Mother’s Day
An AT&T ad for long-distance calling, May 12, 1967.
Orange Crate Art
Trump punctuation
“ ‘It is my understanding that he liked to use the Oxford comma,’ she added.”
David Shapiro (1947–2024)
Quoth the raven: I am language. I am language, And nothing in language is strange, to me.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Advice column.”
Another try at a Pinboard bookmarklet
I asked ChatGPT to write a bookmarklet that would add a URL to Pinboard and paste in text copied from the clipboard as a description. And it works.
“Decline by 9”
In “Not Lost in a Book” (Slate ), Dan Kois writes about a decline in children’s reading.
NYRB Nancy
You know the end times are upon us when New York Review Books puts out a Nancy collection.
First!
In Cicadaville.
Mystery actor
That’s Johnny Roventini (“Call for Philip Morris”) in the background, above a display of upside-down Chesterfield packs. But who’s in the foreground?
Travel
From Glory.
A hidden figure?
From The Spiral Staircase (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946). I can’t decide if the vaguely human form at the center of the screen is meant to suggest a person, lurking, or not. All I know is that it scared the bejesus out of me.
Exile and pleats
From Glory.
The secret comics of plants
At Oscar’s Day : Do plants get Nancy?
“____ no!”
“No” with an expletive attached should be the response of every American voter to Donald Trump in November.
John Mulaney, sardinista
John Mulaney travels with three cans of King Oscar sardines . Says Mulaney, “You don’t know what you’re gonna encounter out there.”
In Esperantoville
Conspiracy (dir. Lew Landers, 1939) is set in an unnamed European nation whose language is Esperanto.
“Adoration” (Price, arr. Fine)
A video of a beautiful performance.
How to improve writing (no. 121)
It makes better sense to arrange the elements in order of their severity.
One series, eleven movies
Where the Sidewalk Ends and others.
Laptop speaking
I opened my laptop and a message in the center of the screen began reading itself aloud: “Hello, Michael. Mr. Eisenhower” — or was it Adenauer? — “has been waiting patiently for you. He is interested not in injecting the incredible but in removing it.”
Apostrophes, missing
From the BBC: “North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs.”
Sluggo’s perspective
In Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, Sluggo draws with perspective.
Car trouble
Car trouble in East Harlem, found by chance.
Salvage FTTW
At a salvage-grocery store, great tea cheap.
A streaming “Adoration”
Elaine Fine’s arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration,” streaming tonight from Juilliard.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Gym ball.”
Word of the day: oaktag
What it is, and where the word comes from.
“One hundred and one psychopaths”
From Pressure Point (dir. Hubert Cornfield, 1962), now streaming in the Criterion Channel feature Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind.
“Oh God! How beautiful!”
In the aftermath of my cataract surgery, my friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing” (1974). In it Dillard recounts several case histories from Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation (1960), a study of people who were able to see for the first time after the removal of congenital cataracts.
Third Birds
In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes about attention and the Order of the Third Bird.