Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail, learning from experience

[Mark Trail, April 19, 2012.]

Mitt/Mark Romney/Trail is learning from experience. On his way to pick up Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, Mitt/Mark travels with his dog inside his vehicle, at least while being photographed, or drawn.

[Yes, one-percenter Mitt Romney and ninety-nine-percenter Mark Trail are the same person. There are no classes in America. No seat belts either.]

Dick Clark (1929–2012)

[“TV deejay Dick Clark, standing in the middle of his teenage fans who are swirling around him on the studio dance floor during rock ’n’ roll number on his weekly show American Bandstand.” Photograph by Paul Schutzer. Philadelphia, December 12, 1958. From the Life Photo Archive.]

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)

*

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

*

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?]