The Cartoon

Well, the old couch is no more. When I left for work yesterday morning just before 8 a.m., it was still sitting on the sidewalk in front of the house. I called the council's large item disposal office when I got to the library about half an hour later, and asked if they were coming to collect it that day. There was some hemming and hawing and keyboarding, and then the woman said, "This shows it's been collected. It was picked up at 8:02 a.m."

So literally minutes after I left they must have shown up. That's great. We didn't have to look like the Beverly Hillbillies all day.

Otherwise, yesterday was busy but uneventful. I did get some texts saying my UK passport application was accepted and it's been printed and is on its way back to me. Woo hoo!

Oh, and I got a funny call from an 80-something-year-old author who was trying to track down a New Yorker cartoon from decades ago. She wanted to include the cartoon in an upcoming book and she knew she'd need copyright permission, but she didn't have enough information to approach the company and ask. She only had a vague memory of what it said and a belief that it ran some time in the mid-1960's.

This woman wasn't affiliated with our school but she called us because she thought it likely we'd have a New Yorker subscription. We would have, a couple of years ago, but we cut it from the library budget. We still get it electronically through our e-book provider but that doesn't include online archives. We do have all the old issues through about 2000 on CD-ROM, though, so I told her I'd try to help.

My boss and I tried to search the CDs, which of course are antiquated technology and turned out to require some special program that we didn't have and which wasn't even compatible with our modern Macs. I was also skeptical we'd be able to search cartoon captions. So we abandoned the CDs.

Instead, when I got home, I logged in with my personal subscription and went to the online archives. And lo and behold, I found the cartoon! It appeared in 1977, not the mid-60's, and this is it:

I'm not sure why she is fixated on this particular cartoon, but one person's hilarious cartoon is another person's head-scratcher. Anyway, I sent it to her, and I haven't heard back yet but I was pretty freaking proud of myself. (Credit really goes to The New Yorker for having such well-indexed archives. All I needed to do was search for the word "truthity," which the author remembered, and it popped right up. Captions are searchable after all!)

On the way home from work I stopped at Waitrose and bought...

...two exotic little Portuguese dessert cakes. (That's mine above. Dave got the other one, of course.) I'd never seen these before but they were good -- white cakes with lemon filling and lemony icing, made at least partly from rice flour. They were like a triple hybrid of vanilla cupcake, rice pudding and lemon meringue pie. I'd buy them again!

(Top photo: A sticker on Finchley Road.)