Zippy and The Little King

[“Slices of Life,” Zippy, June 29, 2013.]

Today’s Zippy pays homage to Otto Soglow’s The Little King. I recognized His Majesty at once. But I didn’t know that he began his reign in the pages of The New Yorker.

Related reading
Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King (The Comics Journal)
Otto Soglow and The Little King (Austin Kleon)
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Feedly v. Feedly

The same post: top, Feedly in the Chrome browser; bottom, the Feedly app for iOS. The app shows the image correctly (it’s meant to suggest a drop-capital), but Feedly in the browser gets it wrong. Feedly, what’s up with that?

As I’m reminded every time I look at my posts, Feedly takes too many liberties with images. Images get relocated and resized, and when a post merely links to a YouTube clip, Feedly adds an image from that clip to its Magazine and Card Views:


[The post Jazz on Route 66 has eleven images. But it also has a link to a YouTube clip, and it’s an image from that clip that Feedly uses.]

And as I just discovered, Feedly in the browser loses images too, as it did when handling this post. The iOS app again gets it right:



My e-mails to Feedly about its image problems (which I first noticed earlier this month) have had no replies. I’m puzzled as to why I seem to be the only person on the Internets who thinks that these problems are worth writing about.

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June 29: Feedly dropped the second image from today’s post too.

King of Corona

A very short film about The Lemon Ice King of Corona: Birth of the Cool (via Coudal).

[The only king is the king of lemon ice.]

M was for Metropolitan

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art website: “The current button design features the Museum’s distinctive letter M logo, adapted from the 1509 book De divina proportione by Luca Pacioli (Italian, d. ca. 1514), the first known publication to treat the construction of the alphabet and to discuss the shapes and proportions of classical Roman letters.”

On Monday, July 1, the Met ends the use of metal admission buttons.

[I am happy to have two such buttons that I can account for.]

Mad breakfast skillz

Without measurement or calculation, I make breakfast disappear bit by bit in proper proportions, ending up with one spoon of Grape-Nuts, one blueberry, and one bite of toast.

The things we humans can do!

Velveeta for breakfast

“I don’t like to golf. I love to golf. That’s why I eat Velveeta at breakfast. It’s made with delicious ingredients, and carefully baked —”

What?

I was listening, not looking, and this commercial made me look, which in some way marks it as successful. But belVita is strangely named, especially in light of the consonant sounds b and v en español. I see the potential for significant, persistent confusion, and a block of cheese for breakfast.

At State and Lake (Route 66 )

Chicago’s State Street makes a brief appearance in the Route 66 episode “Voice at the End of the Line” (October 19, 1962). I put together two Route 66 screenshots to make a Google Maps-like composite.



[Click for larger views.]

Seno Formal Wear (“since 1919”) is still in business in Illinois and Indiana but no longer has a store in Chicago. Bob Elfman’s Sandwich Shop (“famous for corned beef since 1933”) closed in 1985. I cannot figure out what sits between Seno and Bob Elfman’s, and I can find no record of State & Lake Fruit and Nut, named of course for the two streets that meet at this corner. That’s the business I most want to know about too.

Moving upward: I like the second-story signage for the beauty school and beauty supplies. I admired such signage often on the Bronx’s Fordham Road. Arthur Murray Dance Studio, are you still there?

The clanking that comes from the 2009 Google Maps image is the sound of chains: Johnny Rockets and the Halsted Street Deli form what is called a “co-branded fast casual restaurant.” The delis, named for a Chicago street, can be found in twelve more Illinois cities. There is no Halsted Street Deli on Halsted Street. The company website lists no Johnny Rockets now on State. On June 20, a Chick-fil-A opened at its address.

Yelp says that the Triple 1 Chinese Restaurant (which occupies the second-story corner in the 2009 photograph) is closed. In 2009 the second story also housed a Montana tourism office: the URL visitmt.com is visible on the window, though not in this photograph. Is the office still there? The Chicago Tribune took note of MT’s marketing in 2011 and just last month.

The one constant in these photographs: the Chicago Theatre, now with a smaller marquee. We saw Brian Wilson there on his 2002 Pet Sounds tour.

I like watching the crowd watching the famous Corvette driving down the famous street.

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September 6, 2013: Last night I received an e-mail from Katina Callas, whose father, Spyros Papagiannis, owned the State & Lake Fruit and Nut Shop. Katina says that her father was “a very kindhearted man”:

I have many memories growing up and going there. He used to sell his fruit baskets to Marshall Fields. Sometimes he would make me walk down State Street with two baskets one in each hand to make the delivery if his employee didn’t show up. I would have to go back and forth until all baskets were delivered.

He had the best and largest fruit you can imagine. When I go to fruit markets now I never see the quality that my dad had at his store. He had customers from Fritzel’s come in and purchase after their dinner.

Fritzel’s, as I learned last night, was a celebrated State Street restaurant.

Katina had no photographs of the store’s sign. So now she has one to share with her family. The Internet: it’s wonderful.

[E-mail used with permission.]

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

Bert Stern (1929–2013)

Yes, he photographed Marilyn Monroe. But also: with Aram Avakian, he created the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959), a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. It makes 1958 look like the coolest year in history.

Bert Stern, Elite Photographer Known for Images of Marilyn Monroe (New York Times)

[A jazz fan looking at the program for the 1958 festival will wince upon discovering who’s missing from the film.]

E-mail widget betterment

A reader suggested adding a widget to allow for e-mail subscriptions. So I’ve added one to the sidebar. But I couldn’t resist tinkering with Google’s prose. Before and after:



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12:33 p.m.: Blogger’s e-mail widget looks like this in iOS:


I thought that deleting the word here might allow me to shrink the text box and fix Subm-it. No luc-k. So I’ve changed Subm-it to Go. Little details like this one remind me how little interest Google seems to have in the iOS-user experience. For a while it was impossible to edit Blogger drafts in iOS.

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4:22 p.m.: Lo: it is possible to offer an e-mail subscription without Blogger’s semi-ugly widget. The correct link is all that’s needed. The sidebar now offers the feed and e-mail by using nothing but the English language (and HTML).

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DOMA

From this morning’s Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing for the majority:

DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability on the class by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Supreme Court Bolsters Gay Marriage With Two Major Rulings (New York Times)

[I’m glad he got this one right.]