I was listening to NPR with half an ear this morning:
“This is a government that’s lost all of its legitimacy. This is a government that no longer really can be conceived of in conventional political terms. . . . It’s not a government that builds infrastructure. . . . It’s a looting machine. It’s a kleptocracy. It’s a den of thieves.”And then I realized: Oh, wait, he’s speaking of South Sudan.
For some years I’ve posted a photograph of my mom Louise on Mother’s Day. (For instance.) This year I thought to ask her if she had any advice I could share in a post. Here is what she offered:
Always be kind. Be thankful for what you have. Don’t go to bed angry. Always say “I love you.”
Happy Mother’s Day to all.
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper crossword, by Frank Longo, is difficult. (Forty-two minutes’ worth of difficulty for me.) I had to go all the way to 64-Across, four letters, to find a way into the puzzle: “It gives an actor visibility.”
A clue that I especially liked, 34-Across, eleven letters: “Stand with tangy products.” And a clue that taught me something: 55-Across, six letters: “First Best Actor/Supporting Actor Oscar winner.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
“This account — as bizarre as it may seem at first glance — is actually more plausible than the story leaked to the Journal, the New York Times, and CNN”: “Here’s a Theory About That $1.6 Million Payout From a GOP Official to a Playboy Model” (New York).
Thanks, Elaine.
“This crumbling, beer-splotched wall in the back of a sports bar on East 44th Street is one of New York’s more neglected cultural treasures”: “The Sistine Chapel of Comic-Strip Art” (The New York Times).
[Mark Trail, May 11, 2018.]
Mark, are you reading cue cards? Or are you just a big hunk of clip art? Look at Cherry when you speak to her.
[Mark Trail revised, May 11, 2018.]
That’s better.
Mark and Cherry are vacationing at the Hotel Azyoulik, an “eco-resort” in Tulum, Mexico. “Finally, a legitimate vacation!” Mark exclaimed on April 28. In real life, Tulum’s Azulik Resort is an adults-only, clothing-optional resort. Is the Trails’ chosen vacation spot also adults-only and clothing-optional? Is that why Mark’s eyes are wandering?
[Mark Trail, May 11, 2018.]
Can’t be, because their son Rusty is with them, right there in panel three. And there’s nothing I can do to fix his hand.
Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)
[I flipped Mark and his words with the free Mac app Seashore.]
Beverly and Clarence Cleary, in their newly bought house in the Berkeley Hills:
We had discovered in the linen closet a ream of typing paper left by the former owner. I remarked to Clarence, “I guess I’ll have to write a book.” My ambition, refusing to die, was beginning to bloom again.Elaine was waiting for well over a year for me to read Beverly Cleary’s memoirs, this one and A Girl from Yamhill. She knew I would love them. She was right.
“Why don’t you?” asked Clarence.
“We never have any sharp pencils” was my flippant answer.
The next day he brought home a pencil sharpener.
Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).
Beverly Cleary (then Bunn) is now a student in the School of Librarianship, University of Washington. It’s noon:
As we ate our meager lunches and watched drama students, scripts in hand, emote over cups of coffee with soggy napkins folded in their saucers sopping up spills, we discussed the finer points of cataloging and invented an imaginary series of books for our instructor to catalog: six volumes, each with a different editor or sometimes two, one of whom wrote under a pseudonym and the other under her maiden name, some volumes translated from foreign languages and requiring translator cards, each volume with a preface by a different author, etc., etc. This sent us into gales of laughter as each of us thought of an addition to make the assignment more difficult. Such is the sense of humor of librarians. We also had earnest discussions on the finer points of grammar.Related reading
Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).
If you prefer using plain text in Gmail (as I do),
you’ve
probably noticed odd line breaks in sent messages.
That sentence, written in plain-text Gmail, illustrates what I’m describing. It’s long puzzled me. But no longer.
In 2014, Mathias Bynens, who works at Google, explained the problem and suggested a solution: Dear Google, please fix plain text e-mails in Gmail. Today, plain text is still a problem in Gmail. But at least I now know why. And I’ll probably switch to rich formatting. With plain text, it’s too likely that an e-mail recipient unfamiliar with the line-break problem will think there’s a strangely sloppy person at the other keyboard.
Brooks Kerr, pianist and Duke Ellington scholar, has died at the age of sixty-six. The New York Times has an obituary.
There’s a YouTube channel for Kerr’s recordings, but no trace online of the recording I’d like to link to: Soda Fountain Rag (Chiaroscuro, 1975), a wonderful sampling of early Ellingtonia, with Kerr (then twenty-four) accompanied by a spirited Sonny Greer, the Ellington band’s first drummer (then seventy-nine). Instead, here’s a live recording from 1974 of Kerr playing “Soda Fountain Rag,” generally considered Ellington’s first composition.
