No no. 2s?
A CNN teaser for a story about shortages affecting back-to-school shopping just made reference to children “stuck with the dreaded no. 1 pencil.” Not “dreaded” to my mind.
Orange Crate Art
A Lifehacker headline
A clickbait headline from Lifehacker this morning: “How to Start Dating Again If You’re Unvaccinated.” Stay classy, Lifehacker.
“Got that? Sardines.”
Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), the village postmistress, calls in an grocery order for her friend Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a maid in service at a country estate. From La Cérémonie (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1995).
Gum nonsense
From “The Face to Forget,” an episode of the radio program The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (June 14, 1950). These three spots almost send me off to buy gum.
The perfect writing font(s)
Just one example of the thoughtfulness behind iA Writer, whose creators understand that writing is not word-processing.
Twelve movies
Address Unknown and eleven more.
“Too late”
This account of hospital life from Alabama doctor Brytney Cobia needs to be widely shared.
Mary Miller won’t wear a mask
It’s still not known whether she has been vaccinated. If she has been, she’s keeping her (unmasked) mouth shut about it.
A Pessoa biography
The New York Times has two reviews — 1, 2 — of Pessoa, a biography of Fernando Pessoa by Richard Zenith.
Rick Laird (1940–2021)
Rick Laird, bassist, most notably with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, later a photographer.
Domestic comedy
Some tomatoes.
Paul McCartney and relativity
”George Martin was like our teacher, just because of the age. He was a little bit older. It wasn’t much. I mean, I think we always thought of him as an old man. I think he was like probably thirty when he started with us, which I certainly don’t think of as old now.”
“Change in plans!”
“Mom, you’re painting again? You could sell these.” I hate this commercial.
Peppa Pig, language influencer
From The Wall Street Journal : “Peppa Pig, a Pandemic Favorite, Has American Children Acting British.”
“Favorite Books”
An anonymous reader asked me to “correct” the Favorite Books section of my Blogger profile by listing titles instead of writers. From my point of view, there’s nothing to fix. As my wife Elaine suggests, you can take any name on the list as prefaced by the words “anything by.”
Finding D. W.
Jason Szwimer, the voice of D. W. Read for four seasons of Arthur, has a podcast, Finding D. W., devoted to finding and interviewing the other males who have voiced the character.
Go fish
An article about tinned fish.
Today’s Newsday Saturday
“Indy, more formally.”
“Nothing has ever happened”
Deadpan comedy of alienation and poverty from Emmanuel Bove.
Fritzi’s “No”
This Nancy panel makes me think of Guillaume Apollinaire and Sluggo.
“Do”
Only Donald Trump would speak of a coup as something to “do.”
“The most delicate of mirrors”
Anyone who wants to learn about description might benefit from reading Adalbert Stifter.
The walking brain
From The New York Times : “Exercise can freshen and renovate the white matter in our brains, potentially improving our ability to think and remember as we age, according to a new study of walking, dancing and brain health.”
“Deeper matters”
A passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
Sinatra’s spoken-word album
I found it browsing in a record store: Frank Sinatra’s The Outfit, a spoken-word album about wine.
Dr. Jerome Adams makes a metaphor
He’s — what? — theologizing the vaccine?
How to delete an inaccessible note (Mac Stickies)
I found myself with a mysterious problem on my Mac: a note in the Stickies app was inaccessible. The note showed up when I right-clicked on the app icon in the Dock but was nowhere to be found on the Desktop. Thus it was impossible to delete. Quitting Stickies and restarting the Mac did nothing. Searching the Internets turned up nothing. Here is a solution.
Larry Butler Yeats
“I’m a dying animal.”
First glimpses of the little gang
From “Young Girls,” Deborah Treisman’s translation of a passage from the long-lost Proust manuscript now in print as Les soixante-quinze feuillets.
“Smear shots”
A garden-path sentence.