Pure Food

On Flatbush Avenue, there was a Yankee Diner. South on Flatbush, a pizzeria and spaghetti house with a not especially interesting tax photograph. But go north, turn the corner onto Avenue U, and there’s still more food. And it’s pure. Pure Food: that really was the restaurant’s name, as the 1940 telephone directory makes clear.

[4212 Avenue U, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Also in the 1940 Brooklyn directory: Pure Carbonic Inc., Pure Coal Co., Pure Dairy Products, Pure Food Cafeteria, Pure Food Coffee Shoppe, Pure Food Store, Pure Food Stores, Pure Hand Laundry, Pure Home Made Products Co., M.M. Pure, Pure Oil Co., Pure White Laundry, Pure White Laundry Service, and Pure Wine Co.

The two men in uniform must have had some connection to Floyd Bennett Field, a now-defunct airfield then used by the United States Coast Guard and Navy. It’s not the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but still, I feel a song coming on.


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

“Not American Enough”

From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

On Thursday, August 27, Tolouse Olorunnipa reported on the attempts of Republican lawmakers to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office. In several states, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to cut those Americans out of candidacy for elected positions, while in Congress, at least five Republicans have called for prohibiting them from federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, ambassadorships, and congressional seats.

The push has come in the wake of the rise of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and other naturalized U.S. citizens whose policy positions those like South Carolina representative Nancy Mace consider un-American. These policies are, of course, the ones voters elected people like Mamdani to put into place. In her comments to Olorunnipa, Mace said: “This isn’t personal. It’s about what standard we want for the people entrusted with enormous power over the American people.”

Her word choice was revealing. Our elected officials are entrusted with the enormous power of the American people, not over them.

Here’s a gift link to Toluse Olorunnipa’s Atlantic article: “Not American Enough.”

Arts & Letters Daily?

Has Arts & Letters Daily taken any notice of the death of Dolly Parton? No, of course not.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, had me baffled at many points. I’m just going to honest here. I’m not that informed on 1-A, eight letters, “South Carolina symbol.” I ended up switching from a printed puzzle to an online version and figuring out a handful of tough spots with autocorrect flagging my mistakes.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, letters, “Old-fashioned, technically.” Nicely worded.

11-D, three letters, “Animal in a garnish etymology.” I see it there, but I can’t claim to understand why it’s there.

21-D, three letters, “Dishware arrived there in 2026.” I knew it had to be that there.

22-A, three letters, “JFK predecessor.” Kinda perverse. My first thought was DDE. My second was “What was the code for Idlewild?” I think this clue plays a bit unfairly with the meaning of predecessor.

32-D, three letters, “Thousands of Athenians.” I know what the answer means, but I have no idea what this answer means. Now I do.

33-A, six letters, “Hardly a family man.” Aw, come on.

40-A, three letters, “Yellow belly.” Isn’t it spelled with four letters — wuss ?

48-A, four letters, “Arian intro.” Fun if you know about Arianism, but I doubt that was the intent here.

60-A, eight letters, “Lack of ice?” Clever.

My favorites in this puzzle are the two answers that cross at the center: 8-D, fifteen letters, “It’s unreal” and 34-A, thirteen letters, “False response from AI.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Arranged by Elaine Fine

Tonight on PBS’s Great Performances , a Vienna Philharmonic Sommernachtskonzert [Summer Night Concert] that includes Elaine’s orchestral arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration.”

Wie cool ist das denn?

A previous post
The Vienna Philharmonic to play Florence Price’s “Adoration” (arr. Elaine Fine) (With links that tell the “Adoration” story)

Stenography

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Here’s an article about Dickens and stenography, complete with charts of arbitrary characters from Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy (1825), the manual Dickens would have used: Hugo Bowles’s “Stenography and Orality in Dickens: Rethinking the Phonographic Myth” (Dickens Studies Annual ). Alas, no arbitrary characters for expectation and disadvantageous , which may be Dickens’s inventions.

You can see the 1778 edition of Brachygraphy (with the first chapter of Genesis and other texts in shorthand) via HathiTrust.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

MarkText

[Click for a larger view.]

“A true WYSIWYG editor — your Markdown transforms in place the moment you type. No split view, no toggling”: MarkText is a free Markdown editor for macOS, Windows, and Linux. With many themes. That’s Everforest Dark above.

I’m loyal to iA Writer and Byword, but I’m always happy to find a stylish Markdown app.

[Markdown is several thousand times easier to learn than stenography.]

SHAME

A new mnemonic: Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, Erie. SHAME.

*

I see now that other people thought of this mnemonic before I did. I hereby charge them with anticipatory plagiarism.

Oceans 47

The current occupant, just now:

“So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change ’em both.”

The only question in response: why do things like this to an ally? Because, he said, Canadians are “nasty people.”

I wish someone had pressed: but why oceans? Surely they matter to many other nations too. When you will be making these decisions? And how will you choose the names? They can’t both be the American Ocean. And why haven’t you renamed the Strait of Hormuz?

I think journalists would do well to ask straight-faced questions about these absurdities. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, “Don’t hide the madness.”

[Context: the occupant has renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America.]

Car bars

Elaine and I were headed toward Staples when we noticed two women parked in front of the store, struggling to fit a swiveling task chair into the back of a BMW. “Do you need a hand?” I asked, having had some experience fitting similar chairs into similar spaces.

They did need a hand, but not in the way I had assumed. They had the rear seats folded down and were trying to figure out how to remove the bar behind those seats so that they could slide the chair all the way in. One was looking at the BMW owner’s manual, which offered the tersest guidance: “Press the release button.” Which would be where, exactly? Four of us looked at the bar, both ends, and none of us could figure it out.

A fifth person was on her way into Staples. I figured I'd ask if she knew how to remove the bar. She had no idea. A man was on his way into Staples. He too had no idea. We all stood around.

It was sheer luck that one of BMW women did something — what? — and the bar popped out, and two of us pushed the chair in.

This afternoon Elaine and I looked at our new vehicle, a hybrid Toyota RAV4, to see if we could figure out its bar. And we did, but it’s a much less intuitive bar than the bar in our now-gone 2010 Prius. The RAV4 bar is called a luggage cover, though I think that name should more properly apply to the cover that pulls out from the bar to hide worldly possessions.

I like our RAV4 — a lot, really a lot — but everything about it is less intuitive. I’ve yet to look up the Hold button in the thick manual, even thicker, I think, than the BMW’s.

[RAV4 ? It means “Recreational Active Vehicle with 4-wheel drive.” Apple Dictation and Slide to Type both rendered the name correctly the first time out. God knows what a RAV4 will cost with higher tariffs.]