Hank Aaron and Peanuts

For two weeks in August 1973, Peanuts devoted its daily (non-Sunday) strip to Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Snoopy. You can start on Wednesday, August 8, and read through to Wednesday, August 22.

Here’s some context: “Hammerin’ Hank’s 715th Home Run” (Fishwrap). And the New York Times obituary for Aaron.

Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to this moment in baseball, comics, and culture.

Naked City Mongol

[Frank Gorshin, Charles Tyner, and a Mongol. From the Naked City episode “Beyond This Place There Be Dragons” (January 30, 1963). Click for a larger view.]

The Mongol seems to be the official pencil of the Naked City, showing up in a number of episodes.

“Beyond This Place There Be Dragons” is one of my favorite Naked City episodes. You can watch this episode, and every other Naked City episode, at YouTube.

Venn reading
All OCA Mongol posts : Mongol and Naked City posts : Naked City posts (Pinboard)

Time passing

From the Murphy Brown episode “Midnight Plane to Paris” (November 9, 1992). Murphy (Candice Bergen) to her son Avery: “A baby’s brain doesn’t even recognize time has passed. You’re kind of like the Beach Boys that way.”

The worst

Writing in The Atlantic, Tim Naftali, historian, says it’s Donald Trump**:

As a result of his subversion of national security, his reckless endangerment of every American in the pandemic, and his failed insurrection on January 6, one thing seems abundantly clear: Trump is the worst president in the 232-year history of the United States.

With all the necessary comparisons.

“Who? Me?”

The narrator is walking with the painter Elstir who — guess what? — is a friend of “the little band,” “the little gang of girls” whose remote beauty fascinates the narrator. Several of the girls come into view at the end of an avenue. Trusting that Elstir will make an introduction, the narrator turns his back, and stoops to look in the window of an antique shop, “as though fascinated by something.”

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Today

President Joe Biden: “This is democracy’s day.”

And: “Democracy has prevailed.”

Yes, and yes.

It's getting dusty in here

In every corner of our living room. Maybe yours too.

Wrong way

As the Frank Sinatra recording of “My Way” came to an end, Air Force One took off. Well, there’s at least something a Trump** administration can coordinate — even if the farewell spectacle itself started late.

I will think of that “My Way” as the last public evidence of the Trump** presidency. And it’s perfectly characteristic: unlimited ego and grandiosity, tempered by not a trace of self-awareness, joined to an utter poverty of intelligence and imagination. I know, let’s use “My Way”!

“My Way” was preceded by (among others) the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

Uh-oh

“We will be back in some form.”

Stranger Things?

A cover for today

[Barry Blitt, “A Weight Lifted,” The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. Click for a larger weight.]

Gives new meaning to the words “bird droppings.”

Drop him anywhere. In the nearest ocean perhaps.

The New Yorker has a brief feature on this cover and other Blitt Trump** covers.