[Fun while driving.]
Name your Price:
Hi PriceAnd always standing off to the side at the family reunion:
Lo Price
Wright Price
Bergen PriceRelated reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
[My dad would have liked this stuff.]
“Here’s the college campus ---
let’s go to the phone booth”
[Fun while driving.]
Name your Price:
Hi PriceAnd always standing off to the side at the family reunion:
Lo Price
Wright Price
Bergen PriceRelated reading
By Michael Leddy at 3:15 PM comments: 0
My dad, James Leddy, died six years ago today. He’d have been ninety-three this year.
Elaine and I just watched the (terrific) movie Career Girls (dir. Mike Leigh, 1997), in which two college flatmates, both now thirty, reunite after six years apart. Six years might feel like an eternity for someone who’s thirty. These days it feels like no time at all.
Here’s what I wrote after my dad died.
By Michael Leddy at 8:13 AM comments: 0
The man who purportedly represents me in the Illinois House of Representatives, Chris Miller (R-110), is in the news again for lying. From Politico :
State Rep. Chris Miller is continuing to promote the false claim that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. “Make no mistake, Donald J. Trump was overwhelmingly elected in this last election cycle,” Miller said at a [July 28] political event to promote state Sen. Darren Bailey’s bid for governor.Miller’s previous moment in the news: his presence in Washington on January 6, with a truck bearing a Three Percenter sticker.
By Michael Leddy at 2:58 PM comments: 0
[“Nailing It.” Zippy, August 4, 2021. Click for a larger view.]
I thought about going down the rabbit hole yesterday. I went today. In search of an entertaining advertisement for Absorbine Jr., I discovered that there were two Jrs. Here they are, or were, sharing the year 1959 in the pages of Life.
[Life, June 1, 1959 and October 5, 1959. Click either image for a larger view.]
The Absorbine Jr. website makes no mention of a preparation for athlete’s foot. But it does explain “Jr.”:
Absorbine was originally created in 1892 by Wilbur F. Young and his wife, Mary Ida, to relieve the muscle pain of their hardworking horses that pulled heavy cargo. The popularity of the formula grew among farmers, who soon realized it quickly relieved their own aches and pains too.The strange thing is that both products were sold under the same name. “Oh, and pick up some Absorbine Jr., willya?” “You bet.” Imagine the hilarity that might have ensued when an unwitting athlete applied mentholated liquid to a foot. As Zippy would say, “Yow!”
Absorbine Jr., named after W.F. Young’s son, Junior, was developed specifically for humans — for fast, long lasting and effective relief of pain, stiffness and muscle aches.
By Michael Leddy at 9:17 AM comments: 0
Dear Ana Cabrera:
Barack Obama’s birthday party is not a “casualty” of COVID-19. The casualties of COVID-19 are those whose lives have been ended or upended by the spread of a contagious disease. Birthday parties don’t count.
[CNN is on in the background.]
By Michael Leddy at 12:52 PM comments: 0
In downstate Illinois, a county fair refused to allow a pop-up site for COVID-19 vaccinations. Says Bill Alagna, president of the fair board: “That’s not the business we’re in. We’re in the county fair business.”
Here is a photograph of Alagna with a horse. On the left, the horse. On the right, a horse’s ass.
By Michael Leddy at 8:15 AM comments: 0
Weirdness in the news: Betty Eppes, who in 1980 secretly recorded twenty-seven minutes’ worth of conversation with J. D. Salinger, says that the tape will be cremated with her.
Without a Paris Review subscription, you can read at least the start of Eppes’s account of meeting Salinger, published in 1980: “What I Did Last Summer.” The account is anthologized in If You Really Want to Hear About It: Writers on J. D. Salinger and His Work, ed. Catherine Crawford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006).
The Eppes–Salinger conversation is funny and sad:
“Is it true that you’ll eat fried foods only if they’re prepared in cold-pressed peanut oil?”Related reading
“Yes.”
By Michael Leddy at 8:02 AM comments: 0
[“Musician Louis Armstrong signing autographs for neighborhood kids.” Photograph by John Loengard. Queens, New York, 1965. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]
Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.
What I love about this photograph: the food (is that red beans and rice?) and the Coca-Cola must wait. The kids come first.
Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)
By Michael Leddy at 8:01 AM comments: 2
Stand down, Andrew. Stand down, please.
[Andrew Cuomo (precorded) was on TV just now, denying and lying his ass off. With thanks to the English Beat.]
By Michael Leddy at 12:15 PM comments: 0
“What lay behind his writing was this great trauma that he was expressing and suffering,” says Carole Angier, who has written a soon-to-be-published biography of W. G. Sebald. The Guardian has an article about it.
Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)
By Michael Leddy at 8:53 AM comments: 0