Timmy Martin, Ticonderoga user

[Timmy Martin (Jon Provost) writes an urgent message. From the Lassie episode “The Phone Hog,” April 3, 1960. Click for a larger view.]

The ferrule is the giveaway. A Dixon Ticonderoga appears in at least one other Lassie episode.

More Ticonderogas
Bells Are Ringing : The Dick Van Dyke Show : Force of Evil : Harry Truman : The House on 92nd Street : Perry Mason : Pnin

All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

The 26 Old Characters

From the W.A. Sheaffer Pen Company, a dowdy-world history of our alphabet and fountain pens: The 26 Old Characters (1947). Dig the young people eagerly opening letters at 17:38.

Thanks, Martha!

Snowy Day stamps

[Art by Ezra Jack Keats. Stamp design by Antonio Alcalá.]

On October 4 the United States Postal Service will issue four stamps to honor Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962). The Los Angeles Times has the story.

See also “The Snowy Day” and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats (Skirball Cultural Center).

Thanks, Rachel!

How to (finally) Read “Nancy”

Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s long-awaited How to Read “Nancy” is due to appear from Fantagraphics next month, with a three-sentence foreword by Jerry Lewis.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

New glasses

New glasses, so a new photograph in the sidebar. Thank you, Elaine. (For the photograph, I mean.) I think the glasses look rather spiffy. As does the Ethnic Music Festival poster in the background. I found that poster in 1979, in the vicinity of Columbia University. The festival date had passed, so the poster became mine. Only years later, as a full-fledged grown-up, did I get it framed.

I followed, more or less, the convoluted procedure in this post to create a new Profile. (Google does not make things easy.) One difference: it’s no longer necessary to get a screenshot of a photograph with a border added; a border for some reason now shows up automatically.

Is my beard really that white? Only in photographs.

[A question for Google: when you look at a Blogger Profile page and click on View Full Size, why is the resulting photograph smaller than the one on the Profile page?]

Opportunity knocks

From The Big Bluff (dir. W. Lee Wilder, 1955). A schemer speaks:

“An opportunity like this knocks only once — and I know when to open the door.”

Like, uhh, when there’s a knock?

[W. Lee Wilder: Billy’s brother, but you’d never know it from this movie.]

Making by hand

Rosemary Hill, art historian:

To make objects by hand in an industrial society, to work slowly and uneconomically against the grain, is to offer, however inadvertently, a critique of that society.

From “Explorations of a Third Space,” Times Literary Supplement, April 23, 1999. Quoted in Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

I’d like to think of objects very broadly, so as to include, say, a garden, or a handwritten letter.

Stornography

The New York Times reports on the television-news practice of standing in a storm to report on it. I think we need a word to describe this commodification of horrific weather into televised spectacle. My suggestion: stornography. Or storn, for short.

I still remember (1990s?) an unfortunately hilarious CBS Evening News broadcast with Dan Rather standing in a storm somewhere, hanging on to a lamppost or street sign and trying to talk as the wind blew rain into his face. I didn’t know though that, as the Times reports, Rather originated this kind of reporting in 1961.

*

September 14: The word may be catching on.

A de Kooning, stolen and recovered

“It’s hard to believe that they were that — I don’t know what the word for it is”: a retired schoolteacher and his son may have stolen a Willem de Kooning painting from an Arizona museum. The details make the story sound like something for the Coen brothers.

WTC

[From a depiction of the Manhattan skyline on a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can, c. 2003. The World Trade Center was removed from the Chock full o’Nuts label in 2004. We have an empty can with the old label sitting atop a file cabinet in our house.]