Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois. November 13, 2013. Click for a larger view.]

If my cereal looked like that, I too would throw it to the floor. My version:


[Hi and Lois corrected. Click for a larger view.]

This isn’t the first time there’s been a problem with food coloring in Hi and Lois. In 2011, the Flagstons were using black ketchup, giving rise to an Orange Crate Art caption challenge.

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Other Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: smellum

[Henry, November 12, 2013.]

I startled slightly when I saw today’s Henry. This strip is keeping it old-school indeed.

Smellum appears in neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor Webster’s Third. Nor does it appear in the one slang dictionary in my possession (the 1975 edition of the Dictionary of American Slang). I know the word from the Coen brothers’ Depression-era film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), in which it’s spoken by pomade devotee Ulysses Everett McGill:

“As soon as we get ourselves cleaned up and we get a little smellum in our hair, why, we’re gonna feel a hundred percent better about ourselves and about life in general.”

A source from Google Books has smellum as a bit of pidgin English:


[Charles Godfrey Leland, Pidgin-English Sing-Song; or, Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect (London: Trübner, 1876). The sample sentence means “Bring me that perfume.”]

That’s the earliest source I can find. And the scholarly databases I’ve checked have no smellum. Which stinks, I know.

Related reading
All Henry posts (Pinboard)

Digital-naïf watch

I think it remarkable that so many so-called digital natives have fallen for the fake news that BIg Bird is transgender. A few seconds with the Google is sufficient to establish that the story is a spoof. Here is the story’s source, if you’d like to see it. Among the headlines at the site: “Analysts Forecast Drop In Holiday Spending As More Families Rely On Presents From Santa Claus.”

As I wrote in a post in which I made up the term “digital naïf,” “Many so-called digital natives are in truth digital naïfs. The natives’ naïveté is considerable.” Take a look at the Twitter if you doubt me.

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The F word (Find)
Digital-naïf watch

November 11, 1923

[“Wilson Overcome Greeting Pilgrims; Predicts Triumph: ‘I Have Seen Fools Resist Providence and Perish, as Will Come Again,’ He Asserts. Speaks with Difficulty Apparently Suffering Physical Pain, He Is Greatly Affected by Seeing Disabled Soldiers.” The New York Times, November 12, 1923.]

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How to help the Philippines

How you can help Typhoon Haiyan survivors (USA Today).

Prufrock as comics

The opening pages of a comic-book version of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by Julian Peters.

The only panel that seems off: “There will be time to murder and create” (too literal). Other than that, it’s terrific.

[Found via Boing Boing.]

“Tap the Map!”

My son Ben wants to help you learn the fifty states. Enjoy:


[Words and music by Ben Leddy.]

Repurposed cupcake pan

From Cool Tools, a repurposed cupcake pan, now holding nuts and bolts and washers. Nifty.

I am now imagining a pan whose cups are filled with paper clips, binder clips, pushpins, and so on. I like to repurpose household items, as the links below will attest.

Orange Crate Art repurposings
Bakeware : Box flap : Dish drainer : Doorstop : Tea tin

Sixty-eight years later

Elaine and I had the opportunity last night to listen to two World War II veterans give a talk about their experiences in combat. Both fought in the Pacific. Both were at Iwo Jima, or Iwo, as they called it. One was seventeen at the time; the other, nineteen.

An audience member asked if they had difficulties after the war. None, one said, although ”Of course, you suffer some.” The other described his weekly trips to a VA support group, which he has been making for the past thirty-six years. He also showed a list of prescriptions for his war-related problems: twelve every morning, five every night. Sixty-eight years later, he still has nightmares.

The Chicagoan

[The Chicagoan, December 31, 1927. Artist unidentified. Click for a larger view.]

From the University of Chicago Library:

The Chicagoan, published from 1926 to 1935 in Chicago, was explicitly modeled on the New Yorker in both its graphic design and editorial content. The magazine aimed to portray the city as a cultural hub and counter its image as a place of violence and vice. It was first issued biweekly and then, in a larger format, monthly, ceasing publication in the midst of the Depression. The magazine received little national attention during its lifetime and few copies survive. This digital collection reproduces the near-complete run in the University of Chicago Library with issues supplied from other collections where possible.

You can browse the collection here.

Thanks to Slywy for telling me about The Chicagoan. You might like reading her wonderful answer to the question “Why the pencil?”