“Who cares?”

Olivia Jaimes’s “Who cares?” made me remember another “Who cares?” story. From Ron Padgett’s Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (1993):

New York, 1962 (?). On the spur of the moment we decided to go to the premiere of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. The entrance to the hall was packed with people waiting to get in. We worked our way to the door. The ticket seller there said it was two dollars each. We looked in our pockets. We had something like $1.25 total. “It’s two dollars each,” the fellow repeated.

At which point Jonas Mekas, who had organized the evening, appeared behind him. “What’s the trouble?”

“These guys don't have the admission fee. They have only $1.25.”

“So what’s the problem? It doesn’t matter. Let them in!”

Ted loved Jonas Mekas’ attitude.

Related reading
All OCA Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett posts (Pinboard)

[Ted is the best memoir of a poet, by a poet, I have read.]

History and Lois

[Hi and Lois, November 29, 2018. Click for a larger view.]

It’s safe to assume that Ditto won’t be majoring in history. But he may become a spokestoon for the Mindset List, no longer the property of Beloit College. My impatience with the mindset behind the Mindset List is on display in five posts, list by list, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.

One item from the final Beloit list, puporting to describe the historical awareness and life experience of first-year college students in 2018: “They never used a spit bowl in a dentist’s office.” I guess they never went to my dentist.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

“More cornbread for me”

Nancy cartoonist Olivia Jaimes, in an interview, commenting on the hashtag relatable and webcomics:

The self-hating part that often comes with #relatable comics is being like, “Ohhhh, I procrastinated, I’m the worst.” And Nancy adds one more panel to that, being like, “Who cares? I don’t care. More cornbread for me.”

As readers of the new Nancy will remember, Jaimes began her work on the strip with Nancy eating cornbread.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve changed the spelling in the interview to match the spelling in the strip: cornbread, no space.]

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.]