“Meaning everyone”

In The New York Times, Virginia Heffernan writes about attending virtual Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the time of the coronavirus:

I took the deepest breath of the day as if to take in — something. The sense of oneness. It occurred to me that all of us alcoholics — really, all humans with shortcomings, meaning everyone — were breathing in and out, our fragile mortal lungs, puffing away near our hearts, now so vulnerable to this novel virus that could stop them any minute.

I’ve long admired Heffernan’s writing and her work on the podcast Trumpcast.

Keeping our distance

Our household has distanced itself from Donald Trump*’s late-afternoon variety show. We look later to Aaron Rupar’s Twitter for the high-and-low-lights. So it’s extraordinary this morning to see that Trump* yesterday dissed countries under siege, or /seezh/, as he pronounces it:

“They don’t know about social distancing. These are countries that aren’t highly sophisticated.”

Not like our country, where the president stands shoulder to shoulder with the day’s cast, all of them getting to touch the same microphone. Not like our country, where the governor of Georgia learned only yesterday that people with no symptoms can transmit the coronavirus. What the actual fuck.

[Garner’s Modern English Usage: “preferably pronounced /seej/ — not /seezh/.” I misspelled siege as seige when I wrote this post. My Mac seems to believe that seige is a real word.]

“The Handkerchief”

Magnus Eisengrim is describing the wonders of dining on the Canadian Pacific Railway: “‘fresh fish, tremendous meat, real fruit — don’t you remember what their baked apples were like? With thick cream!’” And there were sauces, “‘real sauces, made by the chef-exquisite!’”


Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975).

I suspect that Davies might have been happy to leave “the Handkerchief” a small unexplained mystery in a novel full of mystery. Perhaps an editor insisted that the novelist have someone laboriously point out the joke. If so, I am grateful, because I’m not sure I would have figured it out. See also Vladimir Nabokov’s motuweth frisas.

Garton’s is brown sauce — namely, HP Sauce. Some history:

The original recipe for HP Sauce was invented and developed by Frederick Gibson Garton, a grocer from Nottingham. He registered the name H.P. Sauce in 1895. Garton called the sauce HP because he had heard that a restaurant in the Houses of Parliament had begun serving it.

Here’s an advertising poster. And a song. Don’t miss the song.

And here’s a page with links to three undated CPR dining-car menus. Sure enough, baked apple with cream on each menu.

This passage is the last I’m posting from The Deptford Trilogy, a work I’d describe as a cross between Charles Dickens and Steven Millhauser. I give it all the stars.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: hunker

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the intransitive verb hunker is originally Scottish; its origin, obscure. The dictionary makes comparisons to words in a variety of languages: Middle Dutch, Middle Low German, Dutch, and Old Norse. And there’s the modern German hocken, “to sit on the hams or heels, to squat.”

And to hunker was, at first (1720), to squat: “to squat, with the haunches, knees, and ankles acutely bent, so as to bring the hams near the heels, and throw the whole weight upon the fore part of the feet.” Later (1790) the word acquired a pejorative meaning: “to cower or squat in a lowly manner.”

The meaning I wanted, with down, is “originally and chiefly U.S.” and entered the dictionary as a draft addition in 1993:

to concentrate one’s resources, esp. in unfavourable circumstances; to dig in, buckle down; spec. (frequently in Military contexts) to shelter or take cover, lie low.

The dictionary’s first citation for this meaning is from 1903. I like this second citation, from Chemical Week (1975): “There comes a time . . . when you should hunker down and ride out the storm.”

I hope that you, reader, are hunkered down and riding out the storm.

“Is that so?”

[Nancy, April 1, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

The hand of God — i.e., Ernie Bushmiller.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[I like hm for hmm. And I always like seeing Bushmiller’s three-hyphen dash.]

“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.]