Twenty-first-century OED slips

Bryan Garner posted two photographs — one, two — of the paper slips used by lexicographers at work on the Oxford English Dictionary. In other words, they still use paper slips.

Re: the second photograph: extra credit if you can decipher the word without reading the whole slip. (I couldn’t).

You can see slips from the early days of the OED here.

Art Brown, gone

“The closing of Art Brown also represents one more loss for a way of life — people who write with a fountain pen”: Quo Vadis Blog reports that Art Brown is out of business. The store began in 1924.

Ciseaux - Sécateur - Cisailles

[Click for a larger view.]

I think it must be the best deal in the Museum Shop at the Art Institute of Chicago: The Art of Instruction: 100 Postcards of Vintage Educational Charts, from Chronicle Books. Above, a sample.

[Yes, they’re all in French.]

Minor bill-paying wisdom

Twice in recent months I’ve forgotten to sign my name to the checks that pay our water bill. I have a good excuse though: the feeling of accomplishment I get from writing our account number on the check’s memo line obliterates all thoughts of further writing. You should know that our account number is a twelve-digit string of 0s, 1s, and 2s. Our water department appears to keep its accounts in base three.

But I digress. Here is the minor wisdom:

When you need to write a check, sign first. That way you’ll never get a call from the water department, or any other department, because your check needs signed.

Reader, is there any minor bill-paying wisdom that you would like to share?

A related post
Minor kitchen wisdom (from me and from readers)

[“Need + past participle” is a regionalism I like.]

Route 66 de Chirico

[From the Route 66 episode “Same Picture, Different Frame,” October 4, 1963.]

Jack Marta, director of photography for ninety episodes of the Route 66, was an ace. Take a look at his IMDb page and you’ll see a career that ran from 1926 to 1980.

Here, for a fleeting moment at the beginning of an episode, is an arresting composition that could have been painted by Giorgio de Chirico.

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Thomas Jefferson’s PDA

“Thought you’d like this,” says my son Ben: Jefferson’s Portable Ivory Notebooks. I do. Thanks, Ben.

The Jefferson notebook attracted a flurry of interest in 2005, during the salad days of the hipster PDA. Everything old is new again, and again.

A related post
Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting

[You can buy a brass and ivory notebook here. The pages look like piano keys. Ouch.]

Casting By

Tonight on HBO, Casting By (dir. Tom Donahue, 2012), a documentary film about casting directors. A CNN article describes the film as giving considerable attention to Marion Dougherty, who early in her career cast many episodes of Naked City and Route 66.

As I just learned from The New York Times, it was Dougherty who recommended Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton for All in the Family. What the Times doesn’t mention is that both O’Connor and Stapleton appeared in episodes of Naked City (though not the same episodes); Stapleton was also in an episode of Route 66.

You can watch the film’s trailer online.

Related reading
All Naked City posts (Pinboard)
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[As regular readers of Orange Crate Art know, Naked City and Route 66 have become matters of mildly obsessive interest in my household.]

Tom Hanks types

In The New York Times, Tom Hanks writes about life in the dowdy world of typing: “I use a manual typewriter — and the United States Postal Service — almost every day.”

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

[“Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, posing for adult art students.” Photograph by Gordon Parks. Castle Hill, Massachusetts, July 1955. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

WKCR-FM is playing Armstrong all day.

Related reading
All Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Cool jazz pioneer?

Today’s New York Times crossword puzzle, by Brad Wilber and Doug Peterson, serves in a small way to rewrite music history. The clue for 46-Down: “Cool jazz pioneer.” The answer: TORME.

No, he wasn’t.

The basis for this clue appears to be a paragraph from the Times obituary for Mel Tormé:

But it was as a singer that Mr. Torme made his deepest mark. The critic Will Friedwald, in his book Jazz Singing, cited Mr. Torme as a pioneer of “cool jazz,” spun off from the pop crooning of the day.

Here is what Friedwald wrote:


[Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith To Bebop And Beyond (1996).]

What Friedwald says in this passage is not that Tormé was a pioneer of cool jazz, but that his singing reflected that music. Indeed, Friedwald describes the so-called vo-cool style as coming into its own as “cool instrumental jazz,” or what most listeners would call cool jazz, began to fade in popularity.

I ran the clue for 46-Down (minus the rest of the puzzle) past my dad, who defers to no one in his love of Tormé’s music. His guess: YOUNG, as in Lester. I would have guessed DAVIS, as in Miles. As for the characterization of Tormé as a cool jazz pioneer, my dad calls it “a stretch.” Perhaps the characterization results from someone’s attempt to create a novel clue, something other than “Crooner Mel” or “Melodious Mel” or “The Velvet Fog,” all of which have appeared in Times puzzles. Mel Tormé was a terrific singer, and he’s always crossword-worthy. But he wasn’t a pioneer of cool jazz.

*

Here’s what happened when I wrote to the Times.

Related posts
All crossword posts (Pinboard)
A Mel Tormé story
Tracts, tides, and drunks

[You can search for the history of a word or clue at XWord Info.]