Shredded Wheat hack

[Advertisement from Life , March 27, 1944.]

For the past month or more, I’ve been a fool for Post Shredded Wheat. I’m sure there are eaters who place the “pillow-like biscuits” (as Wikipedia calls them) into their cereal bowls whole. Not me. I crush, which leads, always, to stray shreds on the tablecloth. But I have devised a hack:

Materials: two Shredded Wheat biscuits, one bowl, one one-gallon plastic bag, one free hand.

Directions: Place biscuits in bowl. Place bowl in bag. Crush biscuits. Remove bowl from bag. Store bag in cereal box for reuse.

Silk soymilk, a banana or blueberries (“other fruit,” as per the ad), and a teaspoon of sugar are useful accompaniments. Add after removing bowl from bag.

Related posts
Cereals in the hands of an angry blog
How to improve writing (no. 38) (fixing the Shredded Wheat box)

[Shredded Wheat has been a Post product since 1993.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

My novel is not a work of ratiocination; its least elements have been supplied by my sensibility; first I perceived them in my own depths without understanding them, and I had as much trouble converting them into something intelligible as if they had been as foreign to the sphere of the intelligence as a motif in music.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November (?) 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co,, 2006).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Adagio for Strings

Elaine posted it this morning. I want to post it too. The musician is Cremaine Booker, also known as That Cello Guy.

“Music is the healing force of the universe”: Albert Ayler.

[It’s YouTube: the ads seem to be unavoidable.]

An inefficient nurse

“Heather is not brisk or efficient, as nurses in hospitals are. She is purposely inefficient, in fact.” From Larissa MacFarquhar’s portrait of hospice nurse Heather Meyerend: “A Tender Hand in the Presence Of Death” (The New Yorker ).

Cartoon ink

At George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Day: a well-behaved ink.

*

10:04 a.m.: And a new cartoon for the news.

“Three Terrible Days of Violence”

“What began as a lethargic return to work following a holiday has devolved into an American crucible”: Jelani Cobb, writing in The New Yorker .

“The Reliable Parker Jotter”

[Life , March 22, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

I like this advertisement, mainly because I like the Parker T-Ball Jotter, but also because I have done what Mrs. Beatrice Sopot did, albeit with cold water and without bleach. The Jotter and the shirt came through undamaged.

The Jotter was my first real (non-disposable) pen. I started using one again in 2012. It’s my favorite (and only) ballpoint.

Other T-Ball Jotter posts
Five pens (My life in five pens)
Last-minute shopping (1964 Jotter ad)
“Make My Jotter Quit!” (1971 Jotter ad)
Thomas Merton, T-Ball Jotter user
Watch, lighter, pen (1963 Jotter ad)

Evangeline and me

Lines recited by a character in Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922) brought me back to eighth-grade English:

Ever thicker, thicker, thicker,
Froze the ice on lake and river;
Ever deeper, deeper, deeper,
Fell the snow o’er all the landscape.

I didn’t recognize the words. But that meter: it’s Longfellow. These lines in trochaic tetrameter are from Henry Wadsworth’s Longfellow’s 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha .

And now I’m back in eighth-grade English, where we read Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), all of it, in dactylic hexameter. That really was the forest primeval, and we were stuck in it. I remember how old the little hardcover looked in my young, irreverent hands.

A question: what would you regard as the strangest or most inappropriate or most sadly dated assigned reading of your elementary or high-school education? This post gives my answer: hands down, Evangeline .

Pocket notebook sighting

[From Mr. Holmes , (dir. Bill Condon, 2015). Click either image for a larger view.]

Sherlock Holmes’s doctor has given him a datebook and has asked him to make a dot every time he is unable to remember the name of a person or place. The filmmakers have been thoughtful enough to create a two-days-per-page datebook — to my mind, the dowdiest of formats. Yet they’ve been careless enough to leave out the red lines that should border each date. They’re missing from the first two dates in the first shot and from the first three dates in the second. These shots fill the screen: did no one notice? Bewildering.

I think Holmes is supposed to be writing with a miniature mechanical pencil or leadholder, though it looks more like a ball-point refill.

*

9:22 a.m.: Could it be that red borders are for Saturdays and Sundays only? I have never seen a datebook, old or new, that marks off dates in that way.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : 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 : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Domestic comedy

[In the voice of Jim Nabors, or Gomer Pyle. ]

“Shiraz, shiraz, shiraz!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[If you’re puzzled, see here.]