Domestic comedy

"Have we ever seen John Malkovich in a movie that was any good?"

"Being John Malkovich."

"Besides that one: he was just playing himself."

The cabinet of Hi and Lois

I don't want to keep going with Hi and Lois, but I must. (If nothing else, close-reading Hi and Lois offers a break from the looniness of the real.)

Today's strip reminds me of the children's game of spotting the differences between pictures. Did the same hand draw both panels?

[Hi and Lois, September 2, 2008.]

The curtains shorten.

The window panes widen.

The glazing bars shrink. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

The painting (a Cy Twombly?) shrinks and moves up and away.

Lois's shirt is on backwards. (Kidding.)

Note too that the window sill does not follow the slant of the wall — more disturbingly so in the second panel. The Flagstons must be living in a German Expressionist suburb, next door to the Caligaris.

Related posts
Hi and Escher?
House? (1)
House? (2)
Returning from vacation with Hi and Lois
Sunday at the beach with Hi and Lois
Vacationing with Hi and Lois

Red Cross

The American Red Cross

[September 1, 2008 is the day Hurricane Gustav made landfall.]

Sylvia Sweets remembered

The Flickr page for Jack Delano's photograph of Sylvia Sweets Tea Room now includes a lengthy and evocative account of life at the restaurant from Elaine (Dayos) Liatsos, daughter of John Dayos, who began Sylvia Sweets in the 1930s. A sample:

I remember well the two ladies who worked at McCarthy’s in the fifties and would come in on Friday night, when the stores were open until 9pm and order Salmon Salad on plain dark bread and my father would enjoy making it extra special for them every week — cut in fours with toothpicks.

How wonderful that this picture of the gone world (thanks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) should find so many old and new friends in this century.

Related post
Sylvia Sweets Tea Room

Domestic comedy

"Do you want chocolate chips in the cake?"

"No, just yellow."

Back-to-school shopping

Jana Pruden still wants to go back-to-school shopping:

I never even liked school very much, but the Back to School season was still something special. Back to School was a time of such great newness it always left me feeling that anything could happen.

With my school supplies laid out all clean and perfect in those final days before school started, I could always catch a glimpse of the better me that could possibly emerge that school year.

Ah, supplies. Thomas Merton has a wonderful passage with a similar feeling.

Shopping for supplies was a late-summer ritual when my children were in elementary school. El fanatico (that's me) insisted on the best — Dixon Ticonderoga or Faber-Castell or Mirado pencils. It was only years later that I learned that all supplies were pooled for class use. I think that my kids didn't have the heart to tell me.

The school supplies we now buy are (thank goodness) for personal use — books, computers, notebooks, pens.

House?

The siding contractor has walked off the job.

You can see what the artist is after in the three Ernie Bushmiller panels at the top of this page. In Nancy, the result is elegant. In Hi and Lois, just clumsy. Time marches.

[Hi and Lois, August 29, 2008.]

Related posts
Hi and Escher?
House?
Returning from vacation with Hi and Lois
Sunday at the beach with Hi and Lois
Vacationing with Hi and Lois

The Cupertino effect

I didn't know that there was a name for it. From Wikipedia:

The Cupertino effect is the tendency of spellcheckers to replace a misspelling with a completely inappropriate word.

Better: "to suggest a completely inappropriate word to replace a misspelled word," as it's the user who makes the decision to replace or keep the word. (I just edited the article.)

Someone just added to my revision:

The Cupertino effect is the tendency of spellcheckers to suggest a completely inappropriate word to replace a misspelled word, or a correctly spelled word that is missing from the spellchecker's dictionary.

That's better still. I just went back to condense the sentence:

The Cupertino effect is the tendency of a spellchecker to suggest inappropriate words to replace misspelled words and words not in its dictionary.

The Cupertino effect explains the Appellation Mountains, among other mysteries.

August 28, 2008

From the prepared text of Barack Obama's acceptance speech:

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Instead, it is that American spirit — that American promise — that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours — a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty-five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln's Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead — people of every creed and color, from every walk of life — is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

E pluribus unum.

Susan Eisenhower

Is it common knowledge that Susan Eisenhower is speaking at Mile High Stadium tonight? As in Eisenhower: she is Ike's granddaughter.