WNEW jingles

“Nice things happen to people who listen to radio eleven-three-oh in the metropolitan area”: just one assertion from almost nine minutes of WNEW jingles. I’m realizing only now how much of this stuff has stuck from my kidhood in “the metropolitan area.”

My favorites: “It’s springtime in New York” and “Nice things.”

A related post
Five radios

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Oh Kosmos! Ah Ireland!

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

It is a minor but abiding happiness to know that I am not a quarter-Irish but half-Irish. A cousin did the research just a few years ago. Yes, our grandmother’s people came over from England, as my dad had been told. But what that meant was that they sailed to the States from England (Liverpool). They were Irish. Ah Ireland! Represent! Partly!

Fred Rogers and Pittsburgh

From an article on Fred Rogers and Pittsburgh, seven years after Rogers’ death and two years after PBS stopped offering Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as a daily show (shame on you, PBS):

In November, WQED, the local public television station here, decided to reinstall the Neighborhood of Make-Believe set at its studio where Mr. Rogers filmed his show from 1968 to 2001, with the intention that a couple of hundred people might show up to reminisce. Instead, a line stretched down the sidewalk, and more than 5,000 people over two days took the tour.

Read more:

Sean D. Hamill, Pittsburgh Keeps Alive the Legacy of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (New York Times)

One bright note: PBS has online a handful of excerpts and complete shows. Go to PBS KIDS, and navigate through the Flash until you find a list of shows. The Neighborhood offerings include two complete operas, Spoon Mountain and Windstorm in Bubbleland (here called Neighborhood Opera).

Related posts
Blaming Mister Rogers
“The Essay Writing Song”
Lady Elaine’s can (with a comment from Betty Aberlin!)

A man and a moon

A well-dressed man and a moon, at work for their respective employers, Savvi Formalwear and the Moonrise Hotel, on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Happiness and joy

What’s the difference?

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

J.D. Salinger, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” in Nine Stories (1953)

Related posts
A Salinger catalogue
A Salinger sentence
Another Salinger catalogue
“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”

Pockets and purses

A New York Times slideshow: the contents of pockets and purses.

Artists’ lists

A display of artists’ lists, from the Smithsonian — inventories, thoughts, to-dos. Alas, every image that’s large enough to read has a large repeating watermark that interferes with reading. So what’s the point? Bad move, Smithsonian.

π Day

Seeing the Google logo reminded me: it’s π Day. Recommended reading: “The Mountains of Pi,” Richard Preston's 1992 New Yorker profile of David and Gregory Chudnovsky, calculators of π.

Marcel Proust, running coach

My daughter Rachel reports that the Los Angeles garage where she parked before running a 5K race had a framed quotation from Marcel Proust atop its ticket-dispensing machine. Something about kicking butt and taking charge. Was it this passage, I asked?

[O]ur worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 344.

It was! This passage appears in the Orange Crate Art sidebar, under the heading “Words to Live By.” What great words to stumble upon on the way to a race.

I’m very proud of my daughter. And my son. I’m not proud of the pun one paragraph back.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

“ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE,” $35.00

A reader wondered in a comment how much “ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE” cost back in 1915. Here’s the answer, more or less:



[From the Library of Congress’s Catalogue of Copyright Entries (1913). Via Google Books.]

In an essay in The Oxford History of English Lexicography (ed. A. P. Cowie, 2009), Sidney I. Landau says that the selling strategy behind the New Standard Dictionary “might be summarized as, ‘Give them more for less,’ i.e. increase the coverage of vocabulary and package the book so that it can be sold cheaply.”