“Constellations, bacteria, Balzac, and Nietzsche”

Ulrich, lovesick lieutenant, explains the world to the major’s wife:


Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

Carvel apostrophe

[“Lost in the Stars.” Zippy, June 20, 2019.]

Indeed, it’s Carvel, not Dairy Queen, who can claim the Flying Saucer. So it must have been a Carvel stand that we walked to sometimes in summer. (Yes, it was.) I remember the Saucer’s cookie: like Masonite, without the cakey softness of the typical ice-cream sandwich cookie. Maybe the Flying Saucer cookie kept better in outer space.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A parade of phone booths

[The Brasher Doubloon (dir. John Brahm, 1947). Click for a larger view.]

Six of them, I think, or seven. The proper term of venery for phone booths is parade. Here’s another parade.

Also from this film
An EXchange names sighting : A pocket notebook sighting

An EXchange names sighting: The Brasher Doubloon

[The Brasher Doubloon (dir. John Brahm, 1947). Click for a larger view.]

Morningstar Elisha Coin Dlr is, alas, already out of business. His name also appears in this pocket notebook. At the Telephone EXchange Name Project, ARizona, BRighton, MUtual, and ROchester all are topics of discussion. Nothing for BUrnside.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : Chinatown : The Dark Corner : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Perry Mason : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Pocket notebook sighting: The Brasher Doubloon

[The Brasher Doubloon (dir. John Brahm, 1947). Click any image for a larger view.]

You know you’re in sketchy territory when a plain old pocket notebook is doing duty as address book and storage unit for claim tickets. What’s next to fall from between the pages? An Ace comb? A rare coin?

The Brasher Doubloon is a YouTube find. Still to come from this film: telephone exchange names and a handsome parade of phone booths.

If the name Elisha Morningstar sounds familiar, it’s because the film is adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window (1942).

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

“Dictionaries at War”

Merriam-Webster tells the story of the Armed Services Edition of Webster’s New Handy Dictionary: “Dictionaries at War.”

Last month Elaine and I saw two Armed Services Edition paperbacks in the New York Public Library’s Walt Whitman exhibit: Great Poems from Chaucer to Whitman (ed. Louis Untermeyer) and A Wartime Whitman (ed. William A. Aiken). Both with the same tiny format, 5 1/2″ × 3 3/4″.

“An asphalt spring”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

Got it

Stephen Colbert last night, channeling Donald Trump: “I’ve always said, ‘You can’t trust any poll that doesn’t have a dancer on it.’” And Jon Batiste responded with four bars of Duke Ellington's “Dancers in Love.”

You can hear Colbert’s line and Batiste’s response at the 4:19 mark.

A related post
Colbert, Batiste, and Bill Strayhorn’s “U.M.M.G.”

[How many of these musical comments must I not get?]

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.