a toast to the professor

Because it's Tolkien's birthday, obviously. What isn't obvious is that I'm going to deal with some leftover New Year's stuff, rapidly going stale in the fridge. (And that metaphor actually reminds me that there's something I intended to throw out from there but forgot.)

At the New Year's Eve party, I found at least two other people besides myself who were there without spouses who were home sick. (B. is rapidly improving now, thanks.) For the food table, I made a dish which proved to be of a unique kind among the offerings, a fruit salad. I had to label it to make sure folks got the current-events pun:

What kind of salad am I?
I'm Peach-Mint

Yes, that's a real thing and I found a recipe online. Other ingredients, mozzarella cheese, lemon juice, a little honey.

It's still such a novelty to return to the era in which more works entered the public domain every Jan. 1, an event that once passed completely without remark, that people are making lists. This year the works are those of 1924. Here's some of the good work entering the public domain, and, for something different, here's a list of the crap.

The last item on the list of crap, a movie titled Sandra, rang a bell. I checked and sure enough, it makes an appearance in the children's fantasy Half Magic by Edward Eager, as the movie the book's four children go to see in the chapter where Martha, the youngest, uses the magic charm to become half-invisible. The movie doesn't get a good review here either:

When they came into the theater Barbara LaMarr in Sandra had already reached its middle, and the children couldn't figure out exactly what was happening. But then neither could the rest of the audience. ... The four children did not grasp any of it, but Barbara LaMarr had lots of hair and great big eyes, and when strong men wanted to kiss her and she pushed them away and made suffering faces at the audience with her eyebrows, Jane and Katharine thought it was thrilling, and probably quite like the way life was, when you were grown-up. ... Martha hated it.

I put this in the article's comments section and got some tickled responses from other old-time Eager fans.