Sardines and gin

Once unpacked, so to speak, the headline makes sense: “Popular Tin of Sardines gin bar to open in former Roker toilet block.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

A Gris collage

At The New York Times, Jason Farago offers a close reading of Juan Gris’s Still Life: The Table.

[If I were teaching William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, this Times feature would be doing some of the work for me.]

Cicely Tyson (1924–2021)

Cicely Tyson, in a recent interview with The New York Times: “When I smile, I smile. I do not grin. There’s a difference, OK?” The Times has an obituary.

Cicely Tyson’s third appearance on television was in an episode of Naked City.

“Orange-colored envelope”

Mme de Guermantes: the narrator seeks to know “the mystery of her name,” which is not to be discerned when he sees her leaving her house or riding in her carriage.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

I love the way what “my father’s friend had said” becomes, “after all,” the measure of objectivity. Proust is unsparingly comic in his presentation of a younger self.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Cloris Leachman (1926–2021)

The most abiding image: as Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The most striking: as Christina Bailey, running down the highway in nothing but a trenchcoat in Kiss Me Deadly. The strangest: as Ruth Martin in Lassie, pre-June Lockhart. Jon Provost: “Cloris did not feel particularly challenged by the role.”

The New York Times has an obituary.

Recently updated

An unambiguous forecast Now with a reply from the National Weather Service.

An unambiguous forecast

From a National Weather Service alert for our area:

Between 1 and 2 inches of snow is expected by supper time today.

Do you see what they did there? For some people dinner is a mid-day meal; for others, an evening meal. Supper leaves no ambiguity. Merriam-Webster explains both words.

Now I want to know whether the NWS uses supper regionally or nationally.

Idle question, Michael, let it go.

*

I know myself too well to know that I could leave the question alone. So I e-mailed the Central Illinois office of National Weather Service to ask. Chris Geelhart, lead meteorologist, replied:

The forecaster that issued that statement comes from a farming background in the Midwest, which is probably why he used that wording. My mom also comes from a farming background (in South Dakota) and would use similar wording when I was growing up. Typically we tend to lean toward using actual clock times or more broad terms such as “mid afternoon”, “early evening”, etc. The NWS doesn't have a formal policy on regional terminology, as far as I know.

Chris noted that the use of supper in this morning’s alert was a subject of conversation on social media.

And it’s snowing.

[Thanks to Chris Geelhart for permission to quote him here.]

Time as money

From Innovation Hub, a remarkable story about selling the correct time: “A Watch Named Arnold.”

A magazine exhibition

From the Grolier Club, “Magazines and the American Experience: Highlights from the Collection of Steven Lomazow, M.D.” Many covers to admire. Maybe my favorite: the September 1929 Black Mask, which began the serial publication of The Maltese Falcon.

The Grolier Club has a dozen more exhibitions online. Happy browsing.

“Dead Man Teaching”

The Chronicle of Higher Education tells the story of a Concordia University course: “Dead Man Teaching.” Unconscionable, Concordia.

What most galls me: for the university, it doesn’t seem to matter if the professor is living or dead. Who cares? It’s not like a student would want to e-mail a professor with a follow-up question, right?