Henry billboard

[Henry, March 6, 2015.]

In the Henry world, billboards are of the lattice variety. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a lattice billboard outside of the movies, where they serve as backdrops for motorcycle cops who give chase when James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson speeds past.

Lattice billboards are still available for use in model-train layouts.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Acción Ortográfica Quito

“Ecuador’s radical grammar pedants on a mission to correctly punctuate graffiti”: Acción Ortográfica Quito (The Guardian). It’s a group of three: Diéresis, Tilde, and Coma.

College and football

In a 2012 post I said that I thought that “medical not academic issues will doom college football.” In a 2011 comment I gave it twenty-five years. An idle prediction, of course. But reading about the life of University of North Carolina offensive lineman Ryan Hoffman in today’s New York Times offers further reason to think that college football is doomed. A sport that leads, too often, to brain damage has no place in an institution of learning. At some point the cognitive dissonance of college and football together will be too great to ignore. (Lawsuits will help.)

Carlo Rotella on Muhammad Ali, Homer, and translation

I am happy to discover that Carlo Rotella’s essay “The Greatest” is online, courtesy of the University of Chicago Press. For years I’ve been guarding a xeroxed copy of the essay’s December 1998 appearance in Harper’s, where it was presented as an excerpt from a longer essay published elsewhere. But no: these seven paragraphs appear to be the thing itself. The starting point for Rotella’s thinking is a boxer’s boast in Iliad 23: “I am the greatest.”

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

The Naked City, then and now

Scouting NY looks at filming locations for The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948), then and now. In three parts: 1, 2, and 3.

The frightening truth that they don’t want you to know about sardines

[Field & Stream, June 1977.]

Yes, sardines are addictive. Street names: bait, Moroccan greys, Norwegian kings. I scored four cans of kings last night, on sale, two for five.

This post is for Matt Thomas, who seems to be intent on developing a sardine habit.

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Alex Katz, painter, eater Sardines for lunch, every day
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End of the U.S. sardine industry
“Get high on honey” Honey, a recreational drug
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New directions in sardines
Satan’s seafood

Vietnamese egg cream

I was surprised and delighted to see “Egg Cream Soda” listed among the drink offerings at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. But this egg cream is not the New York concoction of chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer. The menu describes the drink like so: “sweet drink made from egg yolk, sweetened condensed milk & club soda served over ice.” And the menu really calls it an egg cream soda, or soda sua tlot ga. The tlot must be a typo: the Internets identify this drink as soda sua hot ga, or soda sữa hột gà.

Life is better when one is willing to marvel at ordinary things.

Raymond Carver on words and punctuation

Raymond Carver, writing in The New York Times in 1981:

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason — if the words are in any way blurred — the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved.

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Raymond Carver and Ovid
Raymond Carver’s index cards

[1983 or so: I missed hearing Raymond Carver read. It was a late Friday afternoon, it had been a long day, I didn’t want to schlep down to the Northeastern campus. Some other time, I thought. There never was one.]

Satan’s seafood

[Life, June 1, 1959.]

I would have thought that the archfiend made his minions do the seasoning.

In my childhood, all sardines came from Martel. But eaters of a certain age may recall Underwood Sardines. The company’s FAQ page notes that the sardine line “was discontinued years ago.”

Underwood of course is best known for its Deviled Ham. Again, from the Underwood FAQ: “The Underwood Devil logo, which was registered in 1870, is believed to be the oldest registered trademark still in use for a prepackaged food product in the United States.” The Straight Dope has an excellent survey of deviled-food history.

Related posts
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City for Conquest (and sardines)
End of the U.S. sardine industry
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New directions in sardines

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Another college president plagiarizing? A second Minnesota college president has been accused of plagiarism.