A sardine calendar

Here’s a startling headline: “Man builds handmade sardine advent calendar for Christmas” (The Irish News):

A festive creator has enjoyed the reaction “from all over” after he shared his handmade 2021 sardine advent calendar on social media.

Charles Vestal, from Berlin, Germany, told the PA news agency that what started as a “passion project/joke” has prompted interest from hundreds of strangers online.

“I present to you the 2021 sardine advent calendar, filled with 24 Portuguese tinned fish delights to enjoy all December long,” he tweeted — the post has since accrued more than 3,000 likes.

“I’ve always kind of liked advent calendars,” the 38-year-old said.

Here’s the Twitter thread detailing the calendar’s creation.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[I don’t know why advent is uncapitalized in this article.]

Sluggo and charlotte russe

[Nancy, February 15, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

These panels remind me of the opening scene of the film version of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which Spiros Antanopoulos (Chuck McCann) breaks a bakery window to get at the cakes and cookies. Elaine and I watched the film a couple of nights ago.

These panels also remind me of the description of John Keats in William Butler Yeats’s poem “Ego Dominus Tuus”:

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop
    window

Like Yeats’s Keats, Sluggo too is “Shut out from all the luxury of the world.” Which includes charlotte russe — even if Sluggo is eyeing the cakes. Notice, next to the cakes: that’s charlotte russe.

These two panels preface a final one (the one Ernie Bushmiller called “the snapper”), in which a cat stares at a fish frozen in a block of ice that sits on the sidewalk. “I guess I’m not the only one,” says Sluggo.

Did ice usually get delivered with a fish in it?

Related reading
All OCA charlotte russe posts : Nancy and charlotte russe : Nancy and more charlotte russe

Horton’s

If you look back at the photograph of a Brooklyn candy store I posted a couple of days ago, you might notice the name Horton’s prominently displayed. An indefatigible reader did. The J.M. Horton Ice Cream Company, maker of “The Premier Ice Cream of America,” was a venerable name in cool treats. Ephemeral New York and Forgotten New York provide some history. And here’s an excerpt from King’s Handbook of New York City: An Outline History and Description of the American Metropolis, by Moses King (1892):

The J.M. Horton Ice Cream Co. is a name familiar to all New-Yorkers, Brooklynites, and neighboring residents; for its delicious creams have been enjoyed by all. To the epicureans of the table they are indispensable. Their cool and soft flavors lie upon the palate with a delicacy that only experience can appreciate. Upon transatlantic liners; upon the luxurious dining-cars that speed from city to city; at balls, at parties, at festivals, at all private or public gatherings in or about our great metropolis where delicacies vie with one another, Horton’s cream is welcomed as an old friend. Always at its best, it stands without an equal. And Mr. Horton’s name has been so closely associated with the purest ice cream for many years that the two have become synonymous. Indeed, a little girl on being asked how to spell ice cream, said, "H-o-r-t-o-n.“

You can see that name, still bright and clear, at 302 Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, a building that housed a Horton store (Horton called it an “ice cream depot”), with apartments above.

Here’s what an indefatigible reader discovered: Horton’s also made charlotte russe. I found large-scale proof:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 27, 1923. Click for a larger view.]

At some point Horton’s got out of the charlotte russe business. The Horton name, though, still carried enough weight with eaters of the appealing dainty to inspire fakes:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 22, 1928. Click for a larger view.]

And the name continued to carry weight after the company was absorbed by Borden (1928? The late ’20s? 1930? Accounts vary.) You can see the name on this item, a gallonage card for candy stores and soda fountains:

[Ron Case, Images of America: Ramsey (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2001). Click for a larger view.]

Thanks, reader.

[The hyphen in New-Yorkers is a rabbit hole I’m choosing to walk around.]

Billy Strayhorn’s “Charlotte Russe”

One more bit of charlotte russe: an indefatigable reader (thanks, reader) reminds me that Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” was at one time titled “Charlotte Russe.” My guess is that Strayhorn was thinking of the elegant dessert, not cake and whipped cream in a cardboard sleeve.

Here are two recordings of “Lotus Blossom.” The first was released on . . . And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967), the album of Strayhorn compositions that the Duke Ellington Orchestra recorded after Strayhorn’s death. It’s August 30, 1967, with Ellington alone at the piano, as everyone is packing up. The engineer left the tape running. Two days later, a trio, with Harry Carney (baritone sax) and Aaron Bell (bass), unreleased until the 1987 CD. Heartbreakers, both performances.

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

Red and blue

David Leonhardt, writing in The New York Times Morning Newsletter:

There simply was not a strong partisan pattern to Covid during the first year that it was circulating in the U.S.

Then the vaccines arrived.

They proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged. . . .

The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

One remarkable detail:

Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent.

Looking at counties in Illinois, I can see that that’s so. It’s a death cult, really.

Domestic comedy

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

See the previous post.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

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:

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[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.

Related posts
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.