Soylent 2020

I finally realized what Kevin Hassett’s remark reminded me of: “Human capital stock is people!”

Verbal comedy

The Chicago Manual of Style blog CMOS Shop Talk has a nifty quiz about verbs. I scored 9 of 10, as did a friend, and we both took issue with the CMOS answer for the first question: “A verb is the only part of speech that can express a full thought by itself.” True, or false?

I see the reasoning for the CMOS answer, but still I say, “Baloney!” I left a comment saying just that, with a smiley face to indicate my good humor about it all, but I fear that the word baloney may have gotten my comment zapped by a spam filter.

But Elaine assures me that baloney is not spam.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Flo Garner?

 
[Click for much larger views.]

Does this shot of Flo, from a new Progressive Insurance commercial, owe something to the cover of Erroll Garner’s album Concert by the Sea (Columbia, 1955)? It’s not a reach to wonder. It’s a celebrated album.

In 2015 Concert by the Sea was reissued with previously unreleased material as The Complete Concert by the Sea. I wrote about it in this post.

[As Wikipedia notes, a similar photograph appears on the cover of the 1970 reissue of Concert by the Sea, with a model wearing modish clothing. For the 2015 reissue, the model is, for the first time, a woman of color.]

From Clark Terry’s address book

Two pages from Clark Terry’s address book. I like that the D s begin with Duke. Thanks, Ezra.

In 1989 I had the good fortune to do a one-hour interview with Clark Terry on my university’s FM station. He was here to play a concert. A great musician, a genuine Ellingtonian, and a generous human being. Still one of the bright moments of my life.

Related reading
A handful of Clark Terry posts

Mark, huh?

 
[Mark Trail, May 21 and January 11, 2020. Click for larger Trails.]

I saved “Huh?” thinking it might come in handy. And it has.

For weeks now the artwork in Mark Trail has been a bit odd. That really is new Mark on the left. It’s all very “Huh?”

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

A Mirado jingle?

A reader who found my post about the end of the Mirado pencil wondered if anyone remembers a jingle from radio or television: “Eagle Mirado, the pencil that stays sharp for pages.” I went to Google Books to try to find it:



[The Saturday Evening Post, September 7 and 28, 1956. Click either image for a larger view.]

Well, there’s the “stays sharp for pages”, but no jingle. And that is one handsome haircut, isn’t it?

The secretary, too, has an attractive cut.

I also found something in snippet view from Newsweek, Office Management, and U.S. News and World Report (all 1959): “EAGLE’S live TV tests proved a pencil can be strong and smooth and durable without sacrificing any single value!” Live TV tests! So it seems at least possible that a jingle accompanied an Eagle television promotion.

Jingle or no jingle, the idea of pencils being tested on live television makes clear that there was nothing like the dowdy world for home entertainment.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Let the record show that the September 7, 1957 issue of the Post also has a full-page for the Dixon Ticonderoga. Back-to-school time = pencil wars.]

Letters, now

“This beautiful paper was for a rainy day. That day was now”: in the time of the coronavirus, Lynell George suggests writing letters (Los Angeles Times).

Related reading
All OCA letter posts (Pinboard)

Jimmy Cobb (1929–2020)

The drummer and last surviving musician from Miles Davis’s 1959 recording Kind of Blue. NPR has an obituary.

[If you don’t own a copy of Kind of Blue: what are you waiting for?]

Memorial Day

[“Gloucester, Massachusetts. Memorial Day, 1943.” Photograph by Gordon Parks. From the Library of Congress. Click for a much larger view.]

John Pavlovitz on how to grieve

Just in case someone hasn’t yet read it. From John Pavlovitz, “How Do You Grieve 100,000 Lives?“:

You wear a mask at the damn grocery store and you wash your hands and you keep your distance and you show kindness to cashiers — and you follow the simple rules put in place to keep people healthy and alive because that’s what decent human beings do.

What the news has been showing this weekend — people shoulder to shoulder, no masks, on beaches and at parties — is what happens when freedom is reduced to freedom from responsibility. I’ll invoke Julius Lester’s words, which could have been written about those crowds:

They persist in believing that freedom from restraint and responsibility represents paradise. The eternal paradox is that this is a mockery of freedom, a void. We express the deepest caring for this world and ourselves only by taking responsibility for ourselves and whatever portion of this world we make ours.