Orange Crate Art

Friday, January 28, 2022

Pencil vs. pencil vs. pencil vs. pen

Which lasts longer: a cheap pencil, a better pencil, a mechanical pencil, or a ballpoint pen? It’s the work of a fellow with time on his hands.

A related post
“2,162 words for one cent”

“Do I really need a toilet?”

What it can be like to rent in Manhattan.

Thursday, January 27, 2022

From WGBH, preschool STEM learning with Nico & Nor games (iPadOS 12.0 or later): Berry Garden, Coconut Canyon, Farmers Market, Puppy Park, Shadow Cave. The games teach basic science ideas to pre-readers, in English or Spanish. Berry Garden and Puppy Park are the most challenging. Shadow Cave is the most Platonic.

Our son Ben helped create these games and wrote and played the music for them. Go Ben!

You can find all WGBH apps for iOS and iPadOS in the App Store.

Word of the day: bazooka

My friend Stefan Hagemann clued me in to the origin of bazooka, which was the name of a musical instrument of sorts before it became the name of a weapon. Bob Burns, who created the instrument in the early 1900s, explains in this WWII-era short film.

As for Bazooka Joe, he and his gang postdate the war. (The weirdest comics ever.)

Thanks, Stefan!

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

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.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

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!””

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

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.