Some madeleines

[“À la recherche du temps Sluggo.” Zippy, January 7, 2020.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is out for a walk when he happens upon three rocks. He thinks he might be in the wrong comic strip. And thus this final panel. I think of the rocks in today’s strip as madeleines, recalling comics past.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy, Nancy and Zippy, and Nancy posts
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Another circuit

I learned at lunch that years ago, a friend played in a rock band that traveled the upper midwest: Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula. I suggested that he must have been playing the Hotdish Circuit.

[Cf. the Chitlin’ Circuit.]

How to improve writing (no. 86)

Here’s a sentence brought me up short. From The New Yorker, December 23, 2019, page 69:

Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or heartfelt accounts of the people he meets on the trail.

Do you see the problem? You can tell a joke, but you cannot tell an account. Well, you can if you really want to, but you’d be writing decidely unidiomatic English. “He told a joke and heartfelt accounts”: yikes. From 1800 to 2018, Google’s Ngram Viewer shows no results for tell an account or told an account.

So — make sure that verbs and their objects go together:

Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or shares heartfelt accounts of the people he meets on the trail.

I’d tweak a little more:

Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or shares a heartfelt story about someone he’s met on the trail.

I’ll leave the extra changes to speak for themselves.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[The sentence has the same problem in the online version of the article. This post is no. 86 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Now would have been the time

It was Friday when I learned that “I was today years old when I learned/realized” is a meme. Thank you, Rachel.

And it was today when I realized that the name of the MSNBC show Kasie DC is a play on “K-C-D-C.”

If I were likely to take up memes, now would have been the perfect time to do so.

*

What I didn’t realize until two days after making this post: Kasie DC is a play on AC/DC.

Twitter Terms of Service

Do Twitter’s Terms of Service permit the threat of military attack? Do they permit the threat of war crimes? Because the destruction of historic cultural sites has been prosecuted as a war crime.

The Archive of Contemporary Music

“It is one of the world’s largest collections of popular music, with more than three million recordings, as well as music books, vintage memorabilia and press kits”: The New York Times reports that Tribeca’s high rents mean that the Archive of Contemporary Music must find a new home. A resource of this depth must have a home.

The Archive’s website is a browser’s delight. For instance, the catalogs-in-progress. For instance, almost Beatles. For instance, Keith Richards’s blues LPs.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Anna Stiga — that is, Stan Again, or crossword editor Stan Newman working under one of the pen names he uses with easier Stumpers of his making. This Stumper was pretty do-able, though a nest of small words near the puzzle’s center made things difficult for me: 23-D, five letters, “Gang members.” 26-A, three letters, “What 7 may be used instead of.” 26-D, four letters, “Daisy Duck niece.” 32-A, four letters, “Fell.” Wha?

Some clues of interest:

17-A, ten letters, “Old name for the giraffe.” I know the word from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I thought it hailed from the world of cryptids.

30-A, seven letters, “Popular bar since the ’20s.” I have never partaken. Have you?

30-D, five letters, “Ersatz duck calls.” An insult!

34-D, seven letters, “Introducer of ‘Trouble’ (1957).” The board game? No, that would be six letters, in 1965 (KOHNER). I had to DuckDuckGo to make sense of the answer.

43-D, six letters, “Walk.” Kinda dowdy.

44-A, nine letters, “Neon sign seen in Looney Tunes.” I thought of A Mighty Wind.

No spoilers: the answers, not in neon, are in the comments.

Trump* and lies

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump* has made more than 15,000 “false or misleading claims” while in office.

So when Trump* says that Qassim Suleimani “was planning a very major attack,” there is no reason to believe what he says.

Nor is there reason to think that targeting one man would prevent that attack.

[This post explains the asterisk.]

Close enough for tarantellas

A musician is a musician is a musician. Here’s a wonderful example of musical versatility, with Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines in New York and New Jersey:

Playing popular tunes, as well as anything else requested by the crowds, added to their popularity and marketability. And if they didn’t know a particular song they just played the correct tempo for dancing. Shines commented that for waltzes “you could play anything just so long as you played it in cut-time, 3/4 time. You could make up your numbers; you just had to set the right tempo.” This ability to fake their way through any genre provided varied opportunities. While in New York City they were asked to return to Newark to perform at an Italian wedding. As Shines noted, they already knew polkas and Jewish music, and for the wedding they played primarily tarantellas, adapting some of their own songs, a few standards, and some new ones to conform to the traditional 6/8 tarantella rhythm.

Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019).

Up Jumped the Devil documents a life (not legend) in remarkable detail, even down to the recollections of one of Johnson’s teenage companions in fishing. My only complaint: I’d like more about the music. But that would have to be a different book.

Related posts
A New York Times obituary for Johnson : On slowing down Johnson’s recordings

[The post title is after Jonathan Turley’s witless remark about what’s “close enough for jazz.”]

State employees

In forty states, a basketball or football coach at a public university is the highest-paid public employee (ESPN).

I recall the first of my ten modest proposals to improve higher education:

Goodbye to Big Sports. The NBA and NFL can subsidize their own farm systems. Convert the money that supported Big Sports into increased adjunct pay, new tenure-track positions, increased academic support services, and need-based scholarships. Current players retain their scholarships.

A related post
Income disparity in higher ed