Turn on your hazard lights, &c.

What with people taking to the highways this time of year, I thought I’d repost some suggestions I wrote out in 2011:

If you’re driving on a highway and the traffic suddenly slows or stops, and the vehicles behind you are at some distance:

1. Turn on your hazard lights.

2. Leave significant space between you and the vehicle in front of you.

3. Keep checking your rear-view mirror.

4. After someone has come up behind you, turn your hazard lights off.

If someone coming up behind you is not paying full attention, your hazard lights might catch their eye and prompt them to slow down or stop in time. If not, the free space in front of your vehicle might lessen the severity of a collision.

I called the Illinois State Police to ask what they thought about using hazard lights in this way. A desk sergeant said it was the right thing to do and added the second and third suggestions. I've added the fourth for clarity. Please, pass them on.

[What prompted me to think about these things? Driving on interstates through rain and fog and using hazard lights when traffic suddenly slowed and I was the last in line. I also left significant space and checked my mirror, but I do those things without thinking and would not have thought to recommend them.]

Rapture

Martin Dressler has been looking at the advertisements in the cars of the horse railway lines. He has an idea about how to advertise the Metropolitan Lunchroom and Billiard Parlor.

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).

It’s only 1894, and Martin has anticipated the Sachplakat approach to advertising — the single striking image — that was to develop in the early twentieth century. He’s a man ahead of the times.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Turn off YouTube voiceover

“A royal blue background fills the screen with white words at its center: Sony Digital Classics. Close blurry glimpses of white letters resolve into words on a black background: Topic Studios.”

And we who rented the movie would spend half an hour or so trying to figure out how to turn off the voice that was telling us what we were seeing on our TV screen.

That was the unexpected start to our viewing of Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022), rented via YouTube. Was it a Roku problem? No. A problem with the YouTube settings? So it would seem, but the YouTube settings have nothing about accessibility or audio. The problem lay in the settings that were in place — how? why? — for this movie.

The solution: press the up arrow on the remote twice and move to the right — Channel, Captions, Like, Dislike, Save, Settings. In Settings, choose Audio tracks and change “English descriptive” to “English original.” Then watch the movie in peace.

[I recommend Turn Every Page with considerable enthusiasm.]

World of string

[Nancy, May 23, 1950.]

In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, we behold the world in which all kinds of packages were tied up with string. The grocer’s casual attitude — he’s turned his attention elsewhere, even as he replies to Nancy — changes in the strip’s final panel (what Ernie Bushmiller called “the snapper”), as the string unspools through the store window, past a hydrant, across a street, across a lawn, and into the sky, at the end of a kite.

I knew I’d seen this grocer before: he appears in the December 19, 1949 installment of Nancy, in which he obliges Nancy with some wrapping paper. (Some!) In a post about that strip, I wrote: “I hope the grocer has an enormous roll of string suspended from the ceiling with which to wrap packages.” He — and Ernie Bushmiller — haven’t let me down.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

“It’s a tall city”

Walter Dundee, engineer, and Martin Dressler, dreamer, laying plans for the Metropolitan Lunchroom and Billiard Parlor:

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Some grades

[Nancy, May 22, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, Nancy has offered cheerful news: she got an A in history. But Aunt Fritzi wants to know about “the general result.”

Related reading
All OCA “some rocks” posts (Pinboard)

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eighth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, The Passenger

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Richard Hofstadter. "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"

Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse, In a Lonely Place, The Expendable Man

James Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses

Nella Larsen, Complete Fiction (short stories, Quicksand, Passing )

Robert McCloskey, Homer Price

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, Portrait of a Romantic, In the Penny Arcade, From the Realm of Morpheus, The Barnum Museum, Little Kingdoms, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, The Knife Thrower, Enchanted Night, The King in the Tree: Three Novellas

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Thanks to the translators who brought three of these writers to us: Philip Boehm (Boschwitz), Constance Garnett, Leonard J. Kent, and Nina Berberova (Dostoevsky); Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (Tolstoy).

The FSRC continues its SMS (Steven Millhauser Spree) with Dangerous Laughter, beginning today.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, and 2022.

[I just couldn’t bring myself to separate the Millhauser titles with semicolons because of Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright.]

“The power of good penmanship”

Alexander Westerhoven, manager of the Vanderlyn Hotel, is about to offer Martin Dressler, day clerk, the position of personal secretary to the manager.

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Seltzer

The New York Times visits the last seltzer works in New York City.

A coal-hole cover

From Ephemeral New York, the story behind one coal-hole cover.