43.5

[“Expiration Date High Score.” xkcd, July 19, 2019.]

If I had played this game last year, before we went through a kitchen cabinet and tossed the old spices, I think that 43.5 would have been my high score, courtesy of some long-forgotten curry powder that I bought in the early 1980s. Tuna salad with curry powder was a “thing” then.

Drapes, Pop-Tarts, impeachment

[“Breakfast Summit.” Zippy, July 19, 2019.]

Yes, kitchen-table issues.

I like the Dutch door, just like Father Knows Best.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Shade

Oh, look, it’s shade, the only shade in the parking lot. I’ll take it, after taking a picture of it.

[Temperature: 90°. Heat index: 103°. Yes, the shade does look like an angry dinosaur.]

Word of the day: coleslaw

Is it one word, or two? Is cole a kind of slaw? Merriam-Webster has the word solid. The OED uses a hyphen. M-W’s recipe definition is a bit vague: “a salad made of raw sliced or chopped cabbage.” Lots of room for invention there. The OED is more definite: “sliced cabbage dressed with salt, pepper, vinegar, etc., eaten either raw or slightly cooked.” The word first appears in 1794, in the United States: “a piece of sliced cabbage, by Dutchmen ycleped cold slaw.” Yes, coleslaw comes to us from the Dutch koolsla, a reduced form of kool-salade. Kool is cabbage; salade is, well, obvious. The OED notes that “cold-slaw is a result of popular etymology.”

My definition of coleslaw: shredded cabbage, thin strips of carrot (cut with a peeler), red wine vinegar, mayonnaise, salt, cane sugar, and celery seed. There must be celery seed.

[Citation and etymology from the OED.]

Walter is a dilettante

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

[“Dilettante”: that’s the novel’s narrator opining.]

At the table

Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D, New York-8), on CNN this afternoon, deflecting a question about Representative Al Green’s (D, Texas-8) introduction of articles of impeachment: “We should continue to focus on kitchen-table pocketbook issues.” That’s boilerplate language, for Jeffries and other politicians, as a search engine will confirm.

And what’s with pocketbook anyway? The main use for a pocketbook is hitting men over the head. In modern times, purse is a far more common word than handbag or pocketbook. Kitchen-table purse issues, anyone? Or purse and murse?

I know the issues we most talk about at our kitchen table: the dangerous man in the White House and his enablers. They’re kitchen-table issues nos. 1, 2, 3 &c. Elaine, where’s your pocketbook?

WWAHPS?

“So when someone says they are ‘a stable genius,’ that is a real cause for concern, because a healthy person would not say that.” Bandy Lee, psychiatrist and professor, talks with Virginia Heffernan about the mental health of our president and our culture: “Is Trump a Disease? A Medical Perspective” (Trumpcast).

Aaugh!

Self-knowledge:


Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

Mongol?

[Nancy, October 11, 1949. Click for the ferrule.]

Okay, she is after his answers, not his pencil. But that sure looks like a Mongol.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts : Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Yesteryear’s Nancy is this year’s Nancy. I wish the syndicate would reproduce the strips with their dates and proper borders. Cranky me.]

Michael Seidenberg (1954–2019)

Michael Seidenberg was the proprietor of Brazenhead Books, a bookstore with several incarnations, the most famous of which was a Manhattan apartment. I read of Michael’s death in Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. The New York Times finally has an obituary. An excerpt:

The speakeasy bookstore (as news articles often called it) on East 84th Street was a place that, it was commonly said, you could go to for the first time only in the company of a regular. But the writer David Burr Gerrard, in a tribute to Mr. Seidenberg posted on lithub.com last week, said that wasn’t really true.

“Michael was, as he liked to say with his trademark this-should-be-obvious-but-nobody-thinks-of-it grin, ‘in the phone book,’” he wrote, “and would happily give his address to any stranger who called him.”

It’s true. Elaine and I visited in 2012, after I looked up the number online and called. We found, among other things, three books by Alexander King, the first husband of our friend Margie King Barab. Talk about serendipity.

Related viewing
Brazenhead C’est Moi (A six-minute film)
There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books (A three-minute film)