Eggnog economics

Why don’t they make make eggnog all year long? The answer may not surprise you.

A related post
Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe

Steve Jobs on PowerPoint

To be posted in all classrooms:

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Steve Jobs, quoted in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

[A reasoned, nuanced evaluation? Hardly. For that, see Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. And yes, Jobs used a presentation app, Apple’s Keynote, for his keynotes.]

Juneberry78s

Juneberry78s is a great resource for anyone interested in (or soon-to-be interested in) traditional American music. Juneberry’s Listening Room offers MP3s to stream or download. Here are ten (just ten) samples:

Clarence Ashley, “The Coo-Coo Bird”
Barbecue Bob, “Yo Yo Blues”
Dock Boggs, “Country Blues”
Blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother, “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus)”
Frank Hutchinson, “Train That Carried the Girl from Town”
Sam McGee, “Franklin Blues”
The Mississippi Moaner, “It’s Cold in China Blues”
Moonshine Kate, “My Man’s a Jolly Railroad Man”
Ernest and Hattie Stoneman, “Too Late”
Henry Williams and Eddie Anthony, “Georgia Crawl”

Lost mitten

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger size.]

<pathetic fallacy>

Poor little mitten. It’s been waiting on this telephone pole for at least a month.

</pathetic fallacy>

Related reading
Pathetic fallacy

“change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to pieces change”

[“The strongest drive is not love or hate. It is one person’s need to change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to pieces change another’s copy.”]

The above poster appears in Arthur Plotnik’s The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists (New York: Macmillan, 1982).

Also from The Elements of Editing
“Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up”

Featured merchandise

[“Not a coincidence. Large stores retain private forecasting services to know in advance which merchandise to feature.” From Paul E. Lehr, R. Will Burnett, and Herbert S. Zim, Weather: A Guide to Phenomena and Forecasts, a Golden Science Book (1965). Illustration by Harry McNaught.]

Keeps rainin’ all the time.

Related posts
Armstrong and Arlen, blues and weather
Snow, snow, snow

Eameses on PBS tonight

Tonight on PBS, Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter. Like they say, “Check your local listings.”

Related posts
Eames on reams
Twine and yarn

Cello exceptions?

Jim Fleming, on To the Best of Our Knowledge: “It’s a truism in the rock-music industry: if you want to make a sad song, put a cello in it.”

I can think of one flagrant exception to this rule — a song that’s anything but sad in which a cello plays a significant role. And there must be others. Your suggestions are welcome in the comments. (Spoiler alert: mine’s there too.)

Proust in Miami

In Miami, sixteen old folks finish reading Proust. I love it.

Make Way for Tomorrow

[Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore.]

Bookkeeper Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore), hasn’t worked in four years. He’s not retired, just out of a job: the Depression is on. But something will come along. Bark’s wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi) is sure of it, or at least she says she is. Bark and Lucy, both in their seventies, have been married for fifty years. With no income and no pension, they have lost their house to the bank. Now what? How will their children help them? Hard times, for these times: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) is eerily contemporary in its examination of the effects of economic extremity on family relationships.

This film could have been made as a sappy picture of cute clashes between generations: Grandma and Grandpa move in. Hilarity ensues. Instead, Leo McCarey, probably best known for Going My Way (1944), gives us an intimate depiction of displacement and isolation in old age. Bark and Lucy move in, but not together: circumstances require that they live apart for the first time in their married life, each with a different child. The old people are out of place and in the way in their new quarters, and the film makes us feel their awkwardness. The creak of a rocking chair makes Lucy a distraction during her daughter-in-law’s evening of cards: the furniture itself calls attention to an interloper’s presence. A storekeeper reads to Bark (whose glasses are broken) a heartbreaking letter from Lucy, and we understand that Bark must have been unwilling to share the letter — whatever it might have to say — with the daughter who’s taken him in. Yet the Coopers’ children are hardly monstrous: obtuse and selfish, certainly, but not wicked. Indeed, the film makes it clear that having either Bark or Lucy in the house would be trying.

In an interview accompanying the film’s Criterion release, Peter Bogdanovich recalls Orson Welles saying that Make Way for Tomorrow “would make a stone cry.” And for various reasons. The film’s final twenty-six minutes chart five hours of a Bark and Lucy reunion — a late afternoon and evening in Manhattan as they revisit the world of their younger days, walking in Central Park, dining in the hotel where they honeymooned. How delightful these old people seem to those who aren’t their children. And now what? You’ll have to see for yourself.

Make Way for Tomorrow is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection. It is, I’d venture, Leo McCarey’s finest hour and a half.

[Hard Times: For These Times, the full title of Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel.]