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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: A confession of utter stupidity

December 3, 2003 by Terry Teachout

I got up this morning, turned on the computer, tried to check my e-mail, and nothing happened. Neither was I able to get on the Web. I figured it was a transient problem with my high-speed connection, so I spent a pleasant morning not doing e-mail, surfing the Web, or posting to the blog. Come lunchtime, though, I began to suspect a problem. A call to a neighbor established that her high-speed service was just fine, so I called up the cable company, negotiated the thicket of automated possibilities, made contact with a live human being, and told him what was wrong. He suggested I make sure the power cord on the modem was plugged in securely. It wasn’t. Apparently I’d knocked it part way out of the wall. And did I feel dumb? You bet.


Anyway, that’s why I didn’t post anything this morning. (I did, however, enjoy watching some of the hitherto-unviewed TV shows I recorded on my Magic Digital Cable Box in recent days.) And now I have to get ready for a Mencken-related radio phoner to Chicago, so it may be a while before I write anything substantial.


Two things, briefly: (1) Welcome back, OGIC! (2) I just saw a dummy of the dust jacket for A Terry Teachout Reader, complete with Fairfield Porter lithograph. It looks way cool.


Now I’ll see if anything else is unplugged, arrgh….

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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