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“A Woman in the House” The actress Mary Webster, who appeared in one of the strangest (and best) episodes of Father Knows Best, has died.

Things to do

Contact your representative. Contact your senators. And for academics only: Sign this petition.

Shopping for supplies

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
Escape to Stars Hollow : “That bastard Donald Trump”

[I’m exercising extreme restraint in quoting from this endlessly quotable series, which I’m watching for the first time.]

Quintessential Love

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.

Mike Love, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, with James S. Hirsch (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016).

Yep, that’s Mike Love. The settling of scores is never far from his meditative mind.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Things to do

Join the American Civil Liberties Union.

Then and now

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. . . .

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).

As Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times, “Today, to our shame, Anne Frank is a Syrian girl.”

Happy birthday, Rachel

[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.

Barbara Hale (1922–2017)

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.

Rewriting the past

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

Don’t know much about an economics book

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.]