Siri talks back

I used Siri to add a reminder to the phone yesterday morning, then changed the time and changed it again. Was it supposed to be 4:20? 4:40? 5:20? And I said to Elaine, “I’m sorry; I’m not thinking clearly.”

And Siri replied, “Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

The Last Repair Shop

From the Los Angeles Times, here’s a short documentary, The Last Repair Shop, directed by Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot.



The instrument repair shop for the Los Angeles Unified School District is the last shop in the United States taking care of student instruments. I’m not sure what I expected when I fired up YouTube, but I certainly found more than I could have imagined.

Watch if you can: it’ll be time (39:58) well spent.

[Found via kottke.org.]

Overheard

“What did it knock over?”

“Just the snow globes.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard“ posts (Pinboard)

[Fortunately, they were plastic.]

An alternative to Barbenheimer

Our household’s Friday and Saturday night movies: The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946) and Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023).

The Killerbies.

“The odors”

Sonie Marburg’s father worked as a shoe repairman. One day he left his family and Massachusetts to go west.

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

That’s the first moment of involuntary memory in the novel.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor

MSNBC, sheesh

“... trying to put some distance between he and her ...”

I hereby offer all MSNBC reporters a quick course in pronoun repair. And I’ll keep it between I and them.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

MLK: diversity

“It seems to me that integration at its best is the opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity”: Martin Luther King Jr., eleven months before his death, in an interview with NBC’s Sander Vanocur.

The date of the interview: May 8, 1967. The earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation for its 1.d. definition of diversity,

The fact, condition, or practice of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, and (more recently) of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.,

is from December 26, 1968. It’d be a wonderful thing if King’s use of the word in this interview were to make it into the dictionary as an earlier citation. I turned myself into a dictionary person yesterday to try to make that happen.

MLK

[“Honor King: End Racism!” Poster, 33 1/2″ × 22 1/4″. Click for a larger view.]

From the New York Public Library:

Martin Luther King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers when he was assassinated. The placard was mass produced for the March posthumously. At the bottom it says: Allied printing Trades Council, 8 April 1968.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929.

Joyce Randolph (1924–2024)

Joyce Randolph, aka Trixie Norton, the last Honeymooner, has died at the age of ninety-nine. The New York Times has an obituary (gift link).

Randolph was the subject of a Times article in 2007 (gift link), which described her gracious response to fans who spotted her in Sardi’s: “‘I talk to everyone,’ she said. ‘You can’t be hoity.’”

One error in the appreciative and otherwise well-informed Times obituary: in the Honeymooners episode “Better Living Through TV” (November 12, 1955), Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton do not invent the Handy Housewife Helper. The brother of one of Ralph’s fellow bus drivers has a Bronx warehouse in which someone left 2,000 of the gadgets. Ralph and Ed buy the lot for $200 and attempt — attempt — to sell them via a television commercial. It does not go well.

*

July 19, 2024: The Times will not be correcting the error. Details here.

Related reading
All OCA Honeymooners posts (Pinboard)

And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street and Hester Street

[193 Hester Street/129 Mulberry Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I was looking for Chinatown when I found myself in Little Italy. I saw this corner as 193 Hester Street at 1940s.nyc. But it’s also known as 129 Mulberry Street. Hester Street is Chinatown, and Mulberry Street runs through Little Italy, so one can imagine the 129 address as granting this corner greater Italian-American cachet.

I chose this photograph for the laundry — was it a Monday? — and then noticed the Coca-Cola sign and the two youngsters walking in tandem. And that must be a restaurant on the ground floor. A pleasant photograph. And then I looked up the building’s two addresses and realized what I had hit on.

This Mulberry Street address was once the home of Umbertos Clam House, now in business at 132 Mulberry, still without an apostrophe. The 129 address is where the mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo was shot to death in 1972, weeks after the restaurant’s opening. Here’s one New York Times article on the murder’s aftermath (gift link). I’m not interested in rehearsing the details. But I must note that the Gallo name points back to a previous tax post, about the College Restaurant in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.

In 2023, the ground floor of 129 Mulberry is home to another restaurant, Da Gennaro. Mulberry Street remains the home of the yearly Feast of San Gennaro.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)