Domestic comedy

“I cannot open this magazine without coming to grief.”

See the previous post.

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How to improve writing (no. 96)

I began turning the pages of the June 21, 2021 issue of The New Yorker. (It’s called catching up.) From an advertisement for Whitley Neill Gin:

The founder of Whitley Neill Gin, Johnny Neill, is the 8th generation in a family of gin masters going back to 1762. He has sourced 29 botanicals from around the world, creating an innovative and award winning range of gins.

Whitley Neill London Dry Gin, is distilled at the only distillery in the City of London itself. It is inspired by his travels to Africa and contains 9 botanicals including Cape Gooseberry and Boabab. Experience why Whitley Neill is the UK’s number one premium gin.

Best served in a highball with premium tonic, ice and garnished with a slice of orange.

It amazes me, though it shouldn’t, that a distiller who’s paid for a full-page ad in The New Yorker hasn’t paid adequate attention to this handful of sentences. Count the problems, just the glaring ones:

~ A missing hyphen.

~ An extraneous comma.

~ An unnecessary “itself.”

~ Two words without clear nearby referents.

~ A missing comma.

~ Unnecessary capital letters.

~ A misspelling.

Here, look:

The founder of Whitley Neill Gin, Johnny Neill, is the 8th generation in a family of gin masters going back to 1762. He has sourced 29 botanicals from around the world, creating an innovative and award[-] winning range of gins.

Whitley Neill London Dry Gin, is distilled at the only distillery in the City of London itself. It is inspired by his travels to Africa and contains 9 botanicals[,] including Cape Gooseberry and Boabab. Experience why Whitley Neill is the UK’s number one premium gin.

Best served in a highball with premium tonic, ice and garnished with a slice of orange.

I’d like to add a hyphen to “number one,” but Google’s Ngram Viewer shows me that “number one,” sans hyphen, as in “number one cause” and “number one hit,” is far more common. I’ll let that one go.

I see a number of problems beyond mechanics: “8th,” “9,” and “29” look to my eye a bit tacky in this fancy context. (What’s more impressive, “29 botanicals” or “twenty-nine botanicals”?) And Johnny Neill isn’t the eighth generation; he represents or is a member of an eighth generation. “He has sourced, . . . creating” doesn’t quite make sense: to source isn’t to create. “Ice and garnished” calls for revision. The more general invitation — “Experience why,” &c. — might make better sense at the end of the text. And the verb “taste” might make better sense than “experience.”

A larger problem: the disconnectedness of the sentences in the second paragraph. Try reading that paragraph aloud.

Better:

Johnny Neill is an eighth-generation gin master, carrying on a family tradition that began in 1762. As the founder of Whitley Neill Gin, he has sourced twenty-nine botanicals from around the world to create an innovative and award-winning range of gins.

Johnny’s travels to Africa inspired the creation of Whitley Neill London Dry Gin. Distilled at the only distillery in the City of London, it contains nine botanicals, including Cape gooseberry and baobab. Best served in a highball with premium tonic and ice, garnished with a slice of orange.

Taste why Whitley Neill is the UK’s number one premium gin.

Just in case a reader wonders whether I’ve misread some of the small print, here’s the misspelling of baobab. You can click for a better look:

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[This post is no. 96 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Four Seasons Total Documentary

Tonight on MSNBC (9:00 Central), Four Seasons Total Documentary, the story of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference and its aftermath.

[The press conference took place a year ago today.]

A 13th Avenue candy store

[4319 13th Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Another tax photo. In my 1960s kidhood, this candy store (in the same hands? different hands?) was known to me as a purveyor of charlotte russe. You could buy it through the window. Today the window is gone, and 4319 is a children’s clothing store.

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Another Brooklyn candy store : Nancy and charlotte russe : Nancy and charlotte russe again

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Lester Ruff,” Stan Newman. And yes, it started so easily. 1-A, eight letters, “The ones that got away”? Feels like a getaway giveaway. 1-D, six letters, “Southwest’s second-largest city”? Obvious after 1-A. But I struggled with 11-D, three letters, “Don’t just look” (huh?), 16-A, six letters, “Italian art glass” (and yet I have a piece of it, duh), and 34-D, eight letters, “Circle look-alike” (again, huh?). This puzzle turned out to be Maura Ruff than I expected. The distinctive feature: two fifteen-letter answers, 8-D, “That’ll do” and 34-D, “Optimistic sentiment.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

19-A, three letters, “Something drawn to scale.” I think the clue is a pun, but I still don’t get “drawn,”

21-D, three letters, “‘The definitive record’ updated quarterly.” Long may it wave.

24-D, seven letters, “Handle.” The answer makes me think of something from a 1930s movie.

38-A, six letters, “It might be a snap.” Sweet.

44-D, six letters, “Hypothesized transitional guy.” I thought of a KInks song, and I don’t mean “Lola.”

48-A, four letters, “Litter pickup point.” Cute.

If the Newsday paywall makes it impossible for you to access the Stumper, you might try a different browser. I can access the Stumper in Brave but not in Safari. Or try another source — GameLab, for instance (which requires that you turn off your ad-blocker). Newsday would do well to offer a crossword subscription. I’d happily pay for the puzzle, but I won’t pay $6.98 a week for a digital subscription to Newsday.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, November 5, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

I missed this moment yesterday (oil change). I’m not sure if it’s a Hi-Lo attempt at edgy humor, or one more exhibit of the strip’s cluelessness. At any rate, Chip has taken his dad’s advice and is in the closet.

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Recently updated

The oldest Ellingtonian? Eve Duke, earlier this year.

Reading in NYC

“Even in the busiest of places, if you have a good book, you can retreat into solitude”: photographs of people reading in New York City (The New York Times).

Browse the titles where possible. I spotted the same 1959 paperback edition of Jacques Barzun’s Teacher in America that’s on one of my bookshelves.

Droste fail

From Over-Exposed (dir. Lewis Seiler, 1956). Click for a larger view.]

When is the Droste effect not the Droste effect? Right here, with Shirley Thomas, host of Phone Call to a Personality, interviewing famous photographer Lila Crane (Cleo Moore).

[IMDb has nothing for the role of Shirley Thomas. TCM has Shirley Thomas playing herself. Other sources say Constance Towers.]

Out to the parking lot

The town festival was underway, with people leading their animals into the community center. I noticed a pony and a sheep. All the animals were seated at long tables running down the sides of the community center’s conference room.

I went out to the parking lot, where two young women had parked their car so that the driver’s side was smack up against the back of our Prius, making it impossible for me to back out. And the only way they could back out without damaging both cars was to first maneuver forward, turning the wheel ever so slightly, before backing out. I asked them to do so. They were reluctant. I offered to maneuver their car myself and pay if there was any damage. They agreed. So I got in and maneuvered their car out of its space. (I’m a capable driver.)

I asked them if they liked the Rolling Stones and expected them to say “Who?” But they said that they thought the Rolling Stones were a pretty good band, and I agreed. And I got out of their car and into our Prius.

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[Possible sources: Hallmark (town festival), Peppa Pig (animals), oil change (Prius), events in Dallas (the Stones).]