A Nancy Labor Day

[Nancy, September 7, 1953. Those rocks!]

From GoComics, Guy Gilchrist and John Lotshaw’s Random Acts of Nancy reprints single Ernie Bushmiller panels in colorized form. Scott McCloud’s Five Card Nancy is the inspiration.

Also from GoComics, Gilchrist’s Nancy and Bushmiller’s original Nancy strips (the latter running every day but Sunday).

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“A. S. Gerdee, of 3251 Maypole(?) Street, working as a switchman at Proviso yard of C & NW RR, Chicago, Ill.” Photograph by Jack Delano. April 1943. Click for a larger view.]

The Library of Congress has made this photograph available via Flickr.

notepad.cc

From Jacob Bijani: notepad.cc, “a piece of paper in the cloud.”

How it works: Go to notepad.cc and you’ll see a white rectangle, suitable for typing. Your page will have its own URL — http://notepad.cc, followed by randomish letters and numbers. You can change the URL to something more recognizable and add a password if you like.

The advantage of notepad.cc over the also-nifty browser-notepad trick: with notepad.cc, you can compose or access text on any device via your URL. That appeals to the ten-year-old secret agent in me, hugely so. Notepad.cc is way cool, and free.

I found my way to notepad.cc via a Daring Fireball link to a page of Safari extensions. I’m surprised that I’d never heard of this service before.

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7:05 p.m.: Notepad.cc’s bottom-of-the-screen options to change a URL, add or remove a password, and share a link appear to be unavailable in iOS 8.

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November 16, 2016: Notepad is defunct. A reader recommends Notebin.cc.

A related post
Browser notepad

James Ward’s supplies

“James Ward keeps his collection of office supplies at his mother’s house outside London because his flat in Brixton, which he shares with a roommate, is too small. He says his mother, a former librarian, has ‘come to terms’ with the arrangement”: “A Collector Sees the Potential in a Humble Paper Clip” (The New York Times).
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September 7: I just hit page 114 in Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up : “Your parents’ home is not a haven for mementos.” And one page later: “Even if the house is large with rooms to spare, it is not some infinitely expanding fourth dimension.” Mr. Ward, heed Ms. Kondo’s words. Send your supplies to me.

Related reading
All OCA supplies posts (Pinboard)
Tidy?

[James Ward is the author of The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationery Obsession (2015).]

Big fish, little fish

[Field and Stream, May 1977. Click for a larger view.]

This advertisement makes me think of a novel I read this summer. Moby -something.

The thought of eating fish while fishing seems a little odd to me. But the thought of carrying sardines around in shirt pockets is a thought I am willing to entertain.

Time for lunch.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

A Nabokov pencil

Vladimir is sick in bed, suffering from one of his “numerous childhood illnesses.” His mother has gone out to buy the daily present that went with illness. He visualizes her traveling down the street by sleigh and stopping at Treumann’s “(writing implements, bronze baubles, playing cards).” She leaves the shop, still in his mind’s eye, with her footman, who carries what appears to be a pencil. Why is she making the man carry a thing so small? And now she returns, and it turns out that the present had been, in Vladimir’s mind’s eye, “greatly reduced in size — perhaps, because I subliminally corrected what logic warned me might still be the dreaded remnants of delirium’s dilating world.”


Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

Related reading, via Pinboard
All OCA Nabokov posts
All OCA pencil posts
All OCA Nabokov and pencils posts

Abdul-Jabbar on Sanders and Trump

An essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “This is the difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders” (The Washington Post). And Trump’s reply.

Word of the day: Waldeinsamkeit

Ella Frances Sanders, Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014). Click for larger woods.

I wanted to post something from this book (thank you, Elaine), and this word seems to go well with today’s post about man-going-off-to-wooded-island. You can find ten more Sanders-illustrated words here.

Lost in Translation is a charming and imagination-provoking book, though its scholarship is sometimes amiss: at least one of its words has been called non-existent. Waldeinsamkeit is, of course, real. Ralph Waldo Emerson even wrote a poem about it. But if I hadn’t looked up the word elsewhere, I wouldn’t have known to capitalize it. (Sanders draws all words in all caps.) Lower-case lettering would be helpful, as would a pronunciation guide.

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積ん読 [tsundoku]

From “Before Breakfast”

Henry Grenfell, a business man, is preparing for a solitary retreat to an island off the coast of Nova Scotia, “a bit of wooded rock in the sea.” His son Harrison, “a distinguished physicist at thirty,” enters as Grenfell is packing.


Willa Cather, “Before Breakfast,” in The Old Beauty and Others (1948).

Such a slight story, and yet it contains so many elements of Cather’s fiction: a desire for permanence set against the inevitability of change, human finitude measured against cosmic time, a clash of cultures (humanist and scientific), and the drama of “the double life,” as Cather calls it elsewhere:

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

Right now Grenfell is pulling away, moving toward his “private, personal, non-family life.” Like Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor’s House (1925), Henry Grenfell is outward bound.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

xkcd survey

The latest installment of xkcd takes the reader to “a search for weird correlations.” It’s fun.