Holding his head

Stephen Breyer’s retirement announcement made me remember this description from an NPR story:

At oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's best questioners, sometimes takes a different approach [from that of Justice Sonia Sotomayor]. She just shuts down, rather than alienate her colleagues. Still, her anger is often palpable, the color literally draining from her face. And Justice Stephen Breyer on occasion just holds his head.

That description makes me think that he stuck it out as long as he could in an increasingly alienating workplace.

Ectoplasm

It’s late. Solly Bridgetower is walking and talking with Griselda Webster.

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (1951).

Tempest-Tost is the first novel of Davies’s Salterton Trilogy. A group of provincial amateurs are preparing to stage The Tempest.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.”

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