Domestic comedy

Caught on tape:

“This is a close-up of our real family life: having boring stuff doing.”

That’s our son Ben — at four or five? — as he roamed the house with a Fisher-Price tape recorder, interviewing and reporting. He and Rachel made countless cassette recordings: music, newscasts, skits, streams of consciousness. The energy of it all! We were listening earlier this week.

Since early August, I’ve kept my dad’s last word — “Thanks” — in the space below this blog’s title, as what Blogger calls “blog description.” With the turn of the year, I’m going to begin varying the description again, starting with a few of these words from Ben back in tykehood.

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Two hundred blog description lines
Fifty blog description lines

New Year’s Eve 1915

[“New Year Revelers Crowd the Hotels: Largest Throngs in Years Entertained by Costly and Elaborate Programs.” The New York Times, January 1, 1916.]

Bagpipes, auto horns, sirens, fez horns, accordeons, pipes: 1915 knew how to make some noise. But the “fez horn” has me stumped. My best guess is that this term (which appears nowhere else in the Times ) is a bit of awkwardly inventive journalese for a shofar:

Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi, a well-known halakhic authority whose life spanned the majority of the eleventh century, blew the shofar on the Sabbath in Fez, Morocco, when it coincided with Rosh Hashanah. He did so despite the fact that this practice was approved only for the Temple in Jerusalem, with a few notable exceptions.

Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Or perhaps a fez horn is merely a party hat that doubles as a noisemaker. But only a shofar would be able to go up against bagpipes and auto horns and such. (And only when in the hands of a skilled player.)

I didn’t plan to go down a rabbit hole when I spotted this Times article. But now that I’m back: Happy New Year.

Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center Honors

If you didn’t see her performance last night, you should see it now, before it disappears.

How to improve writing (no. 62)

From the bag holding a baguette:

We consider our breads a work of art that honors the traditions and techniques of European bakers. Each of our loaves are baked in small batches and hand crafted to ensure the highest quality crust, flavor and texture.

It’s good bread. But not good writing. The mix of plural and singular words in the first sentence — breads , work , honors — is confusing. The plural loaves would seem to explain the subject-verb disagreement in the second sentence, an instance of what Garner’s Modern American Usage calls “false attraction to noun intervening between subject and verb.” I see at least three more ways to improve that second sentence.

A possible revision, allowing the hype to stand:

We consider each of our breads a work of art that honors the traditions and techniques of European bakers. Each variety is handcrafted and baked in small batches to ensure the highest quality crust, flavor, and texture.

The three more ways: joining hand and crafted to make the usual compound word, placing the cart (the handcrafting) before the horse (the baking), and adding a serial comma. Another possible revision, eliminating much of the hype:

Our bread honors the traditions and techniques of European bakers. We bake each variety in small batches to ensure excellent crust, flavor, and texture.

I’m not sure what counts as a small batch though.

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[About hand and crafted : Merriam-Webster makes them a solid word. The Oxford English Dictionary joins them with a hyphen. The serial or Oxford comma is much debated, but as GMAU notes, “virtually all writing authorities” outside the world of journalism recommend using it. This post is no. 62 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Bad news from the MLA

The Modern Language Association reports that the 2014–2015 job market in English and foreign languages was the worst in forty years: fewer jobs than ever, and a smaller percentage of tenure-track positions.

In 1984, when I was job-hunting, the MLA listed 1492 jobs in English, 1442 in foreign languages. The 2014–2015 numbers: 1015 jobs in English, 949 in foreign languages. In 1984, the great majority of listings were for tenure-track positions. In 2014–2015, two-thirds of the English listings (67.3%) and half of the foreign-language listings (50.4%) were tenure-track.

Another Henry gum machine

[Henry, December 29, 2015.]

At the risk of stating the obvious: one can never have too many streetside gum machines.

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All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

And more gum machines
Henry : Henry : Henry : Perry Mason : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry

Cooper Hewitt Tupperware

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day: a Tupperware Jel-N-Serve Food Mold.

A related post
Tupperware pencil

Honeymooners notebook sightings

[“You owe me a hundred and seventy-six dollars and thirty cents.”]


[“BEnsonhurst 0-7741.”]


[“Her husband’s busy on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, you know. Just make sure you call before six. The phone number is BEnsonhurst 0-7741. Got it? And her name is Alice Kramden.” Click on any image for a larger view.]

The world of The Honeymooners is not rich in stationery supplies. I imagine the Kramden apartment as holding just a pencil or two (sharpened no doubt with a knife) and a “writing tablet” for grocery lists and messages. “The Babysitter” (January 21, 1956) must be the most stationery-rich episode of the (endlessly syndicated) 1955–1956 season, with four — or is it just two? — pocket notebooks playing parts.

They are notebooks, not address books. Norton has been using his to track the cost of Ralph’s phone calls over the last fifteen years. Mrs. Simpson, a neighbor (uncredited), jots down Alice’s number to give to the Bartfelds, a couple in need of a babysitter. Mr. Bartfeld (Sid Raymond) recommends Alice to Harvey Wohlstetter (Frank Marth), who needs a babysitter. Wohlstetter writes down the number first. Granted, he could be making an entry under B (for babysitter ), but I’d rather imagine that he’s using a pocket notebook.

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And more notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder at the Vanities : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : The Woman in the Window

Aisle 16

As seen in a Staples store earlier this evening. Should I have told someone? I deferred to Elaine and Rachel and kept my mouth shut. Maybe the store managers already know. Maybe the sign came back wrong and they’re waiting to replace it. Maybe for now they’re hoping no one says anything. The other signs for Aisle 16 were spelled correctly: stationery .

Have you seen this misspelling at your Staples?

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Domestic comedy

“What a riot!”

“What a hoot!”

“Man, I’m bushed!”

[Our daughter Rachel is back for a few days and has spent some time reading through her childhood diaries and notebooks. Rachel was at times a dedicated diarist, one whose writerly voice, we have now learned, was heavily influenced by 1950s chapter books. These exclamations are from Rachel’s twelve-year-old diaristic self, used here with her grown-up self’s permission. That self is still given to saying “Holy Toledo!”]

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