This may not be funny to anyone who didn't see Les Miserables; I don't know. All I can say is that Darwin and I laughed ourselves stupid over this too late the other night.
From Tickld.
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I don't know why I find The Californians so funny. Darwin, born and raised in Los Angeles, doesn't think it's that amusing. But it makes me weep with laughter every time SNL comes out with a new installment.
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Having spent the last two weeks washing dishes for a family of seven by hand in a narrow single-bowl sink (thank you, previous owners who renovated after they stopped cooking), I've had lots of time to contemplate dishwashing technology, but I think this takes the cake for the most time-intensive innovation:
Because I want a drainer so spatially inefficient that triples the time it takes to wash the dishes? No, I want a big wire rack into which I can cram ALL THE THINGS.
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Here's something more cerebral: Jamie, who has just finished a multiyear program of reading all of Shakespeare's plays, posts a ten-year schedule for working through the Bard the right way, complete with table.
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Our library here in town is so busy making room for all the computers, children's series from Scholastic, and racks of paperback romances that they don't have room for these books which I've searched recently:
- Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
- The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel
- North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
I can't think that these are the most esoteric works of literature ever, but apparently we are dominated by the tyranny of the New Release.
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Speaking of libraries, Cincinnati's old Main Library used to be one of the most impressively library-ish libraries ever.
Here are some beautiful photos that make you want to weep for what was.
3 comments:
Wow! Those were gorgeous library photos! Our public library is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The collection is now housed in a modern building, but the original brick library, funded by Mr. Carnagie, is still standing. We use it now as our literacy center, passport office, and special events.
BTW, I've been wanting to replace my old but large dish drainer, but it seems like they only sell small ones around here.
The fact that it was intended as an opera house reminds me of Kenneth Clark's observation that it wasn't that Baroque churches looked like opera houses, it was that the opera houses looked like churches. That library looked like a bit of both.
We had a Carnegie library here in Dunedin, NZ, too.
Middle Girl recently asked the librarian for help finding poetry by Tennyson. The librarian, very young and not yet jaded, excitedly led her off to the adult poetry section. They returned emptyhanded, the librarian wearing a look of utter shame and confessing that they had no Tennyson at all. Lots of Shel Silverstein, though.
To complete the irony, I found her a collected Tennyson at the library discard store.
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