Custom notebooks in Japan

“Stationery options are so plentiful that a designated paper concierge is on hand to advise customers on selecting the just-right weight, texture, shade, sheen, and thickness”: from a brief report on custom notebooks in Japanese stationery stores (Quartz).

Thanks, Elaine.

Nancy snag

Sluggo has explained to Peewee that “There’s been someone along here before us.” How can Sluggo tell? “By dis broken twig --- they stepped on it.” So when Peewee sees this tree:


[Nancy , August 20, 1949.]

Peewee needs to work on reining in his imagination and expanding his vocabulary.


[Nancy revised , August 20, 1949. Yes, made with the original lettering.]

Giants anagrams into “Snag It,” but that’s a King Oliver tune and has nothing to do with the subject of this post.

You can read Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy six days a week at GoComics.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Spinning and pitching Now with Stefan Hagemann’s patient deconstruction of a Trump-campaign metaphor.

Snow in the city in the school

At Caroline Pratt’s City and Country School, seven-year-olds built and rebuilt and ran a “play city,” with roads, waterways, “little people” (wooden figures), and buildings made of blocks. And the children sometimes staged performances:

One of the most charming I remember was nothing more than the representation of a snowstorm in the city. There were two scenes with backdrops painted by the children on large sheets of brown wrapping paper. The first showed the New York waterfront without snow; the second reproduced the same scene, but covered now with deep white drifts. In the first scene the children were snowflakes, improvising their own dance and finally falling to the ground. In the second scene, workmen came with snowplows and opened up the streets by pushing the fallen snowflakes aside. That was all there was to it!

Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).

A few days ago I was reading about adolescents finding their city far more educational than their school. And now I’m reading about children whose schoolwork is to build a city of their own.

Also from Caroline Pratt
Art criticism
Caroline Pratt on waste in education

Spinning and pitching

Amy Kremer, co-chair of Women Vote Trump, on the news earlier this afternoon, spinning a three-part metaphor to explain why Donald Trump is now on his third campaign manager:

“You have your starting pitcher, your middle reliever, and your closer.”

There must be a joke about screwballs in there somewhere.

*

Stefan Hagemann (who’s made many an appearance in these pages, most notably here) tore the metaphor apart in a comment on this post:

The second item hints at why this is a poor metaphor: relief pitchers relieve. They don’t fire and replace the previous pitcher. Beyond that, the closer’s role is to maintain the lead, not to recapture it. The closer doesn’t pitch when the team is losing, and since pitchers don’t bat (American League) or hit well, usually (National League), the bullpen is unlikely to help a team come from behind.

Maybe the screwball joke is that one of the most famous and successful screwball pitchers, Fernando Valenzuela, is Mexican and would not be welcome in Trump’s America.

Thank you, Stefan.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Urban pastoral, with stationery

Stefan Zweig describes Paris, which he visited as a young man, before the Great War:


Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday . 1943. Trans. Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

N.B.: “stationery which was supplied free of charge.” Garçon, plus de papier, s’il vous plaît!

Other Zweig posts
Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city

School v. city

At fourteen and fifteen, Stefan Zweig and his classmates came to realize that Vienna had more to offer than school did:


Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday . 1943. Trans. Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

The World of Yesterday is a grand tour of a gone world. Our household prefers this dowdier (1943) text to the recent translation with the Wes Anderson/Grand Bupadest Hotel promo on the cover (also from the University of Nebraska Press). Caution: Amazon’s Look Inside tool will show the older translation, but Amazon will send the new one. The older translation can be had from Advanced Book Exchange or Alibris. The translators Huebsch and Ripperger are uncredited in both the 1964 and original 1943 editions.

Other Zweig posts
Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world

Making a Murderer

Steven Avery, tried for one crime and then for another:

“Poor people lose. Poor people lose all the time.”

Dean Strang, one of Steven Avery’s attorneys:

“In some ways to be accused is to lose — every time. What you can hope to get is your liberty back, eventually. That’s all you can ever hope to get.”

The Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer (dir. Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, 2015) is compelling viewing. Especially now. If you haven’t followed the Steven Avery story in the news, don’t start now. Watch the series first.

Thanks, Rachel, for persuading me (finally) to watch.

Cheap shoes

Elaine and I bought two pairs of these shoes at our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer. They’re cheap plastic — $6.99 a pair — so cheap that I can’t find a single photograph online, from any retailer.

We keep our shoes by the back door. Until the weather turns, they’re perfect when taking out the trash or watering the crops (herbs) — easy on, easy off. The shoes have excellent traction and would serve well in any setting that tends toward the messy: with an old pair of socks they’d be a good choice for household painting.

Neither the shoe nor its price tag identifies a manufacturer. The sole says that the shoe is made in the United States “with over 75% U.S. parts.” I hope so.

[Garner’s Modern American Usage : “The preferred plural of pair is pairs .” Click the shoe for a larger size. Correction: I first wrote that the sole says the shoe is made from “75% recycled materials.” Then I looked at the sole again.]

Word of the day: snag

Go out walking in nature preserve. Spot new specimen: snag . The Oxford English Dictionary explains:

snag: N Amer. A standing dead tree.

Webster’s New International Dictionary , second edition, is more expansive:

Forestry. A tree from which the top has been broken. A rampike, esp. one tall enough to be an extra fire hazard.

And Webster’s Third:

A standing dead tree from which parts or all of the top have fallen; esp.: one that is more than 20 feet tall.

The Third directs the reader to stub :

the part of a tree or plant that remains fixed in the earth when the stem is cut down or broken off.

So a snag is taller than a stub.

Following the history of snag in the OED , it’s easy to see how a word having to do with trees came to signify an unexpected complication. The earliest meaning of snag (1577–87):

A short stump standing out from the trunk, or from a stout branch, of a tree or shrub, esp. one which has been left after cutting or pruning; also, a fruiting spur.

Later (1807):

A trunk or large branch of a tree imbedded in the bottom of a river, lake, etc., with one end directed upwards (and consequently forming an impediment or danger to navigation). orig. U.S.

And shortly thereafter (1830):

fig. An impediment or obstacle. Also, a disadvantage, a hitch; a defect.

Followed in 1904 by “N Amer. A standing dead tree.”

The nature preserve in which I went walking had a sign on a trail with vocabulary. A dead tree on the ground: log . A dead tree still standing: snag .

As for rampike, Webster’s Second says:

A dead tree; a pointed stump or partly-burned tree; a tree broken off by the wind leaving a splintered end to the trunk.

I know that visitors are not supposed to take anything with them from a nature preserve. But I think that taking the word snag is okay.