Brooklyn Castle

[Rochelle Ballantyne.]

The documentary Brooklyn Castle (dir. Katie Dellamaggiore, 2012) tells the story of the chess team from Brooklyn’s Intermediate School 318, a team that has won more national chess championships than any other. We watched last night, having played and won with the Netflix Gambit (that is, having managed the queue so as to get the film the day after its release on DVD). The film reminded me of Mad Hot Ballroom : here too we get to see absolute dedication to an art, in a film that is funny, happy, poignant, and inspiring. May everyone at I. S. 318 go far.

The school’s chess teacher and coach Elizabeth Spiegel, speaking in the film:

“Learning chess and becoming good at chess and having to solve your own problems of how you teach yourself things is fantastic for kids. Maybe in this world in which more and more kids can only concentrate for ten minutes, in fact it’s exactly what we need.”

Rochelle Ballantyne, a 318 alum, is now headed for college and is likely to become the first African-American female chess master.

Here’s the film’s website.

[Brooklyn: represent!]

At the Dr. Grabow plant

[Popular Mechanics, September 1970.]

“The machines that make Grabows have no name outside the factory, and no use outside pipe manufacturing. The factory has its own lingo heard nowhere else: machines called frazers, procedures known as tripoling”: from a look at life in the Dr. Grabow plant in Sparta, North Carolina.

Fraise (that’s the correct spelling) and Tripoli (spelled with or without a capital) are nouns new to me. The OED has fraise: “A tool used for enlarging a circular hole.” The fraise isn’t limited to pipemaking: an OED citation refers to marble-workers using this tool. Fraise is also French for strawberry, which makes an image search for the tool amusing. (Search for fraise tool instead.)

As for Tripoli, this OED definition sounded plausible to me: “A fine earth used as a polishing-powder, consisting mainly of decomposed siliceous matter, esp. that formed of the shells of diatoms; called also infusorial earth or rotten-stone.” A trip to Google Books clinched it:


[William Augustin Brennan, Tobacco Leaves: Being a Book of Facts for Smokers (1915).]

Here too, use extends well beyond pipemaking. (Tripoli buffing compound, “for polishing aluminum, stainless steel, and wood”: as advertised here.)

The last time I saw someone smoking a pipe, the bowl had three or four inches of cigar in it. Before that? I can’t remember when I last saw someone smoking a pipe. But I do remember seeing the name Dr. Grabow back in my tobacco-stained past.

And speaking of the past, the OED dates fraise to 1874; Tripoli, to 1601. Old-time ways in Sparta.

Thanks to Mike at Brown Studies for passing on the link to the Grabow story.

Feedly it ain’t

[This post follows from Feedly it is.]

I wrote about Feedly last night in the heady excitement of infatuation. But I soon began to see problems that will keep me looking for a better reader. The interface is (to my eyes) beautiful, but Feedly takes too many liberties with content, as I discovered when I looked at a few recent Orange Crate Art posts with images. There’s nothing complex about these posts, and they render without problems in Google Reader. Watch what happens to the post How to improve writing (no. 44). Here’s Blogger:



And Feedly:



Yes, Feedly has a strange habit of pushing images to the right, where they can look, well, dumb. Feedly also seems to dicker with text, dropping “(no. 44)” from this post’s title in list view.

Worse is what happens to the post The Thompson Twins. Here’s Blogger:



And Feedly:



The sequence of images has been flipped, which turns the accompanying explanation into gibberish.

And still worse is what happens to the post Orson Trail. Here’s Blogger:



And Feedly:



Here too the sequence has been flipped (though May 9 is back where it belongs). Small potatoes, sure, but what if these images illustrated, say, a before-and-after comparison or a how-to post? The potential for confusion seems vast, and it makes Feedly a service I cannot yet trust. Now I’m trying The Old Reader, which has its own frustrations, one of which is its limited access to older posts: “No posts below this line. Probably you have read them all.” Shopping around makes it clearer than ever to me just how well designed Google Reader is, and how great its loss will be to its users.

Feedly it is

Time is running out for Google Reader: the service ends on July 1. I have been waiting and watching, looking for evidence of some clear consensus about what to use instead. The choice seems to be Feedly. Seems to be Feedly: this is the impression I get from my online reading. I just took the plunge, and so far the water is fine.

Here’s a recent David Pogue column about Google Reader and Feedly. It played no part in my decision: I found it only after making the switch. LOL.

Reader, if you use Google Reader, what switch are you making?

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11:44 p.m.: Feedly it ain’t. More tomorrow.

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June 4: Here’s a reconsideration: Feedly it ain’t.

Sad sight of the day

At the front end of my local multinational retail corporation, two employees stood inviting customers to try the self-checkout. In other words, the store is paying some of its employees, at least for now, to get customers to do the work that those same employees could do. The long-term goal: more self-checkout use, fewer employees.

[I mean, of course, associates, not employees.]

Jazz on Route 66

A first-season Route 66 episode features a Chet Baker-like trumpeter. The second-season episode “Goodnight Sweet Blues” (aired October 6, 1961) is even more jazz-centric. Ethel Waters plays Jenny Henderson, a retired singer in failing health who commissions Tod and Buz (the latter a self-identified jazz “buff”) to find and bring to her the members of the Memphis Naturals, the band she performed and recorded with thirty years earlier. She shows our heroes a photograph:


[The fictional Naturals: Snooze Mobley, Hank Plummer, King Loomis, A. C. Graham, Horace Wilson, Lover Brown.]

Two of the Naturals, Jenny says, became famous: Snooze Mobley and A. C. Graham. You may, however, recognize three familiar faces in this photograph. The first: Coleman Hawkins as clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Snooze Mobley. Buz (George Maharis) tracks him down in San Francisco, where he’s leading a quartet.



In keeping with his sleepy nickname, Snooze is virtually speechless. This open-eyed nod from the bandstand signals that he will come to Pittsburgh. When he later says “Mmhmm,” Jenny tells him he’s becoming a blabbermouth.

The second familiar face: the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who plays A. C. Graham, now a busy studio musician in New York. He has to check his datebook and get someone to cover four upcoming jobs before telling Tod (Martin Milner) that he can visit Jenny.



The third familiar face: the drummer Jo Jones as the Naturals’ leader Lover Brown. Lover is doing a short stretch in Kansas City for yet another act of bigamy. Tod arranges a furlough so that Lover can visit “a sick sister.” Along for the ride: a prison official, whom Lover introduces as his manager.


[Notice that Jones is wearing a toupee for the prop photograph above.]

The Eldridge-Jones instrument switch was meant as an inside joke, I suppose, though the joke must have been obvious to a good many viewers. What just a few viewers may have known is that Eldridge indeed played drums, and Jones played piano and trumpet.

As for the other Naturals: Banjoist Hank Plummer died in Philadelphia. His guitarist son Hank Jr. (Bill Gunn) comes in his place. Bassist Horace Wilson (Frederick O’Neal), the scholar of the group, has become a lawyer in Chicago and lost his calluses. And trombonist King Loomis (Juano Hernandez), now a shoeshine man living in East St. Louis, has pawned his horn, lost his lip, and feels great misgivings about even picking up an instrument.

What happens as the story unfolds is fairly predictable: the episode’s title should give you an idea of where things go. What’s unexpected is the opportunity to see great musicians in speaking roles. And seeing Ethel Waters and Jo Jones sing a duet is, really, a once-in-a-lifetime thing.





Waters and Jones are reputed to have been “difficult” personalities. You’d never know it here: they radiate good will and joy. (Perhaps that’s why it’s called acting.) Waters received an Emmy nomination for her performance in this episode (Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role), the first Emmy nomination for an African-American. She lost to Julie Harris (as Queen Victoria, Hallmark Hall of Fame).


[The Naturals minus one. Brown’s manager in the background.]


[King Loomis joins in. Buz on the right.]

A strange detail: the recording of “I’m Coming Virginia” that plays as Tod and Buz visit Jenny is not by Waters but by Marni Nixon. She explained in a 1996 interview:


[Stephen Bourne, Ethel Waters: Stormy Weather (2007).]

Related reading and listening
Ethel Waters, “I’m Coming Virginia” (YouTube)
Other Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Jean Stapleton (1923–2013)

[“‘My husband doesn’t have the male chauvinist attitude that the woman’s place is in the kitchen,’ she says of her personal life. ‘He likes to be married to a woman who has more interests outside the home.’” From a New York Times article, “Jean Stapleton Hopes Most Wives Aren’t Like Edith,” May 17, 1972. Photograph by Jack Manning.]

The Times has a lengthy obituary: Jean Stapleton, Who Played Archie Bunker’s Better Angel, Dies at 90. The 1972 article adds: “‘He can cook and he can take care of the children. In that way, he is liberated too. Yes, he really gets a high mark from me.’” Stapleton’s husband William Putch died in 1983.

Some recent comments

The Anti-Digit Dialing League Now with the logic of area codes, explained in three comments — 1, 2, 3 — from S F Pete and Neal McClain.

San José profs nix Harvard MOOC Now with a comment from San José State’s Tom Leddy (no relation).

The more I read and write, the more I subscribe to Elaine Fine’s theory of knowledge: “What I know is rivaled only by what I do not know.”

Completely Naked City

A twenty-nine-DVD set, Naked City: The Complete Series is available for pre-order, with all 138 episodes. List: $179. Amazon’s pre-order price: $99. Naked City has been an abiding interest in the Fine-and-Leddy household for well over a year. I am happy to see that the zeitgeist has straightened up and started listening to us.

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August 24: As a commenter below notes, and as I learned last night, there is now a release date: November 5, 2013. Guy Fawkes Day is now Stirling Silliphant Day.

Other Naked City posts: GRamercy 7–9166 : GRamercy again : MUrray Hill 7-3933 : Naked Bronx : Naked City Mongol : Nearly plotzing : “Old Rabbit Ears” : Poetry and Naked City : Positively Naked City : TW8-4044 : “WE DELIVER”

W3, another controversy

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is again a source of controversy: Some Say the Spelling of a Winning Word Just Wasn’t Kosher (New York Times).

Other W3 posts
E. B. White on W3 (also starring Dwight Macdonald and David Foster Wallace)
A review of The Story of Ain’t (on W3)