Britney and Brian

An opinion piece by Helaine Olen in The Washington Post: “What Britney Spears has endured would not have happened to a male star.”

A glaring counter-example would be Brian Wilson, whose life was controlled in every particular by psychologist Eugene Landy. Wikipedia has a detailed account of Landy’s treatment of Wilson in 1975–1976 and 1982–1991. Among the details: at one point, Landy was in Wilson’s will for a 70% share of the estate.

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

Money and time

The Washington Post recently offered a series of e-mails devoted to making “A Better Week.” The advice offered therein is fairly obvious: for instance, batch your notifications; schedule recurring activities.

The suggestion that caught my interest: “Buy back your time.” And the example of buying back time that caught my interest is the most upscale of four:

If you can budget $50 a week: You could try a monthly home cleaning service and outsource the deeper cleaning. You could plan to have a few friends over that night, while your place is looking spiffy. If you’re a parent, you could pay for a babysitter and have a few hours to yourself or with your partner.

It so happens that I read this bit of advice not long before reading this item from Inside Higher Ed :

Columbia College in Chicago took down a job ad seeking a housekeeper for the institution’s president after Columbia employees applied for the position.

Members of the United Staff of Columbia College union applied for the housekeeping job at Kwang-Wu Kim’s home, which is owned by the college, amid contract negotiations with the college. The union’s current contract expired in 2018.

“While President Kim is looking for help cleaning his home, those of us who support Columbia students every day are out actively looking for a second or even third income so we can keep our families afloat and pay our bills,” Craig Sigele, president of USCC, said in a statement. “We don’t have the luxury of hiring housekeepers. We are struggling to survive.”

President Kim’s yearly compensation, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education: $635,391.

United Staff of Columbia College has a website.

A related post
Income disparity in higher ed

[I remember as a child of the working-class being astonished that some faculty colleagues paid people to clean their houses. Other Post suggestions: paying $5 to $10 for grocery delivery and $20 a week for a laundry service. The Post’s free way to buy back time: swapping lunch-making with a friend one day a week. Which saves time how exactly?]

The rest is silence, I hope

No sound on C-SPAN for Donald Trump**’s rally in Wellington, Ohio. The sound began cutting out during a recording of Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind,” and now, as a tyke would say, “All gone!”

No sound on another channel broadcasting the rally. That channel shall remain nameless here.

*

I jinxed it — the sound is back, in the form of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. I found it about as difficult (sixteen minutes) as last week’s puzzle, which was by “Anna Stiga,” the pseudonym that signifies an easier Newman puzzle. YMMV: your minutes may vary.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, six letters, “Devices above doors.” I first thought of transom windows and pails of water.

8-D, five letters, “Scheming co-conspirator of ’50s TV.” Not all co-conspirators are criminals.

17-A, eight letters, “It may be a quick hit.” I thought of substances. For all I know, the answer could refer to substances.

36-A, seven letters, “Former Top Chef judge.” A little devious.

36-D, six letters, “Less than sharp.” Clever.

44-A, four letters, “#17 among TV Guide’s greatest cartoon characters.” Keep your eyes open and your mouth closed. And if that’s a spoiler, you already know too much.

44-D, five letters, “Pre-presidential partner of ’51.” Uh, MAMIE? No. Worse.

Best clue today: 35-A, eleven letters, “Rogues on the road.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Comics intertextuality

June 2021: Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes. I made links to eight individual strips, but Facebook turns each into the link I’ve now added.

I can’t claim to know either strip, but I dig intertextuality. Thanks, Kevin.

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And on a related note, Comic Book Guy turns up in today’s Hi and Lois.

Sentenced

Two hundred and seventy months, or twenty-two and a half years. That’s Derek Chauvin’s sentence.

“An old picture postcard”

Our narrator, V., has seen a diary reporting the weather on December 31, 1899, the day of his half-brother Sebastian’s birth. The diary belongs to “an old Russian lady” with the Nabokovian name Olga Olegovna Orlova, and it describes the day as “a fine windless one,” temperature twelve below zero.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941).

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[A droshky is a carriage.]

Recently updated

“America’s flavourite candy” Now with turkey joints.

iA Writer

[A draft. Click for a much larger view.]

Here’s a word in favor of iA Writer, which has become my favorite app for writing in iOS and macOS. No toolbar (unless you want to see one), beautifully designed monospaced fonts, and the joys of Markdown, which I should have started using years ago. Markdown makes for a much more congenial writing environment than HTML, and with keyboard shortcuts, it’s a cinch to learn. Did I mention that I should have started using Markdown years ago?

To create a blog post from a Markdown file,. I select the text, choose Copy HTML, and paste into the Blogger Compose window. Then I remove the paragraph tags — <p></p> — at the beginning and end of the text. (Blogger likes line breaks — <br /><br /> — between paragraphs, made in Markdown with the backward slash.)

In macOS, I still also write in MarsEdit, which also uses Markdown. I tend to think of MarsEdit as the app for writing something to post immediately, iA Writer as the app for writing something I’ll post at some point. I wrote this post this morning in iA Writer.

iA Writer is available for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. All versions have many more features than I’ve mentioned here. (HTML Preview is one.) All but the iOS app allow a free trial. Support via e-mail is friendly and fast. iA Writer is one (or two) of the best apps I’ve ever bought.

Did I mention that I should have started using Markdown years ago?

[The strikethrough that begins the screenshot draft is brought to you by iA Writer’s optional Style Check, which flags possible clichés, fillers, redundancies, and words and phrases of the writer’s choosing, but doesn’t overrule the writer. My only relation to iA Writer is that of a happy customer and careful writer.]

“America’s flavourite candy”

[Life, January 17, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

Butterscotch and nutmeats? You had me at “bones.”

Here is older evidence of this now-gone candy. An unrelated candy, Ganong Chicken Bones (cinnamon and chocolate), is still manufactured. Another treat: Chick-o-Sticks (peanut butter and coconut), also once known as Chicken Bones.

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There are also turkey joints. Thanks, librarian!