“Operative Potters”

[Roughly 1½" square. I didn’t think to measure.]

A page from the Kent State Libraries traces the history of the potters’ union. The National Brotherhood of Operative Potters began in 1890. The union went International in 1931. In 1969 “Operative Potters” became “Pottery and Allied Workers.” Several mergers later, the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics & Allied Workers International Union took shape.

But what’s an “operative potter”? I thought operative might refer to functional not decorative porcelain. But no. Merriam-Webster explains: “a person who does work that involves using tools, operating machinery, etc.” In other words, someone doing factory work, not a solitary figure sitting at a wheel in a shed. [See below.]

I took this photograph right before our toilet plumbing fixture vanished with the rest of our old bathroom. I helped our plumber carry the fixture up a flight of stairs to his truck and got on his authority what I had suspected: there is no good way to carry one of these things. The fixture was likely original to our house, c. 1959.

*

December 19: An anonymous commenter points out the contrast between operative and speculative in Masonic tradition: practical construction work, spiritual construction work. I would like to know if members of, say, the Operative Plasterers’ and Cement Masons’ International Association are aware of that distinction.

Related posts
IBEW logo
Old Grote (Inside the old medicine cabinet)

Rotten weather

There is no such thing as rotten weather. If there were, we could just throw it out and get some new. But this weather keeps.

Cormac “Sluggo” McCarthy

A reader alerted me to this image: Cormac “Sluggo” McCarthy. Sluggo lives!

Thanks, Ian.

*

January 29, 2015: As I just discovered, there’s a series of Sluggos. Just keep scrolling.

Orange hotel art

Welcome to the Pantone Hotel, which “showcases the color of emotion with a distinctive hue on each colorous guest floor.” That corridor looks a little too Shining. But I’d chance it.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange dress art : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

[Via Subtraction.]

Recently updated

Gamewell fire alarm Now with an approximate date. The Internets can be a wonderful place.

“Some nests”

[Click for a larger view.]

I was of “some minds,”
Like a tree
In which there are “some nests.”

Wallace Stevens, from an unpublished poem, “‘Some Ways’ of Looking at Ernie Bushmiller.”

No filter on this photograph. It’s a bleakly beautiful day. Black tree, white sky, and “some nests.” For a partial explanation, see here.

Related reading
All OCA “some” posts (Pinboard)

Overheard

In a nearby city, in a café:

“Can you write, like, all this knowledge down?”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Orange dress art

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day, an early eighteenth-century child’s dress, for a girl or a boy.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight” (1798), of his sister Ann: “My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!”

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

[On my Mac and on a Windows machine, the dress is orange. On my iPad and iPhone, it’s brown. Anyone have another color?]

Dad the tooter

My son Ben has revealed a misunderstanding from his childhood. For some years, I volunteered with a local adult-literacy program. Ben now tells me that when I went to the library to tutor, he thought I was practicing snake charming.

I’m guessing that he must have been three or four, young enough to misunderstand, old enough to remember. Young enough too to think that his dad could do just about anything.

*

5:07 p.m.: Says Ben, “You CAN do just about anything!”

Food and the dictionary

“The adoption of ethnic food words into English is an excellent proxy for the moment our culture embraces these foreign foodstuffs as our own”: How food words join the dictionary (Boston Globe).

I’m not sure what “our culture” means in that sentence, because the article references both American and British dictionaries. But I’m happy to learn from this article that bánh mì (or banh mi ) has entered the American Heritage Dictionary. And I’m surprised to learn that pasta didn’t enter the Merriam-Webster lexicon until 1963.

When Elaine and I moved to downstate Illinois in 1985, pasta was shelved in the supermarket’s “Ethnic Foods” aisle. Exotic stuff, that pasta.

[I can recommend with considerable enthusiasm Los Angeles’s Absolutely Phobulous and Bahn in the USA. Both serve excellent báhn mì.]