Flow, a Mac app

Flow is a free app for Mac, a Pomodoro-style timer with a bonus: it allows the user to blacklist apps (thus avoiding distractions when said user is supposed to be working).

I’ve long used the free timer Tomato One. Tomato Two (macOS 10.15+ only), also free, blocks websites with an in-app purchase. One could avoid all sorts of work by engaging in an internal debate about what’s more useful, blocking apps or blocking websites. Why not retain both options? To my mind, the more timer apps and mechanical timers one has around, the better. Had we world enough and timers.

Thanks to Matt Thomas for recommending this app.

Related posts
Orange timer art : Ozeri Kitchen and Event Timer : The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated (A review)

Made to order

Remembering an unsettling knock on a classroom door made me remember another great moment in pedagogy.

I was an undergrad at Fordham College, in a Shakespeare class with a beloved professor, Paul Memmo. It was mid-afternoon, and King Lear was raging on the heath. All at once, the Bronx sky darkened. Then, distant thunder, and the rain came down. It was weather made to order, as everyone understood.

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Duke Ellington was born 121 years ago today.

Here’s an unembeddable performance, piano alone, a recital for television broadcast, taped in Paris, July 2, 1970. The program, with all compositions by Ellington except as noted:

Fleurette Africaine : Carolina Shout (James P. Johnson) : Take The “A” Train (Billy Strayhorn) : Black Beauty : Warm Valley : Things Ain’t What They Used to Be (Mercer Ellington) : Paris Blues : New World A-Comin’ : Paris Blues : Come Sunday : Lotus Blossom (Strayhorn)

Ellington is in rare form here. I’d point in particular to “Fleurette Africaine,” “Black Beauty” (first recorded in 1928), and “Come Sunday.” And there’s “Carolina Shout.” When in later life Ellington revisited the stride-piano style of his early years, it was typically in the form of brief novelty performances of his “Soda Fountain Rag.” (For instance.) “Carolina Shout,” too, wraps up pretty quickly, but Ellington seems to be playing to give Johnson his due. “There never was another,” Ellington wrote of him in Music Is My Mistress.

A bonus Ellington-related detail: if you watch the broadcast with “Soda Fountain Rag,” you’ll see the pianist Aaron Bridgers. He and Billy Strayhorn had a nine-year relationship, 1939–1948.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

[Ken Vail’s Duke’s Diary, Part Two (2002) omits “Carolina Shout” and adds “Dancers in Love,” “In the Beginning God,” and “Satin Doll.”]

Some rocks, prehistoric

A science project, in today’s Far Side reruns. “Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

“Or a college of any kind”

Responding to a question about his contact with families of coronavirus patients, Donald Trump* yesterday went off in all directions. The slap here comes at the end:

”I think that the whole concept of computer learning is wonderful, but it’s not — tele-, telelearning. But it’s not the same thing as being in a classroom in a great college, or a college of any kind.“

Also: “telelearning”?

[My transcription.]

Homemade music

Sonny Rollins, September 15, 2001: “Maybe music can help. I don't know, but we have to try something these days, right?” We did, and still do. Here is an imperfect gesture toward better days: “Nuages” (Django Reinhardt) and “Georgia on My Mind” (Hoagy Carmichael–Stuart Gorrell).

YouTube also has us playing “In a Mizz” (Charlie Barnet–Haven Johnson). Surely someone out there must remember that tune from Citizen Kane (the party scene in Florida).

Great moments in pedagogy

Out for a walk this morning, listening to an episode of the BBC’s Great Lives about Harold Pinter, I remembered a moment from teaching Modern British Literature twenty years ago this spring. We were reading Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter aloud and had hit — I swear it — this bit of dialogue: “If there’s a knock at the door you don’t answer it.” And there was a knock at the door. I thought I’d better answer it.

It was my friend and colleague Norman, with (I think) something I’d left behind at lunch. I don’t remember what. But I’ve never forgotten the knock. It came the one and only time I taught a Pinter play.

TV as radio

From Tight Spot (dir. Phil Karlson, 1955), spoken by prison inmate Sherry Conley (Ginger Rogers):

“Television should be so good that when you close your eyes it sounds like a radio.”

Tight Spot is available from the Criterion Channel.

Comic strips in a pandemic

The New York Times looks at comics in the time of the coronavirus.

One strip that’s missing: Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, which has taken a surprising turn: Sluggo is now staying with Nancy and Aunt Fritzi, and the kids are doing school on a computer, with delightful results. Another surprise: Aunt Fritzi spoke by phone today with Sluggo’s truck-driving uncles, characters introduced during the strip’s Guy Gilchrist years.

In other comics news, Zippy may be hoarding paper towels.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy and Zippy posts (Pinboard)

The perils of inattention

The Washington Post reports that “U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February”:

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

Donald Trump*’s nose is stuck, along the rest of his head, someplace, yes, but not in a book.