Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “Marc Brown, Arthur, and the REAL Mr. Ratburn,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

Rocky mayo

Lunchtime. We scrutinized the Hellmann’s jar: “KNOWN AS BEST FOODS® WEST OF THE ROCKIES.” Okay, but what about in the Rockies? Which mayonnaise can you buy in, say, Bozeman, Montana? Is there a dividing line that runs through the Rocky Mountains? And if so, where? The questions were Elaine’s. She started it.

I called the 800-number on the jar to find out, and did my best to assure the person answering the call that my query was a matter of earnest, albeit idle, curiosity. I was told that Hellmann’s Mayonnaise and Best Foods Mayonnaise are the same product. (Yes, I know.) I was told that east of the Rockies, &c. And west of the Rockies, &c. (Yes, I know.)

“But what about in the Rockies?” I implored. “Is there some sort of dividing line?”

“No,” the answer came. “There is no dividing line.”

But of course there is, sort of. I found the answer in a book that’s long been sitting in our house: David Feldman’s Imponderables: The Solution to the Mysteries of Everyday Life (New York: William Morrow, 1987). Here is the solution to the mystery under coinsideration:

If you live in or west of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, or New Mexico, chances are you buy Best Foods mayonnaise. If you live in or east of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, or Texas, you probably buy Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Both brands are dominant market leaders where they are sold, but except for the El Paso area of Texas, their distribution does not overlap at all.

And long story short: “when [West Coast] Best Foods took over the Hellmann’s brand in 1932,”

both brands were so firmly entrenched in their areas, and had such a dominant market share, that it was decided not to change either name.

I will be applying for a position with Unilever mayo-support in the new year.

Tom Waits awaits

Tom Waits’s 1978 Austin City Limits performance is online at PBS until January 19. This episode also appears to be airing on at least some PBS stations this week. If you miss it on one screen, you can see it on another. It’s a fairly epic performance.

Other Waits posts
Frank Sinatra and Tom Waits : Out to the meadow with Tom Waits : Pianos, drinking and non- : Tom Waits on parenthood

Cafés to banks

Stefan Zweig, writing in 1924 about Paris:

On the Boul’Mich the banks (as everywhere) have replaced the cafés.

“The Cathedral of Chartres,” in Journeys , trans. Will Stone (London: Hesperus Press, 2011).

It’s like reading Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, with one small local business after another replaced by Citibank.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

[Journeys was recently reissued by Pushkin Press. The Boul’Mich is the Boulevard Saint-Michel.]

“One puny blog post”

[Nancy, December 26, 2019.]

I’ll take a guess: Because, Nancy, you care about your writing, and you want to make that “one puny blog post” as good as you can. It doesn’t matter that you’re not getting paid to do so. It doesn’t matter that no one else might notice, or have any idea how much effort you’ve put in. You will notice, and as the poet almost says, that will make all the difference.

Nancy’s friend Esther has a better guess: “Because you’re using every chance you get as an excuse to be distracted.”

And Nancy: “No, no, that can’t be it . . . but it’s interesting that you feel that way, and we should spend the next half-hour exploring why.”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[“As the poet says”? “As the poet said”? The Google Ngram Viewer helps out. The poet, of course, is Robert Frost.]

Some Christmas

[“He’s Checking It Thrice.” Zippy , December 25, 2019.]

Today’s Zippy is devoted to list-making. With a guest star.

“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts: Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Christmas 1919

[“Snow Quickly Removed. Three Thousand Street Cleaners Did a Speedy Christmas Job.” The New York Times, December 26, 1919.]

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

Dalton Baldwin (1931–2019)

The pianist Dalton Baldwin has died at the age of eighty-seven. A New York Times obituary calls him “an eminence among accompanists.”

Elaine and I heard Dalton Baldwin accompany Elly Ameling, long ago, in the year something-something B.C. (Before Children). It was a blissful night. I’ve since heard Baldwin on recordings for many years. He is the sole pianist on Mélodies, the 4-CD EMI set of Francis Poulenc’s songs, accompanying Ameling, Nicolaï Gedda, William Parker, Michel Sénéchal, and Gérard Souzay, Baldwin’s partner in life and music.

Here is a BBC recording of Souzay and Baldwin, performing works by Schubert, Debussy, Françaix, Poulenc, and Roussel.

Italy’s Sardines

“They call themselves the ‘Sardines’ — because they want to quietly pack Italy’s main public squares like fish in a can. Organizers say their goal is to stop a far-right, anti-immigrant wave rising in Italian society and politics”: Sylvia Poggioli reports on the Sardine movement (NPR).

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Helicopter campuses

“The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed”: thus a new trend in surveillance, the use of Bluetooth to track college students’ class attendance and campus habits via their phones (The Washington Post ).

For me, the most dispiriting bit in this article is a comment from a professor about surveillance and attendance: “‘They want those points,’ he said. ‘They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.’” Yep. Behaviorally.

[The surveillance company SpotterEDU would not permit the Post to publish a photograph of its Bluetooth devices, saying that “‘currently students do not know what they look like.’” A curious student might find an image search for iBeacon a useful workaround.]