An apple name

Yes, Mr. McIntosh, there was a Granny Smith.

Mark Trail , all too doppelgänger-y

Mark Trail meanders along its bewildering way. Mark turned up in the Rio Grande on June 22 after a long journey through caverns measureless to man. And then the strip went back in time: “Two years ago, not far from Hawaii.” An insipid couple, whom we have come to know as Darling (he) and Honey (she) are sailing to New Zealand. “We’ll be in New Zealand soon!” says Darling. (Good luck with that.) Long story short: Darling and Honey take a break to sleep away the night on a tiny island, “not far from Hawaii.” While carrying firewood from the boat to shore, Darling is bitten by what will turn out to be a red imported fire ant. I’m guessing, but a later strip shows something that looks like an ant, and it’s bright red.

  
[Mark Trail , June 28, July 1, July 2, 2016. Click for larger views.]

Back in the present, Mark is planning a vacation with Cherry, just the two of them, to Hawaii. Today, however, we’re back on the tiny island. But look: that’s not Honey in a green hat and bikini, two years back in time. It’s Abbey Powell, a real person at the USDA who appeared in a Trail story in 2015. She’s back. Follow that bird!


[Mark Trail , July 13, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

James Allen has given considerable attention to the female form of late, first with Honey and now with Abbey Powell. (Browse for yourself.) It’s a pity that Allen’s artistic imagination allows only one color for bikinis and hats: that makes things unnecessarily confusing. At least Honey and Ms. Powell have been granted different hat bands. But still: it’s all too doppelgänger-y.

Allen has assured his readers in a comment on today’s strip that Abbey is going to tell us what happened to Darling and Honey. I assume that they got in big trouble with the red imported fire ant, aka RIFA, either by bringing ashore the firewood that introduced the invasive species to the tiny island or by being bitten to death, or both.

It’s enough to make someone say “uunngghh.” Cough. Cough.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Shredded lunch

I took up Berit’s suggestion and made a Shredded lunch. I cut a Shredded Wheat biscuit along the seam and came away with two “nest-like fragile crackers,” just as Berit described them. I put three large pieces of avocado on each (about three-quarters of a large avocado) and added some salt, cracked pepper, and lemon juice, with a chunk of cheddar cheese on the side. Delicious! I plan to repeat this experiment, probably on Friday, by which time the next avocado will have ripened.

Thank you, Berit, for discovering New Directions in Shredded Wheat.

A related post
Shredded Wheat hack

[A truism of the Internets: no one cares what you had for lunch. Well, probably. But people do care about what they might want to make for their own next lunch.]

“How not to write”

Zachary Foster gives advice: “How not to write: 14 tips for aspiring humanities academics” (Times Higher Education). A sample:

The general rule of thumb is to complicate simple ideas. “Living together,” in the words of one scholar, “oscillates between the tone of practical serenity and tragic pathos, between philosophical wisdom and desperate anguish.” It is both “simple evidence and the promise of the inaccessible,” while it opens the possibility of a “unified self” and “synchronous time.” If only this were more widely known, so much domestic friction could be avoided.

Related posts (fake lit-crit)
“Metaphysics’ corrasable bond”
On Rebecca Black’s “Friday”

Not reading

Arthur Schopenhauer:

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

Essays and Aphorisms (1851), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1970).

[Bryan Garner tweeted a photograph of this passage. My best book of 2016: so far it’s Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915).]

Turbo Boost Switcher

[For Mac users.]

Rubén García Pérez’s Turbo Boost Switcher is a tiny app that enables or disables OS X’s Turbo Boost. Turbo Boost is the technology that increases CPU speed (and with it, fan speed and temperature). You know what it’s like when your Mac heats up and the fan goes at full blast? That’s Turbo Boost at work. Disabling Turbo Boost lengthens battery life and and allows a Mac to run at a significantly lower temperature. Turbo Boost Switcher is available in free and Pro versions.

Full disclosure: this blog post will get me a modest discount on the Pro version’s already modest price. Further disclosure: I’ve been planning to write a post about this app anyway, for many months now. I learned about Turbo Boost Switcher, more than a year ago, from Marco Arment’s blog, and have been using it ever since.

From Lucy Gayheart

Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart (1935).

I became acquainted with trade-last , or TL , via an episode of Naked City . Seeing the word again is like receiving an odd and unexpected gift. What am I gonna do with it?

Oh, wait — I know.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Little world

Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl , trans. Joel Rotenberg (New York: New York Review Books, 2008).

Lord Elkins, speaking of aristocrats sojourning at a hotel, has given us a perfect characterization of any petty elite, from a junior-high clique to a workplace’s players and plotters.

The Post-Office Girl is a terrific novel. I wish I had known it when I was teaching: it would have offered a great opportunity for students to think about matters of class and poverty, poverty of both means and spirit.

[I have come to think of the New York Review Books imprint as pretty much a guarantee that a book is worth my time: like the Criterion Collection for books. Wes Anderson cites this novel in particular and Zweig’s life and work more generally as inspiration for his film The Grand Budapest Hotel .]

From Lucy Gayheart

Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart (1935).

Lucy Gayheart! I’m with you in Haverford.

More seriously: I think there are few writers who understand the claustrophobia of little towns as well as Willa Cather does. See for instance the chance meeting of Godfrey St. Peter and Horace Langtry in The Professor’s House .

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[With apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl .]

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.]