EXchange names on screen
There’s always a directory around when you need one, big enough to fill the screen.
Orange Crate Art
Separated at birth
Donald Wolfit and Christopher Guest.
“Dan Duryea is my executive producer!!”
Zippy and film noir.
A “conversation” with a chatbot
I’ve had it with thinking about chatbots as part of the world I want to live in.
Gentleman ?
Never for reference to a mass murderer.
Mystery actor
Looking very young.
Recently updated
A 1922 ad for mail-order pharamaceuticals from O.B. Rude Drug Co.
Valentine’s Day
Snoopy and Woodstock.
Valentine’s Day
A heart amulet.
Changing jobs
“Is it too late to work for Hi & Lois?”
Jury doody
“Over 100 people are calling this number, so you may experience busy signals,” the summons said. “Please be patient and try again.”
NBC, sheesh
“Radar anomoly.”
The Harlem Branch Y
As in Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.”
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Getaways that go without saying.”
A Caedmon drawing and anecdote
A drawing from a record cover, an anecdote from Ron Padgett.
Cubist pencil
“Round, having a novel finish of small squares in assorted colors,” says the advertisement. From 1914.
Bacharach interpreters
An impromptu list, tilting toward jazz.
The midwestern sublime
The midwestern sublime is composed of equal parts vast muddy fields and vast grey skies, as seen from a car on a two-lane rural route.
Errand, errant
I wondered: could errand and errant be related? Isn’t a knight errant, roving about, kinda like on an errand sort of, maybe?
Rebecca Black’s Thursday
With a call for papers on “Friday.”
Ronald Blythe (1922–2022)
Author of Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village.
EXchange names on screen
From This Gun for Hire and Shortcut to Hell.
Twelve movies
Crime and Punishment U.S.A. and others.
IPS e-mail scam
Don’t be fooled.
Edwin who?
What can ChatGPT tell us about Edwin Mullhouse, of Steven Millhauser’s novel Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright ?
Arnold Hasselstrom
A disobedient boy.
ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
ChatGPT has difficulty distinguishing “in the style of” from a hazy idea of subject matter. And ChatGPT assumes that almost all poets write in quatrains of iambic tetrameter, with clumsy rhymes and inspirational messages.
Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry
1983: “If you could accurately enter your whole life into a computer without leaving the minutest fact out, then the computer could possess a chance of becoming artistic. But even then the computer would have to be considered the protégé of its programmer. For now, computers may be profitably used as electronic thesauri, as servants to the new craft of electronic poetry-writing. As far as the art of poetry is concerned, computers will have to wait.” Still true.
O.B. Rude Drug Co.
A Norwegian pharmacy in Brooklyn.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Get the 411, once.”