Things in books

In The Paris Review, Jane Stern writes about strange things she has found in books:

Here are some things I have found: a Seattle traffic ticket for jaywalking, the luggage slip for a first class flight to Paris, to-do lists with some very curious items like “pick up the whip” or “explain cremation.” Often I find ticket stubs (Hamilton !). Once I found a check fully made out for $375.15 that was never given away, and just today I found a yellow card from Pacific Photo Express that offered to transform my images into a “photo fun button.” I am not sure I want such a pin: the illustration shows a creepy little girl getting cozy with Frankenstein’s monster. I can’t quite imagine the right occasion on which to wear that.

The strangest thing I’ve found in a book: this list. But this receipt means more.

Stern’s essay found via Oddments of High Unimportance.

Things in tins

“A palpable shift”: The Guardian reports on the British public’s growing appreciation of tinned fish.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

“The Other Mr. President”

From This American Life, a compilation of old and new stories about Vladimir Putin: “The Other Mr. President.” I remember the one about the bombings of apartment buildings in 1999, which Putin (then prime minister) blamed on Chechen rebels. He invaded Chechnya, won, and was elected president. Long story short: he seems to be an old hand at false-flag operations.

Charge!

I stepped away from the news for a few hours last night, and look what happened. From New York Times :

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said on Wednesday that there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Donald J. Trump and some of his allies might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result.

In a court filing in a civil case in California, the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had accumulated evidence demonstrating that Mr. Trump, the conservative lawyer John Eastman and other allies could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people.

The filing, which I’ve only browsed, makes for surreal reading. Here’s an exchange between John F. Wood, the committee’s senior investigative counsel, and John Eastman:

Q Dr. Eastman, did you write the opinion piece that’s in tab 16?

A Fifth.

Q Okay. Just so I understand, Dr. Eastman, you're invoking your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to question whether this opinion and commentary piece with the byline John C. Eastman, you’re invoking the Fifth Amendment right to not answer that question?

A On advice of counsel, I’m invoking the Fifth.

At another point Eastman takes the Fifth in response to a question about whether he’s refusing to answer questions only about his actions or also about his thoughts regarding the Electoral College.

Screenshots and fair use

After almost eighteen years of blogging, I received a first takedown notice last month, for a post with a screenshot from Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. One look at the details of the notice made clear that my post had been lumped in with sketchy streaming sites, most likely as a result of an automated search for the movie’s title. I filed a counter-claim, and now — hurrah — Google has restored my post.

This page might be useful to anyone who wonders about posting screenshots: “How does fair use work for screenshots?” (PennState University Libraries).

A sit-com trio

Most of the one-off characters in The Mary Tyler Moore Show are played by actors who are, for me at least, unrecognizable. But there are exceptions. Three familiar faces appear in the episode “His Two Right Arms” (March 4, 1972).

[Bill Daily as Pete Peterson, a hapless city councilperson.]

[Isabel Sanford as Mrs. Wilson, mother of Peterson’s aide.]

[Davis Roberts as a citizen asking a question.]

Daily and Sanford should be immediately recognizable to anyone of a certain age who’s spent time in front of a television. Roberts might be less recognizable: he appeared in Sanford and Son as Dr. Caldwell, the cigarette-smoking “doctor” who works in the post office. Catchphrase: “I don’t know.”

Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television.

Recently updated

I envy Mary Richards Now with more complicated technology.

Clicks

Remember, the media industrial complex has a strong interest in raining on every Joe Biden parade — and giving Trump oxygen — so they can try to recapture the ratings and clicks they had when Trump was president.

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) March 2, 2022

That’s why I watched on C-SPAN. Besides, I‘d rather try to make out the after-speech conversation in the aisles.

[Tristan Snell prosecuted Trump “University.”]

No more weeks

President Joe Biden, a few minutes ago in his State of the Union address: “We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks.” Instead, he said, we’re talking about an infrastructure decade. Good one.

And better still, in closing: “We will save democracy.”

Blogger images, side by side

It becomes more and more difficult to get images to display properly in Blogger. My secret formula for getting images to display side by side (as, say, in this post):

~ When uploading, choose Alignment: None.

~ Replace the specs for style:

style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center;"

~ For the image on the left, use

style="float: left; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-right: .2em; padding: 0em 0px;"

~For the image on the right, use

style="float: left; margin-bottom: 0em; margin-right: 0.0em; padding: 0em 0px;"

Using text replacement makes things simpler. But not too simple — or it wouldn’t be Blogger.

[I sometimes concentrate on the trivial to cope with the non-trivial.]