A Pennsylvania postcard post

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

A. A. Milne, supposedly

I am far from disorderly — I know exactly where things are, or at least most things. I don’t know where I came across the above observation, and then there’s this postcard I had lost track of, until I rediscovered it among — guess what? — other postcards and things of that nature.


[Click for a larger view.]

The postcard, a product of Pittsburgh’s Minsky Bros. & Co., is a two-fer: heading east through the overly large state of Pennsylvania, it depicts the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Kittatinny and Blue Mountain Tunnels. The card reads:

Kittatinny and Blue Mountain Tunnels are called the "Twin Tunnels" as there is only 800 feet of daylight between them; then the mountains are behind you, and the Turnpike runs straight as a ribbon for long distances through the fertile Cumberland Valley.

And the message:

(Written Tues) April 26 [1949]

Hi! We're heading fast toward Wash. D.C. The country is really rugged. We travel way up high on hills — valley is way low beneath us. The high altitude makes my ears stop up. Mon. night stayed at Pittsburgh. Today went to Gettysburg. Tonight — Washington. This picture — went through these tunnels (mile long each.) Rosie

[Click for a larger view.]

The tunnels are not quite a mile long, but they are long, and the country is rugged, and must have felt more so in 1949, when people drove with far fewer amenities. We used to take the Turnpike when driving east from Illinois, and I remember the relief I felt when we made it through the last of the tunnels, the ones pictured on this postcard. My ears stopped up too, and I like the lack of self-consciousness with which Rosie acknowledges the effect of high altitude. Is she worried about looking unsophisticated? Not in the least. Am I?

*

In December 2013, Elaine and I did our best to recreate the scene on this postcard: The Pennsylvania Turnpike, then and now.

Related posts
From Lena to Rena (a 1907 postcard)
Re: “things of that nature” and “whatnot”

[For anyone who must drive through it, yes, Pennsylvania is overly large, ridiculously so.]

Quicksilver fix to close

The Mac app Quicksilver has an annoying (annoying to me, anyway) feature of showing the result after copying or moving a file or folder.¹ I found a workaround by Rob McBroom, a Quicksilver developer. It’s easy to make the change he describes: right-clicking on Quicksilver.app and Core Support.qsplugin and choosing “Show Package Contents” will get you to the necessary file.

¹ If you don’t use Quicksilver, this sentence and, well, this post will make no sense. Don’t worry about it.

Senator Feinstein’s bill

Here, from Senator Dianne Feinstein’s website, is a fairly detailed description of an assault-weapons bill that has been under development for more than a year. Feinstein (D-California) plans to introduce the bill on the first day of the new Congress — January 3, 2013. I am confident about how Illinois’s senators will vote: Dick Durbin (D) and Mark Kirk (R) have received F ratings from the National Rifle Association. I will be calling them anyway to register my support for Feinstein’s bill. My representative in the new Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), has an A from the NRA. But I will be calling him too to express my support for the bill.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, December 17, 2012.]

Hi Flagston today reprises a role he performed on February 9, 2009, that of the stingy landlord who sends up a miserable nickel’s-worth of heat. Shame on you, sir, for making your tenants wife and children freeze. In 2009, Hi joked about checking the price of oil before raising the thermostat. Today, facing Lois’s anger and condensed breath, he jokes that “It helps to get all hot and bothered.” Listen up, Hi: if you don’t change your ways, things are going to get a whole lot colder in your house, and they’re going to stay a whole lot colder, especially in a certain room of your house, if you get what I mean, and I hope that you do.

The good news here is that the workers on the Hi-Lo line have figured out how to construct a classic Honeywell thermostat. Compare:


[2009, 2012.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Dropbox, onward, upward

Dropbox for iOS just hit version 2.0 with what its developers call a “shiny new design.” The new icon, though not exactly shiny, looks good to me.

After updating Dropbox on my iPad, I began to wonder: how does one update Dropbox in OS X? Dropbox isn’t in the App Store, and there’s no way to check for updates from the app itself. I found an explanation at Practically Efficient and went from 1.4.12 to 1.6.5.

If you’d like to try Dropbox, this referral link will give you and me each an extra 500 MB of free storage.

More music for voices, forks, and cello

“We’re at it again, and running seriously low on forks!” It’s “Time of the Season,” with voices, forks, and cello.

December 14, 2012

On August 5, 2012, I wrote the following words:

About two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, shootings, various voices in media and politics said that it was inappropriate to be discussing gun-ownership rights — not the right time, too early. In the aftermath of today’s shootings in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, it seems that once again it will be too early for such a discussion.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sounded the refrain earlier today:

“There is, I’m sure — will be, rather, a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don’t think today is that day.”

As violent event follows violent event, the logic here defies logic. Carney is of course right to say that today is not the day to discuss a piece of legislation. But his language is the language of procrastination, of endless deferral. It suggests to me J. Alfred Prufrock: “There will be time, there will be time.” And the reference to “the usual Washington policy debates” suggests a lack of conviction that anything much is going to change. But have gun-ownership rights even been a “usual” subject of debate in Washington? Not much, not lately.

President Obama was more to the point:

“As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."

And now, the president needs to lead.

Related reading
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence

[My transcriptions, from clips available at CBS News.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, December 14, 2012.]

Dot Flagston, look again: there is one door on the side of your family’s station wagon.

It was a car-safety problem that turned me into a close reader of Hi and Lois. The fun never ends. Everything about cars seems to be a challenge for those who assemble the strip.

The two-door station wagon seems hilariously improbable: the spaciousness of a wagon, the awkwardness of . . . a compact? (Especially improbable with baby Trixie on board.) But as I just found out, two-door station wagons did exist, years ago. Perhaps there’s some inside joke inside this strip.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“I’ve never seen Jaws — only bits and pieces.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Edward Tufte’s signage

“Using the format of diamond signs that provide alerts and warnings about the road ahead, this series of works on canvas shows philosophical alerts, imperatives, and thoughts about the path past and future”: Edward Tufte’s Philosophical Diamond Signs.