Intersectional

Watching Murder, She Wrote (for the old stars), we spotted the intersection of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Ventura Boulevard. There’s a building with a distinctive rounded front on one corner. It’s a drugstore in the show, and a drugstore still (now a CVS).

It’s strange that movies and television seem to turn the vastness of Los Angeles into a small town, with one recognizable location after another. It’s the West Coast version of what I call the Naked City effect: see here, here, and here.

A related post
“Our knowledge of Los Angeles is vast and shallow!””

When in doubt, check Twitter

When I found iCloud bouncing me out after asking me to sign in, the first thing I did was check Twitter:

Thank you for chatting with us today. We are here to help. At this time, Apple has heard about this problem with iCloud and the inability to connect. This problem is currently being investigated. To review our system status:https://t.co/VQbSl396lN

— Apple Support (@AppleSupport) January 26, 2022

Yes, it’s a general problem.

*

11:05 p.m.: All’s well.

January 26, 6:27 a.m.: Then again, maybe not.

[I wasn't the one chatting.]

Signatures in unexpected places

Elvis, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger: signatures found on due-date slips and in library books (CBC).

I’ve found on my library’s shelves books signed by Willa Cather and H.L. Mencken and Louis Zukofksy, all there for borrowing. Each time I headed straight to the circulation desk. “This should not be on the shelves,” said I, earnestly.

My favorite professor, Jim Doyle, once found in Harvard’s Widener Library a volume of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough with handwritten notes by T.S. Eliot. Yes, that T.S. Eliot. Jim took the book to a librarian, who promptly took it away.

Sardines forever

Owen Burke likes sardines:

So long as I have a roof over my head and a kitchen cabinet, I will forever have a case of sardines in there through my very dying breath.

He makes the case for a case of Wild Planet sardines, $27 for twelve cans.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Block that metaphor

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall wonders if the defeated former president’s grip is loosening:

There are at least some cracks — seeming cracks? — in Trump’s hold and they center for now on Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

“Going after children”

The defeated former president’s characterization of the January 6 committee’s request that Ivanka Trump sit for an interview: “They’re going after children.”

Well, everyone is someone’s child. Ivanka Trump is a forty-year-old child. The defeated former president is a seventy-five-year-old child.

What I realized only today: “They’re going after children” is a statement that must have been meant to resonate mightily with QAnon people.

Onomastics

A toddler of my acquaintance calls them “The Get Back Guys.”

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)

National Handwriting Day

National Handwriting Day is real. And good handwriting opens doors.

Here’s (fictional) proof, from Kiss of Death (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1947). As Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) waits to ask the prison warden for permission to write a letter beyond the three-a-month allotment, the warden questions a guard:

[The warden reads.] “‘Nick Bianco — Urgent Business.’ Did he write this himself?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good handwriting.”

“He’s not a bad guy.”

“Bring him in.”

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Going to a conference

I was heading off to a conference to present a paper — one of my least favorite things to do. Elaine and I were standing at the baggage carousel of a bus station, trying to figure out how to get to the airport. It was six o’clock at night. My plane was leaving at seven thirty.

I was still packing for the trip, packing very lightly. I had a cheap briefcase of the kind once sold in discount department stores, with a black papery covering over masonite or plywood. The briefcase held the paper I was presenting, a Lands’ End squall jacket, and Stanley Lombardo’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. No meds, no extra clothes, no umbrella, no pens or pencils. I noticed a cup of pencils atop an upright piano and took a couple to bring with me.

We spotted a scientist entering the terminal, a tall man with red hair. He wore a college sweatshirt over his lab coat. We asked him how to get to the airport, and he pointed us to a bus-company employee in uniform. And we began to consider which route would be best to get to the airport on time.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Three possible sources, from yesterday: reading Jerry Craft’s graphic novel New Kid (with a two-bus commute to a posh day school), learning about Steinway’s Victory Vertical pianos, recommending Alan Alda’s Science Clear + Vivid to a friend. I think the dream is about impostor syndrome. Elaine thinks it’s about aging. I think she’s right.]

Asking, not asking

From The Washington Post: “A single word sparks a crossfire between the Supreme Court, NPR and its star reporter Nina Totenberg.”

At issue: whether Chief Justice John Roberts, “in some form, asked the other justices to mask up” in the courtroom, as Nina Totenberg had reported for NPR. Roberts denied making that request, and NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride, deemed the word asked “inaccurate” and “misleading,” and called for a clarification, which has yet to appear.

The part of the Post report that interests me:

On Friday, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara reiterated the organization’s support for Totenberg. She said McBride “is independent and doesn’t speak on behalf of NPR.”

Lara added, “Someone can ask without explicitly asking. Someone can say, ‘This person doesn’t feel comfortable being around people who aren’t masked’ or some other permutation of that and the listeners get the message.”

Exactly. That’s basic pragmatics.

In the polite, restrained setting of the Supreme Court, the indirect approach — “I think it better that we all wear masks in court,” or words along those lines — seems apt. To say such words is still to make a request. In claiming not to have made a request, Roberts might be parsing his words a bit too literally, without regard for pragmatics.

All this parsing might have been avoided if Justice Gorsuch had just worn a damn mask.