You Know How to Eat a Blog? Just Push It Into Your Mouth Until It's Gone.

I saw the 1947 noirish pot-boiler The Lady from Shanghai recently. It contains the following soft-boiled dialogue between Rita Hayworth (as Rosalie Bannister) and Orson Welles (as Irishman Michael O’Hara).

Rosalie: [What if] I don’t know how to shoot?
O’Hara: It’s easy. You just pull the trigger.

This brought to mind the genuinely hard-boiled dialogue from 1944’s To Have and to Have Not wherein Lauren Bacall elevates Humphrey Bogart’s heart rate:

You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow.

To complete the trifecta, I just read here that during a 1939 visit to the U.S., Queen Elizabeth was presented with a hot dog. Unsure of how to proceed, she asked Franklin D. Roosevelt for directions.

Queen Elizabeth: How do you eat it?
FDR: Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone.

The queen chose to go with a knife and fork.

Photo of Queen Elizabeth and Eleanor Roosevelt from UPI.

Does Jay Walker Give Out Library Cards?

What makes a satisfying home library? Books, obviously, but one must have the right KIND of books. And even then, a huge library built of mere paperbacks is an unsatisfactory thing. One needs an agreeable ratio of hardbacks, first editions, limited print runs, and signed copies to make the paperbacks palatable.
Sprinkling in interesting artifacts can also enhance a book collection, giving it that neo-museum vibe. With this in mind, take a gander at Jay Walker's library. As an insanely wealthy Internet entrepreneur (he founded websites like Priceline.com) Walker could afford to have his library built to exacting specifications. For example, if you look above, you can see that his library has an original Sputnik 1 satellite hanging from the rafters. Nice.

Steven Levy got to write up Walker's library for Wired, (lucky rotter!), and his tour covers all three levels and 3,600 feet of Walker's jewel-embossed books, historical tomes, and first editions from the first printing presses. La biblioteca has more esoteric ephemera too, like a “framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II.”
I'd happily settle just for this reading alcove. Toward the window, that’s not a book, it’s a sculpture. Foreground: Andrea Cellarius's hand-painted celestial atlas (1660). If that's too old school for you, check out the technology corner.
Electronica:
One Laptop per Child XO (far left)
RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100
1911 typewriting machine and 1909 Kent radio (back)
Nazi-era Enigma code machine (contraption in center)
Johannes Trithemius' 1518 Polygraphiae (left of it)
Apple II motherboard (right)
Edison kinetoscope next to 1890 Edison phonograph (w/ wax cylinders)
IBM processor, circa 1960 (tube technology!)

If there is an unbecoming slobbering subtext to this blog entry, my apologies. I suppose I should be content with my own books, slightly rare and otherwise. After all, my guess is that just as I don't own any Andrea Cellarius, neither does Jay Walker have some of the titles in MY collection.

The Man in the Cape

Since at least one U.S. presidential candidate seems to have super-powers, let’s check in with the last president who had the guts to wear a cape in public.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (pictured here at the 1945 Crimean Conference) was known to drape a cape around his shoulders, and somehow he did so with style. This is partly due to FDR’s innate savoir faire, but perhaps can also be credited to the fact that his mom made him wear a dress until he was five. (This was a common clothing choice for young boys in the 19th century.)

Photo from the Library of Congress. My sources are here.