Six parties

A New York Times quiz: “If America Had Six Parties, Which Would You Belong To?”

[Me, the Progressive Party. Gracie Allen’s Surprise Party is not a Times option.]

Two eyes, eight parts of speech

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

Garner’s Modern English Usage: “Grammarians have traditionally recognized eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.”

Related reading
All OCA Jane Austen posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 9, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

No masks, no distancing in today’s Hi and Lois ? Okay, it’s the comics. But no legs on the desks? There’s a way to fix that problem.

[Hi and Lois revised, September 9, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

If you look closely, you’ll see that I’ve made another revision that all self-respecting teachers should appreciate.

*

An observant reader points out that the dog on the poster is Odie from Garfield. Thanks, Kevin. And we agree, given that it’s a Garfield poster, it should come down.

[Hi and Lois revised again, September 9, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Phil Schaap (1951–2021)

He was a jazz historian who hosted programs on WKCR-FM for more than fifty years. He was a hero of the music.

The New York Times has an obituary. WKCR is planning a tribute and will be rebroadcasting Schaap’s programs at their usual times.

Better books?

Catherine Morland doubts that Henry Tilney could be a reader of novels.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

Related reading
All OCA Jane Austen posts (Pinboard)

Methods of communication

Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night. They were talking, of course, about their Hulu series Only Murders in the Building.

SC: “Now there’s a lot of texting in the show. Do you guys have your own text chain between the three of you?”

SG: “No, it’s strictly e-mail with these guys.”

SM: “But when we started communicating, we were using pay phones.”

See also “Aloha, Mabel!”

“Tilneys and trapdoors”

Catherine Morland is riding with John Thorpe. But her mind is elsewhere.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

Related reading
All OCA Jane Austen posts (Pinboard)

[False hangings: tapestries covering secret passages.]

Teaching the unmasked

From a New York Times article about life in college, “‘An Emotional Hellscape’: Frayed Nerves for the Teachers of Unmasked Students”:

Irwin Bernstein, an 88-year-old psychology professor, said the University of Georgia had lured him out of retirement this fall. But when he posted a “No mask, No class” sign in his classroom, his department head told him to take it down “since I was in violation of the governor’s order.”

At his next class, a student resisted wearing a mask, saying it was uncomfortable, he recalled. He announced that he was retiring — again — and walked out of class.

Imagine having that moment be your last as a teacher.

The kind of selfishness that student showed is what we see around us in downstate Illinois every day, from all sorts of people. It’s what’s prompted a local bookstore owner to close and move his bookstore back to Chicago — he’s tired of arguing with people who refuse to wear masks in his store, even after he tells them that his children are too young to be vaccinated.

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September 11: An article from The Red & Black (University of Georgia) has much more on Irwin Bernstein’s encounter with an unmasked student in his class. An excerpt:

The 88-year-old psychology professor explained to the student that he could die from COVID-19 due to underlying health conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and age-related problems, Bernstein said in an email to The Red & Black.

Only about 15 minutes into the Tuesday lecture, which consisted of Bernstein taking the student attendance, he asked the student to pull her mask up again, but this time, the student did not respond.

Bernstein, who was already informed that two of his absent students tested positive for COVID-19, then announced his resignation on the spot and left the class immediately.

“At that point I said that whereas I had risked my life to defend my country while in the Air Force, I was not willing to risk my life to teach a class with an unmasked student during this Pandemic,” Bernstein said in an email to The Red & Black. “I then resigned my retiree-rehire position.”

[Yes, there’s a mask mandate in Illinois. But the local response is to ignore it. I’ve rewritten a sentence to make clear that the selfishness here comes from all quarters.]

A Blogger warning

If you upload an image to Blogger, tinker with the code, delete </div>, but forget to delete <div class="separator" style="clear: both;">, your sidebar will end up where the body of your blog used to be and you’ll wonder what’s gone wrong.

The fix: proofread, and delete <div class="separator" style="clear: both;">. You may have to look through several posts to find your mistake.

Google makes so many unannounced changes to the Blogger platform that it’s easy to assume that any odd new problem is the company’s fault. But not always.

Why tinker with the code to begin with? To reduce the size of the big blank space Blogger adds above an image.

A related post
How to get clear images in Blogger

Michael K. Williams (1966–2021)

One of his roles: the trickster-god Omar Little on The Wire. The New York Times has an obituary.

An Omar-related post
The meaning of “rip and run”