Domestic comedy

[Fun while driving.]

Name your Price:

Hi Price

Lo Price

Wright Price

And always standing off to the side at the family reunion:

Bergen Price

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[My dad would have liked this stuff.]

Dad, i.m.

My dad, James Leddy, died six years ago today. He’d have been ninety-three this year.

Elaine and I just watched the (terrific) movie Career Girls (dir. Mike Leigh, 1997), in which two college flatmates, both now thirty, reunite after six years apart. Six years might feel like an eternity for someone who’s thirty. These days it feels like no time at all.

Here’s what I wrote after my dad died.

Chris Miller again

The man who purportedly represents me in the Illinois House of Representatives, Chris Miller (R-110), is in the news again for lying. From Politico :

State Rep. Chris Miller is continuing to promote the false claim that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. “Make no mistake, Donald J. Trump was overwhelmingly elected in this last election cycle,” Miller said at a [July 28] political event to promote state Sen. Darren Bailey’s bid for governor.

Miller’s previous moment in the news: his presence in Washington on January 6, with a truck bearing a Three Percenter sticker.

Miller’s wife Mary (“Hitler was right on one thing”) Miller purportedly represents me in the House of Representatives.

Related reading
All OCA Chris Miller and Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Absorbine Juniors

[“Nailing It.” Zippy, August 4, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

I thought about going down the rabbit hole yesterday. I went today. In search of an entertaining advertisement for Absorbine Jr., I discovered that there were two Jrs. Here they are, or were, sharing the year 1959 in the pages of Life.

[Life, June 1, 1959 and October 5, 1959. Click either image for a larger view.]

The Absorbine Jr. website makes no mention of a preparation for athlete’s foot. But it does explain “Jr.”:

Absorbine was originally created in 1892 by Wilbur F. Young and his wife, Mary Ida, to relieve the muscle pain of their hardworking horses that pulled heavy cargo. The popularity of the formula grew among farmers, who soon realized it quickly relieved their own aches and pains too.

Absorbine Jr., named after W.F. Young’s son, Junior, was developed specifically for humans — for fast, long lasting and effective relief of pain, stiffness and muscle aches.

The strange thing is that both products were sold under the same name. “Oh, and pick up some Absorbine Jr., willya?” “You bet.” Imagine the hilarity that might have ensued when an unwitting athlete applied mentholated liquid to a foot. As Zippy would say, “Yow!”

But a stranger thing, for me: a couple of days ago I wrote in an e-mail to my friend Fresca, “It’s great to know people are getting after books.” (Books I had sent her for a free library had already been taken.) Where did that quaint “getting after” come from? From an ad in the pages of Life, which I hadn’t seen before this morning? I suppose that’s what Vladmir Nabokov might have called precognitive e-mail.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : Nabokov, dreams, precognition

Casualties

Dear Ana Cabrera:

Barack Obama’s birthday party is not a “casualty” of COVID-19. The casualties of COVID-19 are those whose lives have been ended or upended by the spread of a contagious disease. Birthday parties don’t count.

[CNN is on in the background.]

Unforgivable

In downstate Illinois, a county fair refused to allow a pop-up site for COVID-19 vaccinations. Says Bill Alagna, president of the fair board: “That’s not the business we’re in. We’re in the county fair business.”

Here is a photograph of Alagna with a horse. On the left, the horse. On the right, a horse’s ass.

Salinger’s voice

Weirdness in the news: Betty Eppes, who in 1980 secretly recorded twenty-seven minutes’ worth of conversation with J. D. Salinger, says that the tape will be cremated with her.

Without a Paris Review subscription, you can read at least the start of Eppes’s account of meeting Salinger, published in 1980: “What I Did Last Summer.” The account is anthologized in If You Really Want to Hear About It: Writers on J. D. Salinger and His Work, ed. Catherine Crawford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006).

The Eppes–Salinger conversation is funny and sad:

“Is it true that you’ll eat fried foods only if they’re prepared in cold-pressed peanut oil?”

“Yes.”

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On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

[“Musician Louis Armstrong signing autographs for neighborhood kids.” Photograph by John Loengard. Queens, New York, 1965. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

What I love about this photograph: the food (is that red beans and rice?) and the Coca-Cola must wait. The kids come first.

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Stand down, Andrew

Stand down, Andrew. Stand down, please.

[Andrew Cuomo (precorded) was on TV just now, denying and lying his ass off. With thanks to the English Beat.]

A Sebald biography

“What lay behind his writing was this great trauma that he was expressing and suffering,” says Carole Angier, who has written a soon-to-be-published biography of W. G. Sebald. The Guardian has an article about it.

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All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)