Thom Yorke and his teachers

At “a posh private boys’ school full of assholes,” Thom Yorke’s art teacher and music teacher told him that they could see something in what he was doing:

“You don't realize until after how important that is. I’m absolutely convinced that if both those kind men — if they had not done that, I wouldn’t be here today doing this. Convinced.”

“Have you ever thought about where you might have ended up if that hadn’t —?”

“God no.”

Thom Yorke was Lauren Laverne’s guest on the BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs in 2019. The episode is available through May 31.

A pencil runs for governor

NPR reports that in Oregon Pencil, a pencil, is running for governor. And there’s a website: pencil4gov.com.

“Father” is best

From the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey :

Antinous to Telemachus: “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard.”

Telemachus, in what sounds like a reply: “My dad is coming home.”

Daddy? Dad? Really? He’s the goddam paterfamilias!

There’s nothing wrong with bringing Homer into vivid contemporary English (as, say, Stanley Lombardo does), but that English has to sound right. “Daddy” and “dad,” to my ear, don’t.

In Homer’s poem, Telemachus calls his father πατὴρ (patēr), “father.” He calls the swineherd Eumaeus ᾰ̓́ττᾰ (atta), which also means “father.” In Lombardo’s translation, Telemachus calls Eumaeus “Papa” — a wonderful way to mark the swineherd as Odysseus-like (a royal son and displaced person), countrified, and grandfatherly. (Lombardo’s Telemachus calls Odysseus “Father,” of course.) The Phaeacian princess Nausicaa addresses her father Alcinous as πάππα (pappa). Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles, and Lombardo all bring that in English as “Daddy,” which seems appropriate for a teenaged daughter asking to borrow the car(t). Robert Fitzgerald has more fun with the word: his Nausicaa addresses her “dear Papà.”

But Telemachus’s Odysseus? That’s his father, not his dad. And I can’t imagine even the surliest suitor using the word “daddy.”

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard) : Whose Homer?

[Anyone who’s seen O Brother, Where Art Thou? will recognize a borrowing in this post.]

Your guys’s

We saw three people dressed for their prom strolling the aisles of Five Below, amusing themselves and others.

“I like your guys’s sense of fun,” I said. Pronounced /'gī-ziz/. I was surprised to hear myself saying that. But it fit the occasion.

The Thomas’ carriage rides on

I am pleased to see that the horse-drawn carriage (coach and four) that once appeared on packages of Thomas’ English Muffins still appears on Thomas’ trailers, or at least one of those trailers. You’ll have to take my word for it: I was driving.

The coach and four disppeared from the package several years ago: Thomas’ missing carriage.

[Thomas’ spells its name without an s after the apostrophe.]

The pickle turns

[351 East 61st Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Neither a horseradish and pickle company nor a wood turner would find much of a welcome on East 61st Street today, even if they agreed to share the same building.

Capt. Post advertised in the Stewards Manual (Stewards Association of New York City) as early as 1904. In 1921 the business was incorporated. The Captain is listed in Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder’s The Pickled City: A Biography of New York Pickles (2026), a work that lists an astonishing number of New York pickle makers.

[A 1904 advertisement.]

[The New York Times, February 22, 1921.]

[The Spice Mill, February 1921.]

[The masthead.]

Max Deutsch was working as a wood turner and twister as early as 1931, when he was listed in American Lumberman, and as late as 1953, when he was listed in the Industrial Directory of New York State.

I like the Captain’s awning: “CAPT. POST [?] & PICKLE COMPANY.” Maybe an H filled that space? Notice too the graffiti, the Deutsch sign, the MYERS who also worked in wood, the man carrying — what?, and the Italian-American grocery store. Thanks, Brian, for noticing this building. Its neighbors stand, but it’s now gone.

See also the Home of Piccalilli and the Hungarian Pickle Works.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Mother’s Day and Mothers’ Day

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day” — with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural — actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society.

And the story follows.

Happy Mother’s Day and Mothers’ Day to all.

[Wikipedia: Howe’s “Mothers’ Day for Peace” was meant to be observed on June 2.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, easy going. This puzzle might be a good one for someone wanting to try their hand at solving a Newsday Saturday. With 1-D, three letters, “Mobile utility” crossing 13-A, five letters, “___ al Ajillo (garlicky entree),” I started (for once) in the upper left corner and went from there.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

14-D, nine letters, “2020s’ youthful ‘zero reaction.’” I have to admit that I find it refreshing to encounter something different. “Is that a Tilley hat?!” It wasn’t, but we had a fun conversation about hats.

16-A, ten letters, “Screen’s space savers.” This clue can’t be about patching holes in window screens, can it?

19-A, six letters, “Hamlet’s dagger.” I’m not sure if it’s meant as the giveaway I think it is.

27-D, ten letters, “Pandowdy cousin.” I have my seventh-grade English teacher to think for this answer, which was part of the joke he made again and again of the name of a girl in the class. This teacher also had fake stairs down pat.

32-D, four letters, “___ a primera vista.” At a glance, I misread this clue as asking for the name of a dish.

35-D, eight letters, “Velvety milk drinks.” The ways in which simple ingredients can be combined to make things that bear different names always has me looking slightly askance.

36-A, five letters, “Woman of Canadian extraction.” I must be on Matthew Sewell’s wavelength.

37-D, six letters, “Encyclopedia Brown, enduringly.” I got on an EB kick as a grownup, as these posts will attest.

41-A, five letters, “Bandleader autograph with a pentagram.” Oh — of course.

44-A, thirteen letters, “Unplanned minor meetings.” I found the start of this answer cleverly misleading, but I’m not sure that I was supposed to.

48-D, five letters, “Whom Woolf praised with ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.’” Yes, Virginia. My snark inspired by David Markson.

56-A, ten letters, “Unwritten endorsement.” Well, it might be written, kinda, or have been written, at some point, maybe, in the past, at least in a manner of speaking, no pun intended.

58-D, three letters, “What the tennis US Open is played on.” I don’t like cluing this answer in this way, even if I see it right away.

63-A, three letters, “LFB’s putative Wizard inspiration.” Got it, but I had to look it up to understand.

My favorite in this puzzle: 25-A, thirteen letters, “Soft numbers.” Because the clue sounds to me like the title of a John Ashbery poem.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A day in the life of a failing democracy

I think I learn more about what’s happening in our country from one installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American than from an hour or more of televised news. And there’s no need for anyone to say “Look at this.”

Mental acuity

Via Aaron Rupar:

“What’s going on with Marty Makary?”

“Nothing much. He’s [doing?] fine.”

“Are you going to fire him?”

“Uh, I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it.”

It’s been widely reported that the current occupant is planning to fire Marty Makary, the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)