New Year’s Eve 1913

[“Watch Night Jollity Sane: Restaurant Managers Say That Dancing Prevented Disorder,” The New York Times, January 2, 1914.]

Another Henry gum machine

[Henry, December 30, 2013.]

One can never have too many streetside gum machines.

More gum machines
Henry : Henry : Henry : Perry Mason : Henry : Henry

Recently updated

Gulden’s app Now with spicy brown icon.

Familial music

Rachel Leddy and Ben Leddy play and sing Jesca Hoop’s “Enemy.”

More familial music
“Half-Acre” : “I Hear Them All” : “I Want You Back” : “No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature” : “Old Enough” : “Someone Like You” / “Somebody That I Used to Know”

[For a better look at the orange crate art on the wall, see here.]

Gulden’s app

It came to me in a dream: the Gulden’s app. Press the spicy brown dot, and a runner comes to your door with a blob of Gulden’s Mustard for your sandwich. The app would save its user the inconvenience of using Gulden’s plastic squeeze bottle. Location Services required.

This dream app was no doubt the result of a conversation last night about the feasibility of online grocery shopping. And did I mention the inconvenience of Gulden’s plastic squeeze bottle? The knife has not been made than can extract all that bottle’s mustard. The jar was a friendlier container.

This app idea is free to any interested iOS developer.


[Spicy brown icon. Yes, that’s mustard, beveled with an online icon maker.]

Related reading
Other dream posts (Pinboard)

[And in the near far future, drones!]

How to draw a duck

[Cigarette card, “How to draw a duck without pencil leaving the paper,” c. 1908–1919. From the George Arents Collection, via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.]

I want to say that it was a simpler time, but I think it was in truth a more complicated time. That’s one elaborate duck.

Also from the NYPL Gallery
A 1914 telephone call : The Automat : Benny Goodman : A cigarette card of mystery : Inspector Bucket : Invisible ink : The NYPL Stereograminator : Whelan’s Drug Store

Overheard

In an outpost of a prominent coffee chain. The customer was a Gregory Corso look-alike and sound-alike:

“Do you have coffee?”

“Yes, we do.”

“I’ll make it simple for you. Gimme a hot coffee.”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[All dialogue guaranteed overheard.]

Reading surveilled

[W]e have awoken to find a retail panopticon where everything we say or see is observed, counted, and recorded. . . . Even readerly underlining, once the bastion of self-referentiality, is now being viewed for marketing purposes with the help of electronic readers. There is no outside the network today except the ever dwindling space-time of off. As Don DeLillo writes in Valparaiso, his satirical drama of contemporary media, “Everything is the interview.” We have returned to a world before the invention of privacy.

Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

And now the act of reading itself is becoming data. Read all about it: As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You (The New York Times).

[Mac Dictation turned panopticon into panoptic con. Hmm. Thanks for the book, Ben.]

Pedestrians in Los Angeles

The New York Times reports on a crackdown on pedestrians in Los Angeles:

When Adam Bialik, a bartender, stepped off the curb on his way to work at the Ritz-Carlton a few blinks after the crossing signal began its red “Don’t Walk” countdown, he was met by a waiting police officer on the other side of the street and issued a ticket for $197.

“I didn’t even know that was against the law,” he said. “I was like, ‘You are the L.A.P.D., and this is what you are doing right now?’”

When Elaine and I were in Los Angeles last fall, we walked great distances and never got a ticket. I’m pretty certain that we never jaywalked — it would have been like trying to cross a football field.

Christmas 1913

[“13,000 at the Spugs Christmas Party: Band Played, Chorus and Soloists Sang, and Nearly Everybody Danced. 40-Foot Tree Bore Gifts. The Children Got Half a Pound of Candy Each; Luncheon Served to All.” The New York Times, December 26, 1913.]

The Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, the Spugs, was the creation of Mrs. August Belmont. Its mission: “to fight petty holiday grafting.” A 1912 Times article attributed to Mrs. Belmont this definition of Spug̢: “a woman who has vowed never again in all her life to give any Christmas gift that is not offered with a whole heart.” The Times described the Spug as “a working girl who has put her foot on all the usual Christmas-time schemes for raising money with which to buy Christmas presents for those ‘higher up,’” such as floorwalkers and head salesladies.

To all who celebrate it, Merry Christmas. May the presents you give and receive be real ones.