Prelude to a “Choo”

[Nancy, February 4, 1950.]

Hi Flagston’s “Ug!” made me think of Nancy Ritz’s “Ak.” Nancy has just gazed upon a poster for Health Week: “Cover That Sneeze.” Her “Ak” is the prelude to a megaphone-shaped “Choo.”


[Nancy, February 4, 1950.]

Could “Ak” be the etymon of Cathy Andrews Hillman’s “Aack,” “Aaack,” and “Aaaack”? Nah, I didn’t really think so either. If Cathy’s “Aack” has an etymon, it’s almost certainly “Aaugh.”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
“Kchaou!” (A sneeze in the Odyssey)

Meet the Rubber Man

Meet the Rubber Man, British Pathé (1947).

This fellow would have been a wonderful subject for a Beatles or Kinks song.

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All OCA eraser posts (Pinboard)

From “The Diamond Mine”

Willa Cather, “The Diamond Mine,” in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920).

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All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

George Shearing for the Better Vision Institute

[Life, October 15, 1965. Click for a larger view.]

Coming after advertisements for cigarettes (Salem), auto insurance (MIC), coffee (Yuban), and motels (TraveLodge), this page from the Better Vision Institute must have startled Life’s readers. My transcription:

When I heard there’s a campaign to get people to have their eyes examined regularly, I thought maybe I could drive this idea home by writing about it myself (with Mrs Shearing’s help).

Really it should be a law, not just an idea. Seeing is one thing that shouldn’t be left to chance. I know, I never had the chance.

But I have some idea of what I’ve missed. My career as a pianist has taken me to many countries. Judging from the sounds and smells, it must be an unbelievably exciting world to see. I’m not suggesting you’ll go blind because you don’t have your eyes examined. The chances are small but why take the chance? But where a person like me would be grateful to see at all, a person like you has a choice. You can assume your eyesight is all right. Or you can learn through examination that you might be seeing a lot better. I know what I’d do if I had the choice.

George Shearing (1919–2011) was a British pianist and the composer of “Lullaby of Birdland.” There’s a website devoted to his work.

Sergey and Jeff and NPR

Heard on NPR this morning:

Sessions said he should have disclosed two contacts he had with the Russian ambassador in his confirmation hearing.

Oops. Sergey Kislyak knows better than to walk into a Senate hearing. Very bad for business! Revised:

Sessions said that in his confirmation hearing he should have disclosed two contacts he had with the Russian ambassador.

And speaking of should: Sessions should step down.

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All OCA NPR posts (Pinboard)

[I wrote out the sentence right after hearing it. The newsreader may have said “during his confirmation hearing.” But whatever the phrase, it was misplaced.]

Out to the meadow with Tom Waits

Tom Waits talked to Wyatt Mason of The New York Times:

“There’s an expression in classical music,” Tom Waits told me, one Saturday night in January, when he called to talk about where music happens. “It goes, ‘We went out to the meadow.’ You ever heard that one?”

No, said Wyatt Mason. No, says I. Waits’s explanation:

“It’s for those evenings,” he continued, “that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.”

Google and Google Books turn up no evidence of “We went out to the meadow” (or anything close) as an expression in classical music. What is more important: I asked Elaine Fine, classical musician and composer-in-residence, and she’s never heard of it.

Like Bob Dylan before him, Waits is something of a master fabulist, and I suspect that “We went out to the meadow” is his invention. But if anyone has evidence of the expression apart from this Times article, I’d love to see it.

*

7:42 p.m.: From the Waits song “Diamonds & Gold”: “Go out to the meadow / The hills are agreen / Sing me a rainbow / Steal me a dream.” The song appears on the 1985 album Rain Dogs. (Hello, old LP.) And here’s Waits commenting on Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in 1991: “It is like Beowulf and it ‘takes me out to the meadow.’” Note the quotation marks, as if to signal a familiar expression. But I can find no evidence that there is such an expression. I suspect that the classical-music explanation is a put-on, but I’d be happy to be wrong.

Other Tom Waits posts
Waits on parenthood : Frank Sinatra and Waits

[The Times article is about three musicians: Beck, Kendrick Lamar, and Waits. Total cost of the clothes worn by Beck and Lamar in the accompanying photographs: $8,560. Waits wore his own clothes.]

Whither instant?

[Mrs. White, indeed. Life, October 20, 1972. Click for a larger, milder view.]

I found this advertisement while thinking about instant coffee in jars, now nearly vanished from American supermarket shelves. I like the remark from one of the Maxwell House tasters (second small photograph from the left): “It tastes more like coffee.” Well, yes, if you are an instant coffee drinker to begin with (as the participants in this study were), you would expect coffee to taste like instant coffee.

In 2014, Smithsonian looked into instant coffee’s history and prospects: “Is There a Future For Instant Coffee?” There is. The Washington Post covered the same ground(s), with charts: “Almost half of the world actually prefers instant coffee.” The Post’s conclusion: “The only real exception to the instant coffee craze is the U.S.”

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All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

“Improves focus”

From the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode “I’m So Happy That Josh Is So Happy!” (November 23, 2015). Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) has taken a pill she found on a therapist’s bathroom floor. It’s a pill for ADD that “improves focus”— she knows that because she looked online. And now she sits at her laptop to do some lawyering:

“Let’s get to work. All right, let’s see this presentation. What is Karen doing? She put two spaces after a period? What is this, 1997? Well, those have to go. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s kicking in right now. Okay — and what are these, Oxford commas? Well, those have to go too. I just gotta, I just gotta edit this whole thing before I even start. Karen!”

I think this monologue speaks for itself on the subject of “focus.” And though Karen’s wrong about spacing, she’s smart about commas: those Oxford (serial) commas should stay in. See also Stephen Colbert and Vampire Weekend.

Thanks, Rachel, for recommending this series. (Our Rachel, not Rachel Bloom.)

A related post
How to punctuate a sentence

[My transcription.]

Horace Parlan (1931–2017)

The pianist Horace Parlan has died at the age of eighty-six. The New York Times has an obituary.

A few weeks ago I watched the documentary Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan (dir. Don McGlynn, 2000). I remember thinking: what a gentle man. And what a soulful pianist.

Yes, Frieda

[Peanuts, March 4, 1970.]

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts. Yesterday’s March 4 is today’s March 1. Angst is for always. Which reminds me of Ted Berrigan’s great one-line poem:

Angst

I had angst.

The complete run of Peanuts, starting with October 2, 1950, is online at GoComics.

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[“Angst” appears in A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1988).]