Literally eighty-sixed

“This is the most overused, annoying word in the English language and we will not tolerate it. Stop Kardashianism now!” A New York bar bans customers who say literally.

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Betsy DeVos, literally and figuratively
Dustin, literally and figuratively

Dream drawing

Saul Steinberg, in a letter to Hedda Sterne, perhaps April 1944. Steinberg was serving in the United States Navy. He and Sterne would marry later that year. Steinberg says that all he wants is to stay with Sterne “and make drawings”:

We’ll make a long table for drawing, about 12 ft long, with pen & ink section, tempera and watercolor section. Then we’ll buy from some café or restaurant a small table with marble to make drawings on thin paper over the marble surface, the pencil is really sliding, the ideal surface for pencil drawings.

And from another letter, Steinberg to Sterne, perhaps September 1944:

My hand is itching for drawings. I have a thirst for sitting on a tall chair at a drawing table covered with white-yellow paper as a background or cover, and then a book of white smooth paper, a bottle of Indian ink, colored ink, aniline, sharp pencils, small pens, brushes and quiet afternoon, and Hedda painting somewhere in the room.

Both letters are quoted in Deirdre Bair’s Saul Steinberg: A Biography (New York: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2012).

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Five desks (five tables)
Seymour Glass on pencils and paper

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).

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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.

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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)