The legendary notebook of . . .

Inspector Bucket has called on the Bagnet family on Mrs Bagnet's birthday. And he has been invited back for next year. Write it down, Inspector, so that you do not forget!

He drinks to Mrs Bagnet with a warmth approaching to rapture, engages himself for that day twelvemonth more than thankfully, makes a memorandum of the day in a large black pocket-book with a girdle to it . . . .

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

A large black pocket-book with a girdle to it? Ah, Moleskine! — the legendary notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, Chatwin, and Bucket.

I'm impatient with Moleskine's commercial mythology, but I like Moleskine notebooks a lot, girdles and all.

[Girdle: "something that encircles or confines" (Merriam-Webster OnLine), thus the elastic that keeps the notebook shut.]

Hi and Lois watch

Credit where it's due: Hi and Lois has had a three-day streak of fine cartooning. It's difficult to think that the hand behind March 1, 2, and 3 is the hand that drew, say, this February 26 strip — with trick door, lengthening curtains, and shifty muntins.

[Update: It's a four-day streak.]

[Update: The streak is over. Yes, there's an inexplicable slab behind Trixie's thought balloon today. But worse than that: Hi and Lois seems to have turned into Garfield.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Aeneid on Facebook

[From Aeneid on Facebook. Click on the magnifying glass after following the link.]

This inspired project is by Erika Grace Carlson and Heather Day.

(via Coudal Partners)

POUND

It has 1.5 million+ views, but it might be new to you: POUND, a short film by Evan Bernard (via YouTube).

Mary Printz, 1923-2009

Mary Printz, whose work at an answering service inspired the musical Bells Are Ringing (and its "Susanswerphone"), has died:

When clients dialed PLaza 2-2232, the agency's number for many years, they knew they could count on discretion and, when required, innovation. Some messages were routine — at least in the world in which Mrs. Printz's clients moved — involving little more than having the service tell the chauffeur to be at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

Others required quick thinking. There was the time, for instance, that Mrs. Printz took a frantic call from Noël Coward, recalled her husband, Bob Printz, in a telephone interview on Friday:

"Mary," Mr. Coward cried, "Marlene has just had a bottle of Scotch and is finished with it, and it's Sunday; I don't have any more. What'll I do?"

Mary Printz, an Ear for the Famous, Dies at 82 (New York Times)

In 1956, Mrs. Printz started her own answering service, Belles Celebrity Secretarial Service. As Belles' owner, she made a cameo appearance in the July 6, 1969 New York Times article "Phone Users Dial FRustration, Too," about problems resulting from "a sharp rise in telephone traffic":

"Telephone service is the worst I've seen it since 1956," Mrs. Printz complained. "There's just no way I can estimate how much business I've lost."

Belles used what the article calls "the troubled PLaza 8 exchange."

Related post
Musical-comedy pencils

"Ambercroombie & Flitch"

That's one of twenty-three ways to be cool, a page's worth of inspiration at The Daily What. Another way: "Irony."

(via notebookism)

[Links are gone.]

I, an aardvark

It was a value-added shopping experience.

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy.]

David Frauenfelder on fear and spending

David Frauenfelder at Breakfast with Pandora suggests that even as we cut back on expenses, we must also cut back on fear. I like the way he puts it:

Though no one's job is perfectly safe, if we all decide we must have two years' of savings in the bank before we spend again, eventually no one will have a job except the security guard at the bank.

[Apologies to David: I have corrected my misspelling of his last name in this post.]

Orange juice book

From an interview with Alissa Hamilton, author of the forthcoming book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice:

What isn't straightforward about orange juice?

It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

*

So parse the carton for us. For example, what is the phrase "not from concentrate" really about?

In the '80s, Tropicana had a hold on ready-to-serve orange juice with full-strength juice. Then this new product, reconstituted orange juice, started appearing in supermarkets. Tropicana had to make decisions. Storing concentrate is much cheaper than full-strength juice. The phrase "not from concentrate" was to try to make consumers pay more for the product because it's a more expensive product to manufacture. It didn't have to do with the product being fresher; the product didn't change, the name simply changed. Tropicana didn't want to have to switch to concentrate technology.

Q&A with Alissa Hamilton (Boston Globe)

Dirty February

Grass, mud, leaves, afternoon.

It is, as Jane Austen says in Mansfield Park, "the dirty month of February."

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]