From the Only Murders in the Building episode “Hello, Darkness.” Two neighbors in the building:
“Don’t laugh, but I’ve always wanted to be a children’s librarian.”[The librarian is Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton). His neighbor (Jason Veasey) has no name, at least not yet.]
“I’m a librarian.”
“Shut up!”
“That’s our slogan.”
At the last Remote Encoding Center: How the USPS reads terrible handwriting.
Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
I missed Louis Armstrong’s birthday this year, and I just realized that I missed Willa Cather’s birthday last year. Cather was born on December 7, 1873.
Here are just two revealing sentences from a Cather letter to E.K. Brown, dated April 9, 1937. The context: Brown’s 1936 article “Willa Cather and the West” (University of Toronto Quarterly, 1936), a copy of which Brown sent to Cather. Cather calls it “an interesting and very friendly pamphlet” and says that Brown has “certainly brought a friendly and unprejudiced mind” to her work. On one point she disagrees:
I think you make a very usual mistake, however, in defining a writer geographically. Myself, I read a man (or a woman) for the climate of his mind, not for the climates in which he has happened to live.Brown (1905–1951) went on to write the first Cather biography, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, completed by Leon Edel (1953).
The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).
[“Ready for the Slicks.” Zippy, August 9, 2022.]
I don’t think I was yet reading Zippy when Bradford ’n’ Nan made its last appearances. Today’s strip adds new dialogue to the art of an April 2000 strip.
I admire Bill Griffith’s curmudgeonly insistence on genuine artistry in comics. Nan in the second panel: “Don’t be so old-school, Brad! Drawing ability is no longer a requirement.”
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
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.]
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.
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.]
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.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 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).
[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.
