Today’s Google Doodle offers to harmonize two bars of music in Bach’s “signature style.” I tried “Surfer Girl” and “Take the ‘A’ Train” — the results were underwhelming. But as Anne Midgette writes in The Washington Post,
It may only add to the doodle’s charm that what it actually proves is the opposite of what it sets out to do. Nobody can compose like Bach. Especially not a machine.
From Private Life (dir. Tamara Jenkins, 2018). A Thanksgiving guest says that he’s grateful for thirty-one days of sobriety:
“And if I can just make it through today, just today, I will be one-third of the way through the Bermuda Triangle.”Thinking that “today” marked thirty-one days, I guessed incorrectly that “Bermuda Triangle” is a metaphor for the first three months of sobriety. As the Internets will affirm, “Bermuda Triangle” is an Alcoholics Anonymous metaphor for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. For obvious reasons.
[Height: 4 7/8″. Click for a larger view.]
Not a pencil cup, or even a tea tin. What it is is a four-hole holder for penholders, which themselves are the holders for penpoints. (Think dip pens.) A holder for penholders holding pencils: I like that. A holder for penholders holding Mongol pencils: I like that even more. Elaine gave me this penholder holder a few years ago. Thank you, Elaine.
The Mongol is my favorite pencil. Evidence: OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard).
[“What it is is”: I decided that for once in my life, I’d use what Garner’s Modern English Usage calls “this ungainly construction,” just for fun. No comma between the iss.]
[Click for a larger view.]
The pencil cup from Sólo con tu pareja prompted Fresca to photograph pencil cups, which in turn, &c. So here are nine, mine.
Elaine and I carried them downstairs and into the light. Behind Betty Boop and the Twinings tins, please imagine two Bonne Maman jars, an anonymous jar, a china cup, and a plastic cup.
I’ve had the older square Twinings tins since student days. Each is printed with a “4/84” on one side — the date of the tins’ manufacture, I’d assume. The newer Twinings tins make excellent index-card holders. We have six of those scattered around the house for making quick notes.
For more pencil cups, see the Bleistift blog’s Pencil Pot of the Month posts. And reader, if you’d like to post a photograph of your pencil cup(s), leave a link in the comments.
[Elaine gave me the Betty Boop mug many years ago. I have long subscribed to the adage of the Betty Boop & Bimbo Club: “Keep your eyes open and your mouth closed.”]
[Sólo con tu pareja (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 1991). Click for a larger view.]
The red pen must be a Parker T-Ball Jotter. The pencil with the red stripe: almost certainly a Berol Mirado. Placing the thermometer with the writing instruments is a beautiful touch.
Here and everywhere, Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography adds an element of deep thoughtfulness to what seems at first glance to be a light sex comedy.
From Seneca the Younger, Natural Questions IV (A, Pref. 14, 18):
When you want to be praised sincerely, why be indebted to someone else for it? Praise yourself. Say: “I devoted myself to the liberal arts. Although my poverty urged me to do otherwise and tempted my talents towards a field where there is an immediate profit from study, I turned aside to unremunerative poetry and dedicated myself to the wholesome study of philosophy. . . .” After this, ask whether the things you said about yourself are true or false. If they are true, you are praised in front of a great witness, yourself. If they are false, no one is a witness to your being made a fool of.[Please notice that for Seneca there is no question that devotion to the liberal arts is cause for self-praise.]
Quoted in Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual (Boston: David R. Godine, 2018). Adapted from an unidentified public-domain translation.
[Mark Trail, March 19, 2019.]
Doc Davis, Cherry Davis Trail’s father, Mark Trail’s father-in-law, is telling a between-Mark-Trail-adventures story. I believe it’s what they call an interpolated tale. Or is it interminable?
Doc, if you were hoping to find some rocks, you’re in the wrong comic strip.
Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard) : “Some rocks” posts
[D. Bill, “Folk Art.” Wood poles. 1997–1998. As seen at Meadowbrook Park, Urbana, Illinois. “Folk Art,” with quotation marks, is the title. Click for a larger view.]
I like the way the U mirrors the mouth.
In 1993 D. Bill, Darwin Bill (1922–2012), was the subject of a Chicago Tribune story. Here’s a public Facebook page for D. Bill’s art. And here’s an account, with photographs, from someone who went to see him.
Something I’m thankful for: having taught at a regional state university (as they’re called), I never taught children of high privilege, the kind with parents who buy or cheat their offspring’s way in.
The closest I ever came to such stuff: a telephone call from the parent of a flagrant plagiarizer. I’ve put a lot of money into my kid’s education, and I’m not going to let someone, &c. Yes, but I’m sorry: FERPA prohibits me from talking with you about a student’s work without that student’s permission. And that was that.
It’s fitting that ad canvasser Leopold Bloom, who goes to sleep thinking of “one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder,” should see Saint Patrick as an ad man who came up with a smart way to capture the public’s attention. From “The Lotus Eaters” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to all.
[Saint Patrick is said to have used the shamrock to explain the Trinity to the Irish.]
