Ace Gummed Reinforcements

[“No 2. Size.” 2¼″ × 1½″. Click for a larger view.]

We took some items to a Habitat for Humanity ReStore. And there I found these reinforcements — mysterious, shadowy. What were they doing there? And what did they want from me? They wanted me to ask how much they cost: 75¢, but I paid a dollar.

I have vague memories of retro packaging from my youth, so my guess was that the box dates from the 1970s, with a design to make a dowdy school supply seem cool. (I thought too of a Tot Stapler ad featuring Stevie Staple-Freak.) The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies has a similar box, dated to the 1930s. Turn the box over and it does look like we’re further back in time.



Several eBay sellers offer Ace reinforcements made by Dennison. Did Dennison buy Ace? Was Ace always a Dennison name? The mystery deepens.

This post is the twenty-first in a very occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. The vignette effect in the photographs is by the Mac app Acorn.

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
C. & E.I. pencil : Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Dr. Scat : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Esterbrook erasers : Faber-Castell Type Cleaner : Fineline erasers : Harvest Refill Leads : Illinois Central Railroad Pencil : A Mad Men sort of man, sort of : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Moore Metalhed Tacks : A mystery supply : National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint : Pedigree Pencil : Pentel Quicker Clicker : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule

Letterheads

Letterheads dig letterheads. Letterhead Steven Heller offers his confessions — with samples.

Related posts
Eberhard Faber letterhead : Kurt Vonnegut letterhead

[Thanks to Ian Bagger for the link.]

Books about notebooks

The start of a sentence in a Washington Post piece by Josephine Wolff about notebooks: “The half-dozen books I’ve read about how to keep a notebook.”

The promises that books about notebooks make are appealing: follow this system to greater autonomy, creativity, and peace of mind. But I balk at the idea of reading a book to learn how to keep a notebook. One book that Wolff cites, by the creator of the Bullet Journal method, runs 320 pages.

Sanford Sylvan (1953–2019)

The singer Sanford Sylvan died last week in Manhattan at the age of sixty-five. The New York Times has an obituary.

Elaine has written a post about Sanford Sylvan, or Sandy, with links to other memorial posts about him. Elaine knew him when she was a teenager, and heard him sing many times. The two of us heard him in a Boston Shakespeare Company production of Mother Courage, directed by Peter Sellars. It was our third date, January 24, 1984. Linda Hunt played Mother Courage. I’ll never forget it.

The music for that production was by Van Dyke Parks. How could we have known that years later that Van Dyke would be our friend?

More kids ’n’ coffee

The term “kid’s coffee” in today’s xkcd made me remember this bit of dialogue. From River of No Return (dir. Otto Preminger, 1954), an exchange between father Matt Calder (Robert Mitchum) and son Mark (Tommy Rettig):

“Well, there it is: that’s Council City. What do you want when we get there?”

“A cup of coffee. A whole cup of coffee for myself!”

“You’ve got it!”

Related posts
coffee (A repurposed Ovaltine ad) : Kids ’n’ coffee (Nancy and Sluggo)

“Regional Terms for Carbonated Beverages”

[xkcd, February 7, 2019. Click for a larger view. Original here.]

The mouseover text reads “There’s one person in Missouri who says ‘carbo bev’ who the entire rest of the country HATES.”

Today’s xkcd makes me think of my son Ben’s childhood soda-language: “co-Coke” (cold Coke), “kid-Coke” (caffeine-free Coke), and “man-Coke” (the Real Thing itself). See also Things my children no longer say.

[Ichor!]

How to speed up podcasts in iTunes on a Mac

It’s not possible to speed up podcasts in iTunes on a Mac. But you can speed up podcasts by going outside iTunes, and without relying on a dedicated app. Here’s how:

In iTunes, right-click on the podcast episode you want to hear.

Choose “Show in Finder.” If you have several episodes of a podcast in your iTunes Library, the Finder will show them all. The file with the episode you’ve chosen will be highlighted.

In the Finder, right-click on the file. Open it with QuickTime (it’s on every Mac), and click on the arrows to the right of QuickTime’s Play icon to speed up playback, 2x or, much more improbably, 5x or 10x as fast.

Better: use the great free app VLC instead and adjust the playback speed from the menu bar. VLC offers much more control over playback speed (going up to 4x as fast). I find that 1.6x or so is a comfortable speed for most podcasts.

ButlisteningtoIraGlassonThisAmericanLifeisanotherstory.

[Happy to have finally figured this out.]

Izzy Young (1928–2019)

The folk-music advocate and entrepreneur Izzy Young has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary. Here are two paragraphs from an installment of Young’s Sing Out! magazine column “Frets and Frails” (February/March 1967):

Write to Steve Ditlea, WKCR-FM (89.9), Columbia University, NYC, 10025, for full listings of folkmusic shows that include tapings from the Bitter End, the Gaslight, the Feenjon, the Folklore Center and the Washington Square. The most popular show is on Sat. from 7:30 to 9:00 pm. . . . Send your name to Broadside, 215 W. 98th St., NYC, 10025, to aid their petition to bring back Pete Seeger’s “The Rainbow Quest” to TV. . . . Arlo Guthrie’s rendition of his “Alice’s Restaurant” was the high point of the Philadelphia Folk Festival. It sensibly combined elements of his father’s style of talking blues, contemporary notions of the absurdity of human life and protest of the draft in rolling comedy that never lost its sharpness or magical weave.

Belafonte has updated his calypso songs with brass on his latest LP. . . . Capitol has formed a new label, Folk World, to capture part of the “definite folk market, fat and solid”. . . . Now that the Spike Drivers of Detroit are beginning to make it their lead singers have lost weight to improve their image and their girl singer has taken to wearing bras. . . . Why are the Beatles the only group that smiles on publicity shots? Everyone else in Datebook and Teenset feels they have to look dour and hard to be hip. . . . The Loving Spoonful are one of the few groups that are growing up as they become more popular. In fact it’s easier to talk to them now than ever before and their music is not afraid to be happy.

I wasn’t subscribing to Sing Out! in 1967 — I was a kid, with several years to go before becoming a subversive teenager. I bought this issue several years after its publication for a cover story on Mississippi John Hurt. “Frets and Frails” disappeared not long after I began my subscription.

[The Spike Drivers? You can find them in Wikipedia. YouTube has a compilation album and two lip-synced songs — one, two — from a TV appearance. The group took its name from Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues.”]

“Not like the trumpet stop of some ill-made organ”

Tristram has been promising to tell the story of Uncle Toby’s amours with widow Wadman for some time now. The story is finally underway. Here Mrs. Wadman is trying to get Uncle Toby to look her in the eye. She claims to have a mote, or something, there. Danger, Uncle Toby, danger:


Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 8 (1765).

Also from Sterne
Letters for all occasions : Yorick, distracted : Yorick, translating : Yorick, soulful : Digressions : Uncle Toby and the fly : Heat and knowledge : “A North-west passage to the intellectual world” : Paris and Manhattan : Tourism : Plain management

[“Madam”: Tristram’s direct address to an imagined female reader.]

Missing from the SOTU

Climate change, alternative energy, children in cages, the government shutdown, gun violence, violence against ethnic and religious minorities, violence against LGBTQ people, LGBTQ rights, the minimum wage, poverty, the cost of health care, student debt, affordable housing, educational inequality, income disparity, voting rights, opioids, xenophobia, white nationalism.

It took me about a minute to create this list, which is probably longer than the president and his people thought about giving any attention to these matters.