Orange dress art

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day, an early eighteenth-century child’s dress, for a girl or a boy.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight” (1798), of his sister Ann: “My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!”

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

[On my Mac and on a Windows machine, the dress is orange. On my iPad and iPhone, it’s brown. Anyone have another color?]

Dad the tooter

My son Ben has revealed a misunderstanding from his childhood. For some years, I volunteered with a local adult-literacy program. Ben now tells me that when I went to the library to tutor, he thought I was practicing snake charming.

I’m guessing that he must have been three or four, young enough to misunderstand, old enough to remember. Young enough too to think that his dad could do just about anything.

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5:07 p.m.: Says Ben, “You CAN do just about anything!”

Food and the dictionary

“The adoption of ethnic food words into English is an excellent proxy for the moment our culture embraces these foreign foodstuffs as our own”: How food words join the dictionary (Boston Globe).

I’m not sure what “our culture” means in that sentence, because the article references both American and British dictionaries. But I’m happy to learn from this article that bánh mì (or banh mi ) has entered the American Heritage Dictionary. And I’m surprised to learn that pasta didn’t enter the Merriam-Webster lexicon until 1963.

When Elaine and I moved to downstate Illinois in 1985, pasta was shelved in the supermarket’s “Ethnic Foods” aisle. Exotic stuff, that pasta.

[I can recommend with considerable enthusiasm Los Angeles’s Absolutely Phobulous and Bahn in the USA. Both serve excellent báhn mì.]

Johnnie Walker tweed

The BBC reports on the creation of Harris Tweed that smells like Scotch:

The “smart fabric” has been developed for Johnnie Walker Black Label and Harris Tweed Hebrides.

The scent called Aqua Alba has been designed to replicate aromas released from a glass of whisky, known as the nose of the liquid.

According to Johnnie Walker, the cloth smells of “rich malt, golden vanilla, red fruit and dark chocolate tones.”

And: the smell resists dry cleaning.

The first of Neil Postman’s six questions is relevant here: “What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?”

A little Google indignity

Blogger now requires me to prove that I’m not a robot when I’m signed into my account and replying to a comment to my own blog. Sheesh.

*

December 14: I just discovered that if you’re signed in, you can ignore the CAPTCHA.

[Blogger, as you may already know, is a Google service. Google purchased Pyra Labs, developers of Blogger, in 2003.]

World’s most confusing sentence

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Thank you, Seth.

Exam advice

[Der Schrei der Nancy.]

Coming soon to a week near you, perhaps: final examinations. In December 2005, after finding nothing online to my liking, I wrote out some advice for students: How to do well on a final exam. It’s good advice, free for the taking.

And for contrarians: How to do horribly on a final exam.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Nancy will do just fine on her exam.]

Henry calendar

[Henry, December 12, 2014.]

Not only do they have a mousehole in the baseboard (as a good cartoon-home should): they have a commercial calendar on the wall. It must be a gift from the coal company, or something.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

At the CPG Co.

I put in two-and-a-half hours last night. It’ll be the whole day today. Back tomorrow from the Continental Paper Grading Co.

Jane Freilicher on “the cutting edge”

Jane Freilicher, quoted in the New York Times obituary:

“To strain after innovation, to worry about being on ‘the cutting edge’ (a phrase I hate), reflects a concern for a place in history or one’s career rather than the authenticity of one’s painting.”

A related post
Jane Freilicher (1924–2014)