Velázquez and Tootsie Rolls

Hogan’s Alley, “the magazine of the cartoon arts,” has an interview with Bill Griffith, whose Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, will be published on August 29. Two details: Bushmiller’s favorite artist was Diego Velázquez. And about money:

He invested in the stock market with his considerable wealth. But the only stock he really followed was the Tootsie Roll Company. I checked. It’s still a privately held company. Funny and a little weird — but fitting. Sluggo would approve.

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Nancy, writing by hand

From today’s yesterday’s Nancy:

[Nancy, July 20, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Nancy, like Sluggo, has beautiful handwriting. And she’s using a dip pen.

But it’s a runaway gorilla, not Sluggo, at her window.

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All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

An EXchange name sighting

[From One Way Street (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1950). Click for a larger view.]

He: “Where are we?”

She: “Harbor Drive and Gordon.”

Harbor Drive and Gordon is an intersection existing only in movie dialogue. Harbor Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue are real, but miles and miles apart. TUcker was indeed a Los Angeles exchange.

If you look closely, you can notice the cutting and pasting that went into making this directory “page.”

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A CMOS quiz

From The Chicago Manual of Style, a new quiz: Other Languages.

[I scored a 90. Someday I’m gonna get 100.]

The pencil business

[From Outside the Wall (dir. Crane Wilbur, 1950).]

“A bright future in the pencil” — in the pencil what ? Business, I suppose.

It’s possible that “the pencil business” is a jokey way of referring to accounting, but I can find no evidence for that. I think that here the pencil business is, indeed, the pencil business. Outside the Wall might have been a different (and duller) movie had ex-convict Larry Nelson (Richard Basehart) studied accounting.

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Better living through TV

A criminal, in Hi-Jacked (dir. Sam Newfield, 1950):

“How’d we ever get along without television?”

[He just got the idea for his next crime from a television feature about a showroom full of furs. Post title from The Honeymooners.]

The mind-body problem

[After turning on the car’s AC.]

“Is it blowing on us and our feet?”

👍 ?

The Unbearable Ambiguity of Emoji: Does 👍 mean “I accept the contract that you just texted me,” or “I’m acknowledging receipt of the contract”?

🤔.

Knees, outer, inner

Steven Millhauser, “The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,” in Voices in the Night (2015).

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The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp

Shameless fambly promotion:

The New Grown-Ups (our son Ben and friends) have a six-track digital release available from Bandcamp. It’s called Treehopper. As the group describes their music,

The New Grown-Ups blend traditional folk, country, blues, Celtic, old time, originals, and bluegrass into a snafu of contemporary acoustic music.

They sound great. Free to listen, $5 to buy, or more if you like.