Katie Hobbs wins

[Made with the Mac app Acorn.]

In Arizona, Katie Hobbs will defeat Kari Lake in the race for governor. Lake’s response, as reported in The New York Times: “Arizonans know BS when they see it.” An interesting comment from someone who hides behind a filter.

Nancy and wrapping paper

[Nancy, December 19, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, Nancy is visiting her neighborhood grocer. You’ll have to click through to see why she needs wrapping paper. Yes, it’s December 19, but that hint is also a form of misdirection.

I hope the grocer has an enormous roll of string suspended from the ceiling with which to wrap packages. And a pair of scissors to cut the string. Or at least a tape machine.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard) : A selection of paper-roll cutters (Pinterest)

Dustin, blogger

Dustin Kudlick is starting a blog. His sister Meg is helping him add a counter. It feels quaint just to type those words — blog, counter.

But as they say, the best time to start a blog was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.

Culver × 8

Last Sunday the Ghost of Brooklyn Past visited the Culver Paper Co. in Boro Park. This Sunday the Ghost walks the environs of the Culver Line in Boro Park.

The 1940 Brooklyn telephone directory lists twenty-eight businesses whose names begin with Culver, along with a Frank Culver and a Miss Mildred Culver. (Incredible that the directory identified (at least some?) unmarried women as “Miss.”) Here are eight of the businesses, c. 1939–1940, courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.

  [Culver Coffee Pot, aka Culver Coffee Shop, 4409 18th Avenue. Culver Radio, 4419 18th Avenue. The coffee shop is between Natural Bloom Cigars and another coffee shop, the Excellent Coffee Shoppe. The Brooklyn Times-Union reports George Nekolokeos and Peter Kapoolas opening the Culver Coffee Pot in 1928. Advertisements show a Culver Radio in business at nearby 18th Avenue addresses as early as 1929.]

  [Culver Glass Co., 4506 18th Avenue. Culver Public Market, 4510 18th Avenue. The Culver Glass Co. was in business as late as 1959, with Irving Rothenberg as the owner.]

  [Culver Floor Covering, 4518 18th Avenue. Culver Florist, 952 McDonald Avenue. Click, look closely, and you’ll see someone at a window. Click again, look closely, and you’ll see the florist’s sign.]

And now, a twofer. It’s one of the most beautiful tax photos I’ve seen. Do click for a larger view:

[Culver Confectionery and Culver Theater, 4323-4329 18th Avenue. Now playing: Bitter Sweet (dir. W.S. Van Dyke, 1940), with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.]

Today 4409 is a Mexican restaurant; 4419, a yeshiva in a new building. A supermarket stands where 4506 and 4510 stood. A women’s clothing store and a pharmacy are at 4518 and 952. And at 4323-4329 — what else? — a bank.

Once again, Brooklyn Newsstand is an invaluable aid in garnering some details of Brooklyn Past. And once again, our visit will end with imaginary ice cream. This way to the confectionery.

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

Nancy breaks a wall

[Nancy, November 13, 2022. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Nancy, our protagonist has broken the fourth wall. Or the right edge. Or from her perspective, the left edge. And that must be how she got into today’s Zippy.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Looking for trouble

From a short post I wrote yesterday: “I don’t go looking for trouble. It finds me.” I was aiming to sound noirish, and I must have had Raymond Chandler Trouble Is My Business (1950) in the back of my mind. Geo-B thought I was referencing Harry Potter, which surprised me. I’ve read no more than a page of the first Potter novel. But here’s the passage, from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), the third Harry Potter novel:

“I don’t go looking for trouble,” said Harry, nettled. “Trouble usually finds me.”

Last night, we were watching an episode of Seinfeld, “The Switch” (first aired January 5, 1995). Kramer’s mother Babs (Sheree North) meets up with Newman (Michael Knight):

Hi, Newman.

Hi, Babs.

What are you doin’?

Just mindin’ my own business.

You can’t get into trouble that way.

What makes you think I’m lookin’ for trouble?

From what I hear, you postmen don’t have to look too far.

[Fiendish laughter.] Well, you know, sometimes it just has a way of finding me.

Here’s the scene.

Older sources suggests that such phrasing has long been in the air. From Computers in Libraries (1990):

I don’t go looking for these things, honest I don’t. As the editor of Database Searcher has been known to say, “Trouble finds me. I don’t go looking for it.”

From the magazine Soldiers (August 1984):

“I don't look for trouble. Trouble looks for me when I make my walking checks during the trip.”

From Erwin Haskell Schell’s Technique of Administration: Administrative Proficiency in Business (1951):

I want to find trouble before trouble finds me.

And from Mark Guy Pearse’s Christ’s Cure for Care (1902) in which an old mother offers wise counsel:

“Don’t you trouble trouble
Till trouble troubles you.
Don’t you look for trouble:
Let trouble look for you.”

And if we were still in the world of noir, a voicover might now take over:

I remembered a poem my sainted mother used to recite: “Don’t you look for trouble: / Let trouble look for you.” Well, ma, it’d found me — but good.

[Thanks, Elaine, for finding the 1951 and 1902 sources. And thanks, Joe, for identifying Babs as Kramer’s mother, not his sister.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg, and it’s a doozy, or a lulu, or both. Thirty-seven minutes for me, and more than once I was sure I’d have to give up. My starting point was 3-D, four letters, “Where the Rhine rises,” a clue I’ve seen, more or less, before. From there, 18-A, five letters, “Sounding stuffy.” Timely! And after that I struggled. Toughest points, the northwest and southwest. Oof.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Go around.” SPIN? TURN? Your initial guess may be better than mine.

11-D, ten letters, “Play adaptations.” Clever.

14-A, ten letters, “Large racket.” This one drove me a bit crazy.

16-A, ten letters, “What ranch houses typically haven’t.” I was thinking the answer had to be plural.

26-D, five letters, “Depression on a trunk.” A giveaway, nearly indentical to a clue from last Saturday.

42-A, six letters, “Of the above.” Tricky. I first thought the answer must be an arcane bibliographical abbreviation.

44-D, six letters, “French writer of ‘Facts are stubborn things.’” I thought that came from John Adams. But the French writer isn’t the original source either, not that the clue says he is.

49-A, four letters, “Mozzarella alternative for lasagna.” No, I’m a traditionalist.

53-A, five letters, “What a seminarian may become.” It’s misdirection only if your idea of a seminary is, uh, parochial.

59-D, three letters, “Cell ancestor.” A nice way to make the familiar difficult.

62-A, ten letters, “Largest break in the California Coastal Range.” Threw me for a loop. SOMECANYON?

My favorite in this puzzle: 37-A, fifteen letters, “Time best forgotten.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

NPR, sheesh

“As him and his aides think about this.”

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[I don’t go looking for trouble. It finds me.]

To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell

I’m up to episode five in Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong. The podcast remains utterly infuriating — so much wrongheaded thinking about the teaching of reading, so many children damaged as a result. And so much money made from curriculum materials that teach children to read the way poor readers read — by guessing at words, or as those who promulgate these methods now say, “hypothesizing.”

I ended up writing an e-mail to Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, three prime movers behind reading instruction whose work is examined in the podcast. Here’s what I sent:

I’m moved to write to you after listening to the podcast Sold a Story. Not a flattering title from your perspective, to be sure.

I write as a retired professor of English with thirty years of teaching at a regional state school. I came to reading at a young age, well before kindergarten. We were a family of modest means, but I had a dad who read to me every night, a shelf or two of books in the house, The New York Times every day, and a public library. I was one of the lucky kids who catch on to reading without explicit instruction in phonics.

It wasn’t until I volunteered as a literacy tutor working with non-reading adults that I realized how important explicit instruction in phonics is. The program I volunteered with was big on sight words: MEN, WOMEN, EXIT, and so on. I asked at one meeting what students were supposed to do when encountering a word they’d never seen before. There was no answer. I somehow got hold of a phonics curriculum and worked for several years with a man in his fifties who learned to read well enough to read a Rules of the Road handbook and pass the written test for his driver’s license.

So I understand the value of phonics. But it wasn’t until I listened to Sold a Story that I began to realize the extent to which the deficits in many of the students I taught as a college professor must have been related to a lack of instruction in phonics. Something I learned early on: not to ask students to read aloud in class. It can be painful. I don’t mean cold-calling on students; I mean just asking a student to read, say, a sentence or two from a text to support a statement about that text. Things are different, I’m sure, with students at elite institutions. But many a college student, in my experience, cannot read aloud with any fluency. It’s. Word. By. Word. When I realized that I had to feed students words here and there, I knew that it was time to give up on reading aloud.

And now after listening to Sold a Story I better understand why students so often would guess at the meanings of unfamiliar words when reading, instead of using a dictionary. They had been taught to guess about words by using so-called context clues. I would explain, again and again, that often the most important context for understanding the meaning of a word is the word itself, something that you can find only by using a dictionary. In other words, there’s no need to guess. And if you do guess, there’s no way to know if you’re right.

I wonder in retrospect about so many elements of college life. I wonder about the extent to which the dreary professorial practice of outlining the textbook on “the board” is not merely a matter of professorial laziness but a way to compensate, consciously or unconsciously, for students’ weaknesses as readers. And I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.

Your curriculum and others like it have done, I believe, great damage to the cause of reading. When so few elementary-school students (even pre-pandemic) can read at grade level, when so many high-school and college students profess to “hate reading,” it’s clear that something has gone wrong.

Sincerely, &c.

My e-mail to Professor Calkins added that though my family had books and The New York Times in the house, we had no monogrammed towels. From Calkins’s The Art of Teaching Writing (1994): “They [student writers] will ask about the monogram letters on their bath towels and the words on their sweatshirts.” Is it privilege yet?

*

In Education Week, Calkins has responded to Sold a Story (without mentioning it by name) by mischaracterizing advocates of instruction in phonics:

The message that has been pushed out by some phonics advocates, and that has trickled down to parents and even some educators, is an oversimplified one: If only teachers would teach phonics exclusively, then presto, all the reading problems in the world would vanish.

No one pushes out that message. No one would advocate teaching phonics exclusively or claim that phonics solves all reading difficulty. But phonics is a foundation. Without a foundation, you’re likely to be on shaky ground.

Related reading
A few OCA Sold a Story posts

Veterans Day

[From a letter to The New York Times, published as “Two Minutes’ Silence: Plans for the World-Wide Celebration of Armistice Day.” November 9, 1922.]

The first World War ended on November 11, 1918. Armistice Day was observed the next year. In 1954, Armistice Day became Veterans Day. I wonder what the writer of this letter would make of 2022.