“Foreigners”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)

Svend Asmussen (1916–2017)

The violinist Svend Asmussen has died at the age of 100. The Washington Post has an obituary.

Svend Asmussen swung.

A YouTube sampler
“Hallelujah! I’m a Bum” : “Scandinavian Shuffle” : “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (viola) : “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” : “June Night”

“They simply swallowed everything”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)

R. Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions

[Legalese and Bushmiller. Click for a larger view.]

The artist R. Sikoryak has made a graphic novel of the legalese that accompanies iTunes, each page in the style of a different artist, each with a bearded, glasses-wearing, Steve Jobsian character. Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel will be published in March. The pages are all on view here.

Sikoryak’s Roz Chast version of Steve Jobs is more or less Chast’s bearded-guy-with-glasses, who always looks (I think) a little like me.


[A pause in the legalese.]

Dream pants

They appeared earlier this morning: three-dimensional pants, designed by a descendant of Linus van Pelt, marketed under the Trump label. Not pants from a 3D printer: just pants, touted as three-dimensional.

Possible sources: a Gilmore Girls reference to someone as an empty suit, a Gilmore Girls discussion of slacks. (“Please stop saying slacks. That word is creepy.”) And other more obvious sources.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

USPS postage calculator

The USPS’s Postage Price Calculator makes the everyday mailer a capable calculator of postage prices. Useful too for party games. Guess the cost of a large flat-rate box to the Cook Islands! See who comes closest!

[Answer: $95.95.]

“The Revolutionary Post”

From the podcast 99% Invisible, “The Revolutionary Post,” an episode about the development of the United States Postal Service. Did you know that until the mid-1800s, the recipient of a letter paid its postage? And that the prepaid postage stamp led to a boom in letters? And that post offices added “ladies’ windows” where women could pick up their mail?

I’m now waiting on a library copy of Winifred Gallagher’s How the Post Office Created America: A History (2016). In the meantime, here is a brief (unrelated) account of the ladies’ window.

Postcards of the future

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

A little like predictive text: there are a limited number of things you are expected to say. I wonder if Orwell knew about this kind of postcard.

Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)

Daniel Schorr on journalism, politics, and truth

From To the Best of Our Knowledge, a 2008 conversation with Daniel Schorr about journalism, politics, and truth. A useful reminder that before Dunning K. Trump there was Bush the Second, of whose administration Schorr says, “These are people who in a sense have mounted a coup inside the government against the government.” And before Bush the Second there was Richard Nixon, who, as Schorr reminds us, was famously caught on tape observing that “The press is the enemy.”

#grabyourwallet

Here’s a new website for the discriminating shopper: #grabyourwallet.org. With URLs for contact forms and telephone numbers for corporate headquarters.

See also: Pagan Kennedy’s “How to Destroy the Business Model of Breitbart and Fake News” (The New York Times).

Calling Amazon’s corporate number (206-266-1000) got me nothing but a maze of recorded messages. It might be better to call customer service (888-280-4331).

Did you know that Amazon advertises on Breitbart? (I can’t call it ”Breitbart News.”)