M-W, NFT, WTF
Merriam-Webster is selling an NFT of its definition of “NFT.” My post title is meant to suggest my amused disbelief.
Orange Crate Art
Matt Thomas’s Times digest
Matt Thomas is ending his Sunday New York Times Digest after more than thirteen years.
Notebook sighting
From Caught (dir. Max Ophuls, 1949). Two doctors chat, and as the camera swings from one side of the office to the other to track their conversation, The Spiral gets a brief turn as the center of attention.
“Cheezit!! Th’ cops!!”
Zippy as a Bowery Boy.
Norman Lloyd (1914–2021)
My longest-standing memory of Lloyd: as Frank Fry in Hitchcock’s Saboteur. “The sleeve”: unforgettable.
Meta-12
The pleasures of television: Hal Smith, Otis Campbell of The Andy Griffith Show, appears as a drunk driver in a 1969 episode of Adam-12.
Simple fixes for Big Sur’s menu bar
I like a dark wallpaper for the desktop, but a dark menu bar is too severe for my taste.
Separated at birth
Macel Herrand and Pat Harrington Jr.
Current events
“Don’t you want to know what’s going on in the world?” “What’s going on in the world stinks.”
Twelve movies
Children of Paradise and others.
Field trips
Contra a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad skit from this past week’s SNL: talking with people in person felt wholly familiar and wholly wonderful. I think we talked about everything but our pandemic.
Florida, 1954
My mom in Florida, 1954. Photo by my dad.
Will Shortz again
Will Shortz, giving the answer to last week’s puzzle on NPR this morning: “Ma Rainey, as in the movie Ma Rainey’s Blues.” There was no correction from Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Mother’s Day
Heather Cox Richardson has beautiful installment of Letters from an American today, honoring a (non-biological) mother in her life.
Today’s Newsday Saturday
“Deep hostilities.”
Stacey Abrams on Robertson Davies
Stacey Abrams, talking about books with The New York Times.
Block that metaphor
“He might pull the rug out from under Kevin McCarthy no matter how many times he tries to go back to the well.”
Hive mind
My iPhone (iOS 14.5.1) is a hive of activity: the Safari Favorites icons for The New York Times and the Times Spelling Bee change at will.
Cobbler’s bench or mulberry bush?
The things we debate in our fambly. Everyone else knows “Pop Goes the Weasel” as beginning with “All around the cobbler’s bench.” I, like the cheese, stand alone: I’ve always know the song as beginning with “All around the mulberry bush.” Both versions are fine, of course. That’s the folk process. But which is more common, the bench or the bush?
Another thought about vaccination
Now I realize, people here do need to say it’s better to put up with side effects for a day or two or three than to contract COVID. That’s not already obvious to everyone.
The George Floyd Bunt Staff
A “sonic sculpture” by Douglas Ewart.
Recently updated
Charge! Now with photocharger news from the Brooklyn Eagle, 1952.
Vaccine, anyone?
My hopes for widespread vaccine acceptance in deep-red Illinois were ill-founded.
✓
Amitava Kumar writes about writing and the power of the check mark. Jerry Seinfeld did the same thing with a big X.
Writing and dressmaking
Proust and Cather synchronicity.
Nancy reflections
A gumball machine.
When in doubt, scroll
Dropbox being sneaky.
Giggles and glances
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
Adam Gopnik on Proust
So much strangeness in this essay.
Recently updated
Charge! Now with a link to a film from the Brooklyn Public Library that shows the Remington Rand photocharger in action.