Distancing dulls the news about a formerly good friend’s death
Back in my Tribune days, I wrote an article that explained how the extreme summer heat in places like Arizona often leads to a sense of sluggishness and lethargy even if you spend a good amount of time indoors.
I think about it every year when the Sonoran Desert blast furnace kicks into gear—especially during the past few years, while I’ve been working mostly from home.
The New Yorker’s dig at Nero Wolfe; my own case of New Yorker fatigue; when “luxury” isn’t.
Brandishing a dagger, not wiggling a finger.
The MHz channel has been broadcasting episodes of a Nero Wolfe miniseries made (and set) in Italy — it’s a typical “gorgeous period setting” type of mystery series, with stock characters like the beleaguered local police inspector, a man-of-the-streets gumshoe, plus of course the titular detective and his assistant, Archie. (Occasionally the characters, who otherwise speak in Italian, toss in an “Archie Goodwin” in accented English, which makes me laugh a little.)
The title of one episode, “The Red Box,” reminded me of something but I couldn’t figure out what until I went scrolling through my camera roll. There I found a screenshot from last October, of a perfectly petty moment circa 1946, when The New Yorker published a “squib” — a brief little humorous anecdote — about a peculiarity found in the book, which includes 17 separate instances where the title character wiggles a finger at someone. (All that wiggling happened in about 220 pages.)
Charo, Jimmie Walker and George Kennedy in the disaster movie that must have inspired some scenes in Airplane; birds won’t explode from eating rice thrown at weddings; is it “upsy-daisy” or “upsa daisy”?
I swore I wouldn’t clean the floor until the drywall is done, but I caved quickly.
The countertops were installed last week, but the new sink required larger-scale plumbing work than originally anticipated: To access a particular drain line, we had to cut through my neighbor’s kitchen wall as well as my own.
I didn’t have water anywhere in the house for one full day, and no water in the kitchen over a weekend for roughly four days. Everything works now, though, and the drywall repair estimates will begin in earnest next week.
More about that stress later, after I’ve had a chance to decompress! In the meantime, click on the thumbnails below to see the before/after pairings larger, and then read on for some things I learned about this week.
(1) I already knew that Max Factor was a real person, thanks to his reputation as a Hollywood makeup artist in the black-and-white era. He was responsible for Jean Harlow’s platinum hair, Clara Bow’s bob, Lucille Ball’s false lashes and Joan Crawford’s signature overdrawn cupid’s-bow. (He also coined the phrase “make-up”!)
I’d also assumed that “Max Factor” was not his given name, but I was surprised to see how close his screen name was to his real one:
Josephine Baker was a French Resistance spy?!; JFK disinvited Sammy Davis Jr. from his inauguration because racism; when the Second Coming happens, your grave will probably already be positioned appropriately.
Observing the robot saw, from a respectful distance, as it works.
Some things I learned this week. …
After months of research, hemming and hawing, I finally selected a replacement material for the countertops at my place … only to have the fabricator tell me it would be a poor choice to work with.
It turns out the very thing that appealed to me about the slabs in question — their gorgeous pockets of a material with an agate-like appearance — is what would make them problematic during the cutting phase. Those sections have a bigger risk of splintering or shredding at the cut line, because they’re not as densely compacted as the rest of the stone.
Rene explained this to me in person a few weeks ago while we were walking among the stacks of slabs at The Stone Collection, and then he paused mid-stride and gestured at a different stack: “A material like this one wouldn’t pose the same problem,” he said.
“Well, good, because as fate would have it, that happens to be the other choice I wanted to show you,” I said. So we found our two great slabs, and this morning I got to cruise into the warehouse side of JDM Countertops and watch the team actually cutting my slabs to the exact specifications. (The photo at the top of this post shows the robot saw at work on Slab #1, with still-intact Slab #2 at the bottom of the frame.)
Caravaggio tried to castrate a man in a duel but killed him; Churchill hated a painted portrait so much, a staffer set it ablaze; the curious case of the “Spine Collector,” who impersonated publishing people to get sneak peeks at manuscripts; a geography-focused daily puzzle game
Flagellation of Christ, by Caravaggio. (Hello, CrossFit Jesus!)
Some things I learned this week. …
I guess you can surmise it from the topics of his most famous works — card sharps, Judith Beheading Holofernes — but 17th-century Italian painter Caravaggio lived a rougher life than I had known about. Among other deeds, he killed a man by trying to castrate him in a fight.
SAMMITT 