren’t they (Strzok and Page, not the FBI)? Who knows whether all the texts will ever be recovered, or whether the FBI and DOJ are aware of all the methods the lovers used to communicate.

“The Most Happy Fella” is a musical by Frank Loesser (I wrote about Loesser and his oeuvre here) that opened on Broadway in 1956.

“Fella” is an odd bird in that it requires many operatic voices. Perhaps that’s why it’s so seldom performed. My parents, who often took me to Broadway musicals even at that tender age, omitted that one. My guess is that it was because it contained “adult” themes.

But we owned the record. It was one of the few musicals I learned through the recording only and didn’t see in person until I was well into middle age. It’s absolutely wonderful, one of the best ever, combining a touching story and an almost endless flow of beautiful music.

Was it an an opera? I would say not, since it contained huge reams of dialogue. I’d call it “operatic,” though. As a child, however, I didn’t care about such distinctions.

Robert Weede, who played Tony and is shown in this video, had previously been known as an opera singer. But he was a sensation in “The Most Happy Fella.” I’m sad that I didn’t get to see him, but I found a YouTube video of him performing one song from the show, live and in concert.

Do you think he’s hammy? Maybe, by today’s standards. I think he’s absolutely perfect. The character of Tony is supposed to be very emotional. Tony is an Italian-born (the stereotypical Italian accent is part of it) California vineyard owner, an older man who’s never been lucky in love but thinks he’s finally found a woman to love him. In addition, wonder of wonders, she’s young and beautiful. In this song he’s telling his long-dead mother (in heaven) the news.

Just watch Weede transition from explaining the character to being the character. That part begins at around 00:32, and the transformation becomes complete at around 00:42:

Giorgio Tozzi (1980) is very good singing the same song, but in my opinion not as good as Weede:

Michael Corvino, singing here more recently, has a very beautiful voice. But the acting, although fine, is more gentle and displays nothing like the astounding variety and power of the swiftly changing emotions Weede conveys with his face and gestures. Here’s Corvino:

While we’re at it, if you’re still with me, here’s a recording of another favorite song of mine from the original cast album. This one is among the songs from the show that are not the least bit operatic. Enjoy:

There’s this one, too. In the video (and on the record) there’s a short intro I’ve left in here, because it tells you a little bit about what’s happening. Tony is teaching some Italian to the younger woman with whom he’s in love and who is beginning to love him back. But it’s also a quartet that contrasts the happiness of the lovers—who rejoice in each passing day—with the depression of Tony’s older sister and the restlessness of the farm foreman Joey. There’s only one comment to the YouTube video at the moment, and even though I didn’t write it, it expresses my feelings about the song and the feeling I had about it even as a child (“This quartet is almost painfully beautiful.”):

There are few prominent political figures in America I have disliked as much or as long as John Kerry. Even back when I was a liberal Democrat, which is when he first became well-known, something about him (or maybe many things about him) rubbed me very much the wrong way.

Kerry was actually the subject of my very first post (2004) written expressly for this blog. And there’s also this post (“John Kerry: treason then and now”) which I wrote in 2014.

In 2012 I added the following reminiscence:

…[S]trangely enough, back when I was a liberal in the 60s and 70s, something about Kerry almost instantaneously raised my hackles. He seemed a phony, self-aggrandizing, pompous, opportunistic, narcissistic windbag even back then. Or maybe especially back then.

“Especially” not because he was actually worse then, but because his extreme arrogance and air of superiority seemed particularly misplaced in such a young person.

Kerry has always fancied himself an international negotiator, even as a young man:

…[H]e met on the trip with Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of the PRG and a top negotiator at the talks. Kerry acknowledged in that testimony that even going to the peace talks as a private citizen was at the “borderline” of what was permissible under U.S. law, which forbids citizens from negotiating treaties with foreign governments.

As one might expect, neither age nor his lengthy stint as senator nor his time as Secretary of State under Obama has dimmed his desire to negotiate, even now that he’s supposedly a private citizen. If this report is true, he’s still at it, this time to undermine Trump in the Middle East:

During the conversation, according to the report, Kerry asked Agha to convey a message to Abbas and ask him to “hold on and be strong.” Tell him, he told Agha, “that he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President Trump’s demands.” According to Kerry, Trump will not remain in office for a long time. It was reported that within a year there was a good chance that Trump would not be in the White House.

Kerry offered his help to the Palestinians in an effort to advance the peace process and recommended that Abbas present his own peace plan. “Maybe it is time for the Palestinians to define their peace principles and present a positive plan,” Kerry suggested. He promised to use all his contacts and all his abilities to get support for such a plan. He asked Abbas, through Agha, not to attack the US or the Trump administration, but to concentrate on personal attacks on Trump himself, whom Kerry says is solely and directly responsible for the situation.

According to the report, referring to the president, Kerry used derogatory terms and even worse. Kerry offered to help create an alternative peace initiative and promised to help garner international support, among others, of Europeans, Arab states and the international community. Kerry hinted that many in the American establishment, as well as in American intelligence, are dissatisfied with Trump’s performance and the way he leads America. He surprised his interlocutor by saying he was seriously considering running for president in 2020. When asked about his advanced age, he said he was not much older than Trump and would not have an age problem.

Kerry may not think he has an age problem, but in that case he does have a math problem. If Kerry ran for president in 2020 and won, he would have just turned 77 years old before the inauguration. That’s quite a bit older than Trump was when he was first elected, and it’s still significantly older than Trump would be if Trump were re-elected. When you’re at that end of the age graph, every year counts more than it does at the beginning.

But age isn’t really Kerry’s problem if he wanted to run for national office. He lost in 2004 despite President Bush’s unpopularity because Kerry is widely despised, and there’s no big affection for him even among liberals.

But back to his alleged communication with Abbas through Agha. It seems to me that Kerry may be terrified at the possibility that Trump could actually broker a deal in the Middle East, something that eluded Kerry but that he had fervently hoped would be his ticket to diplomatic stardom. How dreadful, how positively unendurable, it would be if Trump—of all people—managed to do what Kerry could not do, and to get better terms for Israel into the bargain.

I have no problem believing that Kerry would do his best to prevent that from happening. It makes perfect sense: tell Abbas to hang tough and not be afraid of Trump, and then Kerry can swoop in later and use his contacts with Europe and the rest of the “international community” he knows so well to broker a much better deal for the Palestinians. As part of this proposal, he must convince Abbas that Trump is on the way out soon, so there’s no need to take his proposals seriously or to be afraid of him.

Andrew C. McCarthy is the most consistently readable, thorough, and clear writer on the topic of all the current government investigations going on, and recent ones in the past as well. I’ve cited him many times, and here I go again:

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.

That is why such an indictment of Hillary Clinton was never going to happen.

McCarthy discusses the process by which, in several succeeding drafts of Comey’s statements exonerating Clinton from having committed any criminal act, all references to President Obama that had originally been included were expunged. An early draft had said this:

That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.

Later drafts changed the presidential reference so that it read “another senior government official.” By the time Comey delivered his remarks, that entire passage was gone, as well, and just Hillary was mentioned:

What most alarmed Obama and Clinton advisers (those groups overlap) was not only that there were several Clinton–Obama email exchanges, but also that Obama dissembled about his knowledge of Clinton’s private email use in a nationally televised interview…

Perhaps [Obama] was confident that, because he had used an alias in communicating with Clinton, his emails to and from her — estimated to number around 20 — would remain undiscovered.

His and Clinton’s advisers were not so confident. Right after the interview aired, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin emailed Jennifer Palmieri and other senior campaign staffers, stating: “Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it on the news.”

Scherwin’s alert was forwarded to Mills. Shortly afterwards, an agitated Mills emailed Podesta: “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.”

Much more at the link.

A little while ago a commenter here wrote: “We and the Brits destabilized Iran in 1953 for the Shah, then the Shah’s reign led to this theocracy.”

The reference is to the coup engineered by the US and Britain against Iranian Prime Minister Mossaddegh [variously spelled]. Here’s what Wiki has to say about it. It’s the sort of thing you commonly will read if you do internet research on the subject:

He was the head of a democratically elected government, holding office as the Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown in a coup d’état aided by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service.

An author, administrator, lawyer, and prominent parliamentarian, his administration introduced a range of progressive social and political reforms such as social security and land reforms, including taxation of the rent on land. His government’s most notable policy, however, was the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been under British control since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC) (later British Petroleum and BP).

Many Iranians regard Mosaddegh as the leading champion of secular democracy and resistance to foreign domination in Iran’s modern history. Mosaddegh was removed from power in a coup on 19 August 1953, organised and carried out by the CIA at the request of MI6, which chose Iranian General Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Mosaddegh.

It seems pretty clear what is being said here, at least from the “progressive” (great word, isn’t it?] point of view. I’ll fill in the blanks for you: good guy Mossaddegh was doing wonderful things for a stable Iran until the greedy bad guys the Americans and Brits got mad at him for nationalizing the oil industry and claiming it for its rightful owners, the Iranians.

You can read that sort of thing all over. Is it true?

One can begin at any number of arbitrary points in Iranian (and Persian, before that) history or modern history. But this might be a good one. While you read it, mull over how very very stable Iran was (that’s sarcasm, by the way) before the coup.

Here’s more:

The CIA’s immediate target was Mossadeq, whom the Shah had picked to run the government just before the parliament voted to nationalize the AIOC. A royal-blooded eccentric given to melodrama and hypochondria, Mossadeq often wept during speeches, had fits and swoons, and conducted affairs of state from bed wearing wool pajamas. During his visit to the United States in October 1951, Newsweek labeled him the “Fainting Fanatic” but also observed that, although most Westerners at first dismissed him as “feeble, senile, and probably a lunatic,” many came to regard him as “an immensely shrewd old man with an iron will and a flair for self-dramatization.” Time recognized his impact on world events by naming him its “Man of the Year” in 1951.

Mossadeq is Kinzer’s [author of a book about the coup being reviewed in the article] paladin—in contrast to the schemers he finds in the White House and Whitehall—but the author does subject him to sharp criticism. He points out, for example, that Mossadeq’s ideology blinded him to opportunities to benefit both himself and the Iranian people: “The single-mindedness with which he pursued his campaign against [the AIOC, otherwise known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company] made it impossible for him to compromise when he could and should have.” In addition, Mossadeq failed at a basic test of statecraft—trying to understand other leaders’ perspectives on the world. By ignoring the anticommunist basis of US policy, he wrenched the dispute with the AIOC out of its Cold War context and saw it only from his parochial nationalist viewpoint. Lastly, Mossadeq’s naïvete about communist tactics led him to ignore the Tudeh Party’s efforts to penetrate and control Iranian institutions. He seemed almost blithely unaware that pro-Soviet communists had taken advantage of democratic systems to seize power in parts of Eastern Europe. By not reining in Iran’s communists, he fell on Washington’s enemies list.

If you want to read a history of Mossadegh devoid of leftist memes, go here:

There are serious men who are under the impression that the CIA led a coup to replace an upstanding, democratic reformer named Mohammed Mossadegh with a fascist Shah named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and that Pahlavi’s crimes were so atrocious that Iran was driven into the arms of the mullahs. None of that is true.

That’s near the beginning. The body of the article fleshes out that thesis with points such as this one:

Extremely valuable property [the AIOC, and the oil industry in Iran that had been developed by the British and not the Iranians], legally owned by the British government and British private citizens, had been confiscated by a foreign government. Before the war, Britain might have invaded. Instead, it retaliated against Mossadegh by leading an international embargo of Iran’s oil and by withdrawing its technicians from the nationalized holdings. Without British know-how, the company could barely function; after the withdrawal, Iranian oil production dropped 96 percent. And the oil that was produced couldn’t be sold.

Oil money funded the Iranian government; without it, Mossadegh’s reforms were worthless, and his popularity plunged. Mossadegh called a parliamentary election in late 1951. When he realized he was going to lose, he had the election suspended.

(That should put to bed the notion that he was an idealistic democrat.)

The entire article is well worth reading, if only to present a thought-provoking alternative to the usual simplistic “US bad, Mossaddegh good” story. Later on, there’s this [emphasis mine]:

The CIA was happy to take credit [for the coup], exaggerating its involvement in what was, at the time, considered a big success — but a private CIA cable credited Mossadegh’s collapse to the fact that “the flight of the Shah . . . galvanized the people into an irate pro-Shah force.” (A large portion of those galvanized people, it should be noted, were hard-core Islamists, who feared that Mossadegh’s slide to the left would include Communist atheism.)

So: Mossadegh was no democrat, and the CIA was not responsible for his ouster; the CIA did not install the Shah in his place, and it did not become involved because of oil. In fact, after Mossadegh was gone, Iran’s oil infrastructure remained nationalized, and eventually the British agreed to a 50-50 profit split.

Note especially this: “So why do so many people believe the imperialist-calamity version of modern Persian history? Because the world is filled with freshmen and sophomoric adults.”

Guess so. My gut feeling is always that history tends to be far more complex than its presentation by either side. But generally I’ve found the right to be somewhat more reliable on that score than the left.

When the 1953 coup occurred, Iran wasn’t the least bit stable. It was already a battlefield among the groups fighting for power: the monarchists, the liberal democrats, the religious fundamentalists, and the /leftists/Communists. I’m pretty sure that the liberal democrats were the smallest group, even back then. In the end—that is, during the revolution of 1979—the latter two groups (religious fundamentalists and the left) united in unholy alliance in order to overthrow the first two groups. That temporary unity was one of the main reasons the revolution was successful.

Iran has suffered ever since. It turned out that it was the religious fundamentalists who were the last men standing, although the left had intended to take that position.

[NOTE: I’ve written quite a bit in the past about Iranian history and in particular the history of the years directly leading up to the revolution of 1979 (see this this, this, this, and this, which is just a sampler of the most important posts but is by no means an inclusive list).]

Well, it’s all clear now:

Gov. David Ige told reporters today that part of the delay in notifying the public that the Jan. 13 ballistic missile alert was a false alarm was that he did not know his Twitter account password.

The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency issued the false alarm at 8:07 a.m., and Ige was told the missile alert was a false alarm two minutes after the alert was sent to cell phones across the state. However, Ige’s office did not get out a cancellation message until 17 minutes after the alert.

It really gives a person a deep sense of faith in the efficiency and competence of government and government officials.

Ige is sixty-one years old, so he’s old enough to be of the generation that’s not exactly completely conversant with the internet. Then again, he needs to be. But don’t despair; it’s been fixed:

Ige added that “I have to confess that I don’t know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords, so certainly that’s one of the changes that I’ve made. I’ve been putting that on my phone so that we can access the social media directly.”

One thing that even Trump’s enemies should be able to say about Trump is that he always seems (so far) to have been quite cognizant of his Twitter password—although they probably wish he weren’t.

A great deal of what goes on with a blog is unseen by the reader. For example, I’ve talked about the amount of spam comments I get, almost all of them blocked by my spam filter. A while back there was a period of a couple of years when spam came in at the rate of about 10,000 a day. Then for some unknown reason it suddenly went down to about 500 a day. That’s quite a jump.

Then it started creeping back up to about 1500 a day. Again, I have no idea why, although I believe there are several layers of filters that operate. Next, I installed a security system that was supposed to improve things, but the main thing it seemed to do was to inform me on a regular basis of the number of attacks the blog had sustained.

“Attacks” are not the same as spam. They’re not necessarily attempts to take over the entire blog by hacking into it, although I’m pretty sure those occur on a regular basis, too. The attacks I’m talking about are another type of behind-the-scenes war, the details of which I’ll skip except to say they’re an attempt by bots (or the people who design bots) to get into part of the blog’s information sources and use them.

Bots are indefatigable—as you might imagine, since they’re not alive. Every now and then I’ll block one through that same security system (I’m being purposely vague here) if I get a notice that it’s been attacking particularly relentlessly. Most of these bots are from places in China and Russia or Ukraine, although there are some from the US (not sure whether they’re really from the US or whether it’s a proxy IP number and location they’re using).

I blocked one a few days ago. Three days later the service reported that in those three days that bot had made approximately 6000 attempts to attack that were blocked. By my hasty calculations, that turns out to be one every one and a half minutes or so, round the clock.

Not all the attack bots are that busy. And I wonder if at a certain point, they are programmed to give up.

[NOTE: I’ll add that, simultaneously with my blocking some of these bots, my spam-comment-per-day rate has gone down to about 50, which is extraordinarily and unprecedentedly low. So, although my goal was not to block spam, it turns out that spam and the attack bots seem to be related.]

Ever since I first saw the play “Noises Off” on Broadway around 1984 I’ve been deeply impressed by Michael Frayn, its author.

I’d read about the play before I attended it. It was said to be very funny and very clever. But it was exponentially funnier and more clever than I’d imagined, probably the funniest and most clever play I’d ever seen, then or later. It was also crazily complex in terms of its “business” and its staging, requiring split-second perfection in its timing, as well as prodigious memories in its actors.

I recently got a look at the script for “Noises Off,” something I’d always wondered about. How does a playwright even write the directions for that sort of thing? The script is just as complicated as I’d thought, a sort of fugue of action and words that’s hard to puzzle out when reading but works perfectly onstage, like a very intricate orchestral score.

And so I’ve long wondered about Frayn, who has also written other plays I’ve seen, of a very different type. What kind of a protean mind does he have?

He talks about his motives here:

MF: I never write with any audience in mind. I never think that anyone’s going to do the plays. People often ask if you think about an audience or if you think about which actors are going to perform them. Well, you can’t, or my brain is simply not big enough to do this. Every channel is, has to be dedicated to thinking about what you are writing. You really don’t have any, or I don’t have any spare space to spare to think about are people going to like this or whatever, or is this suitable for this kind of theatre or that kind of theatre. And certainly with Noises Off and with Copenhagen and with Democracy I didn’t think that anyone would perform them at all, I thought I was just writing them for my own amusement.

Astounding. He sounds sincere, too. Come to think of it, one of the joys of “Noises Off” may be just that: that it was a form of play in the nontheatrical meaning of the word, an activity “engaged in for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.”

“Noises Off” is not only the funniest play I’ve ever seen, bar none, but unlike many comedies its humor bears repeating. I believe I’ve seen it four or five times, the first three times within a couple of years of each other, and I continued to find it very funny each time. A lot of the humor is of the slapstick farcical variety, which is not ordinarily my cup of tea. But somehow it’s pulled off at such a brisk pace that it works phenomenally well.

I’ve seen Frayn’s play “Copenhagan” (also referenced in that quote of his) too, many years later. It’s thoughtful and intellectual and hardly a barrel of laughs. After I saw it, I had to go back and check to make sure the same person had written them both.

More from the interview:

UC: Could you give an example of one of your plays where you remember exactly how you got together the general idea and the specific topic?
MF: Well, I can remember with Noises Off, that – I told you that my first show was four short plays The Two of Us, and one of them was a farce and the point of the evening was, it was played by just two actors, one actor and an actress. And the farce had five characters in it, who were discovering each
other in embarrassing positions or whatever. So the two actors had to do a lot of fast, quick changing and running through one door and to another backstage putting on a different coat or so and one night I watched it from backstage and I thought this is funnier than what’s going on at the front and I must one day write a farce seen from behind.

It was a very easy thought to have and it took me a very, very long time to do.

I bet it did.

If you haven’t seen the play, I’ll mention that it has one of those play-within-a-play structures. But none of the action takes place outside the theater at all. The first act is a rehearsal of a supposed play that’s a second-rate farce. The second act is a performance of the same play as seen from backstage. The third act is a performance seen from the front but occurring much later in a grinding tour in which all the relationships between the actors (not so great to begin with) have disintegrated in various ways.

That explanation of “Noises Off” and its genesis is immediately followed by this one from Frayn, about his play “Copenhagen”:

Copenhagen is again, problems I’ve been thinking about for a long time, about quantum mechanics and indeterminacy. And then I happened to read a book by Thomas Powers called Heisenberg’s War which told the story of Heisenberg’s trip to Copenhagen in 1941, much written about then, but I had
never come across it, and since I’d read it, I thought: this suggests, this seems to encapsulate something about the difficulty of knowing why people do what they do and there is a parallel between that and the impossibility that Heisenberg established in physics, about ever knowing everything about
the behaviour of physical objects. So that idea sort of came quite quickly and it took a very, very long time then to work out how to do it. An appallingly long time.

That’s quite a wide-ranging mind Frayn has.

By the way, Frayn has also had a great deal of success as a translator of Russian:

He is now considered to be Britain’s finest translator of Anton Chekhov (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard) as well as an early untitled work, which he titled Wild Honey (other translations of the work have called it Platonov or Don Juan in the Russian Manner) and a number of Chekhov’s smaller plays for an evening called The Sneeze (originally performed on the West End by Rowan Atkinson).

He also translated Yuri Trifonov’s play Exchange, Leo Tolstoy’s The Fruits of Enlightenment, and Jean Anouilh’s Number One.

One more thing about “Noises Off.” Although it was made into a film, I advise you to stay far far away from that version. The play only works onstage. This is one of the few times I agree with Frank Rich, who “called “Noises Off” ‘the funniest play written in my lifetime’, [but] wrote that the film is ‘one of the worst ever made.'”

Reported:

In a dramatic turnaround, Senate Democrats voted to reopen the government on Monday after receiving a commitment from Republicans to hold a vote on immigration legislation — paving the way to end the three-day shutdown.

The Senate voted 81-18 to move forward on a bill to fund the government through Feb. 8 after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) agreed to end the shutdown and continue to negotiate on immigration and spending matters. If a broader deal is not reached by Feb. 8, the Senate would take up legislation to protect hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who are losing legal protections, as long as the government remains open…

Democrats had been deeply skeptical of McConnell’s commitment, but indicated after a party strategizing session that they’re willing to trust the majority leader.

I have a different—or perhaps I should say “additional—take on it. I think that the story, “The Republicans are to blame when Republicans shut down the government and the Republicans are to blame when Democrats shut down the government” didn’t play all that well in Peoria, and didn’t even play so very well in the Democratic equivalent of Peoria. The government shutdown was always theater anyway, and if the audience isn’t clapping it’s time to book another play in the same theater.

The Democrats are thinking that their next show will be more of a success:

In agreeing to break the impasse after a three-day shutdown, Democrats are banking that they have successfully pigeonholed Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell into opening an immigration debate in the coming weeks and that an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote for an immigration bill would put pressure on the House and White House. They are already warning that if their demands aren’t met, another government shutdown could happen on February 8, when the three-week short-term funding bill runs out. And next time they won’t have Republicans dangling a six-year funding extension for the Children’s Health Insurance Program over their heads.

Does that coming attraction excite you?

Reminds me of the famous Rose Mary Woods stretch:

The FBI is either abysmally incompetent (“fools”) or in full-fledged CYA mode in order to hide its own wrongdoing (“knaves”). I vote “aye” on the latter. But either way, we’re in trouble.

You can find the story here:

Investigators in both House and Senate were stunned late Friday when, receiving a batch of newly-released texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, they also received notice from the bureau that the FBI “failed to preserve” Strzok-Page messages from December 14, 2016 through May 17, 2017.

Given the amount of texting that went on between Strzok and Page, who were having an extramarital affair, that probably meant thousands of missing documents.

A number of critical events in the Trump-Russia affair occurred between December 2016 and May 2017, including:

Conversations between Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The completion and publication of the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The briefing in which FBI director James Comey told President-elect Donald Trump about the Trump dossier.
The president’s inauguration.
The nomination and confirmation of new Justice Department leadership.
Flynn’s interview with the FBI (conducted by Strzok).
Comey’s assurances to Trump that he, Trump, was not under investigation.
A variety of revelations, mostly in the Washington Post and New York Times, about various Trump figures under investigation.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe.
The firing of top Obama Justice Department holdover Sally Yates.
Trump’s tweet alleging he was wiretapped.
Trump’s firing of Comey.
And, finally, on May 17, 2017 — the final day of the missing texts — the appointment of Trump-Russia special prosecutor Robert Mueller.

Strzok and Page had a lot to talk about.

Please read the whole thing.

Even without the pages that have mysteriously gone missing, there’s plenty to mull over in the communications the FBI did supply:

In the newly-released texts, Strzok and Page discussed Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination, which they said would create “pressure” on the FBI to quickly finish up the Hillary Clinton email investigation, known inside the bureau as the “midyear exam,” or MYE…

…[There are] instances in the texts in which Strzok and Page told each other that they were switching to iMessage for further conversation, suggesting they might have moved their discussion of sensitive topics from their government-issued Samsung devices to private Apple devices.

And then there’s this:

One exchange between Strzok and Page, dated July 1, 2016, referenced then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s decision to accept the FBI’s conclusion in the Clinton investigation. Lynch’s announcement came days after it was revealed that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix.

“Timing looks like hell,” Strzok texted Page.

“Yeah, that is awful timing,” Page agreed. In a later message, she added: “It’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.”

It may be long past the time to ask what Loretta Lynch knew and when she knew it.

And see also this as well as this.