Daily Bafflements

• From BBC Radio and The Independent comes an account of the “disastrous” meeting of Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot in 1964, and why it went so horribly wrong. “If you meet your hero in real life you will have an unrealistic expectation based on a facet of themselves that they have utilised as their commercial currency,” says radio producer Jakko Jakszyk. “It is not necessarily representative of what they’re like on a day-to-day basis.”

• In other UK news, British journalists are voting on whether they will strike over their own “austere” pay and the “excessive” pay of their managers and executives.

• And on this side of the pond, the Democratic Party in Rhode Island is fighting against minimum wage laws in Providence, arguing that a minimum wage hike should be “left to the state to determine” and would “cause undue hardships on business,” reports Dave Jamieson of The Huffington Post.

• From Al Jazeera English, a short documentary video about the migrant camps in California today that aren’t all that different from those described by John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.