The Tie Bar

For a long time, I wore a tie only rarely. But a year or so ago, I realized that my ties are now vintage ties. And I started wearing them on teaching days. It’s fun, and now when I wear a shirt with an open collar, it feels like something is missing. I bought a couple of square-end knit ties at Macy’s — ridiculously expensive. I found a few more at a Goodwill — they look a little sad. And then Elaine discovered The Tie Bar. A great selection, $15 a tie, any tie, with a flat $5.99 for shipping. And many square-end ties, the ties I like best.

I’ve posted the front and back of this card not only for your information but for mine. When the card itself has vanished and a tie has broken out in spots, these instructions will be here.

From The Onion? No, The Times.

Marie Myung-Ok’s New York Times column The Internet: A Welcome Distraction has at least one Onion-worthy sentence:

I have come to realize that my writing brain has been waiting for something exactly like today’s dizzyingly overfull, warp-speed Internet.

But she’s not writing a parody. The sentence that really got me thinking though is this one:

Jonathan Franzen found the Internet such a threat that he disabled it by plugging an Ethernet cable into his computer with super glue.

Damn that Franzen. He must be using one powerful computer.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, November 18, 2013.]

Escher-like constructions have appeared in Hi and Lois before:
an impossible hot-dog cart, an all-in-one wall. My best explanation for the wall in this panel (other than Escher or “sloppy”): the Flagstons are part of a museum installation. That’s not an exterior wall behind Hi: it’s a gallery wall with trompe l’oeil curtains and window.

Related posts
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

It is weather

The storms that passed through Illinois and other states yesterday left my environs almost untouched. We had a brief interval of heavy rain and strong wind in the early afternoon. And then the sun came out, though the wind continued for several hours. Other cities and towns were not nearly as fortunate.

When I think about weather, I think of lines from Philip Larkin’s poem “Talking in Bed”:

Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us.

The weather is not destructive or unforgiving or violent. It doesn’t care about us. It just is.

William Weaver (1923–2013)

He was a translator and an FOFOH (friend of Frank O’Hara). The New York Times has an obituary. More about Weaver and FOH in a Paris Review interview, The Art of Translation.

A related post
791 Broadway (Weaver remembering FOH)

New directions in multitasking

All together now: smoking, texting, skateboarding.

The Polaroid Swinger

Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Day: the Polaroid Swinger, designed by Henry Dreyfuss. YouTube has two of the teenage-pastoral commercials. Yes, that’s Ali MacGraw.

High-school student Ethan Young on the Common Core

Ethan Young, a senior at Farragut High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, speaks to his local school board about the Common Core. An excerpt:

The task of learning is never quantifiable. If everything I learned in high school is a measurable objective, I haven’t learned anything. I’d like to repeat that. If everything I learned in high school is a measurable objective, I have not learned anything. Creativity, appreciation, inquisitiveness: these are impossible to scale. But they’re the purpose of education, why our teachers teach, why I choose to learn.

That Young is now the toast of the right-wing Internets is of no concern to me: his perspective here is one that I agree with. I find the Obama adminstration’s efforts in education a great disappointment.

Related posts
Arne Duncan on Colbert
”Warnings from the Trenches”

Telephone exchange names on screen: SUsquehannah

[From the Naked City episode “SUsquehanna 4-7568,” December 16, 1958. Click for a larger view.]

SUsquehannah does not appear on Bell Telephone’s 1955 list of recommended exchange names. But the Telephone EXchange Name Project lists it as a Manhattan exchange, serving the Upper West Side. Ephemeral New York has a photograph of a sign with an SU number.

“SUsquehanna 4-7568” is a fine early Naked City episode, a variation on the “Sorry, Wrong Number” theme. Among its characters is the scariest sanitation worker you’ll ever meet.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Domestic comedy

[Two voices, in unison, honest.]

“That sounds a little like ‘Moonlight in Vermont.’”

What sounds a little like “Moonlight in Vermont” is the theme music from the earliest episodes of the television series Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin). The complete run of Naked City, 138 episodes, is now available on DVD. Amazon has the 29-disc set for $121.16 (list $179.98). The pre-order price ended up dropping — who knows why? — from $99 to $25.48. Our household is delirious.

The biggest surprise about the early half-hour episodes of the series: the lead characters are those of the film Naked City, Lieutenant Detective Dan Muldoon and Detective Jimmy Halloran, here played by John McIntire (with artifical flavoring — that is, a brogue) and James Franciscus.

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts
All Naked City posts