Search OCA with DuckDuckGo

The search box in the sidebar now uses DuckDuckGo, a search engine that does not track its user. Take that, Google.

It’s easy to make a DuckDuckGo search box for a website. Here’s a page with the necessary code. Just fill in the blanks. And here’s a page that offers a different approach. I’m not sure how I arrived at my version, but here it is:

<form method="get" action="http://duckduckgo.com/" target="_blank">
<input type="text" placeholder="DuckDuckGo" name="q" maxlength="255" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" />
<input type="hidden" name="sites" value="mleddy.blogspot.com" />
<input style="visibility:hidden" type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="mleddy.blogspot.com" checked="checked" />
</form>

The search box in the “navbar,” the navigation bar found at the top of some Blogger blogs, seems beyond changing — it’s Google or nothing. So I turned off the navbar, which doesn’t allow for much navving anyway. Unlike the navbar’s Google search, the DuckDuckGo search in the sidebar searches all OCA content, posts and comments.

Words of the year

From the American Dialect Society, tender-age shelter: “The term, which has been used in a euphemistic fashion for the government-run detention centers that have housed the children of asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border, was selected as best representing the public discourse and preoccupations of the past year.”

From the Australian National Dictionary Centre, Canberra bubble: “the insular environment of federal politics.”

From the Cambridge Dictionary, nomophobia: “Your choice . . . tells us that people around the world probably experience this type of anxiety enough that you recognized it needed a name!”

From the Collins Dictionary, single-use: “Single-use encompasses a global movement to kick our addiction to disposable products.”

From Dictionary.com, misinformation : “The rampant spread of misinformation poses new challenges for navigating life in 2018.”

From Macquarie Dictionary, Me Too: “That Me Too is now being used as a verb and as an adjective, combined with the undeniable significance of the movement, made the Committee’s choice for Word of the Year 2018 a fairly straightforward decision.”

From Merriam-Webster, justice: “The concept of justice was at the center of many of our national debates in the past year: racial justice, social justice, criminal justice, economic justice.”

From Oxford Dictionaries, toxic : “In 2018, toxic added many strings to its poisoned bow becoming an intoxicating descriptor for the year’s most talked about topics.”

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive.

Meta-Mason

From the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Deadly Toy” (May 16, 1959). Perry and Della are posing as the Streets, a married couple with a young son. Mrs. Barton, the babysitter, has an urgent question: “Do you have television?” And Mason replies, “Of course!”

I love when old television shows have the characters talk about television.

Related reading
All OCA Perry Mason posts (Pinboard)

Gut

Robert Reich, on CNN just now: “I don’t want the future of the planet to depend on Donald Trump’s gut.”

[Context: an interview with The Washington Post.]

Arrangement in brown and grey and white

[Click for a larger backyard.]

Snow snow snow. What better place to be than inside the house?

I didn’t realize just how brown and grey this scene is until I looked at the photograph on my Mac.

[If you’re wondering, the object in the lower left is a raised bed, covered in cardboard held in place with paving stones.]

Giving Tuesday

Did you know that today is Giving Tuesday?

Mark Trail’s side-eye

[Mark Trail, November 27, 2018. Click for a larger view.]

I would like to imagine that in the interstice, Mark has dashed in front of the other guy, the better to give him the old side-eye. But what’s “strange” here? That someone has an education? And went away from “the jungle,” to a school, to get it? Does Mark believe in (so-called) distance learning for place-bound students?

And speaking of education: if Mark were a little better educated, he might spell José with an acute accent. And the other guy might speak a little less clumsily: “Well, now that you mention it, he does seem highly educated for someone who claims to have grown up around the jungle. But I think he said he went away to school somewhere!”

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

[“The other guy”: aka What’s-his-face, aka “Professor Carter.” Wait, he’s a professor? I know that not everyone spells José with an accent. But in the work of an Anglo cartoonist, its absence looks like a mistake.]

Ancestry and me

I signed up for a free peek into Ancestry.com and got to see my paternal grandfather’s draft card and Army discharge. Neat.

But I have no interest in signing up for AncestryDNA. Taking that test could reveal that I am not part beagle.

[Elaine said I should write this post.]

Scones

It’s a miserable day: 29°, feeling like 14°, and not a sun in the sky. So we made scones, following a Food Network recipe. So easy, especially when the legit baker in the house takes the lead.

I highly recommend scones, served with jam and Irish breakfast tea or with anything else. Three scones down, eight to go.

“Maestro!”

In his youth, Eduard Saxberger published one slim volume of poems. Now, as a much older man, he is baffled but flattered to learn that his work has a small group of young admirers. Among them: the actress Fräulein Gasteiner.


Arthur Schnitzler, Late Fame, trans. Alexander Starritt (New York: New York Review Books, 2017).

Arthur Schnitzler wrote Late Fame in 1894 and 1895. The novella, recently discovered in an archive of Schnitzler’s unpublished work, is a beautifully understated satire about the pretensions of literary movements and the attractions and perils of literary celebrity — even celebrity of the most modest kind.

Our household’s two-person reading club is now on a Schnitzler kick.

[I like the translator’s manyth.]