Brix JarKey

[Nancy, July 2, 1958.]

Fret not, Nancy. The Brix JarKey makes it easy to break a vacuum seal and open a jar. In our household, the JarKey has more or less replaced the Oxo Jar Opener as tool of choice.

I found the Brix JarKey at the local hardware store, where I get to see housewares items I never see elsewhere.

Arrowlock Tag #108

When we got our mower back from the local farm-and-home store, I was impressed by the tag with our name and telephone number, an Arrowlock Tag #108, made by the Macray Company of Flanders, New Jersey. Or is it Arrow Lock? The company website spells it as both one word and two. Either way, it’s a clever design: “Hook to item — fold arrow head.”

[Cost of repair: $25 to replace the inferior hardware holding the handles to the mower, which required the removal of a plastic casing on the mower’s underside, and $8 to sharpen the blade. Pretty midwestern prices.]

EXchange name sighting: MUrray Hill

[50¢ a yard!]

You never know what you might find in a supply closet. When my daughter Rachel saw this envelope full of fabric, she took a photograph and told me to check out the phone number. MUrray Hill!

New Yorkers of a certain age may remember the MUrray Hill exchange from commercials for Gimbel’s Custom Reupholstery. MUrray Hill 7-7500. MUrray Hill 7-7500. The commercials ran on WPIX-TV during morning cartoons and Little Rascals shorts. Yes, my school day, at least my elementary-school day, began with television. Better Living Through TV.

The Textile Building, at 295 Fifth Avenue, houses the showrooms of many textile manufacturers. The address is in Murray Hill, a section of Manhattan that gave its name to a telephone exchange. Liberty Fabrics at some point said goodbye to Murray Hill and MUrray Hill: the company’s New York showroom is now at 584 Broadway, in Lower Manhattan.

Thank you, Rachel.

“Who cares?”

Olivia Jaimes’s “Who cares?” made me remember another “Who cares?” story. From Ron Padgett’s Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (1993):

New York, 1962 (?). On the spur of the moment we decided to go to the premiere of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. The entrance to the hall was packed with people waiting to get in. We worked our way to the door. The ticket seller there said it was two dollars each. We looked in our pockets. We had something like $1.25 total. “It’s two dollars each,” the fellow repeated.

At which point Jonas Mekas, who had organized the evening, appeared behind him. “What’s the trouble?”

“These guys don't have the admission fee. They have only $1.25.”

“So what’s the problem? It doesn’t matter. Let them in!”

Ted loved Jonas Mekas’ attitude.

Related reading
All OCA Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett posts (Pinboard)

[Ted is the best memoir of a poet, by a poet, I have read.]

History and Lois

[Hi and Lois, November 29, 2018. Click for a larger view.]

It’s safe to assume that Ditto won’t be majoring in history. But he may become a spokestoon for the Mindset List, no longer the property of Beloit College. My impatience with the mindset behind the Mindset List is on display in five posts, list by list, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.

One item from the final Beloit list, puporting to describe the historical awareness and life experience of first-year college students in 2018: “They never used a spit bowl in a dentist’s office.” I guess they never went to my dentist.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

“More cornbread for me”

Nancy cartoonist Olivia Jaimes, in an interview, commenting on the hashtag relatable and webcomics:

The self-hating part that often comes with #relatable comics is being like, “Ohhhh, I procrastinated, I’m the worst.” And Nancy adds one more panel to that, being like, “Who cares? I don’t care. More cornbread for me.”

As readers of the new Nancy will remember, Jaimes began her work on the strip with Nancy eating cornbread.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve changed the spelling in the interview to match the spelling in the strip: cornbread, no space.]

Search OCA with DuckDuckGo

The search box in the sidebar now uses DuckDuckGo, a search engine that does not track its user. Take that, Google.

It’s easy to make a DuckDuckGo search box for a website. Here’s a page with the necessary code. Just fill in the blanks. And here’s a page that offers a different approach. I’m not sure how I arrived at my version, but here it is:

<form method="get" action="http://duckduckgo.com/" target="_blank">
<input type="text" placeholder="DuckDuckGo" name="q" maxlength="255" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" />
<input type="hidden" name="sites" value="mleddy.blogspot.com" />
<input style="visibility:hidden" type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="mleddy.blogspot.com" checked="checked" />
</form>

The search box in the “navbar,” the navigation bar found at the top of some Blogger blogs, seems beyond changing — it’s Google or nothing. So I turned off the navbar, which doesn’t allow for much navving anyway. Unlike the navbar’s Google search, the DuckDuckGo search in the sidebar searches all OCA content, posts and comments.

Words of the year

From the American Dialect Society, tender-age shelter: “The term, which has been used in a euphemistic fashion for the government-run detention centers that have housed the children of asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border, was selected as best representing the public discourse and preoccupations of the past year.”

From the Australian National Dictionary Centre, Canberra bubble: “the insular environment of federal politics.”

From the Cambridge Dictionary, nomophobia: “Your choice . . . tells us that people around the world probably experience this type of anxiety enough that you recognized it needed a name!”

From the Collins Dictionary, single-use: “Single-use encompasses a global movement to kick our addiction to disposable products.”

From Dictionary.com, misinformation : “The rampant spread of misinformation poses new challenges for navigating life in 2018.”

From Macquarie Dictionary, Me Too: “That Me Too is now being used as a verb and as an adjective, combined with the undeniable significance of the movement, made the Committee’s choice for Word of the Year 2018 a fairly straightforward decision.”

From Merriam-Webster, justice: “The concept of justice was at the center of many of our national debates in the past year: racial justice, social justice, criminal justice, economic justice.”

From Oxford Dictionaries, toxic : “In 2018, toxic added many strings to its poisoned bow becoming an intoxicating descriptor for the year’s most talked about topics.”

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive.

Meta-Mason

From the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Deadly Toy” (May 16, 1959). Perry and Della are posing as the Streets, a married couple with a young son. Mrs. Barton, the babysitter, has an urgent question: “Do you have television?” And Mason replies, “Of course!”

I love when old television shows have the characters talk about television.

Related reading
All OCA Perry Mason posts (Pinboard)

Gut

Robert Reich, on CNN just now: “I don’t want the future of the planet to depend on Donald Trump’s gut.”

[Context: an interview with The Washington Post.]