Apostrophes in the news

The lyrics site Genius has caught Google swiping its stuff. Daring Fireball quotes from a Wall Street Journal article (behind the paywall):

Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.

When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”

At Daring Fireball, John Gruber mentions Encyclopedia Brown. To my mind, the Genius stratagem is worthy of Alvin Fernald.

Here’s a short video showing Genius’s apostrophes at work.

Lunch

[Life, September 23, 1966. Click for a much larger lunch.]

I went looking for something else and found Lunch. Five things about Lunch:

1. I like the idea of a recipe card, even a virtual one, titled Lunch. File between Breakfast and Dinner, also made with Pepperidge Farm White Bread.

2. I am enough of a child to find the prospect of frankfurter ’n cheese appealing, at least in theory, especially if there’s ketchup. Though the name of the dish should read frankfurter ’n’ cheese: ’n,’ as in rock ’n’ roll.

3. I like the way the carrot sticks resemble fries. A child might be fooled, at least briefly.

4. There’s no good explanation of why the plate and cup in this advertisement rest on what appears to be the tray of a very old high chair. Hot soup in a high chair?

5. HowStuffWorks offers a good explanation of crusts and curly hair. I was always told that eating the crusts puts hair on your chest. Nonsense. What’s not common knowledge: not eating the crusts puts hair on your chest and back.

That’s Lunch.

Grocery’s

Curtis Honeycutt on weird and wonderful practice of adding -’s to the name of a grocery store: Aldi’s, Kroger’s, Meijer’s, &c. He missed my favorite: Jewel’s, which might also be heard as the value-added plural Jewels.

Mac Open Web

Brian Warren’s Mac Open Web, “a collection of open and indie Mac, iOS, and web apps that help promote the open web.” Of the apps listed, I use six: Acorn, BBEdit, Byword, Instapaper, MarsEdit, and Pinboard.

[Via Daniel Jalkut’s Bitsplitting.org.]

Dad jokes

“Accept no substitutes”: Oscar’s Day No. 2492.

Bloomsday 2019

From “Ithaca,” my favorite episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In the wee small hours of the morning of June 17, 1904, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus arrive at Bloom’s place, 7 Eccles Street, Dublin:



Bloom, a wily Odysseus, gains entry by climbing over the railing, dropping down into the area, and opening the door to the kitchen. He then walks upstairs and lets Stephen in through the front door. No. 7 was torn down in 1967. The door and its frame were saved.

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)
2017 (Bloom and Stephen, “like and unlike reactions to experience”)
2018 (“One sole unique advertisement”)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Area : “a sunken court giving access to the basement of a house, separated from the pavement by railings, with a flight of steps providing access.” Definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary.]

Father’s Day

FaceTiming with Rachel and Talia earlier this week, I started whistling for Talia. First, the alphabet song. She smiled and laughed. “Again.” I obliged. “Again.” I obliged. For an encore I whistled “The Wheels on the Bus.” And for a second encore, a little song Elaine and I sing for Talia every time we see her, in person or in pixels.

Rachel said to Talia, “My grandpa whistled for me.” And now I’m the grandpa. Or as Talia says, “bah-pah.”

As Davey McQuinn once said, “Life goes on.” Happy Father’s Day to all.

The magnificent Andersons

Caution: Antenna TV is running a Father Knows Best marathon tomorrow, from 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. (Eastern). Having seen the entire run, I feel no compulsion to watch. But other people — who knows?

What I know is that there’s more to Father Knows Best than the twenty-first-century viewer might expect to find. I’ll quote from one of my posts about the show:

Yes, Father Knows Best presents a colorless (that is, all-white) world — at least in its first two seasons. And yes, Father Knows Best presents a world in which tradespeople and members of the working class are predictably quaint or wise or deferential or gruff. But Pleasantville it ain’t. Nor is it Leave It to Beaver. The Andersons — Jim (Robert Young), Margaret (Jane Wyatt), Betty (Elinor Donahue), Bud (Billy Gray), and Kathy (Lauren Chapin) — are smart and witty people. They say things that are genuinely funny, often at one another’s expense. They are far from simple and cheerful: Jim is a deeply fallible, poetry-loving father; Margaret, like Jim, is a college graduate, and she struggles with the limitations of life as a “housewife.” The kids are a handful: Betty, histrionically critical; Bud, moody and resentful; Kathy, maniacally energetic and, sometimes, destructive. The Anderson house is filled with books; its residents never (at least in the show’s first two seasons) go to church. I suspect that if Jim and Margaret’s makers had let these characters think about politics, they’d have voted for Adlai Stevenson.

I’m not embarrassed to say it: I like Father Knows Best.

Other FKB posts
“Betty’s Graduation” : A conversation from another world : FKB pencil sharpener : Flowers knows best : “Languages, economics, philosophy, the humanities” : “Margaret Disowns Her Family” : Scene-stealing card-file : “A Woman in the House” : “Your dinner jacket just arrived”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, was brutally difficult. I started with 18-A, four letters, “Part of every Julian month.” That gave me 2-Down, six letters, “Talk Like a Pirate Day shout,” and I thought I was off to a good start.

But no. Too many odd facts for my taste: 16-A, six letters, “Southernmost OPEC member.” 24-D, five letters, “Mogul Empire capital after Lahore.” 25-A, four letters, “Home of winetrain.com.” 36-D, eight letters, “Stepford creator.” 37-D, eight letters, “Coffee-flavored sponge cake.” 56-A, four letters, “‘Caffeine free’ Pez flavor.” Even when such answers are guessable, as some of those were for me, getting them isn’t particularly satisfying. I dislike clues that look like the obvious result of starting with the answer and finding a fact to go with it. “Southernmost OPEC member”? Like that’ll ring bells? For me, solving this puzzle (one hour and two minutes) sparked little joy.

But two clues I especially liked: 40-D, six letters, “Lack of pitching ability.” And 63-A, seven letters, “Half a court pairing.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA crossword posts (Pinboard)

Bloggers blogging

In response to the query “Did you write a blog post TODAY?”:

At 30 Squares of Ontario, J D Lowe wrote about Bill Schopp and Streetcars through the Dowdy World. This post made me look into the history of the interurban line than connected two cities in downstate Illinois, 1904–1927.

At Oscar’s Portrait, George Bodmer drew Oscar’s Day No. 2490, a picture of waiting at the post office while someone shops for the right stamps.

At Musical Assumptions, Elaine Fine wrote about Musical Assumptions in a Free and Open Internet. My favorite sentences: “I always thought that if I worked really hard, my work would be recognized. At Juilliard I learned that if I worked really hard I would be observed by my peers, who would then try to work harder.”

At l’astronave, Fresca “just blogged to say I love you, fellow bloggers who remain!” With several answers as to why she blogs, including this striking one: “Nostalgia makes the present sweeter.”

At Oddments of High Unimportance, Mike shared Kill Sticky, a bookmarklet that removes sticky headers and footers from websites. (Mike, your blog disappeared from my RSS some time ago. Now I have it back.)

And at Slywy, Diane offered a reminder that Pollinator Week is coming up, with a photograph of a bee celebrating with a handstand.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to share a link. Long live the open Internet.