A Typeface for Mrs. Pollifax

The Mrs. Pollifax books are delightful so when I found a copy of A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax in a little free library, I took it even though I'd read it six years ago and even though it was a cheap trade paperback from 1973. 

Imagine my delight at the typography! That chapter heading typeface looks just like the font I used in junior high school shop class to make personalized stationery. It's kind of awful and wonderful, and harkens back to old school handwriting: the capital F, the capital L. 

I think it's either Coronet or Ribbon, thanks to What The Font, a nifty site where you can upload an image and it'll identify the typeface. 

Also, I did rather enjoy the description of golf, even if "greensward" is one word (not two):

In Langley, Virginia, it was mid-afternoon. Carstairs inserted the key into the lock of his office door and entered with a sigh of deep relief. He felt he had been excessively well-behaved today. He had risen at dawn, driven bumper-to-bumper to the golf club, awaited his turn in a milling crowd and played eighteen holes of golf under a humid, 90-degree sun. His doctor had told him the fresh air and exercise would rejuvenate him but instead he felt hot, irritable, and betrayed. To a man accustomed to deploying live human beings around the world he could think of nothing more idiotic than mindlessly pushing an inanimate ball around a green sward in the sun.

In Which Lung Cancer Meets A Birthday

Today is my sister’s birthday. She's pretty cute, eh?

More than 8 years ago, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. For the past 8 years, she has worked tirelessly on behalf of lung cancer research and advocacy. Among other things, she served as a patient representative to panels run by the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP).

What is the CDMRP? From its website:

The CDMRP originated in 1992 via a Congressional appropriation to foster novel approaches to biomedical research in response to the expressed needs of its stakeholders-the American public, the military, and Congress.

One of the specific and unusual aspects of the program is that they involve consumer advocates throughout the program cycle – that’s what my sister did for several program cycles.

She was even profiled on the CDMRP’s website (and/but you'll notice I had to go to the Internet Archive to find "her" page). What she said about her association with the CDMRP is:

The work is hard, especially for someone like me who lacks a scientific background. The opportunity, however, to participate in something so important makes all the hours spent sweating over the applications thoroughly worthwhile. I feel tremendous hope for the future when I get to see what the researchers are working on, and I am always honored and humbled to share a conference table with the brilliant scientists who are superheroes to me and my fellow patients. To be able to provide the patient perspective on proposed research is a gift that I cherish, and I take great pride in the work I have been able to do for the LCRP.

Besides the fact that it’s her birthday, why am I writing about this?

Because the current year’s budget for the CDMRP is about 43% of what it was last year, and lung cancer has been cut out altogether.

What kind of cancer kllls more people than any other, by a lot? LUNG CANCER.

If you feel up to it, please complain to your congressional representative. And if you have a few spare nickels, please consider a donation to Lungevity. Thanks.

In which we put our heads in the sand

The other day, I was rummaging around on the intertubes, and I landed on a TimesMachine page for a 1952 copy of the New York Times. What really intrigued me wasn't the newsy stuff on that page, the stuff I'd been looking for - but that on the lower right hand corner appeared a crossword puzzle! An edited by Margaret Farrar puzzle, from 1952.

Being a person who *really* likes doing the NYT puzzle every single day in pen, I grabbed the puzzle image and printed it out for my train ride home.

And man, it is HARD. It is larded with things I had to look up - like "Creator of Mr. Tutt" and "Governor of Hawaii" and "Senator from Tacoma". And it's full of uncommon (archaic) words like the answers to "Assumes presumptuously" and "Roasted" and "Splinter". And then there was the blasé generic "Actress from Germany". I did get "White House initials-to-be" right off the bat because that answer still turns up in current puzzles - though clued way differently (i.e. W.W. II hero who retired from the mil. to run for president or H.S.T.'s successor or Onetime White House inits.)

All in all, it was an entertaining and engaging exercise but I hope to not encounter a "Relative of the civet" or a "Two-year-old sheep" anytime soon.

If you'd like to try, here you go:

And the 2025 classic read is ...

Middlemarch. Yes, I've read it before - I read it in college for English 272, which was a survey class on some 19th century Brit Lit classics. (I still have the asssigned copy, which is why I know what specific class it was ... I wrote it inside the cover.)

But Middlemarch slithered into my consciousness because of that column in the New York Times Book Review called "By The Book" - a weekly interview with some author who has just published something. I skim it every week, and often it's too twee for words, but what I started to notice was how many people mentioned Middlemarch in response to a question.

• What books are on your night stand?
• What books are you embarrassed to admit you’ve never read?
• What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
• What’s the last great book you read?
• Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

Because this had come up in conversation, on Sunday, my sister texted me a picture of the 12/29/2024 book review because yes, Elda Rotor named Middlemarch as something she was embarrassed not to have read.

In a fit of something or other, I sat down at my computer and I methodically searched the Times website for the entirety of 2024, and located 51 of the 52 "By The Book"columns. There may have been one on 9/1/24 - but I couldn't surface it. And 11 times in 51 weeks, someone answered Middlemarch. That's 20 or 22% of the time! (Math is complicated because Robert Kagan gave Middlemarch as the answer to two different questions in the same interview.)  If you would like to see the fruits of my labors, I made a spreadsheet - it's here. 

This is a long way around to explain why I'm cracking Middlemarch open later.

War and Peace: COMPLETED

At the end of last year, I learned about a "slow read" of War and Peace. Something about the idea of reading a chapter a day intrigued me so I bought a used paperback, of the Louise & Aylmer Maude translation, and plunged in. 

For the most part, I did actually read a chapter a day, although there were a few moments when I got behind and caught up, or read ahead because it would fit better into my life. And let me tell you, War and Peace is a potboiler of an action-packed soap opera. That is, up until the second epilogue in which Leo gets all philosophical and stops talking about the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys. And Pierre. To be honest, I think just reading it straight through over, say, a month might have been better. I remember the experience of reading A Suitable Boy and feeling completely bereft at the end; I missed all of those people that I'd spent every evening in bed with. Taking an entire year to read War and Peace meant bite sized reading sessions - but also meant that by the end, I'd forgotten what happened at the beginning. Well, not really, there were a lot of parties at the beginning. 

Anyway - if you so desire - the slow read was under the auspices of one Simon Haisell, at Footnotes & Tangents. Every day, there's a group chat, and every week, Simon does a wrap up. And some kind soul provided merit badges for the end of every section. 

As for me?  I am damned happy to have read it, finished it, done the thing I set out to do. 

April 1st

Of course yes, it's April Fool's Day. It's also the birthday of Gil Scott-Heron (b. 1949), and the anniversary of the day that Singapore became a British crown colony (in 1867), and the date that then-President Richard Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act into law (in 1970), and when Google launched gmail (2004). And in 2009, my mother died. Fifteen years ago.

She sits beside me - in the books on my shelves, the objects hanging on the dining room walls, the roll top desk in the next room. Her plants are in my garden, a bottle of her perfume is on my dresser.

Last fall, my husband and I visited our daughter in the south of France. Shortly before our trip, my sister unearthed a small spiral bound notebook, with the notes my mother had taken when she took my siblings to the same general area in 1985. I scanned the whole thing and took it with us. It's a gem, and we are still quoting aloud from it. Taking that notebook with us was like having her along.

Cavaillon - the Hempstead of France

Here she is, hiding behind an urn, in 1985:

Moky as Gorey character

I miss her. But I am glad to have her around in the ways that I do.

In Which We Attempt That Baked Icing

I'm not going to lie: the spice cake with the baked icing intrigued me, because "baked icing". I had never heard of such a thing. But I am a person that owns two copies of The Joy of Cooking, 1953 and 1975, so I pulled them out and sure enough, both editions had a baked icing recipe.

The Joy of Cooking, 1953

The Joy of Cooking, 1975

How about that language change around the addition of cocoa? In 1953, cocoa varies the flavor, but in 1975 it provides an exciting new taste!

I made Mrs. Wright's recipe more or less as written, and while it was okay, I don't think I'll do it again - mostly because it's hella sweet. The icing is interesting though - it's essentially a baked meringue topping, spread thinly and baked long enough that it's brittle. Also - it's fragile and a little tricky to get out of the pan - it would probably be best baked in a loose bottomed pan.

If you want to try it, here's a slightly tweaked version of Mrs. Wright's recipe. (I used butter and yogurt in place of shortening and soured milk, added ginger, and left off the nuts.)

SPICE CAKE WITH BAKED ICING

• 1/2 cup softened butter (1 stick) 
• 1 cup brown sugar 
• 1 egg + 1 egg yolk 
• 1 1/2 cups flour 
• 1/4 t. salt 
• 1/2 t. cinnamon 
• 1/2 t. ground ginger 
• 1/2 t. ground cloves 
• 1/2 cup yogurt (not greek)

Preheat oven to 350° F. Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and egg yolk; beat well. In a separate bowl, stir together all dry ingredients. Add flour mixture to the butter/sugar/egg, alternately with the yogurt.

Spread into a greased & floured pan (1 8" square, or two loaf pans). Use a parchment sling, or a loose bottomed pan, if you want to be able to get the cake out of the pan in one piece.

• 1 egg white 
• pinch of salt 
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

Beat egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Mix in the salt and brown sugar. Gently spread this meringue on top of the batter. Bake 30-35 minutes. Cool on a rack for 10 minutes, and then gently move the cake to a serving plate.