Ben Leddy, “Immigration!”

The latest from our son. I am grateful for the title card, having never heard or heard of the Justin Bieber song. Sorry.

There are more songs at Ben’s YouTube channel.

Robert Walser: children’s books

A girl-child speaks:


Robert Walser, “The Little Berliner,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Illinois’s higher-ed crisis

The situation for Illinois’s public universities and two-year colleges is worsening. From the Chicago Tribune:

With no money from the state in nearly seven months and its financial reserves almost depleted, Chicago State University says it will be unable to pay its employees come March unless money begins flowing again from Springfield. . . .

While Chicago State is the first school to lay out that dire scenario, other campuses that are heavily dependent on state funding may not be far behind.

The reason for this crisis: Illinois has been without a state budget since July 1, 2015. Several schools have already seen layoffs of faculty and staff (almost certainly permanent layoffs) and hiring freezes.

Bruce Rauner may not be the worst governor in the United States right now — that honor must go to Michigan’s Rick Snyder. But Rauner is certainly in the running. His call for a thirty-one percent cut to higher education is an absurd form of brinksmanship. Not only has Rauner failed to make the trains run on time; he is now piloting the ship of state toward disaster.

Bruce Rauner : Illinois :: Scott Walker : Wisconsin.

New York’s public telephones

In The New Yorker, Ian Frazier writes about the public telephone of the near future in New York City: the Link, with free calls, free wireless, a browser, USB and headphone ports, and (you guessed it) advertisements. The ads will face oncoming traffic and change every fifteen seconds. Frazier’s piece includes a tour of Manhattan’s last four outdoor phone booths. The president of media at Intersection, the company behind Link, promises that those phone booths will remain standing.

You can read more about Link at LinkNYC and more about the phone booths at Scouting NY.

Related posts
The Lonely Phone Booth : Telephone booths

Leeches, catnip oil, strange potions

The place floats by in a one-sentence paragraph, one more detail in “a city of things unnoticed”:

Within a serene brownstone on Lexington Avenue, on the corner of Eighty-second Street, a pharmacist named Frederick D. Lascoff for years has been selling leeches to battered prizefighters, catnip oil to lion hunters and thousands of strange potions to people in exotic places around the world.

Gay Talese, New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

J. Leon Lascoff opened a pharmacy in 1899. His son Frederick followed him in the business. J. Leon Lascoff & Son, Apothecaries (or Lascoff Drugs), closed in 2012. From 1931 to the end, the store stood as 1209 Lexington.

There is much affection for Lascoff Drugs online. Forgotten New York and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York have substantial posts on the pharmacy. (The latter also has an epitaph.) Flickr has a goodly number of photographs.

From a 1953 New York Times story about the store’s collection of old mortars, pestles, and apothecary jars:

Nearly 2,000,000 prescriptions have been filled since Dr. J. Leon Lascoff, father of the present owner, founded the shop in 1899. Among these was one from Los Angeles for hiera picra, a drug virtually forgotten since ancient Egyptian times. The late Martin Johnson used to stock up on catnip oil at Lascoff’s to lure lions in Africa. A millionaire once bought bottles of attar of roses, at $35 an ounce, to perfume his home. Prize-fight managers still get leeches at Lascoff’s, although a hypodermic needle would reduce a black eye better.

Dr. Lascoff fears his collection is getting too well known. Recently, while haggling over an antique mortar in a Columbus Avenue “thrift shop,” the proprietor told him:

“Take it for ten bucks. There’s a crazy druggist on Lexington Avenue at Eighty-second who’ll pay you double for junk like that.”

The 1209 address is now occupied by Warby Parker, described by a real-estate broker as “a wonderful addition to the community.” Things could be worse: the Lascoff neon sign (here’s a closeup) remains on display, minus Lascoff Drugs but still bearing the word Prescriptions . Clever.

Also from New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey
Chestnuts, pigeons, statues
“Fo-wer, fi-yiv, sev-ven, ni-yen”

Spellings of the future

[As seen in a newspaper. As in “a smoldering cigarette bud.”]

Another spelling of the future, traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our — or are ? — language’s evolution. Because language is always evolving.

The slang term bud (marijuana) probably has something to do with the bud – butt eggcorn.

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired fence : Now : Off : Our : Self-confidance : Where

Recently updated

Ending a sentence with it Now with a 1795 source for the ill-considered prohibition on sentence-ending it .

MLK

[“Martin Luther King Trial Montgomery Alabama Intergration.” Photograph by Grey Villet. Montgomery, Alabama. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929.

The Life Photo Archive gives no date for this photograph or other Villet photographs with the same description. The context, I think: King was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, on September 3, 1958, when he tried to enter a courtroom for the arraignment of a man accused of attacking Ralph Abernathy. King had refused to obey a police order to move on. More information here and here.

If King were alive today, the hatred, inequality, xenophobia, and violence that pervade our American culture would cause him to weep — and do more than weep.

Procrastination and creativity

Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology, and a pre-crastinator:

My natural need to finish early was a way of shutting down complicating thoughts that sent me whirling in new directions. I was avoiding the pain of divergent thinking — but I was also missing out on its rewards.

So he taught himself to procrastinate.

Related reading
All OCA procrastination posts (Pinboard)

Richard Hendrickson (1912–2016)

Richard Hendrickson, a weather observer for eighty-five years, has died. The New York Times has an obituary.

Mr. Hendrickson made an appearance in these pages in 2014, after the CBS Evening News ran a story about him. I liked seeing his checked button-down shirt and solid tie, his rotary-dial telephone, and his 1930s weather notebook.