Bob Wolff (1920–2017)

The sportscaster Bob Wolff has died at the age of ninety-six. The New York Times has an obituary.

In the 1970s, I watched countless New York Knicks games with Bob Wolff’s play-by-play and Cal Ramsey’s color commentary. The two men were always betting a steak dinner on something or other.

A related post
Bob Wolff’s archive

Hal Fryar (1927–2017)

I just got the sad news that Hal Fryar, Harlow Hickenlooper of Indianapolis children’s television, has died at the age of ninety. In 2012 Elaine and I met him, talked with him, and sang “Mairzy Doats” with him at the Indiana Historical Society, where he was a volunteer guide. Those few minutes were the highlight of our day. It was only after the fact that we learned who it was we’d been singing with.

Here’s a post about our serendipitous meeting. And here’s
the official website for the one and only Harlow Hickenlooper.

Long-distance

[Peanuts, July 15, 1970.]

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

iOS Dictation fail

It may be unwise to use Dictation when texting about folk music.

Related fails
Boogie-woogie : Curse and bless : Derrida

[“It may be unwise”: at least until you retype. Now Dictation corrects its error.]

Thank you, Judge Watson

Judge Derrick K. Watson of Federal District Court in Honolulu, ruling that the Trump administration’s temporary travel ban ought not to bar grandparents and other close relatives of persons in the United States from entering the country:

In sum, the Government’s definition of “close familial relationship” is not only not compelled by the Supreme Court’s June 26 decision, but contradicts it. Equally problematic, the Government’s definition represents the antithesis of common sense. Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents. Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members. The Government’s definition excludes them. That simply cannot be.

Relationship advice

My son Ben, my newly married son Ben, mentioned a bit of advice that I gave him some time ago: “The wooing phase is never over.”

I have no memory of saying it, but I think it’s good advice for anyone in a loving relationship, and so I pass it on here, with Ben’s permission:

The wooing phase is never over.

Some seventeenth-century prose

Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus (1658) reads the natural world as a network of fives, quincuxes, and decussations, or crossings. I began to think of a companion work:

That Bushmiller hath declared the figure three as equall to somme is not without probability of conjecture.

Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Nancye, or Some Rocks, naturally, artificially, mystically considered (n.d.).

A related post
Some rocks

DQ Breeze

It was the subject of debate, not heated, in our household: was there ever a Dairy Queen product called the Breeze? Yes:

The Dairy Queen Breeze was conceived as a healthier version of the popular Blizzard ice cream treat, made with frozen yogurt instead of ice cream. It plodded along for about a decade before DQ pulled the plug; the chain claimed that demand for the product was so low that the frozen yogurt often went bad before it could be sold.

The Breeze is no. 5 in a list of ten fast foods that have disappeared (The Christian Science Monitor).

For the syntax-minded

[Mutts, July 13, 2017.]

Mutts is almost always delightful. Bill Griffith calls it one of “a few lively, well-crafted dailies bobbing bravely in a sea of blandness.”

Trump[,] Jr.

Andrew Boynton of The New Yorker writes about “The Correct Punctuation of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s Name” — by which he means The New Yorker’s punctuation of that name.

But it’s too simple to say that Trump, Jr., with a comma, is “the“ correct punctuation. It’s correct for The New Yorker, whose use of a comma to set off Jr. as parenthetical leads to the period-comma-apostrophe pileup of Jr.,’s.

So: comma, or no comma? Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) says that both choices are correct. “Journalistic style-books,” he observes, prefer commaless Jr., “probably because newspapers generally disfavor optional commas.” But Garner adds that “the commaless Jr. has logic on its side.” He cites E.B. White’s explanation of the switch to commaless Jr. in the third edition of The Elements of Style:

Although Junior, with its abbreviation Jr., has commonly been regarded as parenthetic, logic suggests that it is, in fact, restrictive and therefore not in need of a comma.

Garner’s conclusion:

Besides logic, the commaless form probably has the future on its side; for one thing, it makes possessives possible (John Jones Jr.’s book). The with-comma form has recent (not ancient) tradition on its side. Posterity will be eager to discover, no doubt, how this earth-shattering dilemma is resolved in the decades ahead. One consideration that militates in favor of the commaless form is that, in a sentence, one comma begets another: “John Jones, Jr. was elected” seems to be telling Jones that Jr. was elected. With a comma before Jr., another is needed after: “John Jones, Jr., was elected.”

A writer can of course make a possessive form with a comma, as The New Yorker has: Jr.,’s. I think though that a style choice that eliminates any possibilty of .,’ is the better choice.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

[In earlier editions of The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. was William Strunk, Jr. What form does Garner’s Modern English Usage use? No comma.]