Car trouble

[1701 Madison Avenue, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Car trouble in East Harlem, found by chance. Is the man looking under the car wearing a hat? Hard to say, but I’m sure he owns at least one. Is that a Wonder Bread delivery truck? Hard to say.

What I do know: that’s a flower shop across the street. And those buildings are now gone.

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

Salvage FTTW

Over the last few months, Elaine and I have made a handful of visits to a nearby salvage-grocery store. (A primary task of daily living in east-central Illinois is making our own fun.) We always find something unexpected; sometimes an item we’ve bought elsewhere at a much higher price, sometimes an item that we’ll later see elsewhere at a much higher price, sometimes an item we’ve never seen elsewhere. (Bell’s Seasoning, anyone?)

Today was a serious score: six boxes of Barry’s Tea, two of Barry’s Gold Blend, four of Barry’s Original Blend, eighty bags per box, $2.00 a box. Amazon has these teas at $7 or more a box. International grocery stores charge much more.

FTTW: For the tea win.

Related reading
All OCA adventures in tea (Pinboard)

[If you visit a salvage-grocery store, check all expiration dates. Our tea doesn’t expire until sometime next year. Bell’s Seasoning, expired 2023, was selling for 30¢.]

A streaming “Adoration”

The Juilliard School’s MAP String Ensemble will perform Elaine Fine’s arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration” tonight in concert. You can watch and listen from this page at 8:00 p.m. Eastern. N.B.: the concert will not be archived for later viewing.

Elaine’s name does not appear on the program but will be announced from the stage. Elaine is a Juilliard grad, so this performance will be especially meaningful to her. Her arrangements of “Adoration” (a work in the public domain) have done much to draw attention to Florence Price’s music.

You can find Elaine’s arrangments of “Adoration,” all freely shared, in the International Music Score Library Project.

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7:35 p.m. (Central): Nothing is streaming. Juilliard messed up.

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May 5: The conductor sent Elaine the wrong link. That’s why we missed the livestream.

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May 6: Happily, there’s an audience video of a beautiful, deeply moving performance.

[Florence Price, “Adoration,” arranged by Elaine Fine. MAP String Ensemble. Catherine Birke, conductor. Alice Tully Hall, New York. May 4, 2024.]

Related reading
A handful of “Adoration” posts

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman. I started with 13-D, four letters, “Typewriters with typeballs,” a giveaway, which gave away 9-A, five letters, “De Niro’s Raging Bull brother” and 16-A, five letters, “Crest collaborator.” Whee. But I found the bottom half of the puzzle considerably more difficult.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, nine letters, “Major merger partner of 2015.” I dislike this kind of trivia.

4-D, six letters, “Belly up.” Thanks, poetry.

8-D, eight letters, “Unable to sail, say.” Adding an element of mystery to the puzzle.

9-D, eleven letters, “What Kramer saves catalogs from.” I like this kind of trivia.

11-D, five letters, “Overnight delivery specialist.” Note: specialist.

23-A, fourteen letters, “The nation’s largest power station.” Surprising to see it in a puzzle.

35-D, five letters, “Inspiration to many mathematicians.” In the online image of the print puzzle, the third column of text ends with the word many. Reading no further, I struggled for a ridiculously long time to figure out an answer.

29-A, four letters, “Ocean liner.” I was not fooled.

31-A, letters, “Number lines.” I was baffled.

33-D, nine letters, “Togetherness?” Nice.

38-D, eight letters, “Sheryl Crow and Paul McCartney.” I thought the answer might be a sign of the zodiac.

41-D, seven letters, “Windows users.” I get the joke, but are they truly users?

44-D, six letters, “Name associated with 11-Down’s time.” Some pretty rarefied trivia.

46-D, six letters, “Clash-prevention expression.” A little too Hi and Lois-y for me.

47-A, fourteen letters, “Fed people.” The answer has an odd ring to it.

48-D, five letters, “Down clue answer, often.” Nicely Stumper-y.

59-A, five letters, “Operatic Charlestonian.”A great clue.

My favorite in this puzzle: 54-A, four letters, “Gym ball.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Word of the day: oaktag

Clued as “Postcard paper,” oaktag appeared in the Newsday Saturday Stumper this past Saturday. I hadn’t thought of the word for years.

Merriam-Webster directs the looker-upper to tagboard : “strong cardboard used especially for making shipping tags.” The Oxford English Dictionary has a proper entry for oaktag: “a thin, tough, lightweight cardboard, usually made from kraft and jute pulp and having a smooth finish and manilla colour.” The OED marks the word as of American origin, with a first citation from 1914. Its etymology is left a mystery: “formed within English, by compounding.” But I could’ve told you that.

The American Heritage Dictionary suggests two possible origins:

Perhaps from its color, which originally resembled that of the oak boards used in book bindings until the 16th century, or perhaps from oakum board, a kind of sturdy paperboard made from oakum.

Sturdy, hmm — like an oak? But oakum appears to have no relation to oak.

A message in a 2002 thread at linguist.list.org cites a speculation from the lexicographer Lawrence Urdang in American Speech (Spring 1984):

Oaktag is a dark beige, which may account for the oak- part of its name. In the 1930s and later, shipping tags were often made of this material, typically with a hole at one end, reinforced with a stiff red circular grommet and a short piece of cord for tying to a package. It seems likely to me that the universal application of the stock to such use accounts for the -tag part of oaktag. This is, of course, a folk eytmology — but then, oaktag appears to be a folk name, doesn’t it?“

Urdang was replying to a query about the word in American Speech (Fall 1982) from the linguist David Gold, who had suggested that oaktag may be something of a New York City-ism. Messages in the 2002 linguist.list thread suggest that oaktag might be something of a New York or East Coast word for a product also known as posterboard, or posterboard. I would think of posterboard though as thicker and white — certainly not “manilla colour.”

Oaktag makes me think of school supplies of yore: mucilage, oilskin, jars of paste with brushes built into the lids. And, much later: Eaton’s Corrasable Bond.

How lovely, by the way, to see manilla, so spelled.

[I’ve quoted the correct version of Urdang’s comment, slightly misquoted on the listserv.]

“One hundred and one psychopaths”

From Pressure Point (dir. Hubert Cornfield, 1962), now streaming in the Criterion Channel feature Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind. It’s 1942. Sidney Poitier is a prison psychiatrist, unnamed, treating a prisoner, also unnamed (Bobby Darin), a member of the German American Bund, imprisoned for sedition:

“At that point I knew that my primary concern was not with the welfare of my patient but with the question of whether he was making any sense, and how many people there were in this world to whom he would make sense. For although psychopaths are a small minority, it seems significant that whenever militant and organized hate exists, a psychopath is the leader. And if, for instance, one hundred disgruntled and frustrated individuals fall in line behind one psychopath, then, in essence, we are concerned with the actions of one hundred and one psychopaths.”

Highly recommended viewing in 2024.

“Oh God! How beautiful!”

In the aftermath of my cataract surgery, my friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing” (1974). In it Dillard recounts several case histories from Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation (1960), a study of people who were able to see for the first time after the removal of congenital cataracts.

Von Senden found that for many newly sighted people, the world is difficult, even oppressive. But others, Dillard says, “speak well of the world, and teach us how dull our own vision is.” She writes about one such person:

Another patient, a twenty-two-year-old girl, was dazzled by the world's brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but “the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’”

Von Senden’s book was published in 1932 as Ranm und Gestaltauffassung bei Operierten Blindgeborenen and nearly lost. An article in Psychology Today tells the story of its survival. The English translation, by Peter Heath, was published in 1960 and is available at archive.org.

Thanks, Stefan.

Related posts
Cataract and cataracts : How to answer a question (A guest post by Stefan Hagemann)

Third Birds

In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes about attention and the Order of the Third Bird. The Order is

supposedly a secret international fellowship, going back centuries, of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists. Participants in the Order would converge, flash-mob style, at museums, stare intensely at a work of art for half an hour, and vanish, their twee-seeming feat of attention complete.

Forty years ago, the philosopher Richard Wollheim spoke of looking at a painting for two hours or more as a lone spectator. No flash-mob needed.

[“Going back centuries?” The Order sounds like the subject of an exhibit in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.]

When publications collide

From the April 30 installment of the NPR feature Trump’s Trials:

“The jury saw text messages between [Keith] Davidson and leadership at American Media, Inc., which published the National Esquire.”

[Perhaps a result of a reference earlier in the broadcast to Esquire Deposition Solutions.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Ideas? Anyone? Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

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No need: the answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all)
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