Mar-a-Lago “under siege”!

Jeepers — I step away from the news to do the dishes and listen to a podcast and then find that in my absence the story broke that the FBI has executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Largo. “They even broke into my safe!” a defeated former president complains.

Well, if you had a safe and also had things you wanted to hide, where else would you keep them?

What’s in the safe could be — and no doubt already is — a big deal.

[“Under siege” are the defeated former president’s words, in a faux-tweet. The podcast was The Problem with Jon Stewart.]

After Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901. I missed the date this year, for two reasons: I didn’t mark it in my datebook, and in my head it’s always somehow August 8, because I know it’s not the Fourth. Armstrong always said he was born on July 4, 1900. Such a date befitted him.

Better late than never: here’s one of my favorite later Armstrong performances: “Azalea,” recorded on April 4, 1961. It’s a Duke Ellington composition, which Ellington wrote years before with Armstrong in mind. As Dan Morgenstern describes the scene in his liner notes for The Great Summit (Roulette Jazz, 2000):

Duke mustered up the courage to pull out a lead sheet for “Azalea.” He pulled up a chair, sat down facing Louis, and held up the words and music. Louis donned his horn-rimmed glasses, smiled that matchless smile, and began to hum and sing. An expert sight-reader, he soon had the melody down. The lyric, even with Duke having moved to the piano, was a bit more challenging, but it, too, fell into place. As all this was taking shape, Ellington was positively beaming, and when a take had been made, he was ecstatic. If indeed he’d had Louis in mind when he created this hothouse conceit, he had chosen properly, for no one else could've made it credible but the incredible Mr. Strong.

With Mort Herbert, bass, and Danny Barcelona, drums. Go, listen. It’s beautiful.

Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Dream chords

I was showing my friend Rob Zseleczky a beautiful set of chord changes: the chorus of “California Girls.” It’s a simple pattern up and down the neck of the guitar. I like the first chord for each vocal line as a major seventh. It’s not that way in the original. I don’t care.

  Bmaj7               C#m7
I wish they all could be California

  Amaj7               Bm7
I wish they all could be California

  Gmaj7               Am7           B
I wish they all could be California girls

And speaking of “California Girls,” here’s what might be the most surprising take on the song you’ll ever hear, with Mike Love, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, and Charles Lloyd. Not from a dream.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[More about the Beach Boys–Lloyd connection here.]

What commas don’t fix

There’s a mistaken clue in Evan Birnholz’s Washington Post Sunday crossword: 102-D, six letters, “What commas may fix.” The answer: RUNONS.

But no number of commas can fix a run-on sentence.

Here’s a lucid explanation of run-ons from Garner’s Modern English Usage :

Run-on sentences do not stop where they should. The problem usually occurs when the writer is uncertain how to handle punctuation or how to handle such adverbs as however and otherwise, which are often mistakenly treated as conjunctions.

Some grammarians distinguish between a “run-on sentence” (or “fused sentence”) and a “comma splice” (or “run-together sentence”). In a run-on sentence, two independent clauses — not joined by a conjunction such as and, but, for, or, or nor — are incorrectly written with no punctuation between them. Hence a run-on sentence might read: “I need to go to the store the baby needs some diapers.” Correctly, it might read: “I need to go to the store; the baby needs some diapers.”

With a comma splice, two independent clauses have merely a comma between them, again without a conjunction — e.g.: “I need to go to the store, the baby needs some diapers.” The presence or absence of a comma — and therefore the distinction between a run-on sentence and a comma splice — isn’t usually noteworthy. So most writers class the two problems together as run-on sentences.

But the distinction can be helpful in differentiating between the wholly unacceptable (true run-on sentences) and the usually-but-not-always unacceptable (comma splices).

Whichever way you define run-on sentence, a comma won’t fix such a sentence. If there’s no punctuation between independent clauses, a comma will only create a comma splice. If there’s already a comma between clauses, another comma tossed in somewhere won’t help.

Some years ago I wrote a two-part guide to punctuation that avoids almost all grammatical terms — even the term run-on sentence. The rules therein (just five) are meant to be especially useful to students, and they account for run-ons, commma splices, and, as they say, much more: How to punctuate a sentence, How to punctuate more sentences.

For a replacement clue, how about “Sentences that don’t mind the gap”?

[And, but, for, or, nor : add so and yet and you have all seven coordinating conjuctions, or as they’re known to teachers of writing, the FANBOYS. The words of course have other uses as well: Are we there yet? I’m so done.]

IRA = BFD

IRA: the Inflation Reduction Act.

BFD: Self-explanatory, I hope. If not, ask Joe Biden.

Along came Mary, and a bookstore

[Hamburger Mary and the Liveright Bookshop, 15 and 17 West 51st Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“Hamburger Mary”? I know that name. William Burroughs, from a Paris Review interview (Fall 1965):

There was a place in New York called Hamburger Mary’s. I was in Hamburger Mary’s when a friend gave me a batch of morphine syrettes. That was my first experience with morphine, and then I built up a whole picture of Hamburger Mary. She is also an actual person. I don’t like to give her name for fear of being sued for libel, but she was a Scientologist who started out in a hamburger joint in Portland, Oregon, and now has eleven million dollars.

In Burroughs’s fiction, Hamburger Mary is a member of the Nova Mob, a group dedicated to creating galactic chaos. (I’m simplifying greatly.) Among the mob’s members: Izzy the Push, The Subliminal Kid, and Mr Bradly Mr Martin. In our world, there’s now Hamburger Mary’s, “a drag-themed burger restaurant chain.” Any relation to West 51st or Burroughs? If there is one, the company’s history page isn’t saying. Wikipedia points to the use of “Mary” as a slang term for a gay man as the explanation.

Next door to Mary, the Liveright Bookshop. Boni & Liveright, the publishing firm founded by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright in 1917, was and still is a distinguished name in modern American literature. A 1963 New Yorker item describes the Liveright Bookshop as the work of two sisters, Addie and Babette Liveright, in business from 1924 to 1952. They were Horace Liveright’s cousins. A 1925 advertisement for the bookshop (which was then on West 49th Street) made an appearance in this OCA post.

If my map-reading skills are firing, 15 and 17 West 51st have been subsumed by 75 Rockefeller Plaza and an American Girl store.

*

August 12: I went to the library to look up “Nostalgic Twins,” the 1963 New Yorker item about the Liveright sisters. Addie (1883–1968) and Babette (1883–1969) were twins, born in Philadelphia, educated in Quaker schools. “We are not intellectuals,” Babette told The New Yorker. Babette worked as a secretary, came to New York and took a course in bookselling, developed a following at Stern’s (a department store), and persuaded Addie to join her in starting a bookstore. The sisters began at 4 West 49th and moved to 15 West 51st in 1929. In 1945 they moved to the Associated Press Building on Rockefeller Plaza. John D. was among their customers. Others: Oscar Hammerstein II, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell, A.S.W. Rosenbach, and the Holland-America Line.

The New Yorker item ends with a joke: “‘Dr. Rosenbach bought from us, but we didn’t buy from him,’ Addie said.” A.S.W. Rosenbach was a buyer, seller, and collector of rare books. He owned the manuscripts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Ulysses.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

The Vignelli map

From the New York Transit Museum: Towards a Better Way: The “Vignelli” Map at 50.

[An excerpt from the map, showing a bit of Brooklyn.]

Rats in cars

“The ‘check engine’ light came on, and I brought it to my mechanic, who popped the hood and found chicken bones, some bread and part of a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich sitting there”: “Why So Many Cars Have Rats in Them Now” (The New York Times ).

A tip our Toyota dealer offered: set the ventilation to recirculate if you’re leaving a car parked for any length of time — say in an airport parking lot. Doing so keeps at least some of the innards off-limits to critters.

The sound of the Senate

I’m watching me some C-SPAN2. As voting remains open on whether to begin debate on the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the sound of the Senate is extremely odd. It suggests to me a cross between a laundromat and a gathering of chanting ghosts, led perhaps by Diane Feinstein and Charles Grassley.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

The Newsday Saturday Stumper seems to once again be available from the Newsday site without a subscription. Hurrah! Today’s Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” or Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. The pseudonym marks an easier Stumper, and this one is indeed easier, though several clues made me struggle. 8-D, nine letters, “Baker of artisanal breads”? Well, it’s not PEPPERIDGEFARM.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Unsuccessful.” I always think of the answer as a word I learned in college.

12-D, three letters, “Know how.” Sneaky.

20-A, twelve letters, “French president’s term.” Pretty Stumpery. I thought the answer had to be in French, and there is an answer in French that looks right, but it’s wrong.

21-D, four letters, “‘_____ travail!’ (‘Too much work!’: Fr.).” Part of the reason I thought the answer for 20-A was in French.

28-A, three letters, “Common contents of bookcases.” ART? CDS? Also pretty Stumpery.

30-A, seven letters, “Hershiser in ’88, Pujols in ’04”: uh, sports? No doubt many solvers will just know this, but not me.

41-A, seven letters, “‘Father’ to ‘père,’ per Wikipedia.” I just liked seeing the answer.

47-D, six letters, “One of four in Romeo and Juliet.” I caught on.

48-D, six letters, “Museum pieces.” There’s a poem that comes to mind.

58-A, four letters, “Fair pair.” I always like an answer that I think I understand until I realize that I’ve probably misunderstood it. It’s like getting a bonus answer when the puzzle is done.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.