A letter to Martin Milner

In 2013 Elaine and I wrote to Martin Milner and George Maharis to express our appreciation for Route 66. Here is one of our letters:

Dear Mr. Milner,

We spent a good part of April, May, and June watching the complete run of Route 66 on DVD. We’re writing to thank you — fifty years late — for the terrific work you did as Tod Stiles. We greatly enjoyed the series’s writing, camerawork, and, especially, the acting. Among our favorite Tod-centric episodes are “The Thin White Line” and “The Cruelest Sea of All.”

It is amazing to see a series that can range from tragedy to comedy, even slapstick, while always making room for fisticuffs, poetry, and progressive jazz. We’re both in our fifties — too young to have paid attention to Route 66 the first time around, old enough now to realize how great the series was.

All best wishes, &c.

We received a letter from George Maharis, but we never heard from Martin Milner. I hope that he saw our letter.

Related reading
All OCA Route 66 posts (Pinboard)
Martin Milner (1931–2015)

Martin Milner (1931–2015)

The actor Martin Milner has died. From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

The red-haired, freckle-faced Milner had more than a dozen years of work in films and television behind him in 1960 when he began plying the highways and byways of America on Route 66 , portraying Yale dropout Tod Stiles opposite George Maharis’ streetwise New Yorker Buz Murdock.

Martin Milner is probably better known these days for his role as Officer Pete Malloy on Adam-12, but Route 66 is the better measure of his gifts.

Our household is a Route 66 -friendly zone.

Related reading
All OCA Route 66 posts (Pinboard)
A letter to Martin Milner

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James Ward’s supplies Now with a reason why Mr. Ward should send his office supplies to me.

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).

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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
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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
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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
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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.