Dies mirabilis

Special Consul Jack Smith issued subpoenas. Representative Bennie Thompson said that the January 6 committee will probably make criminal referrals to the Justice Department. Capitol police officers and family members refused to shake hands with Republican leaders. Michael Flynn’s attempt to block a subpoena was denied. The Trump Organization was found guilty on all seventeen counts. And Raphael Warnock won in Georgia.

The scary thing is that nearly 1.7 million people were willing to see Herschel Walker in the United States Senate.

I hope I have the Latin right.

Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once. The first comes from a post about Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; the second, from Villette itself. The third? You got me. “Pflaaaap!”

“The estrade — okay, platform”
“The nobody you once thought me!”
“Get on with it”
“Post stuff”
“Space for thought”
“At work or at play”
“Walking through a wooded area”
“Brought to the screen on an excellent shoestring”
“When we started communicating, we were using pay
    phones”
“They grow up so fast”
“Click for larger turtles”
“The wet lead makes a darker line”
“Extensive parking facilities”
“Now with more Chock full o’Nuts”
“Stealing radio tubes and engaging in fisticuffs”
“Faculty-sharpener”
“A candy store of the imagination”
“E, G, D, A”
“Ontological underpinnings”
“Not a clue”
“Eyes open”
“And supplies”
“Did he write this himself?”
“Torn between ‘Huh?’ and ‘Wha?’”
“Qua qua qua”
“Where has Merrick Garland gone?”
“Redolent, redolent of coffee”
“Just ‘music’”
“Giveaway”
“Why a duck”
“Shirtsleeve weather”
“Dose folks”
“Check your local listings”
“Mid-century postmodern”
“America is minorities”
“Once a subfolder, always a subfolder”
“Truth matters”
“Pflaaaap!”
“Hey, what a cat, to dig Troy”
“67 + 92 + 25 = 184”
“Run rushes with Zanuck”
“I’m on it”
“Items in a series”
“Changeable signs”
“The reason is not because”
“Sound it out”
“I hope this blog post finds you well”
“Easy to install … see back of box”
“For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so”
“Shiny topics”

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not

Tom Phillips (1937–2022)

The artist Tom Phillips has died at the age of eighty-five. The Guardian has an obituary. Still nothing in The New York Times.

Here is the artist’s website. Here is a slideshow of A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, showing each page of W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document with Phillips’s 1973 and 2010 treatments. And here (badly out of sync) A TV Dante (1989–1991), directed by Raúl Ruiz, Peter Greenaway, and Phillips. Extraordinary stuff, probably unuseable to a teacher of Dante in 2022.

I am the happy possessor of the second edition of A Humument. Looking at any page is an inspiration.

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with (ye gods) goblin mode.

The infra-red sandwich

[Life, January 9, 1956.]

Is this what the O & K Toasted Sandwich Shop meant by “toasted sandwich” — a piping hot sandwich in a sanitary plasticene bag? In other words, a a soggy, sorry mess? I don’t think so — W & K’s Infra-Red Sandwich Bar clearly postdates the O & K. But at some fleeting point in mid-century American life, the infra-red sandwich was a thing.

From David Rhodes’s novel The Easter House (1974):

Sam ordered an infrared sandwich and a glass of beer.

And from Ben Vaughn, Southern Routes: Secret Recipes from the Best Down-Home Joints in the South (2015), a story from a restaurant in Garner, North Carolina:

In the beginning Toot-n-Tell offered simple fare. As she [Mary Ann Sparkman] gives me the roster of menu items from 1968, the year she and her husband, Bill, became the owners, the “infrared sandwich” intrigues me. The early microwave was a popular and convenient appliance for restaurateurs who needed to deliver hot food to the hard-working community. The early microwave used infrared waves to warm the food. Ham and cheese on white bread was fine, but when it was served as the “infrared sandwich,” all melted, gooey, and warm, it was perfect.

Popular Mechanics ran W & K’s ads in 1956 and ’57 but never an item about this machine. The rest is silence, at least as far as I’m concerned.

[Would microwave be an accurate descriptor? The sandwich bar pictured in the Life ad looks more like a toaster oven.]

Recently updated

Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022) Now with a link to a New York Times obituary.

Bob McGrath (1932–2022)

The actor and singer Bob McGrath, the Bob of Sesame Street, has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary.

[Did you know that the character’s last name was Johnson? And that he was a music teacher? Me neither.]

“Business lunch”

Among today’s selections from The Far Side: “Business lunch.”

House calls

[The Family Circus, December 4, 2022. Click for a larger view.]

A doctor who makes house calls? It’s a set-up, Billy. The teacher will know you’re lying.

[“P.J.” is the most plausible excuse. That, or “I left it in the pocket of my other knee pants.”]

O.K. Knee Pants

I couldn’t let the O.K. Knee Pants Co. go uninvestigated.

[Printer’s Ink, December 30, 1926. Click for a larger view.]

This advertisement appears as part of a two-page spread proclaiming the power of advertising in the New York Evening Journal: “New accounts ranging in value from $3,000 to over $20,000 tell the story.” That’s a lot of knee pants.