Steve Soboroff’s typewriters

Steve Soboroff likes typewriters. And there’s a slide show.

LAX English

I found this jotting in a notebook, words that I heard or read at LAX last fall: “Please maintain visual contact with your personal property at all times.”

Simpler: “Watch your bags — always.”

From eleven words to four, from nineteen syllables to five. Is anything missing?

[If I saw a sign with these words, I’d have photographed it, no doubt. So I must have heard an announcement on the PA system.]

Recipes I stopped reading

<read>

3/4 cup reduced fat peanut butter
1 cup light corn syrup

</read>

Previously on Orange Crate Art
Another recipe I stopped reading

[This one’s from a box of Grape-Nuts.]

Gmail is down

Gmail appears to be down for many. Down for Everyone or Just Me says that it’s not just me. Google’s past-hour results for gmail suggest a widespread problem. Trying to sign into an account, failing, and clicking on Gmail’s link to Show Detailed Technical Info results in the following detailed technical info:

You can now type numeric code 93 into the search engine of your choice and find that many others are asking what “Numeric Code: 93” means. I think what it means is that Gmail, for now, is down.

12:40 p.m.: It’s back, at least for me.

Obvious typos

A recent Google search: hot to email professor. A typo? Must be a typo.

Another recent search: note to professor for missing class for birthday. And another bit of carelessness: typing birthday for surgery or trip to present paper at conference, I’m not sure which.

Both searches led seekers of wisdom and truth to my post on how — not hot — to e-mail a professor.

[With apologies to Frank Loesser.]

Introverts of academe

William Pannapacker on extroversion, introversion, and academic life: Screening Out the Introverts (Chronicle of Higher Education).

Best drugstore in the movies?

Tension (1949, dir. John Berry) is a great film noir, with Richard Basehart as the cuckolded pharmacist Warren Quimby and Audrey Totter as his three- or four- or five-timing wife Claire. Also on board: Cyd Charisse and (briefly) William Conrad. Basehart and Totter are terrific as a stunningly mismatched couple. The real star of the film though is the drugstore, an “All-Nite Service” establishment at the corner of St. Ann’s and Thirteenth, wherever that is.

[“Tasty Food.” Click on each image for a larger view.]

Tension begins with a monologue by Lieutenant Collier Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan):

You know, these stores have everything: raisins and radios, paregoric and phonographs, vitamin capsules and cap pistols. They’ll serve you a cup of coffee, sell you a pack of cigarettes or a postage stamp, and in a pinch they’ll even fill a prescription for you.

The store appears to have six main areas. Clockwise from the rear: a prescription counter, a lunch counter, a magazine rack, liquors and candy (both dandy), tobacco, and perfume.

[Warren Quimby fills a prescription. Notice, among other details, “Tomorrow’s Weather by Vicks.”]

[Quimby has a word with the loyal counterman Freddie (Tom D’Andrea).]

[Magazines, liquors, candy, and tobacco, as seen from behind the perfume counter. Mrs. Quimby has met her old friend Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough). He has a big car. She likes that. She’ll meet him outside.]

[Tobacco and perfume counters, as seen from behind the lunch counter. Notice the Eversharp Injection Blades display.]

My idea of a theme park: a dowdy-world drugstore, open all nite.

Further adventures in retail density
Harvey’s Hardware (Needham, Massachusetts)
Whelan’s Drug Store (a Berenice Abbott photograph)

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March 28, 2015: Here’s one more post about Tension and a Culver City theater: A movie theater in the movies.

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May 29, 2018: In 2013 a contributor to the SkyscraperPage Forum shared these screenshots and wondered where the drugstore was located. Another contributor replied and placed the drugstore at 3500 W. 6th Street, the southwest corner of W. 6th Street and S. Alexandria Avenue, Los Angeles. A third SkyscraperPage Forum contributor had already worked out the details in 2012. The drugstore exterior is that of the Chapman Park Pharmacy. To my eye, the drugstore interior looks too dense to be anything but real.

[Paregoric? Merriam-Webster explains: “camphorated tincture of opium used especially to relieve pain.” I know this word from reading William Burroughs.]

Rae Armantrout in NYT crossword

I’m giving away an answer, late in the day. If you do the syndicated New York Times crossword puzzle, please forget about this post within the next five weeks and six days.

I’m happy to see Rae Armantrout in the Times crossword. Years ago (1994) I wrote the first “scholarly” article on her work. Go Rae!

[And while I think of it: can we acknowledge that when in east-central Illinois someone refers to “the Times,” it’s only a persnickety snob who insists on asking “Which one?” Which one do ya think?]

Phone manners

[As seen in the 1940 New York City telephone directories. Click for a larger, clearer view.]

The Anti-Digit Dialing League

[Update: There’s now a post with excerpts from Phones Are for People.]

[Lewis Banci and Milburn Smith, The Ten O’Clock Scholar (1969).]

The Anti-Digit Dialing League was a short-lived movement that arose in 1962 and faded, it would seem, in 1964. Founded in San Francisco, the ADDL opposed “creeping numeralism” and fought a losing battle to preserve the use of telephone exchange names. I came across the group’s name while exploring the 1940 New York City telephone directories earlier this month. Among the ADDL’s members, the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, a co-author of the group’s pamphlet manifesto Phones Are For People (1962). Here is what Hayakawa told Time (July 13, 1962):

“These people are systematically trying to destroy the use of memory. They tell you to ‘write it down,’ not memorize it. Try writing a telephone number down in a dark booth while groping for a pencil, searching in an obsolete phone book and gasping for breath. And all this in the name of efficiency! Engineers have a terrible intellectual weakness. ‘If it fits the machine,’ they say, ‘then it ought to fit people.’ This is something that bothers me very much: absentmindedness about people.”

The same Time article reported that the Bloomington, Indiana chapter of the ADDL had turned to a mild form of sabotage:

Interpreting the area code and seven digits as one huge number, they place calls by saying, “Operator, give me S.I. Hayakawa at four billion, one hundred fifty-five million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, three hundred and one.” Growls Chapter Leader Frederick Litto, “If they want digits, we’ll give them digits.”

I remember when grown-ups used to growl about automation and “computers.” I remember owning a button with the younger statement of those sentiments: “I am a human being: do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” I salute the ADDL’s affection for exchange names. Sign me up.

[Life, February 8, 1963.]

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Update: I have obtained a copy of Phones Are for People.

Related reading
Other exchange name posts

[Befuddled at memory frenzies? You can pick an exchange name for your telephone number from a 1955 list of Bell Telephone’s recommended exchange names, available from The Telephone EXchange Name Project.]