For Mac users: it’s a replacement icon for GrandPerspective, an app that creates a visual display of disk contents. (Useful for finding and zapping humongous files.) The icon is the work of BlackVariant (Patrick). Stylish and orange — I’m in.
Friday, January 12, 2018
GrandPerspective icon
Thursday, January 11, 2018
“Pink protest hat”
[Hi and Lois, January 11, 2018.]
“Pink protest hat”: well, I wouldn’t expect Dot to say “pussyhat” either. The surprising thing is that Lois Flagston owns a pussyhat, which would strongly suggest that she participated in last January’s Women’s March. But you’d never know it from the strip itself: on January 21, 2017, the day of the march, Hi was taking Dot and Ditto out for pancakes. On January 22, a branch was scratching against a window. If Lois was marching, she was keeping quiet about it. Or relatively quiet: Dot knows about that hat.
And soon everyone else will know: the hat is for a snowwoman who holds a sign that reads equal rights. But Lois and Dot should know that the “pink protest hat” is no longer in favor.
Here is an explanation of what’s coming later this month, in life, not comics: “What You Need to Know About the 2018 Women’s March.”
Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
[“Can I borrow your pink protest hat?” would have been a great start for a John Ashbery poem.]
“That’s better”
We might still think of Wi-Fi as fracturing family life, with each member of the group off in front of a screen. Here’s an earlier story of improved technology and one family’s response. Ben Logan (1920–2014) recounts what happened when his father bought an Aladdin kerosene lamp for the dining-room table. “The new lamp gave more light,” Logan writes, “opening up the corners of the dining room, letting us scatter away from the little circle we’d always formed around the old Rayo.” And then one night Logan’s mother announced, “‘I’m not sure I like that new lamp’”:
Father was at his usual place at the table. “Why not? Burns less kerosene.”“I don’t think it’s the lamp. I think it’s us”: exactly. As I’ve written more than once in these pages, technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. Logan describes what followed in his family’s farmhouse:
“Look where everyone is.”
We were scattered. There was even enough light to read by on the far side of the stove.
“We’re all here,” Father said.
“Not like we used to be.”
Father looked at the empty chairs around the table. “Want to go back to the old lamp?”
“I don’t think it’s the lamp. I think it’s us. Does a new lamp have to change where we sit at night?”
Ben Logan, The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People. 1975. (Minnetonka, MN: NorthWord Press, 1999).
Father’s eyes found us, one by one. Then he made a little motion with his head. We came out of our corners and slid into our old places at the table, smiling at each other, a little embarrassed to be hearing this talk.[Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise for pointing me to The Land Remembers.]
Mother sat down with us and nodded. “That’s better.”
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
“The man that hath no music in himself”
Not long after watching our president’s half-throated attempt to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I turned to Nuccio Ordine’s book The Usefulness of the Useless (2017) and found these lines from The Merchant of Venice (5.1). Lorenzo speaks:
The man that hath no music in himself,Aye, mark.
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet
sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
Knowing the words to “The Star-Spangled” is of course not proof that one is “moved with concord of sweet sounds.” And one could have a deep feeling for music without knowing the words to this song. But “treasons, stratagems, and spoils” — I rest my case.
Maurice Peress (1930–2017)
The conductor Maurice Peress has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary. Peress was known especially for his work with Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington. In 2007 Elaine had the good fortune to play under Peress’s baton in an orchestra performing several of Ellington’s longer works. And I had the good fortune to be a member of the audience.
One Kafka sentence
Frieda is asking the schoolboy Hans Brunswick some questions:
Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).
In a preface to this translation, Mark Harman cites a passage from Kafka’s diaries:
Omission of the period. In general the spoken sentence starts off in a large capital letter with the speaker, bends out in its course as far as it can towards the listeners and with the period returns to the speaker. But if the period is omitted, then the sentence is no longer constrained and blows its entire breath at the listener.Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)
Domestic comedy
[In a store. A security guard was headed in our direction.]
“I was afraid they thought you looked suspicious.”
“I thought I looked fetching.”
“Suspiciously fetching.”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Failsonry ?
Oprah is black, a woman, unabashed, loved, genuinely self-made as opposed to the product of intergenerational failsonry & legitimately rich. In other words, abt as close to the anti-Trump as you get. Everything that threatens him. His response will be quavering, angry and ugly.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 8, 2018
Failsonry ? This word appears to exist only in Josh Marshall’s tweet and subsequent retweets. Any idea what he meant to type? Or, if he meant failsonry, what he means by it?
*
January 11: Some smart OCA readers figured it out, or at least I think so. “Intergenerational failsonry” seems to be meant to suggest the International Order of Freemasonry. Thanks, Fresca and Chris, for seeing a masonry and Masonry connection. And thanks to everyone who suggested a meaning. The full story is in the comments.
A Google search for trump and freemasonry suggests to me that Josh Marshall might have done better to skip the pun.
[Josh Marshall is the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo.]
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