A perfect ellipsis

Getting the ellipsis right in pixels is a tricky business. Three spaced periods (as The Chicago Manual of Style recommends) look . . . ungainly. Four spaced periods (an ellipsis plus a period) can look ridiculous . . . .

The horizontal ellipsis character (made by typing …) looks … better. But when that a period follows that character, things look a bit off …. See how much larger the final period looks?

Last night, when I was typing a short post, I realized that I could make an ellipsis and period by using the hair space ( ). Periods and hair spaces make a perfect ellipsis-plus:  . . . . Or in plain English: . . . .

Telephone EXchange names on screen

[From Tension (dir. John Berry, 1949). Click for a larger view.]

The “All-Nite Service” drugstore has everything, including liquor and this business card. Barney Deager must have first come by as an Ass’t Sales Manager for the Southwestern Liquor Syndicate. Now he comes by to take out the pharmacist’s wife. I suspect that nothing good will come of that.

DAwson and FAirfield may not be genuine Los Angeles exchange names: the Telephone EXchange Name Project has nothing for DAwson and just one entry for FAirfield (in use in Alabama).

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Boardwalk Empire : 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) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

[There’s something beautifully tacky about a business card that abbreviates assistant. I would like to think that the abbreviation is another great detail of set design.]

John Kerry, less grandiose

Andrea Mitchell, on NBC Nightly News tonight:

“. . . as six world powers led by John Kerry . . . .”

Less grandiose, better:

“Led by John Kerry, representatives of six world powers . . . .”

Minority report: Mr. Turner

Wikipedia: “Mr. Turner has received universal praise from critics.” Well, okay. Mr. Turner (dir. Mike Leigh, 2014), is a beautiful-looking film, extraordinarily so. Dick Pope’s cinematography makes every landscape, every seascape, every interior a painterly composition. But in this portrait of the artist as a gruff man, it’s difficult, at times impossible, to understand what he’s saying: Timothy Spall’s J. M. W. Turner is all croaks and growls and hoarse mutterings. I don’t think it’s meant to be funny, but many in last night’s audience seemed to find it hilarious, as if the film were a John Belushi samurai skit. Meant to be funny but not so: the film’s depiction of John Ruskin as a lisping mega-twit. To me that seemed the easiest, cheapest of shots. But at least I could understand Ruskin’s words, lisp and all.

Elaine and I both did a little reading about Turner last night and were surprised to learn that his last words were “The sun is God.” In the theater, we had both heard, with no second-guessing, “The sun is gone.” Diction, diction, diction.

My recommendation: wait for the DVD, and watch with subtitles.

Domestic comedy

[After deciding not to go to the fancy place for dinner.]

“I’ll leave my thesaurus at home then.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Gill Sans

[“Perils Of Julia And Gill Man — Movie Julia Adams.” Photograph by Edward Clark. Alterations by me. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger, gillier view.]

Once upon a time, the Creature, or the Gill-Man, was one of the monster models made by Aurora Plastics, along with Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and the Wolfman. The makeup of that quintet bugged me. Four of them: classics. But the fifth? Now he’s a spokesgill-man for the sardine industry.

Scale models — cars, dinosaurs, monsters, planes — were once a fairly standard part of boyhood. Testors Glue, Testors Enamel Paints, decals: necessary stuff, like sardines.

Related reading
All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

[Gill Sans? Sans sardines. The font I’ve used for “got sardines?” is the free CGPhenixAmerican.]

Liberal-arts trashing

“Dismissing the liberal arts seems to have become a litmus test for conservative politicians”: Christopher Scalia, “Conservatives, Please Stop Trashing the Liberal Arts” (The Wall Street Journal ).

[The link goes to a Google search. A direct link works only for WSJ subscribers. Christopher Scalia is a professor of English and son of Antonin Scalia.]

Overheard

“It’s a whacked-out, motherfuckin’ weekend, bro.”

And probably not for the first time.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[Three compound words there, but only one hyphen.]

A movie theater in the movies

[The Culver. From Tension (1949, dir. John Berry).]


[The Kirk Douglas Theatre. From Google Maps, 2015. Click either image for a larger view.]

Elaine and I gave a little leap when we watched Tension again last night. We know this theater. In 1949, it was the Culver. Today, it’s the Kirk Douglas Theatre. We heard the Culver City Symphony there in 2014. Hearing the Symphony is a Thing to Do in Los Angeles.

I still want to track down the location of the drugstore in Tension, which I think must be the best drugstore in the movies. A street sign, barely legible in one street scene, looks as if might read Something Alexandria Avenue . North? South? East? West? Must investigate further.

*

3:46 p.m.: Having traveled N. and S. Alexandria via Google Maps, I don’t think any trace remains of that drugstore.

*

May 29, 2018: The drugstore stood at the southwest corner of W. 6th Street and S. Alexandria Avenue in Los Angeles.

An adjunct instructor’s student becomes an adjunct instructor

Carmen Maria Machado writes about learning from an adjunct instructor and becoming an adjunct instructor:

The irony of this setup has not escaped me: the adjuncts who teach well despite the low pay and the lack of professional support may inspire in their students a similar passion — prompting them to be financially taken advantage of in turn.

“O Adjunct! My Adjunct!” (The New Yorker)

I’ll say it again: the exploitation of adjunct labor is the shame and scandal of American higher education.

A related post
The Adjunct Project