Briefcase madeleine

[The Case Against Brooklyn (dir. Paul Wendkos, 1958). Click for a larger briefcase.]

Ahh, I get it — the case against Brooklyn. And the movie opens with a briefcase! I am belaboring the obvious.

This image was an instant madeleine for me: as a elementary-school kid in Brooklyn, I carried my books to school in an inexpensive knock-off that looked much like this briefcase. That’s what boys carried. High-school guys too. It was a pre-backpack world. I remember girls as carrying their books in bookstraps or in plaid bookbags, something like a fabric-and-vinyl version of a briefcase. Briefcases were made of genuine something — bonded leather? I remember the smell.

And I remember a briefcase for the start of school purchased from Century 21 on Brooklyn’s 86th Street. That’s the chain that just went out of business.

By sixth grade, I had switched to a metal attaché case. And when my family left Brooklyn for a New Jersey suburb, I found that carrying an attaché case was the cue for instant mockery. Mine promptly disappeared. The attaché case, that is. Not the mockery. Damn suburbs. Yes, abolish them.

Reader, did you carry your books to school in a briefcase?

A related post
NYC schooldays

Another time and place

[Massimo Vignelli, a detail from the New York City Subway Diagram. 2008. From The Vignelli Canon (2010).]

Up the road a ways

The New York Times reports on life at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “What the scientists had not taken into account was that some students would continue partying after they received a positive test result.”

Expel ’em.

“What?”

Walking on campus, Elaine and I, masked, see a student, unmasked, headed straight toward us, slowly, head down, reading his phone. We left the pavement and stepped far away to walk around him.

“Giving you a wide berth, son!” I shouted.

He turned. “What?” He looked a bit like Joe Kennedy III. No, more than a bit. Maybe he was reading about his doppelgänger’s primary loss.

“I’m giving you a wide berth!”

This time he didn’t say anything. He just kept walking and reading, unmasked.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that he may not have known what it means to give someone a wide berth. Someone will have to explain it to him. (Joe Kennedy III?)

“What’s he doing?!”

[“Three Strikes.” Zippy, September 10, 2020. Click for larger rocks.]

The rocks have assumed their positions. But what’s up with Zippy? Click to read today’s strip and find out.

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

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

Human?

From a robo-call voice mail: “Sorry, you did not reveal yourself to be human. Goodbye.”

In Indiana

“When you need wigs and novelties, and you’re in Indiana, you can hang it up, buddy!” Tom Waits on stage, in Big Time (dir. Chris Blum, 1988).

“The scale of betrayal”

"The scale of betrayal is almost beyond political analysis": Mara Gay of The New York Times, just now on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour. Gay is still recovering from the effects of COVID-19.

#TrumpKnew

#TrumpKnew pic.twitter.com/rWKzj5Ti1i

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 9, 2020

A reminder

I was out doing errands this morning. I came home to the news. The news. The news. And now I want to repost this image, which I first posted on May 15:



And to preserve the asterisk, which signifies impeached and carries a bonus Kurt Vonnegut overtone:


[Click either image for a larger view.]

Donald Trump*’s revelations to Bob Woodward are further evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work, made worse by dementia. What did Trump* think Woodward was going to make of these revelations? And how did Trump* think people would respond?

Richard Nixon at least had cunning enough to keep his tapes under wraps, at least until he couldn’t.

*

Yep, Dunning-Kruger. From Kaitlin Collins (CNN):

One reason Trump was so irritated aides didn't tell him about Woodward’s attempts to interview him for his last book [Fear ] was because he thought he could have made himself look better in it.

And from Maggie Haberman (The New York Times):

Mr. Trump gave Mr. Woodward extensive access to his White House and to top officials in the hopes the eventual book would be “positive,” in his eyes. Mr. Trump did not speak to Mr. Woodward for his first book on the Trump presidency, Fear, and the president has maintained publicly and to advisers that it would have turned out better had he personally participated.