Cuomo and Gibbon and others

I flipped on the television after an escape to Brontëland and saw Andrew Cuomo talking. Behind him, on a screen, a sentence attributed to Edward Gibbon:

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then [they] ceased to be free.

But it’s not from Edward Gibbon. It’s from Edith Hamilton, sort of, by way of Margaret Thatcher. Background here.

I know the idea from a different part of the political spectrum, as expressed by Julius Lester, who contrasts “freedom from” and “freedom to” in a discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The best way to use one’s freedom right now, if your life and work allow it, is to stay home. That’s the freedom of being responsible, to oneself and to others.

[The they in brackets (parentheses on the screen) takes the place of Athens.]

“Give yourself a coffee-break”

Michael Pollan’s review of Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug notes that the term coffee-break

entered the vernacular through a 1952 advertising campaign by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, a trade group organized by Central American growers. Their slogan: “Give yourself a coffee-break . . . and get what coffee gives to you.”

That sounded familiar. How? Why? Oh — I had looked it up for a blog post in 2014.

Here is one of the Life magazine advertisements that promoted the slogan:


[Did baseball players ever really drink coffee in the dugout? Some, yes. Life, August 4, 1952. Click for a much larger view.]

Bob Elliott was nearing the end of his playing career in 1952. Larry Jansen, in mid-career, was the winning pitcher in the famous 1951 Giants–Dodgers National League championship playoff game that the Giants won in the bottom of the ninth. My dad always remembered hearing that game on the radio. The Giants went on to lose the 1951 World Series to the New York Yankees.

“A cup of coffee,” as some readers will already know, is a baseball term for a short stint in the major leagues. Maybe that’s what the unidentified player on the right was having.

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

“The tedium of dangers”

Fernando Pessoa, from text 75, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

Unreadability

Handwriting in the news:

Parts of the note were apparently illegible to the teller, but he was able to make out the words “all the cash.”

Maybe “Glue me all the cash”? Film fans will recognize that life, once again, is imitating art. Apt natural.

“Trust nurses”

“Trust nurses / Go home”: text on a sign held by a Pennsylvania healthcare worker facing off against protesters wanting to “open the country”, on NBC Nightly News tonight.

Musgrave ephemera

From Musgrave Pencils: a vintage catalogue and Forest to Office, a vintage advertising brochure, both page by page.

A related post
Harvest Refill Leads (A Musgrave product, c. 1930s-1940s)

KeyboardCleanTool icons

I’m engaged in a never-ending battle to keep my MacBook Air keyboard from acquiring the greasy shine that MacBook keyboards acquire. I found a free app earlier this year that helps in that battle: Jan Lehnardt’s KeyBoard Cleaner, which locks the keyboard for easier cleaning. Today I found another app, also free, that’s better: Andreas Hegenberg’s KeyboardCleanTool (herefter, KCT). One clear advantage: KCT doesn’t turn the screen black. In other words, it’s always clear what to do to get the keyboard back. Another advantage: KCT disables function keys. When I wipe down the keyboard after locking it with KCT, hitting F8 doesn’t open iTunes.

One problem with KCT: its images spark, for me, no joy. Here are the images that the app uses to show keyboard-on and keyboard-off. The keyboard-on image is also the app’s icon:

 
[The files are named green and rot. But they’re really blue and rot, or red.]

The gradients look dated to me, and the keyboard reminds me too much of the checkered flag seen at auto races. I tried working with keyboard images available online but found the results unsatisfactory, with tiny dopey-looking keys. Then I had a thought. I used the Mac app Pages to create a circle and added text in Courier New. I pushed the text a little higher in the circle with the align option. I used Preview’s alpha tool to turn the space outside the circle transparent. After figuring out an image for keyboard-on, the choice for keyboard-off seemed obvious.

 
[Orange and black are the new green. Orange is the new red.]

I then used the free app Image2icon to turn the keyboard-on image into an icon.

In use, the images work like so:




[The keyboard-off image is an obvious fake, as there’s no way to manage a screenshot with a locked keyboard. I filled in the circle by hand.]

The mystery of replacing an app’s icons or images is really no mystery at all: right-click the app (when it’s not open) in the Finder, choose Show Package Contents, and look for the appropriate files. They’ll probably be in a Resources folder. Rename the old images or icons (I just add the word old) and add the new ones with appropriate names. Just make sure that your replacements are the same kinds of files and the same sizes as the originals.

What is a mystery: how KCT changes the icon in the dock from keyboard-on to keyboard-off. Way cool.

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

Turtles all the way down

After a week of protests calling for the state to be “reopened,” Kentucky reported on Sunday its highest single-day increase in coronavirus infections. And an Ohio resident who pronounced his state’s stay-at-home order “bullshit” has died of the coronavirus.

The paranoid style in American politics is never at a loss for explanations: another layer of theorizing can always be added to support a rickety conspiracy theory. It’s turtles, or theories, all the way down.

So it’s easy to imagine what the paranoid style — the really, really paranoid style — might make of these deaths: government operatives mingling in the crowds sprayed a chemical on protesters to sicken them and further brainwash the citizenry into believing that the coronavirus is real; government operatives targeted the Ohio resident for speaking out. Or, if you prefer something more outré — the infected protestors and Ohio resident are really “crisis actors,” who serve to further brainwash, &c.

And it’s all in preparation for martial law, coming soon. And it’s turtles all the way down.

“It isn’t over — he is”

[“The Return of Bert ‘n’ Bob.” Zippy, April 20, 2020.]

Today’s Zippy, timely yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, &c.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Dream headline

I saw this headline early this morning, in a sidebar on the front page of a print newspaper, in a dream: “DIY Supermarket Erases Thousands Who Opposed Russia.”

Likely influences: all the at-home activities in the news, a recent trip to the supermarket, voter suppression.

[Unlike my dream newspaper, Orange Crate Art uses sentence-style headlines, which prompted one reader’s outrage in 2014. Pepperidge Farm remembers. See here and here for a laugh.]