Close the door

There was a catastrophic fire in the Bronx today:

Commissioner [Daniel A.] Nigro said the door to the apartment where the fire started was left open, which helped fuel the fire and allowed the smoke to spread. “We’ve spread the word, ‘close the door, close the door,’” to keep a fire contained, he said.

“Close the door” is the theme of a famed PSA created by the sound recordist Tony Schwartz.



Everyone should hear this message. Please pass it on.

[I learned about this PSA in 2017, not long before another fire in the Bronx.]

Yow-Zah’s

[2192 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Snow was on the ground and a beer advertisement on the side of the building when the tax people took this photograph.

The full text:

Yow-Zah’s
Model Airplane Shop
And Other Hobbies
Gas Motors, Parts & Gas Kits
Boats, Accessories, Balsa Wood
And Supplies.

It looks to me as if “And Other Hobbies” and “And Supplies” were afterthoughts. Or they were forethoughts painted over, or sort of painted over. The words now compete with the NYC.gov/records watermark that runs across the photograph.

The date of the building’s construction, according to the Municipal Archives: 1931. A 1931 classified advertisement lists a cigar and stationery store for sale at this address. When this photograph was taken, Yow-Zah’s may have already been defunct (notice the disarray of the windows). By May 1941 the address housed the Paragon Chimney and Furnace Cleaning Company. By 1952, it was Harry’s Hand Laundry (“Shirts 18¢, Sheets 14¢, Pillow cases 6¢.”) Today the address is home to Kaché Restaurant and Lounge, serving Carribean-American cuisine.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates yowza! or yowzah! to 1933: “a general excl., either of approval or of vaguely non-committal agreement.” Yow-Zah’s Hobby Shop is listed in the Brooklyn Telephone Directory, Winter 1939–40: ESplanade 7–9003. And yes, it’s the only Yow-Zah’s in the book.

Thanks, Brian, for finding this photograph.

*

February 4: An eagle-eyed reader reports that the advertisement on the side of the building is for Stegmaier’s beer.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[I searched for the 2192 address in the Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Newstand, a great resource for time-traveling Brooklynites.]

Prune latte

M’m! M’m! Good? Behold the prune latte.

Many years ago, Bob and Ray had a bit about Bob and Ray’s House of Toast. The Backstayges ran a House of Toast in Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife, serving toast (buttered on the far side or the near side) and prune shakes.

And yes, there once were prune shakes.

Thank you, Elaine, for sending the recipe my way.

Related reading
All OCA Bob and Ray posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is about as difficult, I’d say, as last Saturday’s puzzle. Two thirteen-letter answers and two fourteen-letter answers were surprisingly easy to work out with just a few letters’ worth of crosses.

Clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, five letters, “Ill-fitting?” I was thinking about a word the other day and wondering, Wait — is that a word? It is. It is the answer to this clue.

10-A, four letters, “Drapery sample.” The clue improves an often-seen answer.

14-A, five letters, “Accordion cover material.” When was the last time you saw an accordion?

16-D, fourteen letters, “Uncouth, metaphorically.” A funny, dowdy expression. It make me think of what used to be called “bad table manners.”

21-A, five letters, “Well fixed.” Gentle misdirection.

27-A, thirteen letters, “Start taking things seriously.” Though I think of the answer in a different way.

46-D, six letters, “Tony Award, in part.” Clever.

56-A, nine letters, “One in a cast with a cause.” My first thought was of someone suing.

57-D, three letters, “Taking from a timetable.” Like 10-A, a familiar answer improved by its clue.

One complaint: 37-A, three letters, “Express.”Unless I’m missing something, this clue is just not 61-A, nine letters, “Convincing.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Sidney Poitier (1927–2022)

The New York Times has an obituary.

My checklist: No Way Out, Blackboard Jungle, Edge of the City, The Defiant Ones, Paris Blues, Lilies of the Field, A Patch of Blue, To Sir, with Love, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Stop / Stop

The difference between the iOS Timer and Alarm screens bugs me.



Shouldn’t Stop appear in the same spot on both screens? Imagine:

Must get up . . . not be late again . . . reach for phone . . . aha, orange button . . . zzz.

It’s poor design, I think, to make Snooze the more visible option. (Perhaps a developer’s joke to give everyone an easy excuse for being late?) Snoozing can be disabled for an alarm, but that might also be a risky choice. So I tinkered with a screenshot to fix things:

[If only it were fixable on the phone.]

How did I finagle the system font (SF Pro) to make a replacement button? All SF fonts are available from Apple as free downloads.

*

As I just discovered, users have been noticing the Stop / Snooze inconsistency since 2017, at least.

[I found myself hitting Snooze not while sleeping but while cooking. I was knocked for a unexpected loop when my alarm sounded a second time.]

On January 6

An idle question: do doctors and nurses still check on a patient’s mental state by asking who’s president? And if so, is more than one answer considered acceptable? And if more than one answer is considered acceptable, what does that say about where we are? In more than one country?

The crisis of American democracy is a crisis of fact.

On January 6

President Joe Biden, telling it like it is:

“My fellow Americans, in life there’s truth, and, tragically, there are lies, lies conceived and spread for profit and power. We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie. And here’s the truth: a former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest and America’s interest, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”

And: “He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president.”

You can see the full remarks from Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at C-SPAN.

[My transcription.]

On January 6

Here’s an opinion piece by Capitol police officers Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell: “The government we defended last Jan. 6 has a duty to hold all the perpetrators accountable” (The Washington Post ).

On Tuesday night the two men appeared on the The PBS NewsHour, interviewed by Lisa Desjardins. The interview begins at the 23:08 mark. Here’s an excerpt:

Desjardins: Officer Dunn, do you think this danger is still here? Where are we right now, in terms of the threat to democracy, from your view?

Dunn: You know, it’s scary to think about where we are. Sure, we succeeded as far as our mission that day. Democracy went on, late in the night, January 6th into January 7th. Democracy prevailed. But I think it’s very important for everybody now to realize how close and fragile democracy is, and that everybody, everybody, even anybody watching, anybody listening, has a job to do in protecting and defending democracy. That could be us police officers, we police; the legislators, the lawmakers, they need do their job and legislate; the judges judge; and the American people need to vote about who to put in those positions. We need accountability, and we need to make sure the right people are in office that want accountability also.

[My transcription.]

Lighted squares

Stefan Zweig, Diaries (1931–1940). Trans. from the German by Ediciones 98 (Madrid: Ediciones 98, 2021).

A 1935 visit to New York lets us see Stefan Zweig as a spectator-tourist, visiting Radio City, the Savoy Ballroom, and “a self-service café” — no doubt the Automat. This passage’s description of “a geometric composition of lighted squares” made me think of the miniature cityscape in a 1947 film noir.

Elsewhere the diary entries veer from everyday details — letters, reviews, visits with friends and publishers — to an everpresent dread, as Zweig, the citizen of the world, watches the rise of totalitarianism: “I am sure there’s another coup brewing, and I think it will be successful.”

But I think of what our friend Eva Kor said: “Never give up.”

Related reading
All OCA Zweig posts (Pinboard)

[I’m glad that I got a copy of this book when I did: it has already disappeared from Amazon’s listings. Also available from Ediciones 98, in Spanish: Diarios (1931–1940) and Diarios (1912–1914).]