Some rocks

[Please focus your attention on the lower-left corner.]

For some time now I have been hoping to espy “some rocks,” the mystical triad that appears again and again in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Scott McCloud explains:

Ernie Bushmiller didn’t draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car. Much has been made of the “three rocks.” Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be “some rocks.” Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate “some rocks” but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of “some rocks.”

Got it?

This past Sunday, Elaine suggested that we go out in search of some rocks. More than that, really: she was determined to find me some rocks. So I drove, and she surveyed. We passed many an individual rock. We passed many groups of four or more rocks, some of those groups in remarkable disarray. We passed the School, where Children strove / At Recess — in the Ring. We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain. We drove to the outskirts of the outskirts of town, to streets and roads that we found years ago by bicycle. And we found some rocks.


[Some rocks.]

When we drove back into town, Elaine spotted another group, in a parking lot of all places. One U-turn and they were ours.


[Some more rocks.]

Bushmiller’s rocks are rounded and clumped, snow-white on a snow-white lawn. These rocks would never have passed muster in a Nancy strip. But they’re more than I ever expected to find.

Thank you, Elaine.

*

4:03 p.m.: And here at last is the triad that was just down the street, right under our noses all along, as neat a bunch of rocks as you’d ever want to see:


[Still more rocks.]

And here is the instigator of the quest:


[Elaine Fine, wearing a hat and surrounded by vines.]

*

January 31, 2018: “Some rocks” appears to have its origin in the lawn outside Ernie Bushmiller’s house in Stamford, Connecticut. From Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read “Nancy”: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017):

The rambling grounds offered ample foliage and wildlife, and a “one-hole golf course” that the non-golfer routinely ignored. A small grouping of rounded white rocks cropped out from the closely trimmed lawn outside his studio window and became part of his strip’s iconography.

Other posts, other rocks
Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Zippy : Lassie and Zippy : Conversational rocks

[Nancy panel found via Nancy Panels. Zippy cartoonist Bill Griffith often pays homage to Bushmiller’s rocks.]

Unnecessary clarification

From a local television station: “This is our eight-to-fourteen-day forecast — it looks beyond the seven-day.”

I probably could have managed without the clarification. But thanks!

A related post
Unnecessary repetition

Van Dyke Parks on Twitter

Van Dyke Parks has taken to the airwaves on Twitter. A sample: “I repeat: obscenity is the hallmark of an ignorant motherfucker.”

Folle stapler

Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Day is a Folle 26 stapler. With a special guest appearance by the Folle Classic stapler.

Suddenly my staplers seem — well, inadequate.

Related reading
All stapler posts (Really, ten of them)

Brian Wilson on safari

“I’m sure it’ll beat another boring vacation down in Kokomo.” Brian Wilson celebrates the news: I’m Happy To Say, After 71 Years, I’m Finally Going On A Surfin’ Safari.

Related reading
All Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)
“Kokomo” : The Beach Boys :: “What a Wonderful World” : Louis Armstrong

Route 66, very, very meta

The final episode of the television series Naked City ran on May 29, 1963. On October 18, 1963, Harry Bellaver (who played Detective Frank Arcaro) and Horace McMahon (Lieutenant Michael “Mike” Parker) appeared in an episode of Route 66, “Where Are the Sounds of Celli Brahms?” It was the first post-City television appearance for each actor. Bellaver plays Shagbag, the publicity man for the Minneapolis Aquatennial. McMahon plays Fenton, the head of an acoustical engineering firm. What makes it all meta: Stirling Silliphant, creator of Naked City, was a co-creator (with Herbert B. Leonard) of Route 66.


[Harry Bellaver as Shagbag.]


[Horace McMahon as Fenton. Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) accidentally stepped on Fenton’s sunglasses. You may wonder if the word accidentally is needed in that sentence. Yes, it is, as Route 66 abounds in acts of male aggression.]

What makes it all very, very meta is this exchange between Shagbag and Tod’s traveling partner Lincoln Case (Glenn Corbett):

“Twenty-two years I’ve been doing this festival every summer. So I’m kind of greeted out, smiled out, and backslapped out, you know? There’s another thing: I never wanted to be a publicity man. I always wanted to be a cop.”

“You look like a cop. I keep thinking I’ve seen you somewhere before — as a cop, I mean. New York maybe?”

“Nope. Never left Minnesota.”

“Where Are the Sounds of Celli Brahms?” is one of the zanier Route 66 episodes. It’s no stretch for Bellaver and McMahon, as Naked City abounds in moments of arch comedy.

Related reading, via Pinboard
All Naked City posts
All Route 66 posts

[Attention, Daughter Number Three: you can get many good glimpses of Minneapolis in this episode. Notice the library behind Horace McMahon.]

Recently updated

“Warnings from the Trenches” A teacher decides to return to the classroom.

Texting and driving

I tend not to link to what readers can find (or may have already found) at many other sites. Here’s an exception: Werner Herzog’s short film From One Second to the Next (YouTube).

Living and working in a college town, I often see young adults texting while driving. I see older drivers texting too. Their vehicles tend to drift, rudderless, and it’s obvious that their attention is elsewhere.

Don’t text while you’re driving. Watch the documentary and take the pledge.

In search of lost mail

The other night I lamented to Elaine how long it’s been since I visited the post office. I think I was last there in May. Our post office has no great charm: it occupies a small, newish, nondescript building on the edge of town. A classic-rock station plays in the tiny service area. But still: I like going to the post office. Doing so makes me feel that I’m Getting Things, or at least a thing, Done.

Thus I’ve never understood commercials touting the joys of DIY postage. ”I don’t leave the shop anymore,” one satisfied customer says. It’s nice leave the shop and be engaged with the world (and while you’re at it, help keep a postal clerk or two in a job). Even Langley Collyer left the shop, so to speak, going out at night for food and water.

Years ago, when I was working on my dissertation in Brookline, Massachusetts, it was a great pleasure to leave the shop, so to speak, for a midday walk to Coolidge Corner: the photocopy place, the stationery store, and, often, the post office. I would buy some stamps, or mail a letter. But now we’re full up on stamps, for a long time if not Forever, and no one writes letters. Letters, anyone?

On e-reading

Nicholas Carr:

E-books are still taking share from printed books, sales of which declined by 4.7 percent in the quarter, but the anemic growth of the electronic market calls into question the strength of the so-called “digital revolution” in the book business.

The flattening of e-book sales (Rough Type)

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Reading is inherently ephemeral, but it feels less so when you’re making your way through a physical book, which persists when you’ve finished it. It is a monument to the activity of reading. It makes this imaginary activity entirely substantial. But the quiddity of e-reading is that it effaces itself.

Books to Have and to Hold (The New York Times)

[Thanks to Elaine for the first and to Matt Thomas’s Submitted for Your Perusal for the second.]