Captioning New Yorker cartoons

Nice: There are three captions that work with every New Yorker cartoon (A. V. Club).

A related post
Phooey , a caption

The Magic Rub eraser

Mary Norris, New Yorker copy editor, in Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen :

I make a lot of mistakes, thus requiring an eraser at least as large as an ice cube. The eraser available from the catalogue is the Magic Rub, which is of grayish-white vinyl in the shape of a domino. I use it to erase the screeds I sometimes feel compelled to write in the margins of proofs and then regret.

She goes on to mention the twelve-packs in the New Yorker supply cabinet.

I had never used a Magic Rub. Not because of its slightly louche name: the eraser and I had just never crossed paths. But I thought, If it’s good enough for . . . , and bought a three-pack. It’s a disappointing eraser, with an unpleasant color, a ghastly smell, and pockmarked sides that suggest unfinished concrete. And it doesn’t erase all that well. I’m a pretty undiscriminating eraser-user, though I will admit to a liking for Papermate’s ultramodern Black Pearl and Staedtler’s Extruded Eraser Stick. The Stick’s stubby shape and paper wrapper make me think of Choward’s Violet Flavored Mints. To my eye, the Magic Rub does not erase as well as the Pearl or the Stick. I haven’t tried it against the Mints.

Here’s the puzzling part. The Magic Rub’s maker, Prismacolor, describes the eraser thusly:

It’s Latex free, absorbs graphite and erases India Ink. Also comes in a nifty peel-off pencil form to erase dry media in one fell swoop.

And the art-supply company Dick Blick gives this description:

Prismacolor’s Magic Rub is a vinyl eraser for use on polyester-based drafting film, acetate, or tracing paper. It erases delicate drawings cleanly, without smudging.

These descriptions would seem to suggest that the Magic Rub is not well suited for erasing pencil on plain old paper. Maybe that’s why I find this eraser so unsatisfactory.

Related reading
A handful of eraser posts (Pinboard)
Between You & Me, my review
Mary Norris on New Yorker style

Yogi-isms

From The New York Times: “Exploring the Real Roots of ‘Yogi-isms.’” My favorite, not quoted therein: “Little things are big.”

Yogi Berra died yesterday at the age of ninety. The Times has an obituary.

Nabokovian handwriting

Handwriting, father and son:


Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

The index entry for Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov in Speak, Memory is telling: “9–16, 19–310, passim .” In other words, every page with printed text. Nabokov’s father’s presence is everywhere.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[Not long after dinner.]

“This is the dawning of the Age of Asparagus.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Lands’ End: The White Album

[Now with extra whitening.]

The Lands’ End catalogue may never have been a great document of the variousness of Americans, but its recent incarnations appear to have taken a sharp turn to the white. Above, the cover of the Fall Resource Guide 2015, a hefty catalogue with a fold-out cover, an insert printed on thicker paper, two blow-in cards, and 171 pages. And a whole bunch of white people.

I went through this catalogue page by page — three times, for accuracy — checking off every human form. I counted 155. Many, of course, are the same people, appearing again and again. One woman, standing atop a rock, arms outstretched, faces away from the camera, gloved and hatted beyond identification. Of the other 154 men, women, children in this catalogue, thirteen are plainly or possibly not white. That leaves 141 white men, women, and children, making for a catalogue that’s 91.5% white.

It’s a measure of the way our sense of American culture has changed that this catalogue (which fifty years ago might have seemed, at least to a white reader, “normal”) should now look so strangely, aggressively retrograde. Lands’ End, please rethink it.

One thing about these white people: they sure read some interesting books.


[Click for a larger view. Otnajhna Nranfez and Nojatnah Arenzef: friends of the late Vidad Ostref Clewala. Another photograph shows some oversized books with the work of the painter Hen Mati.]

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September 24: Here’s an article that helps to account for the change in direction at Lands’ End: How Lands’ End Is Angling for Millennials, and Injecting Luxury into the Midwest (Refinery29). Angling for so-called millennials with a nearly all-white catalogue seems like an especially strange choice.

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June 20, 2020: Five years later, the plainest thing to say about this catalogue is that it reflects and bespeaks white privilege. It’s like a gated community for clothes.

A related post
Colgate Optic White

[If you look for this catalogue online, you won’t find it, at least not yet. The cover is there, on Lands’ End’s catalogue page, but the link goes to the Fall Preview catalogue, not the Fall Resource Guide.]

Jack Larson (1928–2015)

“Although he swore off fan events after a 1988 incident in Cincinnati in which Sharpie-wielding autograph seekers permanently stained a white linen suit he had had made in Italy, he came to terms with and embraced the Jimmy Olsen legacy in other ways”: “Jack Larson, Playwright Better Known as Jimmy Olsen on Superman TV Show, Dies at 87” (The New York Times).

Spelling in the news

In Fresno, California, three men posing as police officers misspelled the word sheriff on their costumes. The error, though, does not appear to be what led to their arrest.

The scheme — posing as law enforcement and raiding the residences of marijuana growers — makes me wonder if these fellows took their cue from The Wire’s trickster-god Omar Little. Just a thought.

Related reading
All OCA spelling posts (Pinboard)

Speed-cops on patrol

Another Mencken footnote:

In July, 1932 (News of the World , July 24), the Assistant Bishop of Guildford, Dr. Cyril Golding-Bird, appeared before the Farnham (Surrey) magistrates on a charge of dangerous driving. The policeman who arrested him testified that, on being overhauled, he demanded “Are you a speed-cop ?” His Lordship, evidently in fear that the use of an Americanism would prejudice the bench against him, stoutly declared that he ”was not sufficiently colloquial” to have used it. But the magistrates, taking a serious view of the matter, fined him £10 and costs and suspended his driving license for three months.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).

Also from The American Language
The American v. the Englishman : B.V.D. : English American English : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : Playing policy : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking : The verb to contact

Craft vogue

On Weekend Edition Sunday this morning: “now the city is working on crafting a pot-club ordinance.”

When everything from poems to pot to munchies is crafted, it’s time to say vogue word and move on. The verb to craft here accomplishes nothing that to create or to develop or to draft or to work on would accomplish. The work of writing an ordinance implies a degree of care and skill.

Words I can live without
Artisan , artisanal : Bluesy , craft , &c. : Delve , -flecked , &c. : Expressed that : Pedagogy : That said : Three words never to use in a poem

[Google returns 500,000 results for craft and ordinance minus beer. With beer : 939,000 results. Crafted munchies? Yes, really.]