Drudge Report reportage

The Drudge Report is making merry with an offhand, joking comment that Michelle Obama made in an interview with NPR’s Cokie Roberts. Drudge links to this article, which quotes Mrs. Obama on life in the White House: “‘There are some prison elements to it,’ she joked. ‘But it’s a really nice prison.’”

See? It’s a joke.

The context, as given in the above article: “Roberts noted that Martha Washington, the first First Lady, also described living in the role as akin to being a state prisoner.” So the current First Lady wasn’t complaining: she was offering mild agreement, followed by a reminder that to live in the White House is to enjoy great privilege.

Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, seems to have agree with Martha Washington, calling the White House “that dull and stately prison in which the sounds of mirth are seldom heard.” Harry Truman wrote of the White House that “This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone.” There is nothing new about occupants of the White House thinking of the building as a prison — and with far greater seriousness than Mrs. Obama’s comment allows. You’d never know any of that from the Drudge Report, whose sole purpose is to suggest (as Drudge headlines often do) that Michelle Obama is an unhappy and ungrateful camper, or perhaps an Angry Black Woman.

[I still marvel that I got to meet Barack and Michelle Obama, back in 2004.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[Alice Reed’s address book. I wish she’d written out the exchange names. Click for a larger view.]

The Woman in the Window (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944) stars Edward G. Robinson as Richard Wanley, a mild-mannered assistant professor of psychology. Feeling solidity and stodginess setting in (“Life ends at forty?” a fellow clubman wonders), Wanley steps beyond the limits of his routine and finds himself in suddenly desperate circumstances. Yes, that step involves a woman, the beautiful artist’s model Alice Reed (Joan Bennett). The Woman in the Window resonates with two other great 1944 films: Laura (dir. Otto Preminger) and Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder). As in Laura, a man is captivated by a painting of a beautiful woman. As in Double Indemnity, a killer tracks a murder investigation as it tracks him. But Robinson, who played the ace investigator Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity, here takes the Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) role, not the pursuer but the pursued.

A twist in the film’s plot, which I won’t reveal here, suggests to me that The Woman in the Window is very much about “the movies” — about the kinds of things people say and do in the world on screen.

Here, for Matt Thomas, is a shot of Professor Wanley in his study, writing a letter to his wife.


[Click for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station

Dark Punctuation

“What the punctuational physicists at Cerne Abbas did was to shoot colons directly through the midpoint of the space between two words. Exactly as predicted, this not only split the colon into two semi-colons, but caused the words to collapse into one another”: Dark Punctuation revealed.

[Psst: It’s semicolon not semi-colon. I added the hyphen for years before discovering my mistake.]

Feedly improvement via a userscript

Feedly to Google Reader is a userscript that significantly improves Feedly by making it look more like Google Reader. The script’s greatest accomplishment, from my point of view: it stops Feedly from pushing images off to the right. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re a lot better than what Feedly now offers.

As I’ve figured out from some browsing today, the problem with Feedly’s image-handling is that it floats images to the right. One user reports that Feedly changes float:left to float:right, which would explain some of the problems I’ve seen in my posts.

Thanks to CaspianRoach for sharing this script.

Related posts
Feedly it ain’t
Feedly v. Feedly

Penguin Random House

The merger of Penguin and Random House into Penguin Random House is done. I have no idea what that bodes for books, but I think Penguin House would have made a better name. Or Random Penguin, better still. It turns out that the Internets agree.

[What do you call it when someone else has already thought your thought? Anticipatory plagiarism.]

A poem for RZ

I just thought of it:

I wrote this poem in 2005 while teaching a poetry class in which the students wrote poems addressed to friends. The emphasis was on being private in public, writing in a way that would make sense to the poem’s recipient but might seem cryptic to others. Now the poem seems cryptic to me. The only frame of reference I can remember for it: snow. Snow was general all over the northeast and midwest.

Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)

Zippy and The Little King

[“Slices of Life,” Zippy, June 29, 2013.]

Today’s Zippy pays homage to Otto Soglow’s The Little King. I recognized His Majesty at once. But I didn’t know that he began his reign in the pages of The New Yorker.

Related reading
Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King (The Comics Journal)
Otto Soglow and The Little King (Austin Kleon)
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Feedly v. Feedly

The same post: top, Feedly in the Chrome browser; bottom, the Feedly app for iOS. The app shows the image correctly (it’s meant to suggest a drop-capital), but Feedly in the browser gets it wrong. Feedly, what’s up with that?

As I’m reminded every time I look at my posts, Feedly takes too many liberties with images. Images get relocated and resized, and when a post merely links to a YouTube clip, Feedly adds an image from that clip to its Magazine and Card Views:


[The post Jazz on Route 66 has eleven images. But it also has a link to a YouTube clip, and it’s an image from that clip that Feedly uses.]

And as I just discovered, Feedly in the browser loses images too, as it did when handling this post. The iOS app again gets it right:



My e-mails to Feedly about its image problems (which I first noticed earlier this month) have had no replies. I’m puzzled as to why I seem to be the only person on the Internets who thinks that these problems are worth writing about.

*

June 29: Feedly dropped the second image from today’s post too.

King of Corona

A very short film about The Lemon Ice King of Corona: Birth of the Cool (via Coudal).

[The only king is the king of lemon ice.]

M was for Metropolitan

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art website: “The current button design features the Museum’s distinctive letter M logo, adapted from the 1509 book De divina proportione by Luca Pacioli (Italian, d. ca. 1514), the first known publication to treat the construction of the alphabet and to discuss the shapes and proportions of classical Roman letters.”

On Monday, July 1, the Met ends the use of metal admission buttons.

[I am happy to have two such buttons that I can account for.]