"Quarts" Countertops Through Angie's List

Sigh.

A recent kitchen remodeling offering from Angie's provided another example of a failing educational system or a desperate need for enhancing grammar/spellchecking software utilities.  High end kitchens may use granite or quartz, but "quarts"?

A perfunctory web search to see if a recent kitchen upgrade trend had escaped my notice produced only links to quartz countertops.  So someone can't spell, or  someone doesn't give a rip, or there is a vast right-wing/left-wing/radical religious/other-to-be-named-later) conspiracy at work.

The reviews may be trustworthy, but the proof-reading is not.

CNN carried a video of Senator John McCain telling the host, Jake Tapper, "Every life has to end one way or another." adding a quote whose author he thought it was a playwright, "I always knew that no one could live forever, but I thought there might be one exception."

Well, what is the Internet for?  It was probably William Saroyan: "Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case."

I wonder if Saroyan's most famous book, "The Human Comedy" is still read in grade schools?  From what I remember many writers felt that Saroyan was unfairly neglected compared to other writers of his era, e.g. Hemingway or Faulkner..

I was reading a a copy of "Hollywood" by Garson Kanin, fished  from one of the piles of books with which my house is decorated when I came across a section about Marshall Nielan in a chapter devoted to "The Great Profile", John Barrymore.

I don't believe I'd ever heard the Nielan's name before, but was intrigued as Kanin described Nielan's Bits of Life as the funniest film he'd ever seen.  So it was quick to IMDB with this depressing result:

Toilets

"So," he said, "How's your day been?"

It's not quite a rhetorical question, but I paused before I answered: "This will give you an idea:  I've been looking at toilets for the last hour and a half."

Backstory: I was preparing a lesson on using dynamic blocks in AutoCAD modeled after an online tutorial which used toilets.  (Dynamic blocks can be thought of as a stack of objects with only the top object being visible.)

The tutorial used several types of toilets which the narrator implied were available, but the installation of AutoCAD I used had one suitable toilet block.  To get more, I downloaded a ZIP file of toilet drawings from Kohler.

To make the lesson easier for the class I looked for toilets with shapes different enough to be easily distinguishable.  This probably will not come as a surprise to anyone who's renovated a bathroom, but aside from color, a lot of toilets look very much alike.  so as I was plowing through hundreds of drawings it struck me that I must be looking at a duplicate.  Sure enough the drawing I just looked like looked like another one I'd seen about a minute before.  I did an A-B comparison to see if there was a difference.  Here's the video:

There's a small difference in the diameter of the bolt holes for the seat.

I imagine that someone needed the larger/smaller bolt holes to accommodate the demands of feng shui.  ("Oh no! It's all wrong!   The smaller holes will ruin everything for the toilets pointing north.)  What may be more depressing is that there must be people whose job depends on not only knowing the difference between models of toilets, but remembering the tagline for each.  Of course there must be toilets which "reflect your good taste", but are there toilets which make a bathroom happier or more inviting?

Barbara Allen/Barbry Ellen/Tecumseh Valley

I was listening to Meg Baird Sing "Barbry Ellen" (about 3½ minutes into the link below) when I was struck by the similarity of her version with Townes Van Zandt's "Tecumseh Valley". Her treatment of "Sweet William on his death bed lay
For love of Barbara Allen.
reminds me of Tecumseh Valley's
"The name she gave was Caroline
Daughter of a miner"
I'll pester one of the music instructors when school is back in session to see if I'm close.