Out of the past

Anent danger on stairs, from my first third-grade report card: “Must try to walk up & down stairs more carefully to avoid accidents to self and others.”

Believe me, I wasn’t dancing. As I recall, the problem was that I talked to other kids while on the stairs. From my second third-grade report card: “Has made an effort to follow Rules of Safety.”

Overheard

[The television was on for warmth.]

“I’m taking the stairs now, and I’m even doing salsa.”

Exceedingly dangerous. Practice on a floor first.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Critteresque

 
A clock in a speech balloon marks progress as a picture downloads in the Mac’s Messages app. When the clock nears the halfway point and turns into an eye, the image turns strongly critteresque. So I added legs.

“Till spring?”

Pepi is a chambermaid at the Gentlemen’s Inn. “Down there” is the room in the inn where she lives with two other chambermaids:


Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

National Handwriting Day

[Click for the same semi-legible view.]

With a little over four hours left to play, I remembered: January 23, John Hancock’s birthday, is National Handwriting Day.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Another discovery

[SwiftText at work. A life-size view.]

Better than Tyke: SwiftText, by Adam Preble, $1.99 at the Mac App Store. SwiftText has several advantages: you can move and resize its window, create a shortcut key, and append text from another app. Immensely useful if, say, one wants to collect text or URLs for near-future use: there’s no need to leave the browser.

SwiftText has been around for years (since 2011, at least): I wonder why I’m just finding out about it.

A discovery

[Tyke at work, with its icon in the menu bar. Click for a life-size view.]

Being able to change the font makes Tyke more appealing. The change though doesn’t persist if you quit the app.

Tyke, by Andre Torrez, is a free download.

Henry’s z s

[Henry, January 23, 2018. Click for a larger view.]

Written like a true ’toon: the z of sleeping and snoring appears to have originated in the comics.

I remember my dad remembering his work as a tileman in the pianist McCoy Tyner’s house. Tyner mentioned one day that he was going to bag some z s. Zzz.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

Do you recognize him? Leave your best guess as a comment, and enter as often as you like. I’ll drop a hint if necessary.

*

9:18 a.m.: The Crow called it. The answer’s in the comments. This mystery actor also appeared in a 2015 post, looking nothing like himself.

More mystery actors
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Domestic comedy

[Singing.]

“In the bleak Midwestern. . . .”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Context here.]