Daily Office: Monday

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This week’s rather shaky images were taken on the Fourth of July from the rooftop of a building in Chelsea where a good friend of ours lives. The weather was awful, and it didn’t take long for the fireworks to disappear into the clouds of their own smoke. My photographs, therefore, are to be viewed as studies in impressionist color.  

Morning

¶ Lift: Now that Kathleen has her very own personal computer (her first, amazingly; until now, her laptops have always been the property of a law firm), and now that we have conquered the Wi-Fi problem (I didn’t say that!), my dear wife has been discovering all sorts of things online, among them a whimsical New Yorker cover that might have been, by Bob Staake.

Noon

¶ Clock: I’m a sucker for gizmos like the World Clock, which whir along fantastically if somewhat meaninglessly. What kind of triumph will it be if the number of items of email spam exceeds the number of dollars of US debt?

Night

¶ Mad ! Following a link from kottke.org, I came across a blog devoted to Mad Men. It’s called A Basket of Kisses, and it comes from “the highly creative, occasionally obsessive computers of Roberta and Deborah Lipp.”Oremus…

Morning, cont’d

§ Lift. I was so idle yesterday that I’m exhausted. I did nothing but read newspapers and magazines for the entire day, and it left me feeling rather like a passenger on the Axiom. Reading magazines was of course preferable dipping into the two hornbooks on CSS that I bought on Saturday morning, the better to mount Civil Pleasures on good foundations.

Really, I think that I shall have to take today off! Whatever that might mean.

Noon, cont’d

§ Clock. Thanks to Fossil Darling for the link. When I was a kid, there were two things that I loved about gas stations: the smell of gasoline itself, and the magical ability of the pump to correlate the number of gallons flowing through the hose to the cost of the fill-up. The pumps were entirely mechanical in those days, with digits ticking by on enameled wheels.

Night, cont’d

§ Mad! The new season starts in a few weeks, and Kathleen and I are set to review last season’s shows right before. Knowing me, I’ll forget all about it until the last minute.

I see that Jon Hamm stars in two movies that are currently in post-production. Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu.