The guitarist and singer Buddy Guy, quoted in David Remnick’s New Yorker profile “Holding the Note” (March 11, 2019):
“Funny thing about the blues — you play ’em cause you got ’em. But, when you play ’em, you lose ’em.”Related reading
[Mutts, March 7, 2019. Click for a larger view.]
Sorry, Mooch: who is correct. (Who told you that?) Whom for who, like between you and I, is a hypercorrection. Garner’s Modern English Usage explains:
Sometimes people [or cats] strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately. The very motivations that result in this irony can play havoc with the language: a person [or cat] will strive for a correct linguistic form but instead fall into error. Linguists call this phenomenon “hypercorrection” — a common shortcoming.Mooch’s gotcha “Ha!” and smug look in the third panel tell me that Patrick McDonnell, the strip’s creator, understands the difference between who and whom.
Watch Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen avoid acknowledging that Customs and Border Protection keeps children in cages:
“Sir, they’re not cages.” What are they then? “As the children are processed through, they are in sub-parts of these facilities.” But not in cages. Children are in “areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed.” But not in cages.
Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard)
[Axios has it as “some parts,” but if you listen carefully, it’s “sub-parts.”]
We bought a package of Ziyad red lentils, and Elaine made soup. Did she ever. Here, slightly rewritten, is the recipe that appears on the package:
2 cups red lentilsAnd the preparation:
8 cups water or broth
1/2 t. cumin
1/2 t. turmeric or paprika
1 large onion, diced
1–2 cloves garlic, minced
2 T. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
juice of one lemon
2 bouillon cubes, your choice of flavor (optional)
Wash lentils. Combine with broth or water and bring to a boil. Cover and cook for thirty minutes. Stir occasionally.Elaine chose water, substituted Better Than Bouillon Roasted Chicken Base for cubes, tripled the cumin and paprika, used three cloves of garlic, and sautéed a carrot, diced, with the onion and garlic. And she used an immersion blender on the finished soup. What resulted was spectacular — creamy, spicy, slightly sweet, totally comforting. We were hoping for something like the lentil soup we know from Cedars Mediterranean Kitchen in Chicago. But we ended up with something like a very hearty dal. We will be serving this soup the next time we have friends over for dinner.
When lentils are tender, add dry spices and boullion.
Sauté onions and garlic in olive oil until golden, and add them to the soup.
Simmer for five minutes. Turn off heat, add lemon juice, and stir.
Ladle soup into bowls, garnish with parsley and paprika, and serve with lemon wedges on the side.
[Peanuts, March 8, 1972.]
I like it when a comic strip turns into a time capsule. Who was Johnny Horizon? Wikipedia explains. And here, from the Forest History Society, is his story. The naïveté — if we can just pick up enough pieces of litter, we can save the environment.
Peanuts past is Peanuts present. If all Peanuts is eternally present, all time is Peanuts.
Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)
[Nancy, March 5, 2019.]
From today’s Nancy, an Olivia Jaimes panel for the ages. Another kid has been giving Nancy drawing tips: “If you mess up a character’s eyes, just add sunglasses.” “If you mess up their mouth, just make it bigger.” “Worst comes to worst, you can just scribble it all out and add a label.” Thus this fourth panel.
What I really like is the dotted line — très dowdy.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
[Just to be clear: “for the ages” is praise, not sarcasm. I like this stuff.]
HTML Scratchpad is a webpage for messing around with HTML. Before I cottoned to MarsEdit, I used HTML Scratchpad to check whether YouTube videos will play when embedded in Blogger. Not all of them will, and Blogger’s Preview is useless for finding out before posting. But HTML Scratchpad works: copy and paste the code and press Run. Then click to play, or not play.
Say you’re in line at a grocery checkout and someone comes up behind with just one or two items. Courteous shopper that you are, you want to let that person go first. Is there much difference between saying “After you” and and saying “Go ahead”? Is one more appropriate than the other?
Or say you’re holding a door open for someone entering or leaving the store. Courteous as ever, you want to let that person go first. Again, is there much difference between “After you” and “Go ahead”? Is one more appropriate than the other?
I hear each expression as an invitation: please, feel free to go first. To my ear, “After you” sounds more formal, which might make it less suited for everyday use in the folksy midwest. But I’m curious to know what other people think.
Watching The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1967) Saturday night, I wondered: could Mrs. Robinson’s icy “Hello, Benjamin” be the inspiration for Jerry Seinfeld’s “Hello, Newman”?
I don’t expect to have the answer to that question anytime soon.
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The “Hello, Benjamin” I have in mind comes in at the 1:11 mark. As I just discovered, Safari in iOS doesn’t jump ahead to that spot as it should.
[Zippy, March 4, 2019.]
The Automat appears again and again in Zippy. Here, type automat into the search box and you’ll see. Today’s strip repurposes art from a 2014 visit to the Dingburg Automat.
I have a vague memory of sitting in an Automat with a friend in the 1980s. And I have a vague nostalgia for the Automat. The Automat appears in a handful of OCA posts.
