The Apostrophe Protection Society

The Apostrophe Protection Society, founded in 2001, ceased operations in 2019. Its founder, John Richards, died in 2021. Now, under the leadership of Bob McCalden, the APS is back (The Irish Times ). Here’s the society’s website.

The apostrophe plays a small but critical role in these pages. My favorite apostrophe: the one that brought me a box in the mail, marked RATTLE OK.

Related reading
All OCA apostrophe posts (Pinboard)

Fn

For Mac users only: Adam Engst explains The Hidden Secrets of the Fn Key (TidBITS).

Sluggo-head

“I’m a mash-up of childhood innocence and toxic masculinity, Zippy!” Zippy meets a Sluggo-head with muffler-man pants in today’s Zippy.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Healing up

Our narrator, Hermann Karlovich, is nothing if not self-conscious. He boarded a metaphorical bus when embarking on his narrative:

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (1966).

I was surprised to see “heal up” here. I think of it as contemporary (right now) American language, but the Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from 1676: “A fontanel had been made in the same leg, which he was forced to heal up.”

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[First published as Отчаяние [Otchayanie] in a Russian literary journal in 1934; then in book form in 1936; then in Nabokov’s English translation in 1937; then in revised form in 1966.]

On the waterfront, continued

Those three guys hanging out on the waterfront? Geo-B has them covered.

Vagaries of shopping (Premium edition)

Might someone have an idea why a store would be wiped out of Premium Saltines days before Thanksgiving? Is there some traditional dish that makes use of them? I welcome your thoughts.

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