Saturday Evening Post

It began with a New Yorker reference to Rodgers and Hammerstein.  That reminded me that R&H had not always hit the mark, and I picked up a prior thread of misses like Allegro, Me and Juliet, and Pipe Dream.  

The latter referenced one of the stars, Judy Tyler, and I looked up more information on her 1957 death in a car wreck at age 24.  The online bio included a link to a JPG of an Earl Wilson column from 1955 that I, of course, wanted to read.  In it, she came off as ambitious, to say the least, and intent on making it clear no one else deserved any credit for her success.   

But shortly before the customary closing "That's Earl, brother" that I remember from growing up in the late 1960's and early '70's, in the dot-dot-dot section was a line about a Jelke Girl.  That's how I learned about Minot "Mickey" Jelke, scion of the Jelke Good Luck margarine family.  With a few years to wait before coming into a 7-figure inheritance upon turning 25, he decided to put that time to use by becoming a pimp.  (He didn't get away with it.)

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Otherwise on this Saturday:  Pizza and Pepsi for the main meal, with a pastry from a local Italian shop for dessert.  Walked a mile and a quarter afterward.  

Good Quality Time with my little cat in early afternoon.

Mid-afternoon, got blood orange juice for PG from Whole Foods, and I picked up some whole milk yogurt.  

Took a back road home and checked for whether a lone little patch of purple asters along the road was still in flower, which it was.  This picture is from a week ago, when I had time to stop and appreciate them from close range.

Second sight?

Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone reviewed The Royal Scam in 1976.  

Steely Dan's next album, Aja, was indeed a pop killer.

A Good Day

I baked a cinnamon streusel coffee cake early this afternoon.  Then, went to Costco for one or two things and came home with four or five.  (The eggs were $5.79, but that was for a dozen and a half; the Diamond Crystal salt was 37 cents a pound; the pint of Kirkland vanilla, as yet unaffected by the Trump tariffs, was $10; and the Kerry Gold butter and the Rao's marinara sauce both had sale prices that put them below those on supermarket shelves (less than $6 a pound for the former and less than $5 a quart jar for the latter).  

As mentioned above, the coffee cake was made with cinnamon, but our open container of Kirkland (again) cinnamon, although it contained enough for the cake, was at a low level that made it difficult to reach with a measuring spoon.  The answer was readily at hand, though.  

Both PG and I save glass jars just for occasions like this.  There's a shelf in the pantry that holds a dozen or more jelly jars, home canning jars, and other glass containers, and from the stack I picked out one that had held Bonne Maman preserves.  

Maybe a visitor would wonder, but maybe not, if they understood that's how both of us were raised.  Our mothers and fathers had to quit school in their early teens and were thereafter blocked from high-paying jobs, which is why they insisted that their children get as much education as possible.  My mother said again and again that when you had an education, nobody could take it away from you.  

I got there in a roundabout way, which I can attribute to being the first in the family to go to college, but the inexperience that led me to take the scenic route on the road to a diploma also resulted in lasting memories of interesting detours.  That was back when a young person and average student could pay for college with federal grants without signing up for student loan debt.  Any advice I might give now based on that era is as out of date as cookbooks from the 19th Century.

Supper was homemade pizza, washed down with Pepsi, which I've otherwise given up to keep my blood sugar score out of triple digits.  It tasted terrific.  I'll be craving it for days to come.  

Rather than buy Pepsi in bulk, which would be a mighty temptation, I got two cold 20-ounce bottles at Wawa.  The price was $2.59 each, or two 20's for $4.00.  (Don't want to forget that I saw a caramel Lindt bar at Wawa and picked one up for PG.)

That's enough detail about the past day.  Time to go upstairs.

Way back, waaay back...

Not absolutely sure of the above assertion, but the two things I remembered about the first MLB game I attended were that Norm Cash homered and a 36-year-old rookie named Hank Izquierdo was catching for the visiting Twins.  It was his only season with them, and with the help of Baseball Reference, I found that he played only 3 games in Tiger Stadium, with two of them the nightcaps of doubleheaders.  The single game was on Thursday, August 24, and Norm Cash did homer that day.  

Yeah, I did the math, I know how long ago that was...  I can also sing commercial jingles from that era as though I saw them yesterday.  (Since I've watched a number of them on YouTube, it's entirely possible that I did.)  And I've used Izquierdo sometime during the past year in Immaculate Grid.

Friday night

A thought while scrolling:  "That's all well and good.  But I know good and well that..."

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Seen any good stuff lately?  Yes, the Mike Wallace Interview, a half-hour of picture radio from the late 1950's, conversation with the up-and-coming (Henry Kissinger), those past their prime (Mary Margaret McBride, Dagmar, Gloria Swanson, Philip Wylie) and those still riding their 15 minutes of fame (Ralph Lapp) or infamy (Eldon Edwards, Grand Wizard of the KKK).  A few people at the top of their business (Steve Allen, Eddie Arcaro), and some near the end (Commando Kelly, Diana Barrymore).

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As a child growing up a couple of decades after World War II, I learned about the war years through history, not as an eyewitness.  The Manhattan Project had been top secret, I read, except for a few pesky leaks to the Soviet Union, I read later.  When Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, it was a huge surprise to everyone outside that small cadre of nuclear physicists.  No one had ever heard of such a thing.

And so it wasn't until tonight, following up on the Mike Wallace Interview with Philip Wylie, that I learned that the atomic bomb had been the subject of numerous articles in the 1930's in newspapers, in magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated, and short stories in pulp science fiction magazines.  People knew about the sudden cities in Oak Ridge and in Los Alamos.

Actually, the pulp stories continued into the early years of the war (so I found out) until a government agency said in effect, "Ix-nay on the Omb-Bay.  The enemy can read, too."  Philip Wylie had written a story that brought together a great deal of knowledge about the progress being made on nuclear weaponry, and he was taken to a quiet room by several serious men who wanted to know how he knew so much and why he was telling so much about it.

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I was in the basement last night, and I looked across the floor and saw my little cat, Good Queen Swirly.  She saw me and ran to me for some affection, and I was happy that seeing me made her so happy.

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Check this out

Look what popped up just now on my 1st page of YouTube results.  I always did like this one.  Forty years later, I can find out that the guy who stayed behind was Art LaFleur.  No information on the guy who went out for the Stroh's.  

Ding Dong School - NBC - November 17, 1954

YouTube has multiple examples of early television that were before my time, but I still heard about them in my childhood.  Only now am I getting to see shows like Kukla, Fran and Ollie (I knew the song "Here We Are Again" but not until now did I know it was the theme from KFO) and Ding Dong School.  Miss Frances puts me in mind of Fred Rogers in her warm, patient delivery, although without the unconditional positive regard of Mr. Rogers for the very young viewer. 

Of course, there was no PBS back then, and even non-commercial NET was just getting started in 1954, so the show was sponsored, in this case by Ovaltine.  When she slides from the program into the commercial with barely a pause, she uses the same warm tone of voice that signifies she's telling the little members of her audience about another Good Thing.  At least Paul Harvey put a "Page Two" between the content and the sponsor's message.

C'est cette chanson que j'aime...

Blogger's stat sheet says that there have been hundreds of hits this week on this humble, unpublicized, quiet corner of cyberspace, and they all came from Singapore.  It makes a fellow wonder.  Stocking up their files for future AI?

I spent my junior year of college in a small city in France.  Lots of memories, kept in some small cahiers and presently residing in a small box at the bottom of a closet upstairs.  

But some of those memories are in the form of music, and tonight I learned that one of the tubes of my stay in France was used last year in a TV commercial for a supermarché named Intermarché. (The link contains both the commercial and the original song, paroles et musique. A cette heure, de toute façon.)  

Back then, with my limited French, I thought it was a song like I Will Survive, where the singer was determined to go on living despite having lost their lover.  Now, I see it more as the singer rejecting that lover due to his own égoïsme.  Like the joke with a sharp point that a female stand-up made about a former boyfriend:  "We had a lot in common.  We both loved him and hated me."