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The case of the odious odor Now with the real source of the smell.

Fani Willis to Jim Jordan

“Chairman Jordan, I tell people often ‘deal with reality or reality will deal with you.’ It is time that you deal with some basic realities”: if you haven’t read Fani Willis’s response to Jim Jordan, here it is. It’s a wow.

Salad years

A city day: we dropped into a Trader Joe’s to pick up some items. Potato salad? Nope. Macaroni salad? “Nobody’s asked for that in” — and then the employee stopped herself. No, they didn’t have that. Just pasta salad.

From childhood’s hour, I’ve thought of cold cuts and potato salad as a gold standard for “lunch.” And various breads, Gulden’s mustard, and dill spears, please. And I’d settle for macaroni salad.

[The Trader Joe’s website shows packaged potato salad and several recipes. No sign of macaroni salad though. No one’s asked for that in years.]

Caravaggesque

[Barbara Britton and Vladimir Sokoloff in Till We Meet Again (dir. Frank Borzage, 1944). Click for a larger view.]

In a four-sentence review of this movie, I wrote that Theodor Sparkuhl’s camerawork has moments that are Caravaggesque. Here’s one.

[I’d love to see this movie in a superior print. And I’d prefer Caravaggio-like, but Caravaggesque is more common.]

The case of the odious odor

A godawful chemical smell was coming from the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Did a plastic bottle of cleaning product leak? Did a container of cleanser tip over?

We checked every bottle and container. Nothing wrong. What the deuce?

And then we realized: we had bought a roll of scented trash bags by mistake. The roll is now close to its end, or center. The smell apparently gets much stronger as the roll dwindles down.

*

September 8: Paul Drake dropped in and figured out the real source of the smell: not the now-dwindling roll of trash bags we’ve been using but a new box of bags, yet to be opened. “The smell is coming from inside the box!” Paul exclaimed. “And the box isn’t even open yet,” Perry Mason added.

The box goes back to the store this afternoon, wrapped in a trash bag to keep the smell from stinking up the car.

A handful of pencils

[Lee J. Cobb, Douglas Kennedy, and a handful of pencils. From Miami Exposé (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1956). Click for a larger view.]

One of the stranger exchanges in a movie full of strange ones. Stevie is Bart’s girlfriend’s son:

Dan (Kennedy), handing over some pencils: “Stevie said he wanted some pencils.”

Bart (Cobb): “For a five-year-old, this kid sure uses up a lot of pencils.”

And it’s a good thing: as MarketWatch reported last month, pencils continue to sell well because kids use them.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Oops

“If me and my co-counsel”: a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, in a televised hearing from a Fulton County courthouse just now.

[Someone else will have to catch further errors. I‘m watching for just a few minutes.]

How to improve writing (no. 113)

Here’s the start of an obituary in today’s New York Times. Try reading aloud:

Gloria Coates, an adventurous composer who wrote symphonies — she was one of the few women to do so — as well as other works, pieces that were seldom performed in her home country, the United States, but found audiences in Europe, where she lived much of her professional life, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89.

That’s not the first time a Times obituary has opened with a sentence that tries to say too much. Here’s a 2013 OCA post that looks at another opening sentence with a parenthetical sprawl between subject and verb.

I have to invokes E.B. White’s advice again:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

A possible revision:

Gloria Coates, one of the few female composers to write symphonies, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89. Though her works were seldom performed in the United States, they found audiences in Europe, where the Wisconsin-born composer lived much of her professional life.

Elaine, who knows hella lot more about music than the obituary writer does, takes issue with the “one of the few.” Better still:

Gloria Coates, a composer best known for her symphonies, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89. Though her works were seldom performed in the United States, they found audiences in Europe, where the Wisconsin-born composer lived much of her professional life.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 113 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. The passage from E.B. White appears in The Elements of Style, in “An Approach to Style,” the chapter White added when revising William Strunk Jr.’s book. Searching the Institute for Composer Diversity shows 1021 female composers of orchestral music and 233 female composers of works with symphony in their titles.]

A pocket notebook sighting

[Crime boss Phil Jackman (Russ Conway) holds a notebook listing the taverns whose pinball machines he controls. From Portland Exposé (dir. Harold Schuster, 1957). Click for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Mr. Klein : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

“Therapeutic and neuroprotective”

Financial Times reports on the psychological importance of stationery:

Buying a new pencil case as a signal of intent to organise your life isn’t as fanciful as it might sound. The compartments are a “way of organising our central nervous system as well as ensuring that we have the right things for the job,” cognitive neuroscientist Rachel Taylor says. “The whole ritual of buying a new pencil case can be both therapeutic and neuroprotective.”

I think that’s true of all stationery purchases. Be prepared to repeat the key words if challenged about an acquisition: “therapeutic and neuroprotective.” Or, “O, reason not the need.”

I am happy to know that the stationery gene now runs through four generations in my family. There’s little chance of a challenge here.