Domestic comedy

Texting forth and back:

Rebecca Black is on Jay Leno tonight

But it’s only Tuesday!

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts

(Thanks, Rachel!)

“Get high on honey”

[“Young swingers use Golden Blossom Honey when they want a lift. It’s loaded with nature’s own quick action energy. Try it. You’ll agree Golden Blossom is groovy — on grapefruit, cereal and ice cream.” From Life, October 17, 1969.]

Try it — sure, try it, just once, and pretty soon you’re not just wanting that lift, young lady — you’re needing it, and more and more of it, day after week after month after year. One jar’s too many, and a hundred’s not enough. Golden Blossom’s street names: ace, buzz, sweet thing, yellowbird.

[Ace: as in comb.]

“Taste worth dying for!”

The Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, Arizona, seems like an outtake from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Key themes: freedom, self-destruction.

[The spokesman just died.]

The decline of the omnivore

“[T]he coveted creature — known for its sensitivity, inquisitiveness and tendency to congregate around galleries and concert halls — is in decline”: Decline of the Omnivore (Miller-McCune, via Arts & Letters Daily).

I’m grateful to my parents for raising my brother and me as omnivores. Every weekend — or so it seemed — our family went off to a museum or historical site. That was hardly the norm on our Brooklyn block, where our day-trips seemed to provoke amused derision among our neighbors. I remember a well-used copy of Murray Polner and Arthur Barron’s Where Shall We Take the Kids?: A Parent’s and Teacher’s Guide to New York City (1961) sitting around the house. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

A poem for the day

Related posts (really)
Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27

A Garry Wills review

“This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers”: Garry Wills reviews Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.

For dummies

A Google search that led someone to Orange Crate Art: the mixed up files of Mrs basil e. Frankweiler for dummies. That’s sadder than sparknotes for movies.

If you want to be able to talk and write about From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, read the novel, kid. You’d be a real dummy to cheat yourself by doing otherwise.

A related post
Review: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Olivetti again

[“Time Life Inc. photographer Michael Rougier, taking pictures of passing people trying outdoor typewriter at Olivetti Fifth Ave.” Photograph by Peter Stackpole, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

I found this photograph at Life. But it’s also to be found in the Life Photo Archive, where it’s free for non-commercial use. The 1955 Life feature on the outdoor Olivetti, “A Sidewalk Candid Photos Show,” can be found at Google Books.

This post is for my friend Sara, who should find it very meta.

Another Olivetti post
Q.: “Where are you going to get a typewriter?”

HOUSE TO NPR: DROP DEAD

From the PBS NewsHour:

The House of Representatives approved a measure Thursday to bar federal funding of National Public Radio. The bill also prohibits public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR.

The 228-192 vote came mostly along party lines, with most Republicans backing the proposal and nearly all Democrats opposed. Republicans said it was time for the federal government to get out of the radio business.

All but twelve Republicans voted for the bill: seven voted no, one answered “present,” and four did not vote. No Democrat voted for the bill; seven did not vote. Here’s the roll.

My NPR stations, WILL-AM and -FM, are local treasures. If they were to disappear, I’d have little reason to own a radio. I am sorry but not surprised to see that Congressman Tim Johnson (R, Illinois-15) voted to end federal funding of NPR.

A related post
Going to the meeting (A “town hall meeting” with Tim Johnson)

[If the post title doesn’t ring a bell, see here.]

Words from James Joyce

Nations, like individuals, have their egos.

James Joyce, “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” (1907)

I’m half-Irish. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.