Advice in The Washington Post: “How to stay up-to-date on terrible news without burning out.”
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
Yellow Ticonderogas
Eberhard Faber Mongols were on the job in the WJM newsroom during the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. After that, it’s Dixon Ticonderogas and no-name pencils. A great loss for Mongol fans.
Perhaps one of the writers was using a Ticonderoga when working on the episode “Mary Richards and the Incredible Plant Lady” (March 3, 1973). The premise: Rhoda (Valerie Harper) has borrowed money from Mary to open a plant shop, and she’s taking her time about paying back. The reason: she’s secretly using her earnings to buy Mary a new car, a yellow Mustang convertible. Rhoda knows that Mary has had her eye on a Mustang. But it turns out — uh-oh — that Mary hates yellow. She and Rhoda and Georgette (Georgia Engel) sit in the newly purchased car in the dealer’s showroom:
Georgette: “Yellow’s a lovely color, Mary. It’s the color of the sun, and wheat fields.”Related reading
Mary: “Yeah.”
Rhoda: “Ticonderoga pencils.”
Georgette: “And daffodils, and lemons — whoops, I shouldn’t have said that.”
All OCA MTM posts : Ticonderoga posts (Pinboard)
A question
Where has Merrick Garland gone? Long time passing.
Representative Elaine Luria (VA-2), last night: “Attorney General Garland, do your job, so that we can do ours.”
Representative Adam Schiff (CA-28), last night: “We are upholding our responsibility. The Department of Justice must do the same.”
Monday, March 28, 2022
Orange tool art
[Kyocera peeler, Harry’s razor.]
We bought the peeler several years ago in an Asian supermarket. I bought the razor a week or so ago, but I recognized the resemblance only last night.
[People without full beards are sometimes surprised to learn that people with full beards still need to shave. That’s how we keep the beard from overtaking the face and neck.]
Sunday, March 27, 2022
A working search box
For whatever reason, the DuckDuckGo search box that I’ve had in the sidebar for several years no longer works. As Elaine said, it DuckDuckWent. The DDG page for making a search box is gone, and I’ve been unable to make a new working search box with an independent generator. It all makes me think that the company has disabled embedding. So I’ve switched back to a Google search box.
Blogger being Blogger, the code for the search widget is crummy. And the code is invisible in the Layout window. But if you’re willing to edit the HTML for a Blogger template, you can make things nice. Go to Theme, choose Edit HTML, click on the pile of boxes to find and select the Search widget (labeled BlogSearch1), and change
cellpadding='1' cellspacing='1' to
cellpadding='3' cellspacing='3'.
That’ll give the search box a proper left side and make a little more space between the box and the button.
Before:
After:
[If conspiracy theorists are indeed turning to DuckDuckGo, the company might have good reason to disable embedding.]
Helvetica for free
Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary Helvetica, now fifteen years old, is streaming free through March 30.
When I first saw this film, almost fifteen years ago, I wrote something about it. My favorite lines (still) are from Erik Spiekermann:
“Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls’ bottoms. I get kicks out of looking at type. It’s a little worrying, I must admit. It’s a very nerdish thing to do.”
Outtakes (7)
[Outtakes from the WPA’s New York City tax photographs, c. 1939–1941, available from 1940s NYC. Click any image for a much larger view.]
Related posts
Outtakes (1) : Outtakes (2) : Outtakes (3): Outakes (4) : Outtakes (5) : Outtakes (6) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough one, half-hour territory for me. My spirit sagged at 1-A, five letters, “Norwegian flatbread.” (NJAAN?!) I found a better start at 14-A, five letters, “Ladderback chair elements.” 18-A, nine letters, “India, essentially” helped a lot, as did 39-A, eleven letters, “Overlong addresses.” That last answer is one of several unusual longish ones in this puzzle.
Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:
3-D, nine letters, “Guitar-and-castanets performances.” It took me a long time to see that the answer was not another nine-letter word.
15-A, five letters, “Part of a Moscow mule, perhaps.” And with a complicated history. No thanks.
21-D, eight letters, "What some game app developers work with." Not every pun deserves respect.
23-A, thirteen letters, “Xenomorph.” You see what I mean about unusual longish answers?
25-D, eight letters, “Insects that coevolved with tropical trees.” Also unusual medium-length answers.
27-D, four letters, “The Bard's ‘being next to Devil,’ per Coleridge.” Misparsing the clue makes the easy answer much more difficulty to see.
30-D, nine letters, “Mustard or cocoa.” Someone understands me.
37-D, eight letters, “The ’40s Motorette, e.g.” What?
My favorite in this puzzle: 29-A, eleven letters, “It may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Friday, March 25, 2022
First word, first syllable
We were reminsicing over breakfast this morning about WILL-TV, our local PBS outlet, which turns 100 this year. For many years, late on weeknights, the station aired Silver Screen, something of a miniature version of TCM (pre-TCM), with a top-notch movie and a host, Thomas Guback, well-versed in film, providing an intro and outro.
I asked Elaine if she remembered what movie blew our minds when we first saw it on Silver Screen. We had tuned in when the movie had already started and had no context: even more reason for it to blow our minds.
Elaine was at a loss. Inspired by our recent reading of Robertson Davies, I pressed on:
Three words, first word, three syllables, first syllable.
[I held an imaginary steering wheel.]
First word, second syllable.
[I gave an indifferent sideways shake of the head.]
That was all it took. Can you identify the movie?
A solemn vow: this will be the only time I use an OCA post to play charades.
*
No one’s guessed. The title is now in the comments.
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