“Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells”

Sonie Marburg’s teacher has made her cry and then, in a moment of kindness, allows sick, headachy Sonie to wait in the teachers’ rest-room until she can go home without the other children seeing her.

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

One of my most vivid memories of high school: the cigarette stink that filled the hallway upon every opening of the door to the seen-only-in-glimpses teachers’ lounge.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors”

[The Beelers: Esther and Ruby, schoolmates.]

Shovel-ready (Hi and Lois watch)

[Hi and Lois, January 19, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

People of the future should know that in the early twenty-first century, it was common to carry one’s snow shovel through one’s living room. From the kitchen or dining room through the living room to the front door, that’s how we rolled.

But seriously: this panel suffers from redundancy. Chip has said he will shovel “later” — whenever that might be. Hi is headed outside, dressed in his winter togs. He need not carry a shovel for the situation to be clear.

In the second (final) panel of today’s strip, Hi is lying down on the blue sofa, which appears to have been moved, with a heating pad on his back. He whimpers: “AAAEEUGH.” (Notice: no exclamation point, and not even a speech balloon.) And Chip asks Lois, “How is this my fault?”

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[In Peanuts, it’s “AAUGH!”]

Pay-phone noir

[Al Willis (Gene Barry) places a call. From Naked Alibi (dir. Jerry Hopper, 1954). Click for a larger view.]

The cinematography is by Russell Metty. Among his many credits, The Stranger (1946) and Touch of Evil (1958), both directed by Orson Welles.

Siri talks back

I used Siri to add a reminder to the phone yesterday morning, then changed the time and changed it again. Was it supposed to be 4:20? 4:40? 5:20? And I said to Elaine, “I’m sorry; I’m not thinking clearly.”

And Siri replied, “Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

The Last Repair Shop

From the Los Angeles Times, here’s a short documentary, The Last Repair Shop, directed by Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot.



The instrument repair shop for the Los Angeles Unified School District is the last shop in the United States taking care of student instruments. I’m not sure what I expected when I fired up YouTube, but I certainly found more than I could have imagined.

Watch if you can: it’ll be time (39:58) well spent.

[Found via kottke.org.]

Overheard

“What did it knock over?”

“Just the snow globes.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard“ posts (Pinboard)

[Fortunately, they were plastic.]

An alternative to Barbenheimer

Our household’s Friday and Saturday night movies: The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946) and Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023).

The Killerbies.

“The odors”

Sonie Marburg’s father worked as a shoe repairman. One day he left his family and Massachusetts to go west.

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

That’s the first moment of involuntary memory in the novel.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor

MSNBC, sheesh

“... trying to put some distance between he and her ...”

I hereby offer all MSNBC reporters a quick course in pronoun repair. And I’ll keep it between I and them.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

MLK: diversity

“It seems to me that integration at its best is the opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity”: Martin Luther King Jr., eleven months before his death, in an interview with NBC’s Sander Vanocur.

The date of the interview: May 8, 1967. The earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation for its 1.d. definition of diversity,

The fact, condition, or practice of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, and (more recently) of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.,

is from December 26, 1968. It’d be a wonderful thing if King’s use of the word in this interview were to make it into the dictionary as an earlier citation. I turned myself into a dictionary person yesterday to try to make that happen.