Dance Craze

For anyone who needs to know: the 2 Tone documentary Dance Craze (dir. Joe Massot, 1981) is streaming at streaming at the Yousual place. With Bad Manners, the (English) Beat, The Bodysnatchers, Madness, The Selecter, and The Specials. Eighty-five minutes of youthful energy.

The January 6 report

The Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is available from the committee’s website. I’m going to read it — all of it — but I’m going to resist the temptation to post choice excerpts. Right now I am thinking about blog posts as respites from current events.

[And speaking of “6,” it’s -6℉, feeling like -33℉.]

Thomas’ missing carriage

I know that Ye Olde Bakery disappeared from the Thomas’ English Muffins package in some distant past. I remember it from when I was a boy.

[Life, February 29, 1969. Click for a larger view.]

But when did the horses, the carriage, and the people disappear? They make for a striking image, especially with the spokeless wheels.

[Click for a larger view.]

Here’s what the Thomas’ logo looked like recently:

[With spokes. Click for a larger view.]

And here’s what the Thomas’ logo looks like today:

[Click for a larger view.]

I noticed the absence of the horses, carriage, and people only this morning. A company representative tells me that they disappeared a few months ago but that they’re still present at the top of the package. And indeed they are:

[Click for a larger view.]

You can see them on the plastic wrap that’s bunched up above the bread clip. (Or muffin clip?) The little orange figures make me think of a pattern on kids’ pajamas.

I must note that the Thomas’ website, where I first looked for an answer to my question, shows a nice awareness of punctutation conventions:

Why is there an apostrophe after the “S” in Thomas’?

When a name such as Thomas ends with an “s” and is used as possessive of something such as English muffins, an apostrophe can be added after the “s” or an apostrophe “s” can be used. It has been the desire of our Company to use the apostrophe after the “s.” Thomas’ is a registered trademark of Bimbo Bakeries USA.

Carriage or no, apostrophe-s or no, I’ll keep buying Thomas’ English Muffins.

A related post
“Think only pleasant thoughts” (A defense of English Muffins)

Domestic comedy

“Pasta aglio e olio is my signature dish. Pasta with tuna and lemon is my initials dish.”

Both recipes appear in this post. And ten years later, I rediscovered the Village Voice clipping with aglio e olio.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

TCM world

“I live in TCM world”: Charlie Watts, on his taste in clothes. From a Desert Island Discs episode first broadcast on February 25, 2001.

I’ve known about Desert Island Discs for years. Only recently did it occur to me that it’s probably now a podcast. And It is.

These episodes — I’ve listened to five so far — are full of surprises. Did you know that Fiona Hill digs The Specials?

Bloomberg, sheesh

From an article about a defeated former president’s tax returns. Neal is Richard Neal, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee:

Throughout the process, Neal’s more cautious approach to his investigation has grated some of his more progressive colleagues.

Grate, “to cause irritation,” is an intransitive verb. Grating one’s colleagues would be both transitive and uncollegial.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Three passages from Michelle Obama

From The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (New York: Crown, 2022).

On navigating the world as someone “different”:

You learn, as my family did, to be watchful. You figure out how to guard your energy, to count every step. And at the heart of this lies a head-spinning paradox: Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands that you be bold.

On putting something small, like knitting, alongside big things:

Any time your circumstances start to feel all-consuming, I suggest you try going in the other direction — toward the small. Look for something that'll help you rearrange your thoughts, a pocket of contentedness where you can live for a while. And by this I don't mean sitting passively in front of your television or scrolling through your phone. Find something that’s active, something that asks for your mind but uses your body as well. Immerse yourself in the process. And forgive yourself for temporarily ducking out of the storm.

On seing children growing up. When the Obamas visit Malia and Sasha, who are sharing an apartment in Los Angeles, Malia produces a charcuterie board. And then:

Sasha attempted to fix us a couple of weak martinis — Wait, you know how to make martinis? — and served them in water glasses, first laying down a couple of newly purchased coasters so that we wouldn’t mark up their brand-new coffee table with our drinks.

I watched all this with some astonishment. It’s not that I’m surprised that our kids have grown up, exactly, but somehow the whole scene — the coasters, in particular — signaled a different sort of landmark, the type of thing every parent spends years scanning for, which is evidence of common sense.

As Sasha set down our drinks that night, I thought about all the coasters she and her sister hadn’t bothered to use when they were under our care, all the times over the years I’d tried to get watermarks out of various tables, including at the White House.

But the dynamics had changed. We were at their table now. They owned it, and they were protecting it. Clearly they had learned.

I still find it difficult to believe that Elaine and I had the good fortune to meet both Michelle and Barack Obama in 2004, during Barack Obama’s Senate campaign. And I still find it difficult to believe that our country went from eight years of an Obama presidency to — what? Michelle Obama, too, finds that difficult to believe.

Also by Michelle Obama
From Becoming

NYT Letter Boxed fail

[The New York Times Letter Boxed, December 20, 2022.]

I am indignant. I had no idea where I might have gone after grimpen, but I wanted grimpen, a word known to many a reader from T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker”:

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure
    foothold.

The Oxford English Dictionary can only guess: “? A marshy area.”

Eliot seems to have picked up grimpen from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, where it appears as part of a place name:

Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track.

The Annotated Sherlock Holmes explains:

As is well known, Watson’s “Great Grimpen Mire” is Grimspound Bog, three miles to the north and west of Widecombe-in-the-Moor.

All three citations — 1902, 1940, 1968 — appear in the OED, and are the only citations for the word.

Vladimir Nabokov has some fun with Eliot’s vocabulary in Pale Fire (1962). In John Shade’s poem of that name, his daughter Hazel reads in her bedroom:

Sometimes I’d help her with a Latin text,
Or she'd be reading in her bedroom, next
To my fluorescent lair, and you would be
In your own study, twice removed from me,
And I would hear both voices now and then:
“Mother, what’s grimpen ?” “What is what?”
                                                                “Grim
    Pen.”
Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:
“Mother, what’s chthonic ?” That, too, you’d explain,
Appending: “Would you like a tangerine?”
“No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?”
You’d hesitate. And lustily I’d roar
The answer from my desk through the closed door.

A reader of Four Quartets should be able to answer all three of Hazel’s questions.

Related reading
From the Doyle edition (a page of “East Coker,” all marked up) : NYT Spelling Bee fail

Terry Hall (1959–2022)

Terry Hall, best known as the lead singer of The Specials, has died at the age of sixty-three. The Guardian has an obituary and a life in photographs.

Here’s one memorable Specials moment: the video for “Ghost Town.” The song was released as one side of a 12-inch 45. I still have my copy, bought in 1981 at a record store in Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts.


[The Specials, “Ghost Town” (Jerry Dammers). 2 Tone (1981).]

Here’s the extended version of the song that appeared on the 45.

*

December 27: The New York Times has an obituary.

Referrals

Here come the criminal referrals, as announced by Representative Jamie Raskin (D, Maryland-8):

Obstruction of an official proceeding: Donald Trump, John Eastman, and others.

Conspiracy to defraud the United States: Donald Trump, John Eastman, and others.

Conspiracy to make a false statement: Donald Trump and others.

“Incite,“ ”assist,” or “aid or comfort” an insurrection: Donald Trump.

And: “These are not the only statutes that are potentially relevant“ to Trump’s behavior.

And: the committee is referring four members of Congress for sanction to the House Ethics Committee for failure to comply with lawful subpoenas.

And the committee stands adjourned.

[I’d like to see the fourth referral rephrased to parallel the first three: Inciting, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to an insurrection. I originally wrote that I’d like to see Merrick Garland do his job, but the referrals are to Special Counsel Jack Smith. The four members are Andy Biggs, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, and Scott Perry.]