Names and things

Winona LaDuke, founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project and two-time Green Party vice-presidential candidate:

“Julius Caesar’s calendar is something that belongs to one culture, and I always have this problem with naming large things after small white men. Like, you know, who was that guy? Why do we have one whole system of time named after him?”

*

“I don’t mean to repeat this, but I have a problem with the naming thing — big mountains after small men. This whole continent is badly named.”

From the Kitchen Sisters’ podcast Fugitive Waves , episode no. 51, “Harvest on Big Rice Lake.”

Fitzcarraldo in Vermont

From Vermont Public Radio:

A nearly 200-year-old schoolhouse has been moved back to its original site in the Orleans County town of Brownington. . . .

Thousands of Vermonters cheered as 44 oxen pulled the two-story Orleans County Grammar schoolhouse up a hill nearly half a mile.

[George Bodmer let me know that the real Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald appears in a recent New Yorker article. Thanks, George.]

Chrome changes

I was wondering about Chrome this morning: the Back and Forward and Reload arrows looked thinner, and the Omnibox’s drop-down list of URLs had entries in blue. What? Yes, Chrome had changed. The new design is flatter; tabs are a bit taller and have sharper corners, and then there are those blue URLs. Chrome does updates automatically: thus these changes may catch the user (or me) unawares.

It’s easy to get the old look back, at least for now: Type chrome:// flags in the Omnibox and look for “Material Design in the browser’s top chrome.” Select Non-material from the drop-down menu and relaunch.

If you choose to make further changes on the flags page, leave a trail of breadcrumbs as you do. In other words, write down what you’re doing so that you can undo easily if something goes wrong.

Things to like in today’s Zits

[Zits , August 9, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

Left to right: Adolescent sprawl and self-absorption. Speech balloon and arm breaking panel wall. Comic-strip furnishings: vase, stand, painting. Charlie-Brown-shirt zigzag pattern on vase. (That pattern shows up everywhere in Zits .) Speech balloon and arm breaking another panel wall. Stylized but immediately recognizable Tide bottle. Comic-strip laundry basket. Speech balloon and arm breaking yet another panel wall. Middle-aged sag.

But especially the laundry basket, which follows some unnamed principle of comics: a pattern is best suggested, not worked out in its entirety. Consider the clapboards and bricks in the first three Nancy panels on this page.


[The line of Jeremy’s arm makes this little scene a panel in itself.]

Related reading
All OCA comics posts (Pinboard)

From One of Ours

Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

NPR, sheesh

From an All Things Considered story about Olympic athletes who are already done: “While her U.S. teammates are angsting about their events, she’s free to chill.”

Elaine reacted to the sentence before I did.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[The NPR text-version: “While her U.S. teammates are full of angst about their events, she’s free to chill.” The story as broadcast has angsting .]

Parker Jotter sighting

[Populaire (dir. Régis Roinsard, 2012). Click for a much larger view.]

I know: Populaire means typewriters . But that’s a Parker Jotter. Attention must be paid.

The Jotter was introduced in 1954. The metal tip at the end of the barrel was added in 1955. The T-Ball came along in 1957; the arrow clip, in 1958. History courtesy of this page. Populaire is set in 1958 and 1959.

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)
“The Reliable Parker Jotter” (1963 Jotter ad)
Thomas Merton, T-Ball Jotter user
Watch, lighter, pen (1963 Jotter ad)

Happy people, poor psychologists

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

Also from this novel
Little world

Planet Melba

[Always smiling. Click for a larger (though still small) view.]

If Bob Ross were here, he’d call it a “happy little planet.” But then Neil deGrasse Tyson would come in, all spoiler-y, and say, “No, no, it’s a piece of Melba Toast. It’s much too small to be a planet.” But then Bob Ross would let Neil deGrasse Tyson play with Peapod the pocket squirrel, and Neil deGrasse Tyson would say, “Oh, okay, it can be a planet.” Which it is. Hail, Planet Melba!

A find

“Georgie and I call this the ultimate family love song”: so said Mel Tormé, introducing “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” (Oscar Hammerstein II–Jerome Kern), on the recording A Vintage Year (Concord, 1988). “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” was a favorite song of my dad’s. We played an older recording of it at his memorial (also by Tormé). But I didn’t know this version, with its spoken introduction, until I put on my dad’s CD this morning.

You can find the song at YouTube.

[“Georgie”: George Shearing.]