Would it have been worth it, after all

From “The Deflationist,” Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Paul Krugman (New Yorker, March 1, 2010). Krugman’s wife Robin Wells is speaking:

“As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

I think Krugman has it wrong. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and “his wife” — who too has a name, Joanne Woodward — is not to be able to say that you had dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward is to have dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Re: that list: maybe you do.

[Post title with apologies to T.S. Eliot and J. Alfred Prufrock.]

Recently updated

The Michigan Theater (news of an effort to save the building)

“Reasons Why I Am Not Successful”

A list from Lost New York: Reasons Why I Am Not Successful.

(via Daughter Number Three)

Telephone exchange names on screen

[Private eye Brad Galt (Mark Stevens) extracts an eight-digit telephone number from thug “Fred Foss” (William Bendix).]

The Dark Corner (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1946) is ninety-nine minutes well spent. Snappy dialogue, great lighting, liquor in paper cups, Lucille Ball as Brad’s sharp secretary/partner, and Clifton Webb as a Waldo Lydecker-like husband.

One puzzle: A card in “Fred’s” wallet gives his address as 328 E. 23rd Street. The Chelsea district though is on the west side of Manhattan. A slip on the part of the movie-makers? Or is the point that Galt, recently arrived from San Francisco, misses the inconsistency?

As Galt says about another puzzle, later in the film, “All right, so it doesn’t add. What do you want me to do, call the Quiz Kids?”

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse
Baby Face
Born Yesterday
Deception
Dream House
The Man Who Cheated Himself
Nightmare Alley
The Public Enemy

Greek islands for sale?

From German politicians, a suggestion that Greece sell some islands.

[Do not mess with Ithaka.]

From the spam folder

“Drive and talk without using your hands.”

Overheard

In the supermarket, one sweatshirted man to another:

“It pays a lovely dividend, so what the heck?”

Related reading
All “Overheard” posts

Beard-trimming recommendation

See that guy in the sidebar to the right? See his beard, so manly yet so kempt? Behind that beard is a trimmer: the Wahl 9906-717 Groomsman. The 9906-717 works reliably and is surprisingly inexpensive ($14.99 at Amazon). And it has one great advantage over pricier, snazzier trimmers: it runs on AA batteries. In my experience, rechargeable trimmers quickly lose their ability to hold a charge.

I’ve been using a 9906-717 for at least a couple of years, changing the batteries once or twice at the most. My only connection to Wahl is that of a happy customer.

Related posts
Aqua Velva
Hair

Minor kitchen wisdom

Turn off the burner before removing a pan or pot, always. No more wondering, three blocks from home, whether you turned off the burner.

Use scissors to round the ultra-sharp corners of cardboard-box flaps. No more nasty cuts.

Reader, do you have any minor kitchen wisdom to share?

Demythifying John Hammond

Writer and record-producer Chris Albertson has been at work demythifying John Hammond:

[M]any of John Hammond’s accomplishments were genuine and important enough to earn him the place he occupies in jazz history, which is why I found it so puzzling that he was making things up.

Discovering John Hammond: A Closer Look: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five (Stomp Off in C)

Other people too make things up: a 2005 PBS American Masters episode about John Hammond credits him with “discovering,” among others, Bessie Smith, Pete Seeger, and Robert Johnson. Oy. Hammond produced Smith’s final recordings in 1933. He signed Seeger to Columbia Records (first Columbia Seeger LP: 1961). And Robert Johnson was already dead when Hammond tried to find him for the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert “From Spirituals to Swing.”