Lorelai is helping her father get his new consulting business in shape. So she takes him shopping for office supplies. From the Gilmore Girls episode “Help Wanted” (May 7, 2002):
“Before anything else can happen, you need pens, you need paper, you need everything else, don’t you?”Other Gilmore Girls posts
I’ve avoided Mike Love’s autobiography, but seeing it in a Barnes and Noble, I had to look. I was surprised to see that the copies were signed: Love [big space] Mike Love, no comma in between. I browsed the pages of photographs and noticed one that shows a group sitting crosslegged in meditation, amid candles, flowers, and teacups. The caption is quintessential Love:
This meditative gathering included my lawyer Mike Flynn, front left, who won my copyright suit against Brian.Yep, that’s Mike Love. The settling of scores is never far from his meditative mind.
Mike Love, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, with James S. Hirsch (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016).
If the United States was the grail for many, the odds of actually getting in were infinitesimal. For all that Americans regularly spoke of their country being overrun with “millions of refugees,” the numbers who actually made it were astonishingly small. In fact, the difficulties of reaching America due to the war, the Depression, and bureaucracy-mired visa restrictions combined to make the number of immigrants to the United States between 1931 and 1945 the lowest they had been been in more than a hundred years. . . .As Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times, “Today, to our shame, Anne Frank is a Syrian girl.”
Nonetheless, through a combination of intentional propaganda and general paranoia, the perception gained traction that America was being swamped with exiles to the point where millions of jobs and democracy itself were at risk.
George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (New York: Other Press, 2014).
[1987.]
Our daughter hits the big three-oh later today. Man, she’s getting up there. Then again, age ain’t nothing but a number. Whoops — I’ve run out of clichés.
I still vividly remember taking this photograph in the house we were renting when Rachel was born. The curtains were homemade (Elaine’s). The camera was a Canon (Elaine’s). Rachel was toddling by our bedroom window, and I took this photograph without (as Elaine reminds me) knowing anything about how to take a photograph. Lucky dad.
Happy birthday, RR.
My daughter Rachel just sent the sad news that the actress Barbara Hale has died at the age of ninety-four. The Hollywood Reporter has an obituary. Hale played Della Street to Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason in 271 Perry Mason episodes and twenty-six made-for-TV movies. She continued to play Street in four more Perry Mason Mystery movies after Burr’s death.
In an instance of especially awkward timing, Barbara Hale appeared in an OCA post earlier today.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)
And re: “alternative facts”: Orwell on historical truth and totalitarian history
Our household understands little about economics. But yesterday we tried to reason out the threatened twenty-percent tariff on goods imported from Mexico. Wouldn’t it just lead to higher prices for U.S. consumers? Or to a dearth of Mexican goods? We were thinking especially of produce. Wouldn’t such a tariff harm both the Mexican and U.S. economies?
Maybe we know more about economics than we thought: “Donald Trump’s Mexico Tantrum” (The New York Times).
[We do know a lot about home economics. Post title with apologies to Sam Cooke.]
[Henry, January 26, 2017.]
Yes, it’s a panel from yesterday’s Henry, but every day’s Henry is yesterday’s Henry. And I thought that, surely, “hot dog parlor” is yesterday’s language, a term with no currency in the non-Henry world. I thought of what T. S. Eliot wrote: “last year’s words belong to last year’s language.” But was Eliot referring to Henry? Probably not.
Google finds “hot dog parlor” alive and well: “Staten Island finally has its own upscale hot dog parlor” (2004); “ice cream shop turned hot dog parlor” (2009); “the shed has evolved into a hot dog parlor” (2014); “Maggie spotted the shop sandwiched between a hot dog parlor and a shoe repair store” (2016). That last one sounds like my kind of neighborhood, even if its hot-dog parlor and shoe-repair store (shop?) are, like the other parlors and the ice-cream shop, missing hyphens.
“Sandwiched between” reminded me to wonder: is a hot dog a sandwich? Merriam-Webster says yes. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (for a variety of silly reasons that confuse words and food) says no. The NHDSC’s official statement (and its possibly more serious reasons) has disappeared from the organization’s website.
Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
[Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh.]
Barbara Hale joins three other representatives of Perry Mason in this occasional series.
John Beddall, an OCA reader, sent these photographs, which I’ve posted with his permission. Thank you, John.
Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny
