“A-Tisket, A-Tasket”

If CNN’s John King makes just one more reference to “a basket of votes,” I will set the Erinyes after him.

A related post
John King, fast talker

Recently updated

Crosswords, copied The editor is “temporarily stepping away.”

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , March 5 and 8, 2016. Click either image for a larger view.]

Since August 2008, I’ve been noticing (and sometimes solving) Hi and Lois problems. I don’t recall seeing the front door switch direction before. The switch seems to be dictated by the left-to-right logic of comic-strip dialogue.

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9:30 a.m.: The door has switched before: for instance. The door’s direction does seem to vary with dialogue. The strip is off its hinges.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

From a Van Gogh letter

Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, December 26, 1878:

Lately, during the dark days before Christmas, snow was lying on the ground. Everything reminded one then of the medieval paintings by, say, Peasant Brueghel, and by so many others who have known how to depict the singular effect of red & green, black & white so strikingly. And often the sights here have made me think of the work of, for example, Thys Maris or Albrecht Dürer. There are sunken roads here, overgrown with thornbushes and gnarled old trees with their freakish roots, which resemble perfectly that road on Dürer’s etching, Le chevalier et la mort.

Thus, a few days ago, the miners returning home in the evening towards dusk in the white snow were a singular sight. These people are quite black when they emerge into the daylight from the dark mines, looking just like chimney sweeps. Their dwellings are usually small and should really be called huts, they lie scattered along the sunken roads, in the woods and on the slopes of the hills. Here and there one can still see moss-covered roofs, and in the evening a friendly light shines through the small-paned windows.

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh , ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin, 1997).

Peasant Brueghel: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Matthijs Maris: this painting might suggest what Van Gogh had in mind. Albrecht Dürer: here is the etching.

Also from Van Gogh’s letters
“Admire as much as you can”
“It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk”

“Here’s what it’s like to live in the shadow of a Big Ten school”

The University of Illinois today announced the hiring of a new football coach. In such circumstances, our local news outlet (“Your News Leader”) turns into a muzzy cheer squad. “Crazy!” said the anchor. The first twelve minutes of tonight’s hour-long newscast were devoted to the hiring, with more coverage promised later in the hour.

Also today, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner appeared in two nearby towns “to hear [our] concerns” and stump for congressional candidate John Shimkus (who in 2014 described Rauner as someone who “can make the trains run on time”). At the first of these events, a journalist (a former student of mine) was denied entry. Citizens pressing for a resolution to the state’s budget crisis were also denied entry. I don’t know what happened at the second event. Our local news outlet covered neither event.

The school where I spent thirty years as a professor of English is down the road a ways from the University of Illinois, in more ways than one. My school is not a Big Ten school, not a Research I school. It’s what’s called a “teaching university”: students are the faculty’s first priority. My school is small and scrappy and chronically underfunded. And now, in the absence of a state budget, hundreds of employees have lost or will soon lose their jobs. None of that made tonight’s news either.

The U of I’s new coach has a six-year contract that will pay him twenty-one million dollars. Even the reporter explaining the contract’s details seemed to understand the unseemliness of that kind of money, noting that it comes not from the university budget but from “athletics.”

A new bill to fund Illinois state schools asks for forty million dollars for the state’s community colleges. One football coach equals about half that. As someone recently asked, “Where are our priorities?”

[Post title in the manner of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd .]

Pocket notebook sightings

Fresca pointed me to Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950) as a film rich in stationery supplies. Yes. I’d seen the film years ago but had little memory of it — until it began. And then the plot and its people kicked in. And the supplies.

Detective Sergeant Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) carries a pocket notebook. Bad guy Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) carries what must be Benzedrine inhalers. That’s Karl Malden as Dixon’s boss, Detective Lieutenant Thomas.


[Click any image for a larger view.]

Dixon’s partner Detective Sergeant Paul Klein (Bert Freed) also carries a notebook. Useful when interviewing Morgan Taylor (Gene Tierney).



Then there’s a wonderful scene that Fresca mentioned, in which Scalise spells things out for small-time hood Willie Bender (Don Appell): “Take out a pencil and write this down.” Willie’s in a phone booth, the perfect place to take dictation with his no-name pencil.



Mark Dixon sits at a desk to write a letter to be opened in the event of his death. I think he’s using a military-clip Sheaffer.



I’d forgotten how much our household liked this film. Six years after Laura , it’s a Preminger-Andrews-Tierney reunion, with supplies. Thanks, Fresca, for recommending it.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Lodger : Murder at the Vanities : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : The Woman in the Window

[Where does the sidewalk end? As the opening credits make clear, in the gutter.]

“Rocket surgery”

[Dustin , March 7, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

Dustin is a witty comic strip. Nicely punctuated, too.

I just reached the discussion of overworked metaphors in Sir Ernest Gowers’s The Complete Plain Words. On the danger of “falling into incongruity”:

Nothing is easier to do; almost all writers fall occasionally into this trap. But it is worth while to take great pains to avoid doing so, because a reader who notices it will deride you. So we should not speak of increasing or waiving a ceiling, or say that it is beginning to bite. Possibilities more unpleasant than the writer can have intended are suggested by the warning to Civil Defence Workers that many persons who experienced a nuclear explosion will have diarrhoea and vomiting and should not be allowed to swamp the medical services.

The Complete Plain Words , rev. Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut (Boston: David R. Godine, 1988).

More metaphors in trouble
A-Rod’s medicine : Carpetbagging beaver and drunken horse, tired as dogs : Chipping away at a heel : Cliffs and goalposts : Dripping and sketching : End-of-day lunch : Force-feeding and dog-earing : From a back-pocket beacon to a cog : Harvesting : Heels and hackles : Icarus : The nation’s midsection : Plates and juggling : Prongs and platforms : Race, gun battle, prizefight : Resurrection : The sides of the spectrum : Tackling and dissecting : “With the cliff behind us”

And: Too many to list here.

Rev. Robert Palladino (1932–2016)

Robert Palladino, once a Trappist, later a priest, taught calligraphy at Reed College. Steve Jobs sat in, and what he learned about letterforms turned out to be useful when he went to work on the Mac.

From the New York Times obituary:

Though Father Palladino demonstrably influenced Mr. Jobs, the converse cannot be said. To the end of his life, Father Palladino never owned, or even once used, a computer.

“I have my hand,” he would say, “and I have my pen. That’s it.”

A related post
Steve Jobs on connecting the dots

Crosswords, copied

From FiveThirtyEight: “A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.”

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March 8: From FiveThirtyEight: “The longtime editor of two major crossword puzzle series is temporarily stepping away from his editorial role, the puzzles’ publishers announced Monday, three days after FiveThirtyEight published an investigation into accusations of plagiarism against him.”

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April 29: From FiveThirtyEight: “Universal Uclick, a syndicator of puzzles to newspapers and other publications, says it has confirmed some of the allegations of plagiarism that have been leveled against the editor of its popular Universal Crossword puzzle.” The plagiarizing editor, Timothy Parker, will be returning to his position.

As I wrote in 2009 about a scandal in academia: “plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.”

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May 9: FiveThirtyEight reports Parker’s puzzles will no longer appear in USA Today or other Gannett Company newspapers.

Domestic comedy

[Late-night television .]

“Watching people do curling is as strange as watching bugs having sex.”

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“It’s like assisted shuffleboard.”

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“There’s a pinball component to it too. Because the thingies bounce off the sides.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)