National Sardine Day

It’s tomorrow: just in time for Thanksgiving.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

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Words of the year Now with teal.

Vote for a word of the year

Oxford Languages is asking the public to vote for a word of the year. The choices, which for some reason Oxford lists out of alphabetical order: metaverse, #IStandWith, and goblin mode. Vote here.

My choice for word of the year: angst. As in a Ted Berrigan poem from A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1988):

Angst

I had angst.

Me too. “The news” is a nightmare.

Thus far two dictionaries have chosen their words of the year. Why didn’t Oxford Languages do likewise? Maybe they, too, had angst.

*

December 5: The votes are in, and Oxford Languages has goblin mode for its word of the year. Oy and gevalt.

[“I had angst”: yes, that’s the whole poem.]

The rules

From The Chicago Manual of Style blog Shop Talk, an explanation of when to capitalize an initial the.

[Should it be the Left Banke or The Left Banke? I go back and forth. Uh-oh, a nitpicker. Just walk away, Renée.]

Lydia Ricci’s art

Lydia Ricci: “tiny sculptures made from the scraps of daily existence.” There are also animations. And an Instagram page.

Found via Daughter Number Three.

[Lydia Ricci’s art marks the second time in two days I’ve seen a depiction of an old-school cassette recorder with a red Record button. The first time: in an episode of Arthur.]

Recently updated

Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado Now with an artifact.

A source for Columbo

Porfiry Petrovich (no family name) is the principal investigator of a double murder. He is speaking to Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov:

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, translated by Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2021).

At the 278-page mark, this novel just became interesting in a new way. Elaine and I, independent of each another, each wrote Columbo in our margins. So I’m happy to see that Lieutenant Columbo’s creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, named Porfiry Petrovich as a model for their character. Some years back, I thought that the little detective in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques had something to do with the character of Columbo. And I still think that Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, with his invisible wife and missing first name, is in there somewhere.

Two related posts
Columbo’s notebook : Separated at birth: Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, William Hopper

[Re Columbo’s first name, see here.]

A source of swing?

“Nearly imperceptible delays in soloists’ timing contribute to the music’s signature rhythm”: from Science News, a claim about where jazz gets its swing.

Try listening to the two music samples therein (fifty-two seconds of the Duke Jordan composition “Jordu”). I have to admit that I hear no difference between them. The study described in the article includes a an online gizmo that allows the user to try different “swing ratios” with a six-second sample of “Jordu.”

A more satisfying musical experience: hearing Duke Jordan himself play “Jordu.”

Thanks, Frank.

Related reading
All OCA jazz posts (Pinboard)

“Machinery”

[John Cowhey & Sons, 440 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

A recent Zippy strip featured a Mrs. Gowanus, which made me think of the Gowanus Canal, and I ended up wandering around the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Thus I found myself at the corner of Van Brunt and Beard Streets.

I chose this photograph for the quotation marks around “MACHINERY,” which add, at least in my fevered imagination, an ominous tinge to the premises. We brought the “machinery,” boss, just like you asked. Marine equipment, anchors, chains — yikes. I think of Salvatore Bonpensiero being taken on his last boat ride: “Get the weights.”

In reality though, John Cowhey was, as far as I can tell, an upstanding Brooklynite.

[Brooklyn Times-Union, October 9, 1912.]

The following paragraph must be about a son John, as the article in which it appears says that this John and two other businessmen in the area are “fast friends”:

[“Ex-Barnacle Fighter Finds Waterproofing Skyscrapers Like Painting Ship Hulls.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 25, 1929.]

Here’s another Cowhey son:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 2, 1937.]

A story that would be a bit scarier if the subhead didn’t give it away:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 20, 1931.]

And a photograph accompanying the article:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 20, 1931. Click for a larger view.]

Brooklyn Newsstand turns up several articles about a lurid story with the Cowhey name: in February 1884, an Annie and John Cowhey, sister and brother, were accused of killing their father Denis Cowhey and their sister and brother-in-law Catharine (Kate) and Thomas Collier (or Collyer — it’s spelled both ways, sometimes in the same article). The three died from arsenic added to soup and hash. Given the absence of any reference to the well-known Cowhey & Sons in articles about the murders, I’ll guess that this John Cowhey has no connection to 440 Van Brunt. And for what it’s worth, he is described as a former stone-cutter who tended bar. The Cowhey siblings were never prosecuted.

The most interesting detail about this case: a young woman matching a description of Annie Cowhey purchased two boxes of Rough on Rats poison, one before Denis Cowhey’s death, the other before the Colliers’ deaths. But Catharine Collier was deemed the likely killer: she did not want her father to remarry and, after killing him, was believed to have become desperate.

[The Delineator, January 1905.]

I have begun to realize that it’s impossible to just find a nifty photograph, post it, and be done.

The 440 location is now a private residence, with six bedrooms, six bathrooms, and 9,149 square feet. Pretty severe looking, if you ask me, or Google Maps.

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

“Sort of a dull ashtray”

In today’s Zippy, Bill Griffith remembers his wife and fellow artist, Diane Noomin. There was a New York Times obituary.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)