“School supplies and fun”

[Life, August 31, 1953. Click for a larger view.]

Notice the date on this Life advertisement: it’s almost September, and there’s still time to buy school supplies. Perhaps you tarried after reading last week’s full-page Pedigree ad? No rush. And speaking of “no rush”: do click for a larger view of the pencils and cases, the cheerful copy, the reference to last week’s ad, and the spritely figures scampering about the page.

Related reading
Back-to-school shopping : Pedigree pencil

“Cheaper buy the dozen”

[Life, August 24, 1953. Click for a larger view.]

Oh, they’re clever, what with their puns and their pencil named after the largest of the British Virgin Islands. And with their not even mentioning s-c-h-o-o-l by name. But school is around the corner: why else would there be a full-page advertisement announcing that Pedigree pencils are on sale?

Notice the date of this Life: August 24. When I was a boy in Brooklyn, school began after Labor Day. School in New York City and other northeastern places still begins after Labor Day. In downstate Illinois and many other places, school begins in mid-August. In 2015 CNN offered some explanations of “why August is the new September.”

Back to pencils (briefly): I have never liked Pedigree. But I always loved shopping for school supplies with my children, even for “1 box tissues” and the elusive “oilcloth.” I’m not sure we ever figured out that one.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)
Pedigree pencil (With a photograph of an old one)

Mandela via Obama

Barack Obama’s response to the events in Charlottesville, in three tweets, two hours ago, is a passage from Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994):

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

[I’ve added two commas to match the source.]

Charlottesville

Michael Eric Dyson, writing in The New York Times about “Charlottesville and the Bigotocracy”:

It is depressing to explain to our children that what we confronted as children may be the legacy they bequeath to their children as well.

It is more dispiriting still to realize that the government of our land, at least in the present administration, has shown little empathy toward victims of white bigotry, and indeed, has helped to spread the paralyzing virus of hatred, by turning a blind eye to what is done in their name.

Now is the time for every decent white American to prove he or she loves this country by actively speaking out against the scourge this bigotocracy represents. If such heinous behavior is met by white silence, it will only cement the perception that as long as most white folk are not immediately at risk, then all is relatively well. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing could more clearly declare the moral bankruptcy of our country.

All is not well at all. The horror of the events in Charlottesville is compounded by the response of our president, whose words, tweeted and spoken, reveal his inability to grasp that horror (“So sad!”) and his absolute lack of moral clarity (“on many sides, on many sides”).

Here, via Cameron Glover, are six organizations in Charlottesville deserving of support: Beloved Community Charlottesville, Charlottesville NAACP, Charlottesville Pride, Charlottesville Solidarity Legal Fund, Legal Aid Justice.

All publicity is good publicity

Our president, in a telephone call to Eddie Calvo, the governor of Guam:

“Eddie, I have to tell you, you’ve become extremely famous. All over the world they’re talkin’ about Guam, and they’re talkin’ about you, and I think you’re gonna — tourism, I can say this — in tourism, you’re gonna go up in, like, tenfold, with the expenditure of no money, so I congratulate you.”

Both the president and the governor seem to be operating under the mistaken show-biz assumption that all publicity is good publicity. I think that we’ve just passed some outer limit of what’s plausible in our political reality.

[The passage I’ve quoted begins at 0:57. My transcription.]

Fifty blog-description lines

Google’s Blogger calls the line that sits below a blog title the “blog description line.” I’ve added a hyphen. For years, the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s “Orange Crate Art” sat there: “Orange crate art was a place to start.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, using some word, phrase, or sentence from a recent post. And I began keeping track. Here are the fifty most recent blog-description lines, beginning in November 2016. I like looking at them as pieces of found language:

“Use more glue”
“Bleak enough”
“Low ceiling”
“NO TODO ESTÁ PERDIDO”
“Availability ‘Unknown’”
“A single instrument played with two hands”
“Specially crafted”
“Long overdue”
“Caroline, no!”
“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“”’”’”’”’”’”’”’”’”
“Hardly a horn”
“The missing pixel”
“Great for entertaining”
“Down the slippery slope”
“Save 7¢”
“Thinking especially of produce”
“Anne Frank is a Syrian girl”
“Oh, who listens to the lyrics?”
“#grabyourwallet”
“No challenge is to great”
“Elementary particles”
“Monkey, monkey, underpants”
“Old-fashioned posting”
“Fresh perked”
“Goodnight little house”
“I SAW IT WHATEVER IT WAS”
“Work dreams”
“Truck amok”
“My own notebook”
“$104,425”
“Correct to one-tenth of a second”
“Irrelevancies and solid objects”
“Certainly”
“What is something I’ve never heard of?”
“Superb views”
“Small and fast”
“Meal after meal, plus snacks”
“Probably wouldn’t hold up in court”
“Drink that coffee straight and lets get going”
“Begins talking”
“May transmit moods”
“Biff”
“‘CliffsNotes!’”
“‘I’m supposed to believe this?’”
“‘I’ll get it!’”
“Clickety clack, clickety clack”
“Keep showing up”
“Flout”
“Corrasable”
“It’s Mueller Time”

It’s still Mueller Time, but my, that coffee does smell good.

Related posts
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more

[If you read Orange Crate Art via RSS only, you’ve been missing out.]

Sardines, et al.

Fish and bigger fish: a sardine disco ball (or bait ball) comes to a bad end, as documented by the BBC. “Tuna. Their arrival changes everything.” Also sea lions, sharks, dolphins, and a whale.

Thanks to Matt Thomas at Submitted for Your Perusal for passing on the link.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Re: our improvising president

Earlier this week The New York Times reported that Donald Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” “was entirely improvised.” I fear that this characterization (which I quoted in a post, without comment) gives improvisation a bad name.

In a moment of crisis, improvisation may be urgently needed. I recall the WWII medic who used a pocket knife and fountain-pen cap to perform a tracheotomy. But a capable improviser doesn’t make it up from nothing: the medic of course would have been trained to perform a tracheotomy. Nor does a capable improvising musician just make it up: he or she creates in the moment from a lifetime’s experience as a listener and performer.

There is a marked difference between a resourceful, quick-thinking, practiced improviser and a would-be tough guy who flies by the seat of his pants. We should be careful not to equate improvisation with our president’s reckless bluster.

The aroma and the actuality

The laundry deliveryman will think twice about making a harmless observation when the private detective Albert Arnett (Walter Slezak) is around. Dialogue from Born to Kill (dir. Robert Wise, 1947):

“My, that coffee smells good. Ain’t it funny how coffee never tastes as good as it smells?”

“As you grow older, you’ll discover that life is very much like coffee: the aroma is always better than the actuality. May that be your thought for the day.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Kafka coffee

Still on the balcony. Karl Rossmann has been speaking with a young man who is studying on a neighboring balcony. He works in a department store by day and studies at night.


Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. from the German by Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2002).

Earlier in Amerika Karl and his comrades wash down lunch with “a black liquid that burned in one’s throat.” I’m guessing that’s not coffee but Coca-Cola.

Also from Amerika
The Statue of Liberty : An American writing desk : A highway : A bridge : Companions : Under-porters and errand-boys : In one door, out the other : Sardines

All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)