“Tap the Map!”

My son Ben wants to help you learn the fifty states. Enjoy:


[Words and music by Ben Leddy.]

Repurposed cupcake pan

From Cool Tools, a repurposed cupcake pan, now holding nuts and bolts and washers. Nifty.

I am now imagining a pan whose cups are filled with paper clips, binder clips, pushpins, and so on. I like to repurpose household items, as the links below will attest.

Orange Crate Art repurposings
Bakeware : Box flap : Dish drainer : Doorstop : Tea tin

Sixty-eight years later

Elaine and I had the opportunity last night to listen to two World War II veterans give a talk about their experiences in combat. Both fought in the Pacific. Both were at Iwo Jima, or Iwo, as they called it. One was seventeen at the time; the other, nineteen.

An audience member asked if they had difficulties after the war. None, one said, although ”Of course, you suffer some.” The other described his weekly trips to a VA support group, which he has been making for the past thirty-six years. He also showed a list of prescriptions for his war-related problems: twelve every morning, five every night. Sixty-eight years later, he still has nightmares.

The Chicagoan

[The Chicagoan, December 31, 1927. Artist unidentified. Click for a larger view.]

From the University of Chicago Library:

The Chicagoan, published from 1926 to 1935 in Chicago, was explicitly modeled on the New Yorker in both its graphic design and editorial content. The magazine aimed to portray the city as a cultural hub and counter its image as a place of violence and vice. It was first issued biweekly and then, in a larger format, monthly, ceasing publication in the midst of the Depression. The magazine received little national attention during its lifetime and few copies survive. This digital collection reproduces the near-complete run in the University of Chicago Library with issues supplied from other collections where possible.

You can browse the collection here.

Thanks to Slywy for telling me about The Chicagoan. You might like reading her wonderful answer to the question “Why the pencil?”

Domestic comedy

“Good grief. This was on when we were both sentient beings.”

“I was not only sentient; I was watching.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Contemplating, with dismay, television past.]

Goodbye, Blockbuster

From The New York Times:

Blockbuster, which had more than 9,000 retail stores across America nine short years ago, will close over the next two months the few hundred video-rental stores that it still has, the company’s owner, Dish Network, said Wednesday in a bittersweet but long-expected announcement.

There is no permanence.

Damn you, Dictation

Edifice will die a hero’s death, endowed by the gods with powers to Courson Blatz.

No.

The thing itself, a sentence from the introduction to Sophocles’s Theban Plays, trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, 2003): “Oedipus will die a hero’s death, endowed by the gods with powers to curse and bless.”

Related posts
Dictation and boogie-woogie
Dictation and Derrida

[Blatz is a beer, among other things. What is it doing in Apple’s Dictation servers?]

E-mail? Email?

“Should it be “e-mail” or “email”? Bryan Garner answers.

I prefer e-mail , as in How to e-mail [not email ] a professor. But I’m no “pseudo-snoot eccentric” (Garner’s term): email, no hyphen, is just fine by me.

Sherwin and Zerbina and Bert and Harry

[“Plotz,”Zippy, November 6, 2013.]

Yes, that’s a tabletop’s worth of Ding Dongs.

New Yorkers of a certain age will recognize the fellows on the television screen as the Piel brothers, Bert and Harry, cartoon spokesbrewers for Piels Beer. Their voices were provided by Bob and Ray, Bob Elliott (Harry, on the right) and Ray Goulding.

YouTube has at least four Bert and Harry commercials: one, another one, still another, and one more. A website for collectors of the past has a piece of original art that might have served as the model for what’s on the television.

I like Bill Griffith’s approach to things. Does he worry whether people will get it? No. But someone will. Or maybe they’ll find this post.

Related reading
All Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Susan Sontag: “To collect is by definition to collect the past.”]

Benguiat style

Elaine and I dug the signage in this next-to-last episode of Route 66:


[From the Route 66 episode “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way: Part 1,” March 6, 1964.]

And more recently, we dug the titles in the 1960s educational film You Be the Judge:



I was ready to issue a call to help, but I think I’ve answered my question: the designer behind this kind of lettering, though not necessarily these letters, would appear to be Ed Benguiat. The key word: interlock. House Industries’s Ed Benguiat Font Collection has an Interlock font (with nearly 1,400 ligatures) that pays homage to Benguiat’s work. Here is One minute ’til three in Ed Interlock:



I now realize that Benguiat’s interlocking letters are a trace element in Frank Holmes’s cover design for the Beach Boys’ album SMiLE. And now I’m trying to figure out where else I’ve seen interlocked lettering. Other album covers? Cereal boxes? I am in search of lost type.

Where have you seen interlocked lettering?

*

11:07 a.m.: There’s something similar in a poster for A Hard Day’s Night.

Related reading, sort of
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[You Be the Judge, produced by Crisco, stars a young Bonnie Franklin. She and a girlfriend engage in a cook-off with a couple of goofy boys. The girls use Crisco and measure carefully, while the boys make a catastrophe of their dishes. And then the girls throw the contest. Some education. The film is available in the educational-film compilation How to Be a Woman (Kino). This DVD and the companion How to Be a Man include several films from Centron Corporation, whose employees created the great 1962 film Carnival of Souls.]