“Pathogen Resistance”

[“Pathogen Resistance.” xkcd, March 31, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s xkcd is beautiful and moving and hopeful.

[The mouseover text, at the original: “We’re not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.”]

Hair and what to do with it

Sooner or later, people are gonna need haircuts. George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Day made the think of recommending the Remington ShortCut Pro Self-Haircut Kit to anyone without a lot on top. It’s the perfect tool for giving yourself a uniformly short haircut. But it’s sold out at the manufacturer’s website and Amazon.

*

Later this same morning: Elaine has reminded me that she said last week that these gadgets would become hard to find.

Groceries emoji

After going out for groceries last week, I went looking for a suitable emoji and found none. Though the Unicode Consortium lists countless emoji for individual foods, there’s no emoji for the stuff one buys in a grocery store, aka “groceries.” The best I could find: “shopping cart” (🛒) and “shopping bags” (🛍). But the cart is empty, and the bags, also empty, appear to come from a toney mall.

I’m surprised to find nothing for “groceries” on the Consortium’s list of proposed emoji. Though I’m not equipped to propose an emoji, a task that calls for some serious design skills, I can describe what I’d like to see: a brown paper bag, appropriately dented in two or three places, with a loaf of bread, a box (perhaps of cereal), and a head of celery jutting from the open top. A cliché, of course, the groceries people used to carry on television, though the emoji need not be in black and white. But there must be celery.

The Catalina update reminder

If you, like me, have no interest in moving to macOS Catalina, you may want to remove the annoying update reminder from the System Preferences icon in the Dock. I’ve seen various suggestions for how to do so. This one works. It’s easy: uncheck three boxes in Software Update and paste three lines of code, one at a time, into the Terminal. Following these steps also removes the update reminder from the Software Update icon in System Preferences.

If you click on Software Update, the reminder will return. That’s how I got the reminder back to get a screenshot for this post. But you can remove the reminder again. And here’s another reminder: Software Update is not the App Store. Update notifications from the App Store are welcome things.

[Sometimes I have to concentrate on the trivial to cope with the non-trivial.]

“Say, have you got frogs’ legs?”

Magnus Eisengrim describes Charlie Wanless’s monologist routine “on the bottom shelf of vaudeville.” Wanless, Eisengrim says, possessed “little but the self-assurance necessary for the job.”


Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975).

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

[“That tribute to motherhood”: the song “M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me)” (Howard Johnson–Theodore Morse), imperfectly quoted elsewhere in the novel.]

No questions

Elaine just told me that Donald Trump* has taken to Twitter to brag about the television ratings for his coronavirus briefings. His ratings. I won’t link, but it’s true.

I will shout into the void a suggestion that I thought of earlier today: When Trump* says that he’ll take questions from reporters, they should remain silent. And after a suitable silence: “We have some questions for Dr. Fauci.” No reporter is obligated to give a narcissist further opportunities to lie, exalt himself, and propagandize.

And a suggestion for the rest of us: Just don’t watch. Read a book. Sing a song. Wash your hands.

Margaret Atwood on pandemics

“So here we are again”: Margaret Atwood writes about pandemics and this pandemic. She offers six possible responses (individual, not institutional) and recommends nos. 1, 3, 5, and 6.

Our household has already picked those four, but I still find it helpful to hear (in my head) what Atwood has written. And we need all the encouraging, helpful words we can get.

Thanks, Stephen.

[I recognize that Atwood doesn’t address the dangers and economic hardship that many people face in this pandemic. And yes, I hear the words in my head as I read. I am a slow reader.]

Fred Hersch pencils

The pianist Fred Hersch writes his music by hand, as seen in the documentary film The Ballad of Fred Hersch. He prefers to keep things analog:

“My life is binder clips. . . . I am kind of a dinosaur in that way. You know, I’m a pencil geek. I buy my pencils — I get these special English pencils. I sort of like the ritual of the whole thing, trying to figure out what kind of paper. I mean, even the copying and taping of the parts is somewhat of a ritual.”

We see a variety of pencils on camera. First, a Mirado Black Warrior.


[Click on any image for a larger view.]


[The titles are from My Coma Dreams (2011), a theater piece, music by Hersch, libretto by Herschel Garfein.]

Next, a Mirado.



Finally, what appears to be a Derwent Graphic. That’s English, yes. The red stripe reveals its identity.



Here and there, a Dixon Ticonderoga and a Staples pencil appear in other hands.

The Ballad of Fred Hersch (dir. Charlotte Lagarde and Carrie Lozanois, 2016) is now streaming, no charge, at Vimeo. And Fred Hersch is playing online, via Facebook, nearly every day, at noon Eastern. I’m more and more taken with his music. My favorite Hersch piece so far: “At the Close of the Day.” When I heard it (unidentified) in the film, it sounded like something I’ve known for years. But no — I had heard it just once before, earlier this week. And here’s a 1999 performance.

[Note: You don’t need a Facebook account to watch and listen.]

Digital vs. analog Nancy

In today’s Nancy, children debate the advantages of reading in pixels and print. Highly inventive stuff from Olivia Jaimes.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, hit the spot. Plenty of challenges, but still a puzzle whose answers fell into place. But almost didn’t in the southeast corner. But finally did. But I still don’t understand one of them: 58-D, three letters, “Whispery direction.” What? Aha: I figured it out when I typed the answer in the comments.

My entry into this puzzle came by way of three three-letter answers: 6-, 7-, and 8-Down, “Successful runners,” “Things ripped and burned,” “Nostalgic division.” Those three gave me two ten-letter answers, 1-, 15, and 17-A, ten letters, “Big word for ‘big-hearted’” and “Ptolemaic Kingdom capital.” And the game, or puzzle, was afoot.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

17-A, ten letters, “Flaubert protg.” I thought protagonist before realizing that protg must be a botched rendering of protégé. There must have been a problem at the diacritics desk. Anyway, I liked seeing the answer.

19-A, four letters, “Round tab.” I see what you did there, Matthew Sewell.

22-A, nine letters, “Ancient Polynesian invention.” For a second time I meet up with this word in a Saturday Stumper, which I know from a short essay about Muhammad Ali and Homeric translation. Thanks to the dictionary.

36-A, seven letters, “Improvised lines.” A nice bit of misdirection for anyone who first thinks of ADLIBS.

48-A, seven letters, “Regular gal or guy.” I like the slight clash between the informal clue and the tonier answer. At least I think it’s tonier. Though possibly in a louche way.

54-D, four letters, “Nickname like Reese.” Wait, Reese is a nickname?

57-D, three letters, “Music from Cremona.” Once again, an answer I didn’t understand until well after finishing the puzzle.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.