Audrey Hepburn and sardines

[Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina (dir. Billy Wilder, 1954). Click for a larger view.]

Linus Larrabee (Humphrey Bogart) has been looking through the cabinets in the company offices. There must be something to eat. Tomato juice, puffed rice, sardines, tomato juice, tomato juice. Sabrina appears lost in meditation as she holds a can of sardines.

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All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

Newhart sardines

Dinnertime. No one has shopped. The only thing Bob and Emily Hartley have in the house is a can of sardines. Bob is not a fan:

“I thought we were saving them for a special occasion — like a famine.”

From The Bob Newhart Show episode “The Separation Story,” October 5, 1974. Written by Tom Patchet and Jay Tarses, the latter of whom created The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd . We always like seeing Jay Tarses’s name on our television.

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All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

Sam Ervin, Mongol user

Watching Dick Cavett’s Watergate on PBS tonight, I was startled to see Senator Sam Ervin (D, North Carolina) holding a Mongol. I went looking online.


[“Watergate.” Photograph by Gjon Mili. Washington, D.C. August 1973. From Google Arts & Culture. Click for a larger view.]


[“Watergate Hearings.” Photograph by Gjon Mili. Washington, D.C. June 1973. From Google Arts & Culture. Click for a larger view.]


[My caption: “Speak folksily and carry a sharp Mongol.” From U.S. News & World Report. No identification, but clearly from the Watergate hearings. That’s Samuel Dash to Ervin’s left. Click for a larger view.]

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All OCA Mongol posts
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Clara Cannucciari’s Depression cooking

A YouTube series with the late Clara Cannucciari: Great Depression Cooking. Heard in the episode The Poorman’s Meal: “You know, I had to quit high school, ’cause I didn’t have stockings to wear. And that’s a fact.”

See also the website Great Depression Cooking with Clara.

Depression cuisine

Jane Ziegelman:

“Freshness was not necessarily a virtue in the 1930s. This sort of infatuation that we have with food that’s fresh, just off the farm and crisp and sweet — that didn’t really hold much water for Depression-era cooks, who were more entranced with modern, frozen foods. That was the miracle food.”

From an interview (my transcription) with Jane Ziegelman and Andy Coe, who have written A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. Listen: “Creamed, Canned and Frozen: How the Great Depression Revamped U.S. Diets” (NPR).

Thanks, Rachel, for pointing your ma and pa to this interview.

[Note to self: must read.]

Bobby Hutcherson (1941–2016)

The vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson has died. The New York Times has an obituary.

Here are three Hutcherson performances of his “Little B’s Poem”: 1, 2, 3. I first heard this tune as recorded by Tete Montoliu and have loved it ever since.

elementary OS

[Click for a much larger view.]

The screenshot above shows an old (2007) MacBook now running elementary OS, a rather Mac-like variety of Linux.

When I tried starting up this MacBook recently (curiosity, curiosity), I found myself getting nowhere. The hard drive was fine. RAM cards, fine. But my Mac could last only a minute or two before freezing up. I tried reinstalling OS X (why not?). But the problem remained, and remained a mystery.

Time to experiment: I added some RAM (4GB, $30) and installed elementary OS (wiping out OS X in the process). Installation was easy: I downloaded the 1.15GB file, burned it to a DVD, booted the old Mac from its optical drive, and followed the prompts. (The computer is too old to boot from a USB device.) In a couple of hours, I had a new-old spare laptop for basic computing.

If you visit the elementary OS website, you may too quickly conclude that the operating system is for purchase only. Not so: like other varieties of Linux, it’s available at no charge (add the custom price of “0”). Wikipedia’s article about elementary notes that the “Purchase elementary OS” strategy is controversial. If I find myself using elementary OS with any regularity, I’ll be happy to make a contribution. My greatest problem in using elementary OS thus far: forgetting that familiar key combinations (⌘-S, ⌘-T) don’t do what I think they’re going to do.

Invaluable in getting elementary OS to keep its cool, at least on my old MacBook: indicator-cpufreq. Adding it as a startup program makes a world of difference.

Mystery actor

[Click for a much larger, more mysterious view.]

Do you recognize her? Do you think you recognize her? Leave your best guess in the comments. If necessary, I will add a hint.

*

11:50 a.m.: A first hint: this actor is best known for a television role.

*

12:50 p.m: A second hint: the actor and that television character have the same first name.

*

1:10 p.m.: The answer is now in the comments. That’s Marion Ross as Katy Fuller in Teacher’s Pet (dir. George Seaton, 1958). Ross went on to play Marion Cunningham in Happy Days (1974–1984).

More mystery actors
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I’ll use actor.]

NBC, sheesh

“Germany has played flawless.”

No, flawlessly . There is such a thing as a flat adverb — “an abverb that has the same form as its corresponding adjective” — but flawless isn’t one. Fast and slow are.

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All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[Definition and examples from Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).]

Corn, dropped

Verlyn Klinkenborg:


“August,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

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All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)