Misspelling in the news

An Illinois woman has been arrested for entering Hawaii with a fake COVID-19 vaccination card. It showed her as having received the Maderna vaccine.

Related reading
All OCA misspelling posts (Pinboard)

Lives of the fakes

In The New York Times, the lives of fake works of art:

Works declared to be fake often enjoy diverse afterlives, according to law enforcement officials, academic scholars and art market veterans. Some are retained by universities as study instruments, some as the legacies of well-intentioned donors who lacked an expert eye. Some were used in a sting by an undercover agent who hoped the sense of wealth created by fancy paintings on a yacht would be a persuasive part of his pose.

But many of the works, experts say, have second lives that very much resemble their first: as fakes recycled to unsuspecting buyers.

[See also the great documentary Art and Craft (dir. Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, 2014).]

Burying the lede

An odd headline in The Washington Post: “Four conservative radio talk-show hosts bashed coronavirus vaccines. Then they got sick.”

More accurately: “Four conservative radio talk-show hosts bashed coronavirus vaccines. Then they got sick and died.”

“Aloha, Mabel!”

From “How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?,” the third episode of the new Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin) is conferring with Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) on how best to get in touch with their neighbor Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez).

“Let’s see if Mabel's free. I’ll call her. Or should I text?”

“Calls bother them for some reason.”

“Yeah. I think it’s a text. What sounds more casual? ‘Dear Mabel,’ or ‘Greetings, Mabel’?”

And then: “Hey, I figured out the perfect greeting for the text.”

[Click any image for a larger view.]

Mabel’s pencil

[Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) and pencil. Click either image for a larger view.]

That’s a screenshot from “True Crime,” the first episode of the new Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. Mabel is probably making notes on the podcast she — and at least two of her neighbors — are listening to, All Is Not OK in Oklahoma.

Her pencil: I’m pretty sure it’s a Tombow Mono-R. The gold band at the top is the clue. For those who believe in fanatical attention to detail, here are some more pencils in film and on TV.

Recently updated

Camp COVID A mid-June Christian youth camp in Illinois — no mask, no vaccination required — is now the source of 180 “confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19.”

Scooter construction

[“Young boy nailing wheel parts fr. an old roller skate to a wooden plank in the first step toward making an orange crate scooter.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. New York, New York. June 1947.]

[“Young boy playing w. his orange crate scooter which he just made by nailing the wheel parts fr. an old roller skate to a wooden plank & adding an orange crate.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. New York, New York. June 1947.]


[“Young boy playing w. his fruit crate scooter which he made by nailing the wheel parts fr. an old roller skate to a wooden plank & adding the crate.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. New York, New York. June 1947. All photographs from the Life Photo Archive.]

That’s a different kid and different scooter in the third photograph. Did a parent insist that he put on that jacket to look presentable? “I’m not gonna have you in Life magazine lookin’ like a bum!”

Related posts
Roller-Scooter truck assemblies : A Henry scooter

iA Writer keyboard commands

“I didn't find a comprehensive list of keyboard commands for iA Writer. So, I made one”: iA Writer Keyboard Commands (Bicycle for Your Mind).

[From 2017, but every command I’ve tried still works.]

Roller-Scooter truck assemblies

[From the Johnson Smith & Co. 1938 catalog. Click for a larger view.]

The pitch begins:

What boy doesn’t want a snappy scooter – ’specially if the toughest work is all ready done for him and he knows that when he’s finished he’ll have the smoothest running, fastest shooting scooter any kid could help to build!

And only 65¢!

Well, sort of. What’s for sale here is not a scooter but “truck assemblies.” Truck? I had to look it up: “a small wheel.” What your 65¢ is buying: roller-skate wheels. That’s all, folks.

Lose the tie and sweater and knickers, add a t-shirt and dungarees, and the kid in the advertisement could have stepped from the pages of my youth. In the early 1960s the big kids on my block in Brooklyn rode scooters like this one. The front was a milk crate or produce crate, with a piece of wood nailed across the top for handlebars. The kids rode in the street, which was narrow and one-way, with cars parked on both sides. I remember that they were somehow engaging in games of combat — taking swings at one another, or crashing into one another, or something. I watched from the sidewalk.

Here’s a page with some history about these scooters. Here are some Life photos of scooters. And here’s a post with a cartoon scooter, a real-world scooter, and previous reverie.

Also from this catalog
Comical motto rings

[Every post right now is a retreat from all forms of news.]

“Fanatical attention to detail”

[Dustin, August 30, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

Simone just told Dustin that he needs to edit his new résumé. He’s written “fanatical attention to detail” twice.

I didn’t know that “fanatical attention to detail” is work-speak. Here, take a look at DuckDuckGo’s search results.

As for detail, and fanatical attention to it: Dustin spells it resume. Garner’s Modern English Usage says résumé (“So spelled, preferably.”) Merriam-Webster has resume and resumé only as variants. Determining whether the Dustin font has the accented characters required for résumé would require a fanatical attention to detail I’m not prepared to offer.

A few more Dustin posts
Bad copyediting : Literally and figuratively : Phrasal-adjective punctuation : Was or were?