A riposte to My Dinner with Andre, for pencil-necked geeks.
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2011.
Tags: Andy Kaufman, Freddie Blassie
"He walked across a rope stretched at a height of 120 feet, and was nearly knocked off during a performance by a man who shot fireworks at him."
The Great Blondin was the best of all 19th-century tightrope walkers, but there were plenty of others who attempted to master the art. This quintet of stories from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle relates some of the sublime and scary moments faced by high-wire practitioners.
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“Blondin” (February 23, 1897): “A man who was as famous in his time as the Czar of all of the Russias has just died in a suburb of London at a comfortable age. He was Blondin, the rope walker. The man had many imitators and few rivals since he came into prominence, but none of them won quite the celebrity he enjoyed. Hardly any of them earned it, in fact. It was he who first conceived the notion of crossing Niagara on a tight rope at a great height above the rushing water, and this self appointed task he carried out, once wheeling a barrow, and again with his head enveloped in a blanket, again crossing at night and again carrying a man on his back. In the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London he walked across a rope stretched at a height of 120 feet, and was nearly knocked off during a performance by a man who shot fireworks at him. He returned to America not long ago and gave exhibitions at West Brighton that were seen by many thousands. Until he was 70 years old he retained his wonderful sense of balance and agility, and could be seen throwing handsprings in front of his house in Ealing.”
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"It was he who first conceived the notion of crossing Niagara on a tight rope...carrying a man on his back."
“Cycling on a Live Wire” (July 30, 1897): “A decided novelty in the line of tight rope performances may be witnessed free at Ridgewood Park next week. Professor Arion, who attracted considerable attention several years ago walking on a narrow span over Niagara Falls, and who has since been giving exhibitions in various parts of the country, will ride a bicycle over a live trolley wire every afternoon and evening. The feat is the latest addition to Professor Arion’s repertoire. His wheel, with the exception of the tires, is a regulation bicycle, fitted up with thirty regulation globes, which receive a current of electricity from the trolley wire beneath. The suit which the performer wears is studded with similar lights, covered wires being attached to his clothing, and when riding at a height of 75 feet above the ground, the sight is a brilliant one. In addition to the above number of tricks, Professor Arion will make up a bed on the wire, first unrolling a mattress, then covering himself with sheets and blankets.”
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“An Insane Tight Rope Walker” (April 22, 1884): “Harry Leslie who made himself famous by crossing the Niagara Falls on a tight rope, is in a violent state of insanity. He was arrested at nine o’clock last evening by an officer of the Seventh Precinct for attempting to stab a man. His mania is said to be grief at the death of his wife which occurred some time ago, and his failure to obtain steady employment. Last evening he created a sensation at his residence, corner Monserole and Manhattan avenues, Greenpoint, by throwing a rope from an upper window and announcing his intention of walking across the street. After thinking he had fastened it to the opposite house, a crowd of about 250 persons gathered below. While the rope was dangling from the window he clutched it and climbed on the sill, from which perilous position he was rescued with difficulty.
Leslie thinks he is a wealthy man and buys blocks of property in Greenpoint for which he gives worthless checks for millions. After the occurrence of last night he was watched by a member of his family. He attempted to stab the policeman who arrested him.”
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"A piece of burning stuff from one of the lighted torches had fallen on her head and set her long hair on fire."
“An Exciting Scene” (January 30, 1869): “An exciting scene occurred the other day at Alcazer, in Spain. Mlle. Rose Saqui, a rope dancer, was performing some jugglery feats, balancing daggers, lighted torches, etc., on the tight rope, when suddenly the cry, ‘You’re on fire’ arose from the audience. A piece of burning stuff from one of the lighted torches had fallen on her head and set her long hair on fire. With one foot on the iron rope and another in the air, the woman did not lose her presence of mind. She passed her hand over her clothes and felt nothing. ‘In your hair!’ cried the excited people. Mlle. Saqui understood, and carried her hand to her head rapidly stifled the fire. She then continued her performance as if nothing happened.”
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“The Advocates of Women’s Rights” (July 12, 1876): “The advocates of women’s rights ought to rejoice over the fact that a woman has successfully imitated the opposite sex in one other and hitherto untried field. An Italian woman walked over Niagara Falls on a tight rope and returned, on Saturday last. She performed the feat admirably well, and proposes to repeat it, the next time carrying a man on her back. That will not be hard to do as many of her sex can attest who have, figuratively speaking, carried some worthless member of the race over all the hard places in life. If there is a man so contemptible as to be willing to be thus publicly carried on a woman’s back, his entire brotherhood who permit women this privilege in the literal sense ought to rise up against him and exterminate him. Meanwhile, let the strong minded rejoice. If they have had not any new discovery or exceptional work accomplished by their representatives as yet, they have some clever imitators among the sex, and the most recently famous of the number is this young woman who has successfully crossed Niagara Falls.”
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Tags: Charles Blondin, Harry Leslie, Mlle. Rose Saqui, Professor Arion
"He turned his head to see what was going on, and there was the steel grille of a black van heading straight toward him."
From “Lucky Jim,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s amazing 2002 GQ profile of Jim MacLaren, an incredibly accomplished athlete and actor who suffered two devastating accidents and passed away last year:
“Soon he could run a marathon in just over three hours, routinely finishing in the top third of able-bodied contenders. And then he took up triathlons. Yes, triathlons. Once he’d survived a few of those, he set out to conquer the Ironman, one of the most brutal organized sporting events ever imagined. Two and a half miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking and a full 26.2-mile marathon, all in one race, all in one day. And all on one leg. Which explains what Jim MacLaren was doing in Southern California on that cool June afternoon in1993. He was participating in an Ironman.Jim was excelling. He was speeding through the town of Mission Viejo on his bicycle, tearing ass at thirty-five miles per hour. The sidewalks were crowded with spectators, and he was dimly aware of their cheers. He had just pulled ahead of a thick snarl of cyclists. He was leading the pack. Suddenly, Jim heard the crowd gasp. He turned his head to see what was going on, and there was the steel grille of a black van heading straight toward him. He realized he was about to be hit by a goddamn car.It was supposed to have been a closed racecourse. But for some unknown reason,a cop guarding an intersection decided to let one car through, and he misjudged how fast the bicyclists were coming. As Jim MacLaren was approaching,the cop was gesturing to the driver of the van to hit the gas. The driver, a 50-year-old man on his way to church, was merely obeying orders. He floored it. He didn’t see Jim until Jim was on his windshield.This time Jim vividly remembers being hit. He remembers the screams from the crowd. He remembers his body flying across the street and smashing into a lamppost headfirst, snapping his neck. He remembers riding in the ambulance and being aware that he could not feel his limbs. He was put under anesthesia for emergency surgery on his spine, and when he woke up he was in the trauma ward. He could not move. His head was shaved. There was a bolt screwed into the back of his skull, preventing him from shifting his head even a millimeter. Jim remembers this well. But what he remembers most clearly is this image: All the nurses were in tears.’We’re so sorry,’ they kept saying. Jim MacLaren was now a quadriplegic. He was 30 years old. And this is where his story begins.” (Thanks Kevin Kelly.)
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Tags: Elizabeth Gilbert, Jim MacLaren
"Supervised, public visit of course." (Image by Phillip Capper.)
Need a baby to hold – $50 (Midtown West)
My friend Chloe has never held a baby before. Can anyone help her? She has never experienced the feeling of looking into a newborn baby’s eyes and seeing God. For 50 bucks I’ll pay you to let my friend Chloe hold your baby. Supervised, public visit of course. This is no joke! 50 bucks for about 15 min of your time. Email me back with any questions.
Tags: Chloe
"On Aug. 16, 1987, thousands of new age adherents following the lead of Arguelles." (Image by Luke Hancock.)
On August 18, 1987, people gathered in Central Park (and other locales all over the world) for an odd event called Harmonic Convergence, blowing conch shells and dancing, which would supposedly delay Earth’s doom. It was a bit of ridiculousness birthed (with sincerity) by a Minnesota art historian named Jose Arguelles, who just passed away. Here’s an excerpt from his obituary:
“Jose Arguelles, an art historian whose teachings about the Mayan calendar inspired the harmonic convergence event of 1987, has died at age 72.
His publisher and a statement from his foundation said he died March 23, in Australia. A spokeswoman for the publisher said Monday the cause was peritonitis.
On Aug. 16, 1987, thousands of new age adherents following the lead of Arguelles gathered at places such as the red rocks of Sedona, Ariz., Serpent Mound in Ohio and the Arthurian town of Glastonbury in England.
Arguelles was living in Boulder, Colo., and had written The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, which argued for replacing the Gregorian calendar, said Earth was in the last phases of a galactic beam of light it entered in 3113 B.C., and called for meditation to give humanity a chance to enter a new age in 2012.
At a mountain campsite, he blew a conch shell, and around the world others chanted, formed circles, held hands at dawn and danced in what one participant said was an attempt to change the worldwide consciousness. Debunkers ranged from academics to the Doonesbury comic strip.”
Tags: Jose Arguelles
Beatrice Wood came to art late but with gusto. (Thanks Documentarian.)
From Michael Kimmelman’s 1999 remembrance of Wood in the New York Times: “The time is summer 1917, the place, Coney Island. Beatrice Wood is seated on a fake ox while behind her, in an oxcart, against a painted backdrop, sit Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. They have come from the roller coaster. ‘With Marcel’s arm around me,’ Wood recalled years later, ‘I would have gone on any ride into hell with the same heroic abandon as a Japanese lover standing on the rim of a volcano ready to take a suicide leap.’ In the photograph she looks more queasy than lovestruck, clutching her hat as if afraid it might still blow off.
Wood, who died this year a few days after her 105th birthday, flirtatious to the end, became a potter of luminescent talent, having taken up ceramics in her 40’s when she failed to find a teapot to match some plates she had bought in Holland. Her fame, which mostly came later in life, stemmed from a combination of her art, her longevity and her sheer verve.
When she was born, Cezanne was still a little-known painter and Grover Cleveland was President. When she died, she was, in a sense, just coming into her own, having had a full-scale museum retrospective in New York City a year earlier and having been named a ‘living treasure’ by the Governor of California a couple of years before that. Through a friend she’d lately been introduced to a film director who decided to base a character in a new movie on her. The director was James Cameron. The character was Rose in Titanic.“
Tags: Beatrice Wood, Francis Picabia, James Cameron, Marcel Duchamp
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Trying to cheer up Phil Spector's monkey...
...since 2009.
- Classic Films: The Man in the White Suit (1951) + 8 1/2 (1963).
- Old Print Articles: Children smoking cigarettes (1883-98) + Human calculator awes vaudeville (1901) + Hetty Green, millionaire miser (1889-1902).
- Classic Photographs: Annie Oakley, With Rifle, in Her Dotage (1922) + Seth Kinman’s Drinking Establishment (1889).
- Featured Videos: Hunter S. Thompson “debates” a Hell’s Angel + Kitten sits in bucket, doing nothing + Female workers causing male discomfort + Snowman frightens people + Toning abs with forced, scary laughter + Genesis P-Orridge delineates the difference between men and women + Poland’s Bieber storms America + Kurt Vonnegut teaches fiction writing + William S. Burroughs shooting Shakespeare + Robot surgeon plays “Operation” board game + Horned, tattoo lady + Robots play soccer in Germany + San Fran in 1906, just days before the earthquake + Remote-controlled roaches + Guy in patriotic underwear dances for seniors + Senior stoners talk toking.
- Recently Posted on NYC”s Craigslist: Solitary man selling freezer suitable for serial murderer + I’ve been saving pieces of Van Johnson’s hair since 1987 + If you give me money, I will tell you my darkest thoughts + Brooklyn man, likely drunk, needs you to loan him a million dollars that he will pretend to spend + I will haul away your shit + I’m not selling my A-Team memorabilia just because I’m 30, though that is a contributing factor.
- Martin Kenneth Tytell was a typewriter legend well into the computer age.
- An inside account of the Apocalypse Now set, which had a heart of darkness.
- Richard Feynman needs just a minute to teach an important lesson.
- Charles Bukowski tells us how to avoid dead ends.
- Economist Joseph Stiglitz analyzes wealth disparity in America.
- Queens resident George Willig scales the World Trade Center in 1977.
- Ray Kurzweil holds court at the iLabs Singularity Summit.
- The Slow Internet movement gets an anthem.
- Attending a ridiculous poetry convention in Reno.
- NYC cigarette salesman Lonnie Loosie is profiled.
- The apartment building that changed NYC.
- George Orwell recalls a troublesome elephant.
- An 1885 advertisement for a high-end spittoon.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
An inside look at the insane set of Apocalypse Now, reported with verve in 1977 in Newsweek by Maureen Orth:
“Life on the set – four different locations in the Philippines – also escalated quickly to apocalyptic dimensions. The young crew, composed largely of Americans, Filipions and Italians, weathered a typhoon, survived dysentery and sweated through day after day of relentless heat – alleviated by periodic R&R trips to Hong Kong. Stuntmen amused themselves by diving from fourth-story windows into the motel pool below. The prop man, Doug Madison, became adept at fabricating top secret CIA documents, thought nothing of driving 400 miles to fetch a special Army knife, and made a connection with a supplier of real corpses – before he was vetoed. At one point, Coppola asked Tavoularis to produce 1,000 blackbirds, which prompted the designer to consider making cardboard beaks for pigeons and dyeing them black. The film company retained a full-time snake man, who appeared every morning on the set with a sack full of pythons. The Italians brought in pasta and mozzarella from Italy in film cans. Did Coppola want a tribe of primitive mountain people living on the set in their own functioning village? He got it.” (Thanks Longform.)
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Tags: Francis Ford Coppola, Maureen Orth
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Spend 1 million ina – $1 (Bklyn)
I bet you I can spend 1 million dollars in one day without even leaving Brooklyn thing is I don’t have it so the trade you can record how I do it. If not I got a better idea loan the money to me you don’t even have to leave my sight bet you I can still spend without actually spending when people see that kind of money I will still get whatever I want without spending a dime sounds crazy but true. Email me to get this started.
I would guess that Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga is the most factual book that Hunter S. Thompson ever wrote. It’s amusing to see Gonzo look so intimidated, but, you know, you buy the ticket, you take the ride. (Thanks Documentarian.)
“The Angels don’t like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it. ‘Yeah, I guess I am,’ said one. ‘But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.'”
Tags: Hunter S. Thompson
Science has long reduced drudgery while expanding economies, but what if it forgets to do the latter? Alexander Mackendrick’s 1951 Ealing comedy looks at the purgatory a society becomes when work is drastically reduced but workers are not. It’s a time much like our own.
Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness) is a brilliant if haphazard chemist who’s been bounced by Cambridge and a string of textile firms due to his curious, combustible research projects, many of which end in literal explosions. But most explosive of all is his new invention: a fabric that can’t be dirtied or damaged and never wears out. Stratton has the indestructible fabric fashioned into a white suit and is prepared to present it to the press but neither Capital nor Labor is quite so sanguine about a magical material that will cause profits to plummet and displace workers. Soon, Stratton is on the run, his life’s work on his back, being pursued by suits and overalls alike.
Made during the decade when economist Joseph Schumpeter redefined the Marxist term “creative destruction” to mean innovations that bring with them uncertain times and painful adjustments, Mackendrick’s satirical comedy presaged the vocational tumult of the Information Age, when numerous careers have been disappeared into the 0s and 1s of an unblinking computer screen. “I admit some will suffer,” says one the film’s seemingly forward-thinking captains of industry, “but I will not stand in the way of progress.” As if any of us could.•
Tags: Alec Guinness, Alexander Mackendrick, Joseph Schumpeter
Named “one of the greatest men of 2001” by the Polish edition of Elle.
Tags: Kuba Ka
"Her appearance would never cause the uninitiated to think that she was anything more extraordinary than an old fashioned woman of moderate means and simple tastes."
Dubbed the “Witch of Wall Street,” Henrietta “Hetty” Green was the wealthiest woman in America in the early 1900s, a force in numerous aspects of the country’s economy, from railroads to real estate. But she was far more feared than loved. Oft-sued and consistently caricatured for her legendary cheapness, Green’s complicated portrait is painted to some degree in the following quartet of old print articles.
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“Hetty Green’s Millions–Peculiar Dress and Tastes of a Widow Who Has Broken Banks,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (September 17, 1893): “Not a small part of the fame of Brooklyn can be laid to the credit of the remarkable women who have lived and live now within its borders–women who have taken rank and honor in almost every walk of life. It is a well known fact that a very large proportion of the real estate in this city is held in the names of women. It is not a widely known fact that the woman who is reputed to be the richest in the United States lives in the City of Churches, and right in the classic section known as the Heights, too. Her wealth is variously estimated from $40,000,000 to $80,000,000 and her name is Mrs. Hetty Green. Her name and personality are more familiar to Wall Street than they are to Brooklyn society. That is because Mrs. Green has chosen to devote all her time to the manipulation of her fortune and has let society get along without her. Hetty Green at an Ihpetonga ball would create a sensation, indeed, but it is not likely that such an occasion will ever be recorded by society writers.
Nobody ever saw her with a dress which was not severely plain, and seldom has she been noticed when she did not carry an old style and well worn black satchel. Her appearance would never cause the uninitiated to think that she was anything more extraordinary than an old fashioned woman of moderate means and simple tastes, who was on her way to the corner grocery or the bakery on the block below. Yet, if money is power, this same staid looking person is one of the most powerful human beings in the country.”
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“Hetty Green, Menaced, Arms Herself–Yet Only Things in the World She Fears, She Says, Are Lightning and a Religious Lawyer,” New York Times (May 9, 1902): “Mrs. Hetty R. Green, the richest woman in America, now carries a revolver. She says she has been threatened several times, and, as she frequently has much money and negotiable paper about her, she wants to be in a position to protect herself.
Mrs. Green, accompanied by a clerk from the Chemical National Bank, called at the Leonard Street Station on Saturday and applied for a permit to carry a pistol. Sergt. Isaac Frank was at the desk, and when he learned the identity of his callers he invited them to seats within the inclosure.
‘Now, young man,’ said Mrs. Green, ‘I want permission to carry a pistol. Because I am a rich woman some people might to kill me. I have often been threatened.'”
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"Mrs. Ives insists that Mrs. Green is the 'stingiest woman on the face of this earth.'"
“Calls Hetty Green Stingy,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (December 23, 1902): Mrs. J.H. Ives of Brooklyn, the stepmother of the ‘Napoleon of Finance’ Ives, is now in the ranks of those who declare Hetty Green, a ‘stingy woman.’ In fact, Mrs. Ives insists that Mrs. Green is the ‘stingiest woman on the face of this earth.’
Mrs. Ives’ assertion grows out of a transaction involving the loan of a chair and a sofa to Mrs. Green’s husband, now dead. Out of pity, she says, Mrs. Ives loaned the furniture to make Mr. Green more comfortable in his meagerly furnished room. She and Mrs. Green were schoolgirls together and this explains her interest in Mrs. Green’s husband.
‘I always like Edward Green and sympathized with him,’ said Mrs. Ives. ‘I knew what he had suffered at her hands Why, he couldn’t call his soul his own. He and his wife were not living together and he had a little room in the Cumberland, where the great Flatiron building now stands. He was sick and I called to see him. I was shocked at the surroundings in the wretched place. There was only a bed and a nightstand in the room and the poor fellow didn’t even have a chair to sit in, Still, he did not complain; he had lived with her too long to think of complaining.
Well, I loaned him a rocker and a sofa that had been in our family for many years. When he and his wife were reunited they went to Hoboken and my sofa and rocker went with them. After Mr. Green died last March, I asked Mrs. Green to return the things. Mrs. Green never gave me any satisfaction.”
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“Hetty Green’s Husband Dead,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (March 19, 1902): “Edward Green, husband of Hetty Green, died at his home to-day. He had been ill a long time with a complication of diseases. Edward Green, known wherever Mrs. Green went as ‘Hetty Green’s husband,’ lived at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn during the winter of 1897-98 with Mrs. Green and her daughter Sylvia. Chief Clerk F.C. Niolo knew both Mr. and Mrs. Green very well and has been on very friendly terms with Mrs. Green ever since their stay at the St. George. He was greatly shocked to hear of Mr. Green’s death.
He said: ‘They were a very happy and contented couple. Mrs. Green was distinctly the man of the family and the head of the house.'”
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Tags: Henrietta Green, Hetty Green
“Cavity Sam” gets cracked open by a bot. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
"But I wore the juice." (Image by Paoletta S.)
Idiocy is annoying but repeated idiocy is galling beyond belief. Why don’t we learn from our mistakes? Why do we repeat them? Perhaps we’re too stupid to know that we’re stupid? Errol Morris looks at this conundrum on his Times blog in the extravagantly titled 2010 post, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is.” An excerpt:
“David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called “Offbeat News Stories” he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:
ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS
At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.
At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.
Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.
In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into ‘this thing’ blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details — ‘although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work.’ He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn’t anywhere to be found in the image. It was like a version of Where’s Waldo with no Waldo. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid. He came up with three possibilities:
(a) the film was bad;
(b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or
(c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.
As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.”
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A Morris commercial for Miller beer:
Tags: David Dunning, Errol Morris, McArthur Wheeler, Michael A. Fuoco
At Cornell University. (Thanks Open Culture.)
Tags: Richard Feynman
"Chana." (Image by Geoffrey Gallaway.)
I NEED 50 CARTON NEW PORTS MADE IN CHANA (FLUSHING -)
I NEED 20 OF CARTON NEW PORTS MADE IN CHANA ASAP CALL ME JAY I GOT CASH ON HAND ……NO BULL SHIT QUEENS
“He’s dead, man.”
Poem published in 1897.
RICHARD CORY:
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich — yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
••••••••••
As reimagined by Simon & Garfunkel in 1966:
X-ray.
Xanthippe: The irascible wife of the Greek philosopher, Socrates, and the type of the scolding wife. Allowance must be made for a woman whose husband brought home company for dinner and nothing else. She mourned sincerely for him at his death.
Yard: A standard measure of 36 inches, the word being derived from the Saxon gyrd, or rod. The yard was anciently regarded as the circumference of the body, but Henry I decided it should be the length of his arm.
Yawning: Deep inspiration of breath with widely opened mouth, a natural effort for nervous relief when exhausted.
"Y-M-C-A" (Image by Cod.)
Young, Brigham: The famous Mormon leader, and the head of the Latter Day Saints of Salt Lake City. He was the Governor of the Territory, a position from which he was removed by President Buchanan, but not convicted. At his death he had seventeen wives. He was originally a house-builder’s workman in New York State, but embraced Mormonism in 1831 and became first elder, then apostle, amid finally president in 1844, in succession to Joseph Smith.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
Zenana: The portion of a dwelling in India where the female members of the family are kept, and to which strangers are not admitted.
•Taken from the 1912 Standard Illustrated Book of Facts.
See also:
As women joined the workforce in droves during WWII, this jaw-dropping educational video was there to prepare bosses to handle these strange creatures. Oy vey. (Thanks Reddit.)
From “Typewriter Man,” Ian Frazier’s 1997 Atlantic profile of Martin Kenneth Tytell, a manual keyboard whiz in an age when people had all but given up typing words in favor of processing them:
“The Manhattan Yellow Pages has so many listings under ‘Typewriters’ that you might think getting someone to fix a manual would not be hard. The repair places I called were agreeable enough at first; but as I described the problem (Fixing an e, for Pete’s sake! How tough can that be?), they began to hedge and temporize. They mentioned a scarcity of spare parts, and the difficulty of welding forged steel, and other problems, all apparently my own fault for not having foreseen. I took my typewriter various places to have it looked at, and brought it home again unrepaired. This went on for a while. Finally, approaching the end of the Yellow Pages listing, I found an entry for ‘TYTELL TYPWRTR CO.’ It advertised restorations of antiques, an on-premises machine shop, a huge inventory of manuals, and sixty-five years of experience and accumulated parts. The address was in lower Manhattan. I called the number, and a voice answered, ‘Martin Tytell.’ I told Mr. Tytell my problem, and he told me he certainly could fix it. I said I would bring the typewriter in next week. ‘You should bring it in as soon as possible,’ he advised. ‘I’m an old man.'”
••••••••••
From the 2008 obituary for Tytell in the New York Times: “When he retired in 2000, Mr. Tytell had practiced his recently vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented, repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a second-floor shop at 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, where a sign advertised ‘
When he retired in 2000, Mr. Tytell had practiced his recently vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented, repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a second-floor shop at 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, where a sign advertised ‘Psychoanalysis for Your Typewriter.’
There, at the Tytell Typewriter Company, he often worked seven days a week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers like the writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, the newsmen David Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and the political opponents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson. Letters addressed only to ‘Mr. Typewriter, New York’ arrived there, too.
There, at the Tytell Typewriter Company, he often worked seven days a week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers like the writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, the newsmen David Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and the political opponents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson. Letters addressed only to ‘Mr. Typewriter, New York’ arrived there, too.”
Tags: Ian Frazier, Martin Tytell
Bears and elk died so that Seth Kinman could decorate his California bar.
I already posted a story about the rugged nineteenth-century hunter and chair maker Seth Kinman. The classic 1889 photograph above is a look at the eccentric interior of his bar in Table Bluff, California, which filled with whiskey many a Humboldt County sawmill employee.
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Seth Kinman’s great great grandchildren display some of his memorabilia.
Tags: Seth Kinman
Even during WWII, they didn’t know such horror.