Three mascots

In today’s Zippy, three mascots: Gertrude, L’il Softee, and Good Sam. I remember Gertrude from childhood. I remember Good Sam from a highway. L’il Softee is known to me only from today’s Zippy and a subsequent Internet search.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, you can buy vintage toilet paper on eBay.]

Being a liberal

“Perhaps more than ever, there is an urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be”: Cass Sustein offers thirty-four statements to explain why he is a liberal (The New York Times, gift link).

Carters

Jimmy Carter’s statement on the death of his wife Rosalynn is worth thinking on.

White Rose Tea

I went to Brooklyn Newsstand to look for White Rose advertisements. Why not? In the 1930s they were plentiful. In the ’40s and ’50s, the brand appears mostly in supermarket advertisements — just a name and a price. As I’ve said in a previous post, White Rose was once ubiquitous in New York.

I see a strong modernist impulse in these seasonal ads:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 9, 1934. Click for a larger view.]

The stylized server puts me in mind of the work of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Modley: see, for instance, Modley’s Handbook of Pictorial Symbols (1978). If you don’t have an Internet Archive account, take a look at The New York Primer (1939). Modley founded Pictorial Statistics Incorporated (what we might now call an infographics company) in 1934.

[Brooklyn Times-Union, January 21, 1935. Click for a larger view.]

I was startled to see this image: are those cheeks, or eyes? Either way, these home-bound pedestrians seem to have stepped from a page of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard) : A short history of White Rose, Inc. : White Rose pencils, from the collection of my late friend Sean Malone

On the waterfront

[31 President Street, Waterfront District, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just some grocery store in the Waterfront District. Notice in the windows the signage for White Rose Tea, a brand once ubiquitous in New York. Notice too the three gentlemen standing on the corner. The guy on the right certainly looks ready for his close-up. He puts me in mind of Tony Galento, the ex-fighter who played Truck in On the Waterfront. And here we are, on the waterfront.

And if you look closely, you can see next to the corner store an outpost of the International Longshoremen’s Association.

The corner store and several adjacent President Street properties are now gone. In their place today, GreenSpace@President Street, a community garden. The darker brick building past the fire hydrant, 115 Van Brunt Street, is the only building still standing on that block.

[Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : A short history of White Rose, Inc. : White Rose pencils, from the collection of my late friend Sean Malone

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Steve Mossberg, is YAUDS — Yet Another Ultra-Difficult Stumper. I made an inauspicious start with 9-D, three letters, “Eight dashes, for short.” I can’t believe I got the whole thing.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, letters, “Patagonian purrer.” I guesed. Could it be? It could.

1-D, four letters, “Jump-on-tail skateboard stunt.” OLLIE doesn’t fit. Now I know two skateboard stunts.

3-D, four letters, “Word from the Greek for ‘measure.’” I think I knew this, sort of.

6-D, twelve letters, “Venue offering theme rooms and costumes.” I’m relieved to find a tame answer here.

11-D, ten letters, “Unimaginable extent.” Happy to have seen it right off.

16-A, nine letters, “Drop-off remark.” Ha.

21-A, ten letters, “Understood.” The answer feels like something from a more reasoning time.

22-D, three letters, “What I might mean.” Tricky.

24-A, six letters, “Head turners.” My first thought was SPINES. Chalk that up to Pilates.

25-D, ten letters, “Salmon and squid.” The answer shouldn’t have surprised me but did.

30-D, three letters, “Proposal prelude.” A word due for a comeback.

31-A, three letters, “Craft that benefits craft.” A value-added clue.

35-A, four letters, “Delivered pitches.” I am wise to you, Steve Mossberg.

40-A, seven letters, “Folders for photos.” Very clever.

42-D, six letters, “Where clerical work is done.” Unexpected, even given the misdirection.

43-A, ten letters, “It’s not just a number.” I like the quaintness.

54-A, three letters, “He covered RMN’s reelection campaign for Rolling Stone.” Maybe the only giveaway in the puzzle.

56-A, nine letters, “Treat in a snow-capped wrapper.” But is it? Is it really? To me, the name itself says No, I am not a treat.

My favorite in this puzzle: 26-A, seven letters, “Modern verification solicitation.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

How to improve writing (no. 115)

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to have coffee with me — or tea, whichever I want:

One of Joe and my favorite parts about being on the campaign trail is meeting supporters just like you. I truly mean that, Michael.

“Joe and my” is just embarrassing.

Get me rewrite:

“Joe and I agree that one of our favorite parts,” &c.

“Something Joe and I both love about being on the campaign trail,” &c.

And yes, I’ve told them, or someone.

*

I finally read to the end of the e-mail:

If you’d like the opportunity to sit down for a Cup of Joe — with Joe and I — consider making a contribution to our campaign today.

*

November 29: They got it together. Witness this invitation on the platform formerly known as Twitter: “Have a cup of joe with Joe and me.”

Thanks, Rachel.

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[Formatting as in the original. Bold, underlining, and italics always add authenticity to one’s writing. This post is no. 115 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

DO NOT DISTURB

From an e-mail interview with Steven Millhauser (Los Angeles Review of Books ):

Oddly enough, reading has rarely created in me a desire to see more of the world. Reading a work of deeply imagined fiction seems to replace the outer world so completely that I ask nothing except not to be disturbed.

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E.M. Forster on books on Frasier

From E.M. Forster, “A Book that Influenced Me,” collected in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951):

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

I spotted a few words of this sentence on the band that runs across the bookshelves of Niles Crane’s library.

[“Sharing Kirby,” November 20, 2001. Click for a larger view.]

That’s Kirby Gardner (Brian Klugman) on the ladder, son of onetime high-school goddess and Frasier crush Lana Gardner, née Lynley (Jean Smart).

No disrespect to the actor, but I think Frasier jumped at least a baby shark with the introduction of Kirby. Here he’s rearranging Niles’s library, pausing now and then to read and eat Cheetos. (Don’t worry: he’s wearing gloves.) Why is Kirby working for Niles? Because Frasier, claiming to feel guilty about not getting Kirby an internship at KACL, has talked Niles into hiring the lad. In truth Frasier is getting revenge for Niles’s not sharing a rare wine find. Kirby is no prize:

Kirby: I fudged a little bit on my job history.

Frasier: So you never actually worked at NASA.

Kirby : Or Burger King!

The book that influenced Forster: Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.

[Lots of English majors in those writers’ rooms.]

Domestic comedy

“Is it raining on the phone, or outside?”

“On the phone.”

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