Onofframp

Va-Va-Va-Voom

2012-01-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

Things change. Desires don't change, but what is desired changes.

Take figures. Women's figures. Once upon a time the hourglass figure was the definition of perfection. A 10. Enough curves to cause a train wreck. Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six (36-24-36) were not lottery numbers, but the most desirable measurements: bust, waist, hips.

Any desirability measurement that went along those lines would nowadays be considered tacky. Probably even offensive. Six pack abs is good for guys, and gals.

I was reminded of how the eye of the beholder has changed when I recently saw 'Goldfinger' for the umpteenth time. Honor Blackman, in her Pussy Galore role was always desirable, but nowadays I wondered if she'd get past the casting call with her lower body girth. Nowhere near bordering on the anorexic look that fills the covers of so many magazines these days.

And then there was the obituary for Denise Darcel, 87, a screen actress of the 1940s and 50s. I was not familiar with her, but immediately got the message, along with the picture when Margalit Fox, in her first sentence described Denise as someone who was a "great beauty"...with an "unmistakably pneumatic figure." The accompanying photo from a film with Glenn Ford offered 1950s proof of the description. Probably a good thing Mr. Ford is seen seated. Sure she was attractive. But by today's standards, she would seem to be a curiosity item.

"Pneumatic figure." What a great description. George Carlin in an early monologue described the tug-of-war with sex and church, pain and pleasure, when he talked of the church of "Our Lady of Perpetual Motion."

There were lots of ways, now I'm sure considered of a certain era, that were offered by guys to desribe the perfect female form. William B. Williams, the WNEW radio disc jockey offered the woman "with a wiggle in her walk." Country songs tell of the "body built for sin." There's that religious thing again.

She has "a butt that could move furniture." This isn't always a good thing. Although J-Lo seems to gotten away it with so far.

Wolf whistles and popping your thumb knuckle in your mouth were always auditory and physical signals that female desirability (a babe) has just passed by. The thumb knuckle thing always confused me though, because I always wondered why anyone would want to nearly bite themselves.

But the unmistakably best dated description of beauty is "she's built like a brick shithouse." No one born after 1949 says that one anyone. You have to hang out in nursing homes or racetracks to hear that one.

Deconstructing that one does leave you wondering what is so good about a brick shithouse? Solid, sure. Okay, a tornado is not going to whisk you away if your timing is really bad, but really, brick and shit? Nothing I'd like to be naked with. Texture and likely the smell should be a mood kill.

"Unmistakably pneumatic figure." Our Lady of Perpetual Motion. Perfect for a family newspaper.

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The Last Hurrah. Maybe.

2012-01-18T16:28:00.000-08:00

It's not the sports page I grew up with. It's not even the sports page from only a few years ago. Not when a first page story is about a pair of guys who kayaked 1,500 miles around an Arctic Circle island, and to the best of anyone's knowledge, are the first to do so.

But it's a new world. It's always a new world, and adapting is the key to survival. And it would seem for a print publication that experts placed on Death Row, the New York Times sports section is doing pretty good. It is equal parts results, and Sports Illustrated.

Take today's story. A teaser for it appears on the front page of the paper, leading to three fairly spectacular color photos. Lengthy text, more pictures and a map follow a few pages later.

Improbably, the two guys are named Turk and Boomer. Apparently their real names, not nicknames. Their last names no less. They are polar opposites in age, one 65, the other 26. There has to be something about spending 104 days circling an Arctic Island under the midnight sun, and what it does to your complexion, because judging by a black and white photo of the two, they both look at least 65. One's preserved, the other fast forwarded.

The island, despite being close to the North Pole, has a population on it. Turk and Boomer arranged for food and supplies at key points that was provided by the residents. It was an Arctic version of mass transit. There's another kayak right behind this one. Turk is the older one, and when their names are said out loud you think you're going to be listening to sports radio. WICE. Maybe that's how they landed on the sports page.

We can't possibly have heard the last of Turk and Boomer. The media will beckon. It has to. Turk, because of his age figures this might be his last hurrah in a life full of adventures, unless of course he's challenged to compete against Boomer on skis. Turk reminds the world he can paddle, and he can ski.

Keep checking the sports page.

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Reading the News Backwards

2012-01-14T08:57:00.000-08:00

This doesn't mean reading it right to left. Or, starting at the back of the newspaper and working my way forward. Although as a kid, I became aware of an uncle whose approach to New York City tabloids, The News, The Post, or Daily Mirror was to place the front page face down and start with the back page and go forward from there. This of course allowed faster access to the race results. And in fact, although I don't need the paper for race results, (HRTV, Internet suffice) I have adopted this approach whenever I pick up one the remaining tabloids. Sports is at the back.

No, reading the news backwards refers to the habit I've seen myself take up of saving whatever paper I didn't fully get to, and at some point when it's rainy, or too cold to work in the garage, or whenever, and pick it up and go through it as thoroughly as I'd like to. This generally doesn't take long, and you might imagine why.

There's no reason to read an October 2011 story about Herman Cain in January 2012. The Euro? They settled that. Now they're onto debt downgrades. Romney in Iowa? Hey, we're headed to South Carolina now. It's actually a great way to take the news in. See what you didn't read in the first place, and now see there's still no good reason to read it. It's a great time-saver.

I'm quite up on the news. I just don't always get the chance to absorb it with the attention I'd like to. Thus, the snow drifts of newspaper in the living room that drive my wife nuts, and the eventual shrinkage of the pile as tasks alternate and I devote some time to "catching up."

And while I do occasionally realize I missed a concert or something I might have considered going to, the arrangement works well. Catching up is fun.

Take learning that Lenny Dykstra and Jose Canseco were going to box each other in early November in a celebrity boxing match in Hollywood. Lenny talking trash about how Canseco "ruined my career by spreading lies." No idea of the outcome, and no idea if the bout was for charity. Considering Dykstra's career also involved investment fraud and grand theft auto, the bout might have been for his legal bills.

And the post office. An 'A-Hed' piece in the WSJ never really gets too dated, and in one in early November we learn about the lengths the postal service goes to decipher bad handwriting and get the mail delivered despite the obstacles the sender has placed in their way with hieroglyphics, and bad spelling.

We learn a new word, at least to me. 'Nixie,' a piece of mail that can't be delivered because of being poorly addressed. What we don't learn is what the postal service does with the envelopes that appear to have cash in them and can't be delivered. It's assumed if there is a legible return address the mail will make its way back to the sender that way. And thank goodness for those return addresses that do-gooders keep sending in the hopes of raising a few bucks. Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity project has kept me from seriously dipping into my own supply of self-produced Avery return address labels. Thanks, Jimmy.

Letting the news "steep" on the floor also allows attention to stories that might have been overlooked if the approach were more frantic. Take the Q&A interview in the NYT in a section called Small Business.

This piece is fairly recent, but without an aging process, would have completely escaped me. I usually don't read anything about chefs, or the preparation of truffles, or "drizzles of olive oil," but this one caught my eye.

'After South Boston, A Restaurant was Easy,' is the business story of Barbara Lynch, who by all accounts operates a string of very successful restaurants in the Boston area. Her training was not formal, but nearly reform school. She stole an MBTA bus at 13, didn't get caught, took bets from teachers and dealt drugs in high school. She's 47 now, attractive, married, and no longer steals buses.

What I would have missed if I had thrown that paper out.

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Joe Torre

2012-01-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

In between the recent holidays my son-in-law gave me a copy of his firm's holiday gift to their clients: a folded sleeve jacket from the accounting and consulting firm of J. H. Cohn, LLP with a DVD inside titled, 'Insight on Management with Joe Torre.' My son-in-law's firm is not J.H. Cohn, and his is not an accounting firm, but the gift still fits as a corporate giveaway.

Joe Torre is of course the former New York Yankee manager who has gone on to positions with The LA Dodgers, Major League Baseball, and now likely a part-owner of the Dodgers. Joe is a New York legend, and his association with the J. H. Cohn firm is well known to anyone in New York who looks up at transportation advertising.

I don't know how big the Cohn accounting firm is. It's not one of the Final Four, but they must have some reach. Joe apparently is a spokesperson for the outfit, and the DVD is one of those casual instructionals on views and techniques regarding "Leadership, Team, Integrity, Resilience, 3 Cs and Strategy." The three Cs apparently are: Commitment, Conviction and Caring.

Joe is seen at a table, nicely dressed in a business suit and tie, wearing an enviable diamond New York Yankee logo ring on the right hand, a nice wedding band on the left, and a multi-function watch that could land aircraft. He's not wearing cuff links, but the interviewer throwing him softball questions and prompts is. The two of them are introduced by the President and CEO of J.H. Cohn, (who is not named Cohn) who looks like he was certainly born sometime during Richard Nixon's first term in office. The president remains off camera, and is only there to get the proceedings started.

It's a perfect business DVD, and a perfect business holiday gift. I'm sure there are companies that have made it required viewing. I asked my son-in-law if he's watched it, and the answer was an easily understood "no." His is a small outfit, and they probably don't need the kind of team building that Joe talks about.

I've had this DVD in front of me for over a week now, and it had to happen. I finally gave it some thought and wondered how Joe compared to my memory and what I read about Casey Stengel, the equally legendary Hall-of-Fame Yankee manager from a completely different era.

I viewed. I took notes. I compared. I wondered how Casey would have been packaged in a DVD if there was such a thing when he was around.

First off, Joe is not funny. I guess this is no surprise to anyone who's followed him, but he really isn't. The DVD and its business, baseball, kinda-like-life metaphors are boring. Dry. Dry as toast in the Sahara.

I wasn't a really formed adult when Casey was in his heyday. I remember him as the Yankee manager and how everyone said they could win that many games and that many World Series if they were the manager, given the players they had and the talent.

Stengel was a talker. He was a reporter's dream interview, if you could stay with him. His leadership style was summed up in his statement that, "There are 25 guys on a team, and my job as manager is to keep the 5 guys who hate me away from the 20 who are undecided."

An example of one of his Cs, Caring, would be his understanding of what went into a player's physical and mental well-being. Always keen to have his players ready for the game he recognized that a ballplayer wasn't necessarily done in by spending the night with a woman, but was surely done in by "spending the night looking for a woman." Joe doesn't address this aspect.

Another one of Stengel's Cs, Commitment, would be his loyalty to his players. When asked by a reporter if he was aware that so-and-so was seen in the hotel lobby at 3 A.M., well past the curfew, and if he was going to say something, Stengel is said to have hardly missed a beat and explained to the reporter that first, he was going to find out if the player was coming or going. He might have been arriving very late, or leaving very early. Get the facts first. Joe touches on this, but not as succinctly.

I remember in the early 70s Casey had something seemingly incomprehensible to say about the Oakland As, who under their owner Charlie Finley were a colorfully dressed team that alternated parts of their uniform colors in their doubleheader games. Stengel went on-and-on about their socks. Their socks were a part of the uniform changes that were made during doubleheaders.

Casey Stengel is hardly mentioned these days. I've seen his name come up in two fairly recent obituaries.

An example of his third C, Conviction, would have to be what he said about Greg Goossen, a catcher who played for many teams and never really lived up to the expectations about his career. In Goossen's obituary the Stengel association was recounted.

"It was Casey Stengel who made Goossen a baseball trivia legend with one remark in 1966. Stengel, having retired as the Mets manager the previous season, was visiting the Mets’ training camp when he pointed at Goossen and was reported to have said, 'Goossen is only 20, and in 10 years he has a chance to be 30.'" Be patient with the talent.

Another recent obituary, for a cartoonist/writer I can't remember, went on about his being sent to the Polo Grounds in New York, the first home of the New York Mets, in 1962, to interview Casey, who was the expansion team's manager. Casey was shagging fly balls in the outfield during practice (he had been a player as far back as 1912 for the Brooklyn Dodgers) and came to the dugout for the interview asking who it was he was supposed to talk to. The cartoonist/writer remembers he asked Casey what could they expect from the Mets this year?

The DVD would still be playing. The writer remembers he never got to ask another question.

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The Obits Annual 2012 Part II

2012-01-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

I'll never really know how my mind works. Years and years ago, sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, there was a cartoon in Playboy of, I think, a Fink Bread truck (there really was once a Fink Bread in New York City, that baked bread for commercial eateries) that was being held up by a gang of either hippies, or beatniks. They were armed, but totally bummed out when they realized what their target was, and that, "Hey man, it really is a bread truck."

I was reminded of that thought was I began reading, mostly re-reading, the obituaries in the recently compiled release from the New York Times. "Hey man, these people really are dead."

There have been obituary compilations before. Years ago there was 'The Last Word.' There was a collection of Robert McG. Thomas's obituaries as they appeared in The Times, '52 McGs'. The Economist produced a massive, high paper quality hardcover edition of their obituaries, 'Book of Obituaries.' But all these books were compilations of obituaries as they occurred throughout a period of time, not just a 12 month period.

If you can parse the events, the freshly produced obituary is a bit of historical short story that appears soon after someone's demise. Maybe it is theater. The front cover topping blurb in 'The Obits Annual 2012' calls them "the curtain call." The show is over, liked it or not, and here's the wrap up of people who brought it to you.

Now, re-reading these obituaries at a further elapsed time from their first appearance, it settles in my mind that these folks have really passed away, and we won't be hearing from them in the present tense any longer.

Tony Curtis will not be seen around town in large glasses with his younger wife, or standing in front of a recently completed painting. George Shearing can't possibly now produce his version of music that will yet be written. Sargent Shriver will not weigh in on Arnold and Maria's lives.

The freshly absorbed obituary is the service and the trip to the cemetery. The later read same obituary is the headstone. It's the final proof the subject has left us.

Except of course in Elvis's case. Or anyone else you care to mention.

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Carnegie Hall and the Coats

2011-12-30T10:44:00.000-08:00

The first time I heard the story about the coats, Madison Square Garden, and the Six-Day Bicycle Race it came from a retired NYPD detective who spent some time each day hanging out in the family flower shop in the1960s. Barney Greene, a retired 3rd grade detective who started on the police force so long ago he told of the era when the patrolmen spent tours of duty that lasted days as they slept in the station house. They weren't called New York's Finest then, but perhaps New York's Most Fragrant.

Barney looked every bit a retired detective. Clean-shaven, pink faced, fedora, three piece suit, white shirt, tie, cuff links, collar pin, NYPD tie clasp, polished black shoes, and overcoat that he never seemed to take off. He was the house dick in the hotel lobby in any movie you ever saw, and that you'd now see on Turner Classic Movies. He lived in the neighborhood, was a bachelor whose brother played with my father as kids. He smoked cigarettes and didn't speak much, but did occasionally tell a story.

At some point in the 60s they renewed the Six-Day Bicycle Race at Madison Square Garden. This was the "old" Garden, on 8th Avenue and 50th Street. Six Day Bike Races were once very popular, but like a lot of things, disappeared. The Six-Day Bike Race was six days of 24 hours of riding by bicycle teams from all over the world, competing on a banked, indoor track. In today's lexicon I guess it would be billed as 24/6. Sundays were taken a little more religiously then.

Barney's taciturn story went that when people in the audience stood up and cheered during one of the special sprint portions of the race program, thieves would pop out of the old Garden's stairwells and scoop up the overcoats and minks left on the back railings and head for the exits, loaded down with whatever outerwear looked good enough to steal.

It was these special sprint portions of the program that drew a wider audience and a more flamboyant crowd that liked to bet on the outcomes. Typically mobsters and their girlfriends. Thus, better coats.

I was reminded of Barney's story when I read Jimmy Breslin's coat-grabbing account in "A Life, Damon Runyon." The book is a biography of the reporter Damon Runyon and is filled with stories and characters from his era, described in Mr. Breslin's own descriptive, wise-cracking, sarcastic style that is as much a part of New York as Times Square.

Mr. Breslin, being a newspaperman himself, and a writer, describes the same scene, but in rich detail. Basically, the same thing happens, as it would repeat itself throughout the six day event. In Mr. Breslin's account, a coat with bullets in it goes accompanied out the exit with a new owner, a coat Damon Runyon was holding for someone.

The other night at intermission at Carnegie Hall I wandered toward the back of the hall on the main level and stood looking at the stage from the back railing. Just inside the railing I was leaning on was an inner railing that ran the width of the seats. Seats were empty for intermission, and several coats were draped over this inner railing. All within easy reach.

I could only think about the story from the flower shop and Jimmy Breslin's description. No one appeared from the shadows and made off with the coats. A colorful selection of North Face puff coats. Not a damn one was worth stealing.

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The Obits Annual 2012

2011-12-26T08:44:00.000-08:00

When you're a media company as large and influential as the New York Times, you can set the standard. You lead, not follow. There are fiscal years, calendar years, and NYT years.

Take one of their latest publications, "The Obits Annual 2012." It landed wrapped under our Christmas tree with my name on it. I unwrapped it.

Since we haven't yet crossed the divide into 2012, no one has yet passed away in what will be the new year. Yet the Times uses 'Annual 2012' in their title for a book that contains selected obituaries that appeared in their newspaper from July 2011 back to August 2010. Thus, the Times "obituary year" is August 2010 through July 2011.

No problem really, once you absorb the ground rules. They do present a year, 12 months, and provide a controlled substance for obituary addicts like myself and others. They are providing a drug and a service.

The book is a fairly hefty paperback, arranged by months and trumpeted by some literary celebrity blurb, one of which is so forceful it makes its way onto the cover, above the title. There is a foreward by Pete Hamill, which might be seen as bad news for some of Mr. Hamill's enemies, since his foreward is not being published posthumously. He's not included as an obituary entry. The NYT obituary editor, William McDonald contributes an introduction.

Mr. Hamill leads off as sonorously as he talks: "The cause of death, or course, is always life." My own thoughts run that life, however short, is what always precedes death, and obituaries are about that life. Mr. McDonald gives us the numbers, and the nuts and bolts of the business of delivering the stories of the selected deceased. Neither of these sections are so long that you are tempted to skip them. They are good setups to what follows. Lots of reprinted obituaries, arranged chronologically, with pictures. Not bad at all.

Before I even saw the book, I longed for something like it. There have been compilations before, but it's the inclusion of the photos that add life to stories about someone's passing. I will forever remember when I read Robert McG. Thomas Jr's. 1998 obituary of Charles McCartney, 'The Goat Man,' whose obituary was accompanied by a picture of Mr. McCartney in front of the school bus he had lived in at one point, the day it appeared in the paper.

Reading obituaries was nothing new for me, and reading them in the Times was also nothing new, but reading that one that day, I got so excited I felt I had to tell others there was something they should read. I at least shared the joy with the guy who sat next to me at work. I can't say he became a convert, but he did enjoy what he read.

Robert McG. Thomas is no longer with us, himself getting a nice sendoff in January 2000. But nothing ended there. A lot more passings, and a lot more well-written, witty, ironic, informative pieces by very capable writers await us in the Annual 2012 edition.

Even if we haven't put the new calendar up yet.

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Sign of the Times

2011-12-24T10:07:00.003-08:00

Yesterday's WSJ carried this picture of France's President Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel having a Euro discussion in sign language, made necessary because their vocal cords had given out after a year's worth of meetings and PowerPoint presentations.

Recovery is expected, that may also include the Euro.

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Speak Low and Get Ready for Speech Therapy

2011-12-21T16:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not at all sure how these things happen, but yesterday, @obitsman Tweeted a link to a story from Scientific America, along with an audio clip, of what is being detected as a rapidly gaining practice among 20-something women to end their sentences with a low guttural vibration sound. This practice has a name, and it's called 'Vocal Fry.'

Of no surprise, it is believed young women are consciously, or unconsciously imitating patterns of speech of Britney Spears and Kim Kardashian. Imitating speech of celebrities is nothing new, and the current trend is seen as a pleasant replacement to the 'uptick' at the end of sentences. The audio clip gives examples of each, but frankly, I can't detect the 'Vocal Fry' sound. The uptick, yes.

Add to this today's WSJ's 'A Hed' piece on capturing a stray cow that came to be known as 'Ninja Cow,' and you have what may be evidence of species regression.

Ogden Nash famously penned two lines that went: "The cow is of the bovine ilk/One end is moo, the other milk." This seems to be the 'moo' story.

In its own right, the cow story is the usual great blend of a unique, funny story, with loads of WSJ puns. Words are played with more often than children.

Where the WSJ finds a reporter who really knows something about cows is unknown, but apparently they know where to look. The story evolves from the inability, over a period of time, to recapture the stray cow who is believed to have gotten loose from a cattle truck in front of the Plattsmouth, Nebraska City Hall.

One effort, unsuccessful, was to bring in another cow, Tasha, a show cow in hopes of luring the Ninja cow to a corral. The story goes that the show cow's handler played cow sounds from a laptop (the latest app in on its way) and got the show cow "to low." Ninja cow responded, but didn't fall completely for the trap, and trotted off.

"To low" apparently means: the action or act of lowing; a bovine animal's deep subdued resonant sound.

Bovine 'Vocal Fry' is not mentioned. But if I were a young female, I think I'd seek some advice about sounding too low.

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The 16th Pole

2011-12-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

My Saratoga buddy is Irish-American. Both his parents came over from the green isle many, many years ago. This explains his near perfect attendance at wakes. If obituaries and death notices are the Irish sports page, then there is usually a game to go to.

The most recent attendance was at a wake for the 86 year-old brother-in law of his brother-in-law, the fellow married to one of John's sisters. The deceased's name was Harry and he loved betting on the horses. He was genuinely known as 'Harry the Horse.'

He lived in New Jersey in the latter part of his life, but still liked to go to Aqueduct in Queens. He favored Aqueduct over any other track, but in the last two years of his life he favored breathing and rest more than anything, and generally went nowhere.

Harry was of Lebanese descent, who somehow married into an Irish-American family. How this occurred is unknown. There was a mixup somewhere.

My friend John reports it's not many a wake you come away from feeling better than when you went in, but the good feeling generated at Harry's wake was rejuvenating. Harry's son filled in the attending with on the cremation plans. Harry apparently wanted his ashes spread at Aqueduct. No surprise there, but not something encouraged by track management.

The son, perhaps being like his father, advanced the idea of approaching some trainers the family came to know and see who might be willing to distribute the ashes at the track. The son figured the 16th pole would be a great spot, since this is generally where his father's selections stopped running, if not sooner.

So Harry made to the finish line, but his ashes may not, unless there is a good tail wind. No problem. They'll likely figure in the exacta, or the trifecta, or even the superfecta.

Harry will not get shutout.

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The Left Bank

2011-12-14T16:26:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I ever saw an obituary about a person that shows a picture, not of the deceased at any age, but rather what they left behind.

@Obitsman has Twittered the world about what turns out to be just such an obituary. It's an AP piece, appearing online in what looks like the Washington Post, about George Whitman, an American who lived in Paris and owned and operated a legendary bookstore on the Left Bank.

The picture of the bookstore is thoroughly charming, and the good news is that Mr. Whitman's daughter plans to keep it going. Good news indeed.

Anyone who lives to be 98 who was taken to China in 1925 at the age of 12 by his physics professor father on sabbatical probably really did snuggle with a beautiful Eskimo woman in Greenland for a period of time at some point. I don't know if Mr. Whitman was the last of the romantics, but his life does make you think there won't be many more like it.

It sounds like if he slowed down, he did it very gradually.

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Good British Fun

2011-12-13T17:14:00.001-08:00

If the British dryly define good sex as the absence of something going wrong, they do seem to get rather excited about debate. Or heckling. Or heckling during a debate.

There seems to be a British tradition of not listening to the opposition, and instead zinging as many barbs as they can at the speaker, no matter who it is. Here, we call it standup comedy, but over there it passes for government. Sometimes things really are the same, they're just described differently.

Take a very recent picture of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, explaining to Parliament why European Union treaty changes were not signed by Britain. It is nothing short of fantastic. It's not DaVinci's 'Last Supper,' or Rembrandt's 'Dutch Masters,' but it is Britain's version of 'Saturday Night Live,' or, 'Having Fun at Work.'

Four members of the opposing party are seen simultaneously addressing, or heckling, the prime minister. The first guy on the left seems to be saying "Where's the beef?" (Wellington?) The next two are either telling Mr. Cameron his fly is open, or his mind is closed. Something like that. The woman pointing a directional with her left hand most certainly has been a teacher, because she seems to be showing David where the door is that bad boys should go through on the way to the headmaster's office. Why the two at the end seem to be restrained is unknown. They may have been given the wrong seats.

And the prime minister? He seems to be loving it.

Perhaps in Britain, good government is the absence of things going well.

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Itsy Bitsy Petit

2011-12-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

As admitted to recently, when someone passes away whose music I haven't heard of, I generally check out iTunes, listen to a sample, and then decide whether to download it and put it on my iPod. My iPod purchased list really does contain a good deal of music from dead singers and songwriters.

But when Lee Pockriss recently passed away and I learned he had written several songs that became hits in the 50s and 60s I had no need to purchase songs he had written. I already had them on CDs, notably 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.'

While I haven't yet transferred my CD version to the iPod, I have just downloaded the French version and transferred it to the iPod. Pourquoi, you might ask.

Aside from using iTunes for archival research into music of deceased artists, I also use it to flush out sound track music, from movies and television. This generally works well, and leads me to some new artists that I would have never heard of or listened to. Perhaps they are dead, but that's not the point.

A recently viewed movie, with a very lively soundtrack, was 'A Good Year', the 2006 Russell Crowe movie that finds Russ shedding chain mail, guns, and boxing gloves while getting into a Peter Mayle story set in Southern France about a rich guy inheriting a chateau and vineyard.

It's actually a fun movie, propelled by the lively playlist in the sound track. The movie predates Marion Cotillard's best actress Oscar award for the 2007 movie 'La Vie en Rose'. There's visual candy for everyone in the movie. Landscapes and architecture as well.

The movie ends, for some reason, with the French version of 'Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.' There hasn't been a bikini in sight for the whole movie, but the arrangement is so lively with the French lyrics, that you get a whole new image of the girl embarrassed to come out of the locker room wearing the latest two piece.

The lyrics in French make it seem that the bikini is not only small (petit) it's barely there at all. It sounds even more alluring. Perhaps it's nearly transparent. The song became a hit in 1960, and a bikini then was really a two piece that revealed the navel. It hadn't yet gotten close to being dental floss.

I do remember when the song became a hit. I did have visions of perhaps seeing something really outstanding at the beach, but by then we weren't going to the beach anymore for some reason. It did cause excitement with the male adults as well, our neighbor and my father's best friend in the neighborhood making noise toward the radio that sounded something like "hubba, hubba, hubba." when the song was played. Sound as image.

Come to think of it, we used to go to the beach with that neighbor and his son, going in his truck to Rockaway Beach. Perhaps because of the song, the guys were no longer allowed to take their kids to the beach.

And they weren't even playing the French version in the states.

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Good Defined

2011-12-10T11:47:00.001-08:00

The British aren't the only witty people in the world. There are witty Americans, and witty everybody else, I'm sure. It's just that English is the only language I'm completely fluent in, so it seems I only get to recognize either American or British wit.

Who's wittier? Who knows? The British do seem to add a bit of scholarly tone to their wit, as if they're quoting it out of the Oxford Dictionary. Perhaps it's the accent, but I don't read with an accent.

Take the recent story that appears as a 'London Journal' piece in yesterday's NYT by Sarah Lyall. With a last name like that, she's got to be British. Bureau Chief, perhaps?

The headline itself is great, and so fits the story: 'A Nod to Willing Flesh Entangled in Dispiriting Words.' Four columns, with a picture of Barbara Windsor and Alexander Waugh in London in an baronial setting announcing the winner of the 'Bad Sex in Fiction Award'.

Ms. Lyall beats us to it and quickly poses the rhetorical question, "Why not a 'Good Sex in Fiction Award'?" Turns out it's not a rhetorical question, and I don't know if it's being British that allows a columnist at The Independent, John Walsh, to provide a ready answer, but he has one.

"What on earth would you do that for? Good sex is like good driving--it's the absence of things going wrong, and it is an extraordinarily boring thing to write about."

If you really think about it, even a little bit, he's probably right. A scholarly definition of good sex: no one got hurt, embarrassed, or otherwise suffered any traumatic mental anguish. Certainly it must happen a lot, because we're up to 7 billion people here on earth, and artificial insemination can't account for all those people.

So, the next time someone crows that, "the sex was good," "the sex was great," "the sex was fan-tastic!," there is absolutely no need to be the least bit envious, jealous, or sullen.

In Britain, it merely means they got in and out of the parking lot without causing a 12 car pileup.

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Angela vs. Angelina

2011-12-09T07:50:00.001-08:00

Angelina Jolie was in NYC the other day. You didn't have to be a fan, or a stalker to know this, because she was literally everywhere, photographed in more outfits in a single day than Leslie Stahl wears during one '60 Minutes' segment. Angela was here because of a movie about Bosnia she's directing. She's trying to become the next Robert Redford.

But the truly most photographed woman of all time outdoes her. Once again, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany hits the newspapers, along with her sidekick Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France. Of course it's about money, and in this case the saving of the Euro. I think.

Once the Euro is saved, I'm wondering how many times Angela will get coverage. She's been photographed with Sarkozy more times than Roy Rogers with Triggger.

There are two things in life that seem to trump all: money and sex. The appearance of Angela Merkel in more publications than Angelina tells you who the ace in the suit is.

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Viva Viagra

2011-12-07T09:02:00.001-08:00

The man whose 1956 guitar licks to Howlin' Wolf's recording, Smokestack Lightin' that have recently come to be used in an ad for Viagra, Hubert Sumlin, has passed away at 80.

It's just another example of what you can learn from obituaries. Not really being up on blues guitar, I learned more than the Viagra tie-in. We know music of all kinds (Beatles, Beethoven, Carl Orff, Bob Seger) comes to be used in commercials. It's a second wind for someone who has usually already passed away.

But not Hubert. He just passed away, and the commercial is out there. The audience the product is aimed at might well remember Howlin' Jack, Hubert Sumlin and Smokestack Lightin'. Marketing to the demographic.

Imagine the durability of one's music that it's popular in 1956 and comes to be used in a 2011 commercial, and you're around for it.

What I usually do when I read of a musician who has passed is check out iTunes for a sampling of the song, or songs mentioned in the obituary. If I like what I hear, I download it and put it on my iPod. My iPod purchased playlist is filled with dead people. People I never heard of until they passed away and got written up. But I like the music.

When I got to iTunes I easily found Smokestack Lightin'. Hardly an obscure song. There was a premium price of $1.29 attached, and popularity bars that went nearly all the way to the right. Several people were there ahead of me, it seems.

I'm sure I've heard and seen the Viagra commercial that has Hubert playing. It's impossible to watch football of any kind without a Viagra commercial. I really don't remember the music, however. This weekend should fix that.

The only commercial for that type of product I do remember is the one where two people are so relaxed in twin outdoor bathtubs overlooking a meadow, with so little else on their minds that they haven't yet realized the house has blown away. The earth shook, and someone came and hauled away the debris. That's a powerful mood to be in.

A good friend is a singer is a Doo-Wop group called 'The Emotions'. They appear at several venues throughout the year but I always catch their act at a Catholic high school in Flushing in the annual Doo-Wop show. It's a great show, reasonably priced, and quite entertaining. Five to six acts perform for different durations around an intermission, with a live orchestra. A well produced show.

A few of the members of the 'The Emotions,' my friend included, have red, white and blue Medicare cards in their wallets. Nothing stands out there. Most of the audience does as well.

Soon into their act the leader is telling a joke about people in a bathtub and the music, played by the orchestra, is clearly Presley's 'Viva Las Vegas.' But the words have changed. It's now 'Viva Viagra.'

My friend tells me he was always concerned about doing the number at a Catholic high school with the monsignor standing by. No problem. He's counting the house and happy to have them.

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The Main Reading Room

2011-12-05T09:47:00.001-08:00

Once a year, the New York Public Library, the grand pile of marble on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan, is open for tours as a thank you to its supporters and contributors.

This is not an especially select bunch, since everyone needs money, and a $40 contribution from someone like me gets myself and a guest in to join the other several thousand people who show up to sip wine, eat cookies, listen to carols from a military glee club, get their face painted, or picture taken with people dressed as lions, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, the Grinch, and others on stilts, who aren't there to change the light bulbs,

There really isn't anything about this open house that isn't open if you just pop-in on a given day and wander around yourself. Except for the stacks. There is an opportunity to tour the stacks of books that are beneath the main reading room, that go down seven levels, and extend west under Bryant Park.

The tour doesn't really last long, but it is informative. Our tour guide promised us we'd have the "longer" tour, but afterwards I figured this must have meant we walked more than the other group at the other end.

The first level of stacks, and the only one we went through, was down one flight of stairs from the main reading room. It was nice to go down a flight of stairs in NYC and then not need a MetroCard to keep going. We entered a very humid, low-ceilined place with fairly narrow aisles, with open metal-slated shelves that held nothing but books. Not a best seller in sight. These were books for reference, filed in the library's own system by size, that users can request from above that someone will hopefully retrieve and deliver before the lights go out.

Millions of titles are described as being there. The sort is so densely packed that OAP-OAW could be one shelf, or several. The third letter is the break. There is a narrow slot in the floor that runs along the base of the shelves that allows a view of the floor below, almost as if you were looking back down a staircase. This allows ventilation between the levels.

Pipes and wires in steel baskets run overheard. There isn't much height, and there is a submarine feel because of the narrowness of the aisles. If I had bumped into a periscope I wouldn't have been at all surprised. I would just hope the sub was one of ours.

The titles that I passed were obscure. Thick volumes with "Dutch Law" on the spine. I imagined someone trying to figure out how to void the sale of Manhattan from the Indians. Or, maybe New Jersey was also part of the deal, but no one ever bothered to cross the river and claim it to be New York. New Jersey's Governor Christie could be in for a real surprise. Other books passed were about "German Law" and Irish windows.

Miles of aisles, and I wasn't in Hope Depot. The stacks was described as going under Bryant Park to a western spot that could be entered or exited from a secret spot. No secret was divulged.

I imagined following an aisle of books and maybe popping up near the bust of Gertrude Stein, or perhaps all the way to the corner of 40th and Sixth and tickling the toe of the nine foot tall statue of Andrada, the hardly-known Brazilian who was considered a contributor to their independence and who loosely provides a tie-in that has never stuck, as Sixth Avenue is officially known as Avenue of the Americas. (Get it, North and South America? It is hard.)

But the Main Reading room is the real show, but you gotta look up. All the way up. Over 50 feet. It's one of the highest ceilings you'll ever see that doesn't have a scoreboard attached. The room itself is nearly a football field long, with the famous parquet, marquetry tables and brass shaded lamps that can intimately provide seating for 600 close, warm personal friends.

Say who you will about Donald Trump, and most will say plenty, he did once identify the library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the two best examples of surviving architecture in New York City.

I told my daughter who accompanied me that the Main Reading Room always reminded me of the passage Thomas Wolfe wrote about the old Pennsylvania Station that was torn down in 1964 for offices and Madison Square Garden.

There are still people who can tell you about the old Penn Station, but we are starting to get ready for co-pay gift cards from Mt. Sinai, or nursing homes, but we haven't completely disappeared. And to prove how things tie in my daughter told me that while she was waiting for me to get out of the freshly completed, unadorned men's room on the Amtrak level of the "new" Penn Station there was someone on their cell phone telling someone else that they were now at Penn Station, and it certainly wasn't Grand Central Terminal. Bring that guy back on the show.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) wrote of the long departed upper level of Penn Station:

"The station...was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time.

"Men came and went, they passed and vanished, all were moving through the moments of their lives...but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof."

You won't catch a train out of the library, but you can certainly give your imagination a ride.

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Most Quoted

2011-12-04T05:51:00.001-08:00

William Shakespeare is certainly a most quoted fellow. Sources in the Bible are probably the most quoted. Presidents, prime ministers, generals, all get quoted during and long after their stint on earth. But mid-20th century writers? Certainly not so much.

But then there's Raymond Chandler, famous mystery writer whose many works were turned into many movies. Hard-boiled, steel-plated characters whose lips never moved when they spoke. A turned up snarl was a smile.

How proud Mr. Chandler would be, and how pleased his many fans have to be, to realize he was quoted, paraphrased twice during the same week, in the same newspaper, by different reporters. This was surely a toast at his grave, and it wasn't his birthday.

Maureen Dowd earlier in the week used a Chandler intelligence put-down on Rick Perry to convince us that Newt Gingrich was at least smarter than a man whose brains, if they were elastic, couldn't make suspenders for a parakeet. If negative campaigning were this good, we'd want elections all the time. It could have it's own channel. But maybe Comedy Central already is that.

One Chandler utterance is usually enough to keep you from forgetting, but two? Later in the week is the weather story coming out of Southern California and the damage caused by the Santa Ana winds that blew in, from a different direction this time, and toppled trees, wrecked some buildings, and certainly jangled people's nerves.

Friday's NYT carries a first section story by Jennifer Medina that opens with a Chandler passage about such winds from a short story 'Red Wind.' Near the end of the piece the nature poetry in the story gives way to what we expect from a Chandler story: booze, fights, knives, and women.

He even had a way with the weather.

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To Wit

2011-11-30T12:10:00.001-08:00

Say what you will about the NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, I find her at her best when she is requoting someone else. We get two benefits here. We get a great turn of phrase brought back to life that likely never made it into Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, that if it weren't for Ms. Dowd's memory we would never hear the phrase again, and we get it applied to a present day context that the original speaker could hardly have ever imagined.

Take today's screed on Newt Gingrich. Ms Dowd paraphrases Raymond Chandler to say that if brains were elastic, Rick Perry wouldn't have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.

I'd love to know Chandler's context for that metaphor. One imagines he was referring to a thug, or an LAPD lieutenant. Perhaps both. I myself somewhat collect these kinds of gems when I encounter them in text. I have preserved one from Chandler that goes to the effect that the playboy character Christopher Lavery was going back to the beach to lie in the sun and show the girls what they didn't necessarily have to go on missing.

Ms. Dowd once blended in someone's quote about their enmity toward Swifty Lazar, a Hollywood power agent who apparently was vertically challenged, when they told Swifty in some restaurant to go hang himself from a Bonsai tree.

One of my favorite ones gets a workout at this time of year and involves fruitcake. Russell Baker once declared that it was "the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom." My wife has a tendency to buy multiple packages of "goodies" then hides half of them in the kitchen or the pantry. When I have plowed my way through the visible ones I seek out the hidden ones. This usually leads to some discussion that I wasn't supposed to eat whatever it was. It wasn't meant for me. This of course leads me to leave a note on a half-consumed package of goodies that food was not meant to be a "family heirloom." She still hides food.

But, if points were being awarded, the first place award would go to Christopher Buckley for reminding us that Dorothy Parker, a Smith graduate, said of the girls at Bennington College that if they were laid end-to-end, she wouldn't be at all surprised.

I wonder if Ms. Dowd will ever get to use that one.

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Svetlana

2011-11-29T13:10:00.001-08:00

It was no surprise this morning to see the obituary for Stalin's daughter occupy three front page columns of today's NYT, below the fold. When I heard yesterday that Lana Peters, the last name the daughter came to be known as, had passed away, I knew there'd be coverage.

The obituary didn't run anywhere nearly as long as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, but then again, they were completely different people. But the obituary does what all obituaries do for someone who leaves us at an advanced age, in this case 85. We get a long look back at their beginnings and a linkage to a world most of the current living can only read about. The deceased goes so far back that a sepia toned family photo that's likely 75 years old hits the front page showing one of the most despised world leaders lifting and hugging his daughter. And she came to live among us in the United States.

My own first awareness of her was when she came to the United states and took up residence, publishing an autobiography that became a best-seller in the late 1960s. Her name appeared in the paper with some regularity, and she lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I seem to remember reading of her in connection with writing mysteries as well. Her death was even a bit of a Russian mystery, with no consensus that she died November 22nd, or even several months ago in a remote area of Wisconsin.

A sad, ragged life is described. However, seeing a picture taken of her last year in Wisconsin where she is seen walking outdoors in what looks like a park with a cane, brings to mind a Russian Dr. Ruth Westheimer, moving kind of slow, but ready to tell you something.

Like most good obituaries, there is a final word from the subject. She said her father's name made her a political prisoner. And along that way she expressed a wish that her mother had married a carpenter.

Walt Disney's father was a carpenter who worked on the building of Chicago's World's Fair of 1893. Perhaps if the mother had made that union, she really would have been happier.

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LoLo

2011-11-23T12:43:00.001-08:00

It finally happened. A solid proposal to pave NY Harbor, create land, connect to Governors Island, extend subways lines, build buildings, and in general create enough urban debate that would outlive Donald Trump, if not even all his kids.

Years ago I used to work in lower Manhattan from a West Side vantage point that gave me great southerly views, as well as western ones. I could look up from my 28th floor cubicle and clearly see Governors Island, and with just a small turn to the right view the Hudson River, with New York and New Jersey landfill and piers already extending so far out into the water that I used to ask myself, "Why don't they just get it over with and pave the damn thing?"

Sure, connecting Manhattan's west side with New Jersey could present problems to the Circle Line cruises, but maybe they could go through a canal of sorts. Nothing would be impossible. Except perhaps computing sales tax.

Now comes the bold thought to build landfill that would connect lower Manhattan with Governors Island. The neighborhood could be called LoLo, for Lower, Lower, Manhattan. This is a serious proposal from serious people who I suspect don't read the tabloids.

Lo Lo of course is shorthand for Lindsay Lohan. J Lo is shorthand for Jennifer Lopez, and depending on what they've done with their lives the night before always dictates what we hear about them the next day, whether we want to or not.

Naming any neighborhood lower anything is dangerous; naming it lower two times is real estate suicide. Years ago I read a story that there was a movement to call the territory just south of Upper Brookville, Lower Brookville. Predictably, people in that very affluent part of Nassau County commented that they weren't going to be known as living in 'lower' anything. The southern portion is just called Brookville, which is still pretty good, and doing better than most of us.

The proposal is so grand that by the time the first landfill was dumped no one would remember Lindsay Lohan. They probably wouldn't even remember Pledge weeks from public television.
So Lo Lo might gain traction, since it would be a new neighborhood, with no one already there getting a new name.

Will some decendents of the Manhattan Indians appear in Federal court and claim that the original deal didn't include building on top of the water? Will the Circle Line cruise charge more for having to go further to get around Manhattan? Will a bridge be named after a mayor?

Some things in life are certain.

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The Inquest is Scheduled

2011-11-18T12:45:00.001-08:00

People who pass away in Britain are no less dead than they are here, but they are remembered quite differently.

Take the headline and story that appears today in the Manchester Evening News, tweeted by @Obitsman, from a Factiva feed.

Happy-go-lucky dad discovered dead at house
18 November 2011

TRIBUTES have been paid to a man who has been found dead.

The body of Alan Heaney, 37, was discovered at a house he had been staying at on Grimshaw Street, Accrington, last month.

Police said they were treating the death as ‘unexplained’ and said they were awaiting toxicology results. A post-mortem examination carried out to determine the cause of his death has proved inconclusive.

Shocked family and friends have paid tribute [to] him calling him a ‘happy-go-lucky guy’. His mum Mary, 62, from Belfast, said: “I still haven’t got over it and the shock of not knowing how he died. You never expect your son to go before you. The last words he said to me were ‘I love you loads mum’. Normally we go over each year at Christmas to visit him but we won’t travel this year. It’s too heartbreaking.”

Joiner Alan was born in Belfast and moved to Accrington 15 years ago with his uncle Billy and worked as a labourer and joiner. He had two daughters, Shannon, 14, and Courtney, 11, with former partner Sharon Fox.

Sharon, 38, of Edleston Street, Accrington, said: “I was very shocked when I found out and the children were heartbroken. “He was my first love. He was a sweet guy and was very charming and had the gift of the gab. He would always try to help his friends and if he couldn’t he’d find someone who could.”

His uncle, Billy Allison, 50, of Cartmel Avenue, Accrington, said: “He was a happy-go-lucky guy and was kind to everybody. He was a caring family man who loved his two daughters.”

He leaves parents Mary and Paul, brothers Stanley and Gary, ex-partner Sharon and their daughters Shannon and Courtney, uncle Billy and cousin Trisha and many friends.

A funeral service and cremation was held on Friday, October 28 at Accrington Crematorium followed by a service in Belfast.

An inquest into his death will be carried out in January.

‘CHARMING’... Alan Heaney, right, was found in the house in Grimshaw Street
[photo not available]
by Jonathan Macpherson
Greater Manchester Newspapers Limited

This tells us several things about the British.

Despite the fact that Alan's funeral service and cremation were at the end of last month, he is still being written about three weeks afterward. His blue-collar occupation, 'joiner,' is noted with respect. It reminds me of my NYC birth certificate that has three occupations pre-printed on the form in the spot for the father's occupation: "spinner, sawyer, bookkeeper, etc." It also allowed a spot for something else to be filled in.

There must be budget cuts in Manchester. Inquests seem to happen a good deal faster in a Miss Marple episode.

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Four-Oh

2011-11-18T06:33:00.001-08:00

Advice to someone who has just turned 40:

Don't let anyone tell you that being 40 is something special, something to worry about, or something to be happy about.

What's really special is being over 60 and getting the government to send you money each month. Direct deposit.

Art Buchwald claimed that being on Medicare was easy. Getting paid by Medicare was the hard part.

When the GIANT sends you money, you will have won. (At least for awhile.)

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The Munchkins Do Lunch

2011-11-17T10:25:00.001-08:00

I don't know if the recently deceased Munchkin Karl Slover told the story, or it was another Munchkin, but apparently one time while making the 'Wizard of Oz' the lunch break, or break, got a little extended and all the Munchkins came back to the set loaded.

A scene of utter chaos was described--probably over nearly a 100 little people running around after each other, laughing, shouting, grabbing ass, tripping and bumping into things. A sound stage of pint-sized people who had too much of a fifth, or a quart. A shame. No YouTube then.

The story in its own way reminds me of a women who was the General Counsel where I once worked. She was short, but not quite in the Munchkin category. Still, it was hard to tell if she was sitting down, or standing up.

And like many executives, she had to give presentations. Seated (I'm sure of this), she would drone on so that I thought she would be quite useful in getting a roomful of caffeinated kindergartners to slow down and take a nap.

After a few of her presentations I later thought this might be dangerous. She could induce sleep so soundly that the EMTs would probably be called to the school for fear that the kids had been gassed. They'd have absolutely no respiration.

She was the opposite of an inebriated Munchkin. She was the anesthetized Munchkin.

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Latin

2011-11-11T17:19:00.001-08:00

The unthinkable has happened. Olli Rehn, of the European Union has managed to steal limelight from Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and appears today on the first page of the Business Day section in the NYT. Big centered photo, above the fold.

I have to wonder if it had anything to do with the quote that is featured as part of the caption. Mr. Rehn is pictured in front of a projected graph depicting either something financially Europeon, or the fluctuating Las Vegas line on Saturday's Penn State-Nebraska football game.

Mr. Rehn inserts a Latin phrase, 'sine qua non" to describe what is needed for restoring confidence in the Italian economy. Gracie Allen once quite famously ran for president against FDR on the Surprise Party ticket. Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi is just running on Party.

I just missed Latin. My friend George, who lived upstairs and was just a little bit older (think Wally and Beaver) had to take Latin in Catholic school. Not that I was destined for Catholic school, but I always considered myself lucky that declining verbs was not going to ever be something I would be concerned with.

Of course in those days, Catholic masses were said in Latin, just like Greek masses were said in Greek. Give me Greek any day. It wasn't all Greek to me.

No one other than Bill Buckley and Catholic priests ever really spoke Latin, but people were always inserting phrases like Mr. Rehn's into their conversation. You could hear the italics in their voices. 'Quid pro quo' was another.

I always got a kick out of Robert Stack when he and the other guys in bad suits on "The Untoucables" tried to figure out the 'M.O.' When I learned it stood for 'modus operendi' I felt probably as good as my friend George when he got a passing grade on a Friday Latin test.

Tempus fugit, caveat emptor, e pluribus unun, no problemo. But I do confess, I did have to look up 'sine qua non.' In a BIG dictionary I found it means: 'without which not.' So, what Mr. Behn was saying is that restoring confidence in the Italian economy won't occur without 'structual changes' in the European Union.

Mr. Berlusconi's hold on the top political office in Italy might well be as tenuous as it is because he might have been out at the Party and not taking Latin.

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Smokin' Joe

2011-11-08T14:10:00.001-08:00

The last time I saw Joe Frazier he didn't look good. My friend and I saw him at an autograph session outside the jockeys' silk room at Saratoga this past August. He wasn't promoting a book, just signing autographs of anything anyone presented him with. The appearance had been announced at the track during the week that he would be there on Friday. Some people had boxing gloves, track programs, or just plain paper.

There was decent line that did move. My friend and I didn't get on it, but we did angle around to take a good look at Joe. He was seated, dressed quite snappy, but didn't look well at all. He looked a little wane. Someone was standing quite close by, seeming to be lending physical, as well as perhaps mental support.

When I looked at the line and who was on it I quipped to my friend that no one who was born after 1960 should be on it. It had been 40 years since the first Ali-Frazier fight, that Smokin' Joe won with a unanimous 15 round decision over Muhammad Ali. Before the fight both were undefeated heavyweight champions. Never before had undefeated heavyweight champs fought each other. It was a fight for the ages.

As Dave Anderson leads off today, Frazier and Ali, Ali and Frazier are two names that are forever linked. Even that day at Saratoga, they were linked. Without Ali anywhere in sight, the second race was named the 'Ali vs. Frazier 40th Anniversary Race.' This, despite the fact that the fight took place in March 1971 and it was now August. Someone knew something was up.

I was at the first Ali-Frazier fight. AT the fight, in Madison Square Garden, last row of the blue seats with my father and another friend; $20 tickets that I had gotten IN THE MAIL when the fight was announced and tickets went on sale. Imagine that: face value tickets for that fight, in the mail.

The excitement was more than electric. It was Biblical. As Johnny Addie, the ring announcer intoned at the start, EVERYONE was there. Frank Sinatra in a tux was taking pictures from the ring apron with his Nikon for Life magazine. Burt Lancaster, also in a tux, was nearby. Mayor Lindsay was several rows back. Someone must have still been mad at him for flubbing the city's response to the 1969 snowstorm. Mayors continue to get embarrassed by snow. Lorne Greene could be seen through the compact binoculars we had brought, as well as Colonel Sanders, dressed just like he was on the bucket. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, was there.

The next day the paper reported that two people suffered fatal heart attacks at the fight. The build up had been tremendous. It was going on for weeks. The fight that you had to be at, or see in a theater in what was then the nascent pay-per-view days. It wasn't going to be on television a week later. And it wasn't.

Two undefeated heavyweight champions squaring off. $2.5 million dollars apiece. Ali would later exclaim to Joe that they got them cheap. Maybe they did. The referee, Arthur Mercante, Sr. would later comment that he saw some of the best punches he had ever seen that night, from both fighters.

It was my first fight. I still have several of the $1.50 programs I bought that night. The results of the preliminaries are unknown to me, I do remember the NYC Sanitation worker from the Bronx in a four rounder, John Clohesy, who would a few years later die of cancer himself.

Ali's brother Rahman Ali was also on the card in a six rounder. Jimmy Elder in a six rounder; Willie (The Worm) Monroe in a four rounder. Ken Norton was on the card in a six rounder. I remember nothing of Ken Norton in 1971, and why would anyone? He would of course become a nemesis for Ali, breaking his jaw in one fight, but his foot-in-the bucket style went unnoticed, uncommented on.

After that fight, I became a BIG boxing fan. Saw many fights at the Garden, Felt Forum, many on pay-per-view, and many at Sunnyside Garden, a local blood pit hard by the elevated Flushing train in Sunnyside Queens, now long gone to a Wendy's and flame broiled burgers.

Seeing Joe at Saratoga was sad, not just for the expired 40 years, but for the diminshment of strength, and invincibility, his and mine.

But before the end, there was the fury, and it was something to see. There was the night at the Garden when he was tuning up for an Ali fight that he fought Jerry Quarry, a durable heavyweight who took as much as he gave, but usually ended up bleeding so much from cuts that his fights were usually stopped.

That night was no different. Frazier was thoroughly dominating a very good fighter. He was sharp. But almost a Christmas ghost was also in the ring with them. Joe Louis was the referee. THE Joe Louis. But that Joe was glazed-over, never really seeming to be with it. As Quarry was becoming a side of beef that Joe used to chop up in a Philly slaughter house, he didn't react to the danger Quarry was being put in. Quarry's corner threw the towel in toward a befuddled Joe Louis. It was over for Quarry. And it was over for Joe Louis. Smokin' Joe went on to meet further opponents.

Dave Anderson today tells you he liked Joe Frazier over Ali as a boxer, and a man. The boxer part is the one I have an opinion on, and I would agree. Joe always came in ready. In shape. Not distracted by his entourage, not needing rope-a-dope. Not giving a flurry of punches 15 seconds before the end of a lackadaisical round in the hope of fooling the judges that the prior 2 minutes and 45 seconds were just like that as well.

Joe was ready that day at Saratoga. He couldn't have been feeling well. He knew more than was publicly known. But he was in that winners' circle, presenting a trophy for the Ali vs. Frazier 40th Anniversary race, shaking his fist in the air. So what if it was holding a cane.

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The Daisy Ad

2011-11-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

Until I read the 2008 obituary for Tony Schwartz, the man credited with creating one of the most powerful political ads of all time, I had never seen the TV ' Daisy' ad. It apparently was only shown once, prime time, in 1964, and was a political ad for Lyndon Johnson when he was running against Barry Goldwater.

Although I was in high school at the time, I only watched some late night television. I don't remember anyone at school talking about it, and no one in my family mentioned it. Sentiment in New York ran heavy against Goldwater. I was aware of these feeling, but didn't really have any of my own. I still will never forget, however, that a student with a strong streak in chemistry walked around with their own political sticker that went: AuH2O = H2S. This is chemistry shorthand meaning 'Goldwater' and that he stinks, because he is hydrogen sulfide gas (smell of rotten eggs). The kid left off the up arrow at the end though, signifying creation of a gas. It was that kind of high school.

When I recently read Steve Jobs's obituary, the singular appearance of the Orwellian ad for Apple computers that ran during the 1984 Super Bowl was mentioned. And it turns out Ridley Scott ('Aliens') gained early fame for directing it.

But back to Daisy. Without mentioning Goldwater's name, the ad basically pointed out to Americans the danger of voting for Mr. Goldwater, a man who had publicly stated that nuclear warfare, on a small scale, could help gain objectives. Goldwater was significantly behind in the polls at the time, but didn't slip any further after the ad. He did lose the election by a wide margin, however.

A lot of words and years have rolled by since 1964. Campaigns and presidents have come and gone, and are still coming. Now it seems there is even a book about the ad and the political era.

'Daily Petals and Mushroom Clouds,' by Robert Mann either refreshes your memory, or tells you about something you never heard of. It well may have been the dawn of a political ad that entered the consciousness and sub-consciousness. Others have followed.

Lyndon Johnson won, escalated the war in Viet Nam, and became a very unpopular president, despite many other solid achievements. He chose not to run to 1968. A rare event, to have a sitting president choose not to run.

Nuclear weapons have still never been used, by anyone, on a small or large scale. But politicians are people, and sometimes very smart people.

I will never, ever forget Barry Goldwater appearing on the 'Tonight' show with Johnny Carson in 1966, or so, laughing at himself and telling the audience that he never realized how unpopular a president he would have been until President Johnson adopted his policies.

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A Nation's Loss

2011-11-03T15:18:00.001-07:00

It's not often you get to read a British and American obituary on the same person. But such an opportunity presented itself today when @obitsman tweeted about a beloved British TV personality and professional eccentric and the NYT wrote about the same subject, Sir Jimmy Sevile, who passed away at 84.

The NYT obituary is by Margalit Fox, who gives Sir. Savile the full monty. He gets three columns, a photo with Prince Charles and a recap of his life that reads like it's still going on. It's an entertaining read, even if you never heard of the old boy.

But it's the British obituary that gives you a sense that Great Britain has suffered a great loss. Without seeing the print edition it's not possible to know if this was Page 1 news, above or below the fold, but you get a sense it should be Page 1. The online version is accompanied by over a hundred comments, that are still pouring in. Sir Jimmy is surely missed.

The British obit treats us to their special way of talking and writing: Jimmy was an 'adorment.' His speech was 'garrulous' through a 'gurning' visage. He was a character. He was parts of our:

Captain Kangaroo
Dick Clark
Buffalo Bob
Jerry Lewis
Professor Irwin Corey
Henny Youngman
John Gotti, Jr.
Mr. Wizard
Mr. Rogers
Earl Schieb
Paul Popiel

As Ms Fox notes at the close of her piece, it's absolutely no wonder his body will be in repose in a in a local hotel "in the manner of a dead monarch lying in state," as the Daily Mail of London reports.

You wonder if British government offices will be open. Or, at least how will alternate side parking be affected?

http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com/

The Couple of the Year

2011-11-03T06:27:00.001-07:00

They are easily the most famous couple on earth. No, not the tacky Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, but the international duo of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. If there was still Vaudeville, they'd always get top billing.

They are, once again, shown together on the front page of today's WSJ. They have made more editions of more papers than there were guest hosts on the Johnny Carson show years ago.

Dick Schapp, the sportswriter and broadcaster, once quite famously got himself in deepest do-do when he told a TV audience that the thoroughbreds Riva Ridge and Secretariat were the most famous stablemates since Mary and Joseph. Dick paid for that one, but he did become immortal.

So, maybe Angela and Nick can't quite compare to Dick's metaphor, but there are easily this generation's Euro version of Spencer Tracy and and Katherine Hepburn.

Whether they get to save the Euro and bring the Greeks on board or not, they are the best act since Sonny and Cher.

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The Study Of

2011-10-29T06:03:00.001-07:00

Many, many years ago the high school biology teacher, who was also our home room teacher, Mrs. Demas, zeroed in on me during the second day of class and asked me to explain the entomology of the word 'biology'. I knew having a Greek name myself, and her having a Greek name, it was going to be a very long term if I didn't this one right.

I did. 'Bio', life; 'ology', study of. All these science disciplines have branches. But it wasn't until the other day when I read an 'A-Head' WSJ piece about 'hominology', a still-to-be recognized branch of biology that studies hairy, upright, walking creatures, that I realized I might be able to add something to scientific knowledge.

There are no authenticated photos of these animals. In different parts of the world the creatures go by different names and have different looks. The creature is generally known to us as the Abominable Snowman, also being called, Sasquatch, Bigfoot and Yeti.

Imagine, a whole scientific discipline devoted to studying the likes of Donald Trump, who goes around town like Major Strasser in Cacablanca and demands to see people's papers.

Who knew?

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Print Trumps Digital

2011-10-27T06:06:00.001-07:00

You're going to have to buy the paper itself, or crane your neck at a newsstand to see today's front page NYT picture of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel in her blue velour track suit chewing on a pencil at a meeting in Brussels about saving the Euro.

The picture is most prominently placed. Top line, perfectly centered, four columns wide. Story to the right. Angela is easily the most thoughtful looking person on earth. She might be saving the Euro, but she also might be doing any number of other things.

Figuring out NFL point spreads.
Who to call in from the bullpen.
Where to send the ball in after the timeout in NCAA Division I Women' basketball championship game.
Interrogating a suspect in place of Helen Mirren on 'Prime Suspect'.
Telling Frankie No at Rao's that her table is ready.
Considering an exacta bet at a study carrel during the Breeders' Cup.
Listening to budget cut proposals at a city council meeting regarding libraries.
As a judge, taking no truck with a showboating defense attorney.

She is easily the most important and thoughtful person on earth.

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Red On Red

2011-10-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

'Red On Red' is the title of the latest book by Edward Conlon, an active duty NYC detective who seems as at home with words as he might with police procedures. The book was published in April and is his second, after 'Blue Blood' of a few years ago.

'Red On Red' is a novel that is filled with delighfully simple poetic descriptions of people and places in NYC. My thoughts were to start to compile a list by highlighting the really good ones that I come across, but there are so many that I feel I would deface the book for someone else, even though I did buy it for myself. The book is a looked-forward-to page turner before I reset the 3-way bulb to zero and hit the sheets. Four hundred plus pages will last me a while

My surprise is that I haven't read a single book review. I've yet to come across a passage with a car chase, gunfire, or doughnuts. And I'm still entertained. I like to think if the sequence of time were different, Frank McCourt would haul the book into his creative writing class at Stuyvesant High School and show the students what writing can be like.

Given my own familiarity with NYC, and the fact that the story takes place in NYC, I see everything that is described. And I'm always sensitive to mistakes, typos, and bad facts, even though it's a novel. None. In fact, the book straightened out my confusion over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and which one involved bread and bridges. A Catholic cop cleared it up.

Not all books hew so well to facts and descriptions. Someone in the publishing business fairly recently told an attentive room of people that there is no fact checking done in publishing. If a writer wants fact checking, they have to pay for it themselves.

This does seem like misplaced trust. It makes you wonder about anything Dick Cheney has written.

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Just Win, Baby, Win

2011-10-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

There's that word again: "iconoclast," being attached to the recently departed Al Davis.

You can start with the obituary that appeared in the NYT by Bruce Weber (pre-written it would seem since Bruce is peddling cross-country on a bike heading toward NY and hopefully kudos from Mayor Mike for shrinking his carbon footprint).

You will find words like "controversial," "renegade," "combative," and "irascible" in the piece. A quote from Don Schula who called him "devious," and one from Dan Rooney that was much stronger: "a lying creep."

The sportswriter Dave Anderson always kept the adjective "sinister" embedded with nice words so often that Mr. Davis asked Mr. Anderson why did he always use the word "sinister." Al complained that didn't Dave know his mother read the Times? But he didn't mind the word.

All you need to know about Al Davis can be gleaned from his formative surroundings. Born on the Fourth of July (like George Steinbrenner), 1929 and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue, in Brooklyn

Al may have found fame, notoriety and fortune on the West Coast, but the East Coast never left him. He was a Lord of Flatbush, all about egg creams, potato knishes, Coney Island franks and of course leather jackets. He was Brando on a chopper, not Brando in his ripped underwear. Tooth picks were meant to be chewed. Maybe even swallowed.

His favorite symbol might well have been what he saw under his mom's kitchen sink: bottles with a skull and cross bones, signifying poison. No safety caps in that era.

The theatrical producer Billy Rose was so disliked that when he died it was said no one came to the funeral, there was only the hearse. A one car funeral. As short as you can get. Not so for Al. All the adjectives seemed to fit, and he didn't seem to mind. He induced heart attacks.

When there were court cases surrounding his proposed movement of the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles, the owner of the San Diego Chargers, Eugene Klein, gave testimony against approving the move. Klein was so infuriated with Davis his anger from the witness box induced a heart attack on the spot.

Eugene Klein survived, eventually sold the Chargers and became one of the most successful thoroughbred race horse owners of all time, winning multiple Breeders' Cup races and Eclipse awards. He loved telling people how happy he was owning horses, who didn't demand contracts and negotiations. He recommended horses to anyone who wanted to own something to do with sports.

Owning horses didn't put you in a league with Al Davis.

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The Great Pumpkin Eating Disorder

2011-10-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

One wouldn't think a pumpkin could mimic a human eating disorder, but there's no other way to describe pumpkins that overeat, then burst. The bulimic pumpkin. Charlie Brown's life can be fraught with enough perilwithout having a pumpkin go heaving on him in The Great Pumpkin Patch.

The story is really about people who grow outsized pumpkins with the goal of being the first to nurture one to theOne Ton mark--2,000 pounds. They're apparently getting close to the gardening version of the sub four-minute mile.

Obsessive gardeners armed with champion seeds, lakes of enriched water, hormones, and plant surgery are well on their way to making something that's big, even bigger. Bragging rights, exclusive leather jackets, and a little prize money are all the incentives these people need to keep at it.

There are claims by some gardeners that they can even hear the pumkins grow. And if true, that some of these planted mammouths can gain 50 pounds in a day, then who's to say the unaided earmight not hear something subdividing underneath that orange skin? Sci-Fi week on Turner Movie Classics.

No weight loss programs for these fruits. Just the opposite: more is better. But, as with most things in life, there's nothing that can't be overdone.

One grower remembers coming back from church to find that his biggest pumpkin had exploded under the force of its own growth.

"There was a footlong crack through the rind. It just blew up."

What would Charlie Brown do?

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History Online

2011-10-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

What on line meant just before Prohibition was enacted.

The One and Only

2011-09-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

This photo in today's online edition of the NYT should help you with all you need to know about Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the rest of the world.

She is never in the dark.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Ten Left, Thirty-two Right Past Zero...

2011-09-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

If you don't learn something everyday, you didn't wake up.

Take today's story in the NYT about a building that is on the southwest corner of 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. It's been there forever, but only qualifies as a 60 year old modern building. And since it doesn't look like crumbled aluminum foil it has to be considered an old modern building that somehow achieved landmark status as long ago as 1997.

I never knew it had become a landmark building. I did know about it being a bank because of the vault that is clearly visible from Fifth Avenue. I always thought showing the vault in so visible a spot made sense. It reminded me of what we used to do when we locked up the family flower shop at night.

Since the cash register was clearly visible from the street, and there were no gates on the windows in those days, and we didn't want anyone to think that vast riches awaited if only they broke the glass and wandered in and pulled out fistfuls of cash, we used to empty the cash drawer, leave it visibly open, and leave the bill holders in the up position, like an open drawbridge. We never had a break-in.

When I pass this building I might now think about it having become a landmark building and a new source of New York-style controversy. However, I will definitely always remember the picture that appeared in a newspaper years and years ago that showed the gym-locker combination numbers that someone drew on the dusty outside window.

Even given that, I don't remember ever reading about a break-in.

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Just Because They're Now Dead...

2011-09-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

Finally. Someone has passed away who left behind family who likely loved him, neutral strangers, and an unknown number who probably still hate him.

Douglas LaChance, a multi-term past president of the newspaper deliverers' union who spent stints in prison on racketeering and extortion convictions, as well as parole violations for testing positive for cocaine, has passed away at 69.

Douglas Martin's obituary in today's New York Times reached all levels of survivors. Mr Martin includes a 1992 quote of praise from the Times's publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, as well as a belief that there might still be some out there who are surviving enemies.

Certainly Mr. LaChance himself acknowledged there might be a few people who could be considered enemies when he was once asked by the police if he had any enemies and he replied that the Manhattan phone book was a good place to start.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Gee

2011-09-25T13:25:00.000-07:00

Years and years ago in our prior house we were having the bathroom redone. Completely. To accomplish this we were using our next-door neighbor and his brother who were general contractors and had done prior, good work for us.

Al and Emilio were from Italy, but had been in this country quite a while. They spoke English with heavy Italian accents, but were understandable. They were two of the best workers you could ever find: each strong as an ox who put in a full day's work. Doing virtually anything. Even weekends, if needed.

They did many things using simple brute strength. To break up old sidewalk they pounded away with heavy sledgehammers and iron poles. No pneumatic drills for them. The general contractor bit was their sideline. When there was real work, they were bricklayers.

They shoveled out an extension to our cellar by hand. Cubic yards and yards of dirt came flying up into the driveway, to later be shoveled into a dumpster. They resupported the sagging porch with a steel I-beam. There didn't seem to be anything they couldn't do, and do well.

So when we were having the bathroom redone we opted for a whirlpool tub. A porcelain, cast iron tub that weighed 450 pounds. Empty. Dead weight.

Had Al and Emilio ever installed a whirlpool tub? Could they even get it in the first floor bathroom? Good questions. All answered. Not all yes.

The tub was uncrated and Al and Emilio devised something with straps and yokes on their shoulders and hauled the tub up a short flight of front steps, through the living room, down the hall, and gently placed it in its new home. Perfectly. Nothing was damaged.

I always said they looked like a pair of oxen inching their way along through a very heavy task. In this case, one had the front and one had the back, and they grunted and seemed to be talking to one another, perhaps in Italian.

Several times we heard someone say "Gee." We also heard someone get very annoyed and start cursing in Italian. But then "Gee" came through again, and other sounds that I can't remember.

I always love telling the story when I talk about these brothers and how much work they did and how strong they were. I also love buying the local newspaper whenever I'm away on vacation.

So, imagine the memories that got resuscitated when I bought the Glen Falls Post-Star and read one of the day's stories on the Washington County Fair. This one was about teams of oxen and the commands that are used to direct them.

Gee: Go right.

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One in A Million

2011-09-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

There's an expression that goes: "you're one in a million." This is usually meant as a compliment because your pleasant virtues or talents are considered so unique that they're hardly shared by others.

But, "one in a million," however rare, does give the world 2,000 other people who are just like you if you consider you're being measured from the 2 billion person population of China. It's just math at that point.

@Obitsman aside from writing obituaries for a major newspaper scans countless newspapers online in search of a story. Yesterday he gave the world a Tweet on someone in England who grew a particularly large onion--a world record in fact. There's a world record for everything, and none of this should surprise anyone.

The fact that the man looks like Frank Perdue and appears to be cradling a strange chicken that's all breast proves the mathematical "unique" ratio of things around the world.

Frank and Peter are just part of "one in a million."

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Septembers

2011-09-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2001
September 16, 2002
Forever linked by bad people.

The dates on the stones let you measure the time
Of the lives that lived in between.
The bracketed years reveal to the current
The joys and the troubles they've seen.

On any given day a person is born
You can record the date of their birth.
And on any given day a person can die
And you can record that they've left this earth.

And the morning we made our dusty descent,
An accomplishment undiminished,
We learned of the others and their bracketed date,
And our own, that remained unfinished.

So it is incredible to believe the end can be met
At the hands of someone we knew.
He put an end to life, he put an end to himself,
But he didn't put an end to you.

No one ever dies
Who lives in hearts
Left behind.

The World's Finances

2011-09-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

Globally, financially, things are probably not good again. Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel is being seen in the news a lot, and this time not with the French guy.

In today's NYT photo on the first page of the second section, she is seen with Finland's Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen. (The picture above is prior to the meeting with Mr. Katainen.)

Her schedule must have worn the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, out.

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The Containers

2011-09-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

As a whole, not many of us truly contribute anything that changes the world in any way. This doesn't mean that we should give up as soon as it's apparent that whatever we're doing is really only going to prove the certainty of the adage: death and taxes. Some people might miss us for a while, but we're not likely to crack the obituary plane and get a send-off that alerts the living that what we did in life "revolutionized" something.

Even those that do accomplish something that when added up is worth noticing are not always aware at the time that what they're doing is going to change anything other than their finances. That's why it's best not to get discouraged. Our lack of global contribution may not be apparent until it's over. You just never know.

Take the story of Keith Tantlinger who recently passed away. Hardware, basically is what he contributed, but what it allowed did change things. Greatly.

Shipping containers could be stacked because of what he devised, and thus, ships could be filled with them, and the containers filled with cargo. Like the barrels that fit inside of the barrels that you might have played with as a kid, containerized shipping got its boost from his design for stacking the boxes. Box boy supreme.

I love the containerized shipping stories. They lead me back to an entry I made September 11, 2009 about the waterfront and one of my favorite stories about pilferage and a deterrent to it, however inconvenient the deterrent was.

Mr. Tantlinger's contribution ensured the lefts could come over with their rights on the same voyage and enjoy a better chance of reaching market legitimately than falling off the backs of trucks.

Saks Fifth Avenue in New York has a dedicated express elevator that whisks the eager straight to the floor containing women's shoes.

Brought to you by hardware.

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The Rhino

2011-09-09T12:10:00.000-07:00

One of the joys of reading news stories rather than viewing them is that the well-written ones might contain a nugget of information that is just plain worth thinking about.

Take a recent story of the theft of rhinoceros horns and skulls. This nasty business is driven by the price that can be obtained for ground up rhino bones that some attribute aphrodisiac qualities to. China for instance presents a big market for this.

Never mind that chemically the ground up calcium is equal to eating your fingernails, as one scientist put it. BIG, big money is in this, with the value of the product exceeding cocaine, gold, or heroin.

The story comes to us from the front page of the August 26, 2011 NYT. It comes out of Ipswich, England, written by Sarah Lyall, who I think is their bureau chief over there. The market and the theft seems centered in Europe, but the reporter recounts a 2009 burglary in which a rhino skull was taken from a trophy-display wall of a check-cashing place in Albany, NY.

I've been to Albany, NY. I've been to check-cashing places. It's completely beyond my imagination that the intersection of these two places could produce an opportunity for the theft of a rhino skull.

How does a check-cashing place in Albany, NY stray from the linoleum floor, dropped ceiling tile, fluorescent lighting, floor-to-ceiling bullet-proof Plexiglas decor of a check-cashing business that seems to be the universal design? They generally look more depressing than NYC's OTBs did.

Of course, the place could have all these qualities, but they added the trophy case because of the owner's exploits. Not impossible. I was once in a diner in Derby Line, Vermont that had a stuffed polar bear, growling in an upright pose near the door. Frank's.

All of this just goes to show you, when there is market for something, someone will find the supply.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Arrival

2011-09-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

I always liked this Whitney Darrow cartoon I once saw in The New Yorker. It's from 1967, long before I ever became terminally employed at an insurance company, and long before ever even thinking about starting a family.

The irony is I came to work for the very company named in the caption, and I always thought it funny that they might have ben pushed to pay for things that fell outside a small standard deviation of the mean.

The cartoon has fresh meaning for me since an offspring has now given birth to her second, and while the scene in the cartoon is not entirely representative of their family size, it does somewhat replicate the gathering that was at bedside the other night.

It's been a while since I've been in a hospital room, but the technology and accomodations are impressive. The bed looked like something that would be used in the space program, with an at-first confusing digital readout on the side. It said 61 degrees, and I couldn't imagine there was a need for the outside temperture to be known. And the room didn't feel that cool.

Of course the readout had nothing to do with temperture, but everything to do with the angle the back part of the bed was placed at. In this case, a comfortable 61 degrees for sitting up and talking to people. I went home that night trying to get my pillow in that exact setting. I had to eye-ball it.

There's more, but significantly, the room was a private room: standard for this hospital for maternity, it seems. Sleep-over couch, chairs, flat panel TV, absolutely full bathroom. The bassinet looked like it came from Ethan Allen, curved, polished wood, and looking nothing like Tupperware.

The meal menu looked like something from a hotel, and it turned out the father could order his dinner from there as well. The food my daughter was plowing through looked good, and apparently was tasty.

All this of course lead me to ask my daughter and my son-in-law if their helath plan was aware of this, and how were they going to try and wiggle their way of the deductible and co-pay with this one.

I know all about these things.

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Plus

2011-09-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

Willie Nelson likes to tell the story about his birthplace, Abbott, Texas. According to Willie, the town's population never increases: when a baby is born, a man leaves town.

Abbott it seems has some unique population characteristics, somewhat like those of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. In Abbott, everyone is fertile, and there are no multiple births.

Well, there is a Westchester County hamlet that seems to have different characteristics.

Olivia-Rose was added to the population rolls this morning, but no one left town.

http://onofframp.blogspot.com

Men Will be Boys. Always.

2011-09-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

This one firmly comes under the category of "men will be boys." I will admit that personally while I don't spend as much time being a boy as I once did, I've never really fully outgrown it, either. We're where we are because of where we've been, and sometimes we've never left.

@Obitsman twittered the other day about 'fake puke.' That's exactly how he put it, and I know he's been taken for being an adult.

It seems there's a family business that has proved highly successful at making and marketing the stuff. The link to a news story should prove it.

Knowing a little bit about the Obitsman, I suspect he's disappointed that a prominent person associated with this industry hasn't recently left us. The next best thing is to at least Twitter the world that there might be an IPO worth looking at.

Of course great delight in such things is taken. Take Niles Crane, the wispy brother in the sitcom 'Frazier' who becomes beside himself when he learns that his wife's family fortune comes from the manufacture of "urine cakes." These of course are the scented discs that men aim at when at a urinal, usually in a restaurant that has tablecloths. The better joints use them, or pails of ice to diffuse the smell that can accumulate. Think cat liter that dissolves.

Well, true to my experiences, reading about fake barf reminded me of the time an insurance executive told me of the era when he flew a lot, the airline attendants were 'stewardesses' and nearly all the passengers were men. Think Mad Men, and you're mostly there.

There's nothing guys like more than getting attention from attractive females, who because of their job can't tell them at that time to go somewhere the plane's not scheduled to go to, unless of course it crashes. So Gordo tells about the time he boarded an aircraft with an air sickness bag partially filled with Dinty Moore stew. He fakes becoming sick while in flight, and when he's got the stewardess's attention and concern he tells her he'll be fine, as he plunges a spoon into the bag and makes sure he watches her expression while he swallows a little of the stew, that of course she thinks is something else.

It's not known if this lead to any further friendship between Gordo and the concerned stewardess, but those were the days.

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The Last Word

2011-09-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

I like to get to all the obituaries I can in the New York Times. I even scan the paid notices, and particularly the In Memoriams. Sometimes I do skip, or "speed read" through a few if it doesn't look like there's going to be anything that interests me about the subject's work, era, or personality. This happens when it seems there's a banner day for news obituaries, when there literally might be 5 or 6 to read.I know the writer of the obituary doesn't write the headline, but when I read 'Stanley Bosworth, 83 Iconoclastic Head of Brooklyn School' I knew I was going to find the time to read about this guy.

Marilyn Johnson, in her primer on obituaries, The Dead Beat, describes code words that are used by obituary writers to dance around phrases that might not be appropriate to use when publicly writing about the deceased. With imagination, or inside knowledge, the code words, or phrases convey the blunter meaning.

Ms. Johnson offers the British way of doing this when a phrase like "gave colorful accounts of his exploits" is code for "liar." The list can be quite an entertaining. Read the book. Read The Last Word as well, a compilation of obituaries from the NYT, as edited by Marvin Siegel, with a forward by Russell Baker.

There is of course a proper English definition of "iconoclast." My own version is that it means "a-pain-in-ass." But since Mr. Bosworth is announced to have been 83, and head of a Brooklyn school that I'll assume is, or was prestigious, I'll add "lovable" and "successful" to my "pain-in-ass" definition.

Reading the obituary, I'd have to say I was right. He sounds like my kind of guy. And when an obituary is good it helps when it can close with a quote from the subject, that may or may not be the words they would choose to be remembered by, but certainly in the eyes of the writer help convey a huge chunk of the subject's personality.

Consider Douglas Martin's close of Mr. Bosworth's obituary:

"But when asked if he found anything satisfying about getting older, he was unmistakably straightforward. 'I have the satisfaction of seeing people I hate die!' he said."

I'm not near 83, but I've already had that satisfaction a few times, and look forward to having it again.

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The Winner Is

2011-08-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

Two friends leave Saratoga racetrack on a Friday after 9 races of a 10 race card. It is the fourth consecutive racing day of their attendance at the meet, and overall they're both ahead a few bucks.

Still ahead, despite Friday's selections producing nothing so far. There is still the 10th race, but a dinner reservation is pulling them out of the place and toward the parking lot. Handicapping has been done, so a last ditch effort at producing a winner for the day is made by calling into an OTB account a $2 exacta box on two horses. The personally designed and used handicapping numbers have let them down today, but one of them feels it's no time to abandon them now. They don't want to be at the airport when their ship comes in.

A simple $2 box bet is made on the two horses earning the top handicapping numbers. The other fellow, after realizing that while he's driving he can still get a bet in through the passenger's account, also makes a $2 exacta bet on two horses, but only uses one of the same horses the passenger does. There's something else he likes, and he goes with it.

With telephone betting, you get an ending balance, and rapid update of funds if you hit something. It works quite well. So, there's an ending balance that is reflective of the two $4 bets being made.

Time is allowed to elapse. The race will be over and the winner posted before the restaurant is reached. A simple call to check on the balance when it it is reasonable to assume that all activity is official is all it will take to tell if someone won anything, or neither won a thing. If the balance increases, it won't be known who won, but one of the players in the car will have. More detailed results will be obtained later.

Before the restaurant parking lot is achieved, the account announced to the owner that $117.50 has been added. This is great news.

Further details are not sought until the next morning when the newspaper was looked at the the motel office as they were preparing to return back downstate. So who won?

It doesn't matter. They'll both be back.

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The King

2011-08-17T05:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, someone I know Twittered, "Bye Elvis. Again." It took a bit to remember, but August 1977 was when he passed away, and of course August 16th was the actual day. At least to some.

Thirty-four years have now gone by. A whole generation has entered middle age who may not have even ever heard of Elvis, much less heard Elvis. That's the way it goes. I never went to a silent movie, and never saw Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in one. My mother and father did, however.

Elvis turned many a pair of knees to jelly. A long time ago, Nostalgia met Marketing. So why not an Elvis app for a smartphone? Those same knees, now maybe arthritic, or even replaced, can relive the good old days with a downloadable app that when pressed, fills the screen of the smartphone for eight seconds with the above image. A few seconds into the display, Elvis winks, and purrs "G'night" to the smartphone holder.

He may have gone into that good night, but he can be brought back.

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The Move

2011-08-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

It is not believed there were many witnesses. At least not many that qualified as being legally alive when the rented U Haul van (with Apportioned Arizona plates) advertising itself on both sides as being available for rental for $19.95 a day, rolled through Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York carrying some of my departed mother-in-law's furniture. The van was being driven by my son-in-law, whose wife is my oldest daughter, and who committed herself to taking her grandmother's brocaded Queen Anne, mahogany carved couch into her guardianship to be placed in her cellar. Also, a more contemporary wingback chair, and two period-piece end tables, without the period lamps. For now, she still has the room to do things like this.

The route through the cemetery was swift and respectful. No proceedings were noticed, so no one who might have looked up could have thought that a very cheap type of hearse was coming in to do its thing, and that some people were not spending what they were spending on a funeral. This was strictly a means to an end to get to the destination without encountering parkways that prohibit commercial vehicles. It also was a way my son-in-law suspected might get him out of the slight jam he was in by taking the wrong exit from something else. It worked.

So, passing through one resting place, the furniture came to be deposited in another resting place. My daughter's cellar.

The beat goes on.

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The Room

2011-08-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

The woman I married came with her mother's furniture.

While this doesn't mean that in addition to her parents their furniture was at the wedding as well, it does mean that it was always "there" somewhere, and would eventually be with us when the time came. And it did.

Several pieces first made their way into our two car garage. They were covered, and while not as protected as in a museum, the pieces did have a roof over them, even if the legs did get wet when it really rained hard. Bricks were eventually added.

But the real emergence and blending with our lives came when we moved to a house that in effect had four bedrooms, but only a need to put humans in two of them. A house with two uneeded bedrooms wasn't purposely sought after, but it did seem like a good place to make new roots and enjoy the extra space.

Of course, extra space to Americans merely means there's an opportunity to fill it up. And this happened when one of the four bedrooms, on the first floor, became what I would call the 'Helen Museum.' The room became a near re-creation of the living room of my wife's mother; the apartment in the Bronx that my wife last lived in before marriage.

Saying the furniture is "old" is not descriptive enough. Some wag, other than myself, said the room was "stuck in the 70s." They meant the 1970s, when really the room was the perfect complement to a roll of Indian head pennies. It was from Edith Wharton and the 'Age of Innocence.' Only the solid wood console (color) television and electricity might lead you to believe you entered the latter part of the 20th century.

The sofa and two arm chairs were decently upholstered, the coach being restored after my wife rescued it from the curb after her mother accidentally set fire to it in their Bronx apartment. After learning that her mother was all right, she found the couch on the curb where the firemen had dragged it from the fourth floor. It got another life.

The faux fireplace and mantle was another touch, with the electric lit logs that radiated enough heat to get metal spinners turning, giving the appearance of flames flickering. They reminded me of the story a neighbor told us of someone she went out with who created a VCR tape of the Yule Log that would be on Channel 11 on Christmas Eve. He would play the tape on TV when trying to establish a romantic mood. Turns out she broke up with him for some reason. Perhaps he didn't tape enough of the Yule Log.

Years and years have passed and the room remained an ode to the departed. I offered to have a fire escape painted outside the window to further the commemorative look, but was dismissed as being silly.

But the beginning of the end has arrived, and literally by chance. My wife won the 32" flat panel television at the Christmas office party raffle. First prize. She's lucky like that. Thoughts started to be voiced that use could be made of it in the 'TV room' as 'The Room' became known.

The flat panel TV however remained in its box, somewhat blocking the view of the current TV. Offers to unbox it and set it up were met with voiced plans that the room was going to be redone, and that they were not going to stand a flat panel TV on top of another TV. "That would look stupid."

Inertia needed to be broken. So, with my new found time, the TV was unboxed and hooked up and operational while the curator was out working one day. It was placed squarely on top of the old TV. The fear of course was that by the time it came out of its box at the museum director's command, HiDef TV would be replaced by 3-D TV. Someone had to act.

A financial standing was checked before this action was performed because it was fully understood that once the empty box hit the side of the house, there was going to be action at the top of the mountain and things were going to move. And they did.

Gold was sold and furniture was shopped for. The couch was going to be allowed to go. This of course came as a surprise, but a dream and a voice was recited as poof that it was now okay to shed it.

What the calendar makers failed to note was the designation of 'Family Heirloom Day.' I've now marked it on the calendar, and will look at next year's calendar on the same date and see what happens. Upon hearing that the couch was going my oldest daughter, now with a house and some extra room, offered, no insisted, on getting the couch to her place. It was going to be used.

Brocaded, Edith Wharton, Queen Anne, mahogany carved furniture in a center hall colonial might make sense, but in a cellar?

Perhaps yes. After all, there is space. For now.

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The Thoroughbred

2011-08-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

FILLIES, TWO YEAR OLDS

TYPE OF RACE SHORT LONG

STK Aug 14

1xmc/nw2/Opt.Clm. 75,000 Aug 10

1xmc/Str Alw 50,000 Aug 10

Mdn Aug 11, 14, 15, 21(T), 21 Aug 14(T), 19(T)

Mdn (NY) Aug 12, 14, 17(T), 21 Aug 21(T)

Mdn 75,000 Aug 10(T)

Mdn 60,000-50,000 Aug 12

Mdn 50,000(NY) Aug 19

Mdn 35,000 Aug 10

Thoroughbred races are subject to 'conditions' of the race. The above is a section taken from an upcoming Saratoga Condition Book that trainers use to consider what races their horses might be eligible to run in. Conditions are basically the eligibility rules governing who can enter a particular race. This is to establish a bit of parity in that a really great horse is not pitted against an inferior horse. Horses are graded by 'class.' Decent, competitive racing is hoped for.

Unraced, and horses who have never won a race, generally start out in 'maiden' races. Despite maiden denoting a unmarried female, maidens in horse racing are just horses, either colts or fillies, who have never won a race. There are some sub-levels to maidens, but we don't need to go into that.

The next level is usually a 'non-winner of one, other than maiden...' This is generally where horses need to be entered after they've won a maiden race. In this type of race, everyone has 'broken their maiden' and is therefore a winner at some level. Thus, everyone is racing against horses with similar achievements.

The 'levels' go up, generally to 'non-winners of three, other than...' and the waters here are getting deeper. Horses with more races and more success. Tougher competition.

Generally, few horses ever win more than 4 races. The 'level' conditions generally stop at three. After that, horses need to go into stakes races, graded stakes races, or conditional allowance races. This is where the purse money, and the competition is stiffest. Of course, a really good horse might go straight from their maiden win to something else. It's up to the trainer. You can skip around, but once passing through a condition, you can't go back down.

All kinds of people Twitter. I came across one that said it might be a good idea to refer to divorcees as 'non-winners of one, other than,' etc.

Since this generally stops at three, and marriages might not, how would you classify Elizabeth Taylor if she were a race horse?

Silly question. We've all known she was a stakes horse.

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Polygamy in Your Grocer's Freezer

2011-07-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in a country western song I think I hear the lyrics, "...melt your cold, cold heart."

Robert Ettinger, the founder of the cryonics movement and the Cryonics Institute, passes away at 92, and is put on ice for the future. Whenever.

Mr. Ettinger founded and ran an institute that froze deceased humans in the hopes that future medical technology would find a way to bring the frozen being back to life. He practiced what he believed in. And while there are certainly those who think he was many bad things aside from crazy, he did at least wait until the person had passed away naturally before adding them to this deep freeze farm. A murderous Jack Frost he wasn't.

His mother was his first patient. Currently, the institute he ran houses 106 frozen people waiting to be be brought back to life. In addition, the claim is that there are 900 dues-paying members who are planning to add themselves to the locker when the right time comes.

Aside from his mother, Mr. Ettinger froze his first wife, as well as his second wife. Amazingly, this put Mr. Ettinger in the rare position of outliving two wives. This is hallowed ground. He told those who asked, that if both wives were revived (and assuming himself as well) he will be presented with a "high class problem."

How presumptuous. There are many men here on earth right now who are trying to live with two women.

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Homographs

2011-07-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

Finding homographs for me is like what it is for those people who find edible mushrooms in the woods with the aid of sniffing dogs.

In fact, even knowing what to call words that sound different, mean different things, but are spelled the same, was something hard to find. I was developing a small list of such words, but didn't know what to call them. It wasn't until some years ago my daughter corralled a group of speech professors at SUNY's Geneseo college that the word 'homograph' emerged after academic debate for such a word category.

The list goes on, but doesn't get added to fast. Some homographs are a bit routinely realized, like tear and tear. Others are less obvious: invalid and invalid; resume and resume. But, as always claimed, reading obituaries can be instructive, and not just with something having to do with the departed's life.

Margalit Fox, a linguist herself, writes in the NYT an obituary about Bruce Sundlun a former governor of Rhode Island who is described as having flair, and is described with flair by Ms. Fox.

He was a multiply decorated war hero. He had multiple homes. He had multiple marriages and multiple divorces. His exploits...

And there it is. Another homograph. Quick, dig it up.

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The Triumvirate

2011-07-22T05:45:00.000-07:00

If there was such a thing as international financial baseball cards, this one would rank up there with a team picture of the 1927 Yankees.

Greek finances have been saved, and the Gang of Three seems chiefly responsible. In fact, if they were starring in an Off-Broadway play it might cheekily be titled: 'Two Babes and a Dude.'

A picture of Angela appears no less than three times in today's New York Times. She's Paul Bunyan, AND the ox named Babe.

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Third Avenue

2011-07-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for anything nostalgic about Third Avenue, particularly anything set around the time the elevated tracks were there. The "El" was torn down in 1956, but I clearly remember it, although never needed to ride on it. The family flower shop was there on 18th Street, in the same building my grandfather, grandmother and great uncle lived, where my father and his brothers had moved after Second Avenue.

So when I read of a book titled 'This Place on Third Avenue' by John McNulty, a collection of stories written about the comings and goings of the population from a gin mill named Tim and Joe Costello's, I had to look into it further.

John McNulty wrote these stories from the mid 30s to the mid 50s and they appeared in The New Yorker. John was a reporter for the Daily News, but found an additional outlet for his writing in these sketches.

Talk about being gobsmacked! Yogi Berra once stated, "I really didn't say everything I said." And he should believed.

By the second page of McNulty's stories I'm reading about a cab driver, 'hackman,' who misses the old days regarding a certain joint that was a favorite. The cabby comes into Costello's and moans, "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

This is one of the most famous Yogi Berra sayings ever. I can't tell when the piece was written, but nothing in the book has a copyright after 1956. If McNulty was having the cabby quote Berra, he'd likely would have attributed his statement to Berra.

Despite a limited education, I'm sure Yogi learned to read. With no disrespect, it's not likely however he was a reader of The New Yorker.

I can't wait to read what else might come to light that's been underneath the rumbling of those tracks all these years.

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Eating Fish

2011-07-21T06:27:00.000-07:00

I thought someone was kidding me a few months ago when they claimed to have eaten a fish taco. I had never heard of one. And then they revealed they were sick as a dog after. That part didn't surprise me.

So what is there to think of the world's eating champion, Takeru Kobayashi, getting set to square off with a rock band's singer in a contest of eating fish tacos in Huntington Beach, California on August 3rd?

The WSJ reports yesterday that there may be a hitch. Not enough mahi-mahi to go around and provide the filling for the two eaters. Imagine that, two guys show up, and there aren't enough fish in the ocean.

Maybe Al Gore's right about this global thing.

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Modern Day Churchill

2011-07-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Fear not.

Angela is on the front page of today's WSJ.

Urban Myth

2011-07-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Urban myth. Urban legend. Too good to check.

A few blog entries back it was discussed what happens when an extreme favorite in horse racing runs out of the money. The place and show pools return lopsided sums to the backers of the horses who finish ahead of the unfortunate favorite.

This was discussed in the posting 'A View from the Bridge.' The legend of someone committing suicide when Twilight Tear ran out of the money in the 1944 Maryland Handicap at Laurel was repeated. The source of the legend was described. A promise was made to check newspaper accounts of this event.

Done. If someone did get shot in the head and fall off the roof at Laurel it was murder, not suicide. Twilight Tear ran coupled in the wagering--as an entry. This means that there was another horse, from the same owner--in this case Calumet Farm--running under the same betting number as Twilight Tear. Rules of racing go in and out on this over the years, but generally, if there are two or more horses in the race running for the same owner, they compete as an 'entry,' meaning the betting result of one is as good as the betting result of the other.

So, despite the fact that Twilight Tear ran out of the money, it's entrymate, Miss Keeneland, pulled the bacon out of the fire, and finished second. Thus, the bridge-jumpers that were that day that were betting on the 'sure thing' of Twilight Tear finishing at least in the money, were treated to a stay of bankruptcy by the rules of racing and were paid off for place and show because the entrymate at least gained second.

The past performances show that Twilight Tear ran with an entrymate, but don't tell you who the entrymate was. A full chart would, but finding that these days would really require some archival research.

My only regret in all this is not that I believed in something that didn't happen, but that it's too late to get to Les here on earth and tell him he's been repeating a great story, but a fable.

I'm just going to have to wait to join him somewhere.

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Not All Metaphors Apply

2011-07-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

For most of us, saying "I wouldn't trust him as far as I can throw him" is a phrase meant to convey a complete lack of trust in someone, because throwing someone for most of us would not result in much yardage. Billy Bangert had to express distrust a different way.

Billy Bangert, who recently passed away at 87, was sometimes referred to as the 'World's Strongest Mayor,' for founding a town in east St. Louis in hopes of attracting the Olympics, while at the same time being a champion shot-putter, discus thrower, caber tosser (a Scottish telephone pole), and all-round strongman of novelty events.

(Ron Swoboda was once described as the strongest Mets outfielder, but then some wag added: "odor's not everything.")

Stephen Miller gives us Mr. Bangert's surely colorful life in an obituary in today's WSJ. It is not without some confusion, although it is straightened out when you do a little research.

Mr. Miller tells us Billy carried the 775 pound Dinnie Stones across the River Dee bridge in Potarch, Scotland. At first, this was thought to be a vary large large human named Dinnie Stones. Perhaps a relative of Dwight Stones, the U.S. Olympic high jumper.

Not so, since reading on there is a reference to someone doing the same thing with Dinnie Stones in 1860. This would make Dinnie quite an old person who hasn't yet succumbed to being overweight, let alone being over 150 years old.

No, the Dinnie Stones are a pair of very heavy rocks in Scotland that people lift up, carry, toss a bit, and if successful, carry across the Potarch Bridge. They seem to do strange things in Scotland, perhaps due to the weather.

But after all, they did invent golf.

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Jimmy Roselli

2011-07-16T07:27:00.000-07:00

Anyone who is what is known as "of a certain age" and comes from the New York area and listened to AM radio will likely remember the singer Jimmy Roselli, who just passed away, amazingly at 85. No harm was done to him other than what it seems he did to himself.

Margalit Fox, in her NYT obituary, cleverly recounts the life and times of Jimmy Roselli, a widely popular singer in the 60s whose star was going up like the rockets from Cape Canaveral. Jimmy could do no wrong, until he did, and seemingly torpedoed his own career. He fell off the turntable, and was only heard from by those who sought him out on purpose. He didn't come at you anymore in a media blitz.

Adding to Ms. Fox's recount is a passage I came across in the book 'Donnie Brasco', an FBI agent's 1980s account of his infiltration of the mob in the late 70s. Donnie Brasco was the name he used, and he kept his undercover role up for an incredible six years. The Al Pacino/Johnny Depp movie wasn't bad, and got good notices for its actors and creators.

Reading the obituary's account of Mr. Roselli's career as well as the passage from the book, you get a sense of what a pariah Jimmy had become. Also, how far his career had fallen and what he was resorting to to keep it going. The account, related from events at the NYC's famous Little Italy San Gennaro festival, is I would think from the late 70s.

-----------------------------
The book 'Donnie Brasco' is written in the first person by the FBI agent Joseph Pistone, with Richard Woodley.

One time during the Feast of San Gennaro, Lefty and I and Mike Sabella were sitting in a club across the street from CaSa Bella, which Mike usually closed during the feast because he hated tourists.

Jimmy Roselli, the Italian singer, had his car parked out on the street. He opened the trunk, and it was filled with his records. He started hawking his own records out of his car trunk right there at the feast.

Mike couldn't believe it. He went outside and said to Roselli, "Put the fucking trunk down because you're fucking embarrassing me by trying to sell your fucking records here on the street."

Roselli closed the trunk immediately.
"He'll act different from now on," Lefty says.
--------------------------
According to the obituary, perhaps not.

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Bottle Openers

2011-07-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

Perhaps amazingly, perhaps not, but within a week of the WSJ running a picture and text about a uniquely designed bottle opener, the NYT expanded on the theme and produced a scavenger's guide to bottle openers last Thursday in its Home Section.

The NYT piece is more informative and gives you a sense of how something as simple as a bottle opener can be turned into an object d'art by designers.

This if course caused me to e-mail the reporter and tell them that the lowly bottle opener has a nickname of being called a "church key". The e-mail didn't come back as undeliverable, so I have to assume they at least got it.

No response was ever received, but that's the way it can be with reporters. Some of them don't like it when you might know something they don't.

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Keep Your Eye on the Pinstripes

2011-07-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Stephen Miller, the obituary writer for the WSJ, scored the equivalent of an obituary scoop the other day when he wrote a bylined obit about Barry Bremen, a compulsive imposter who crashed events and gained at least 15 minutes of fame several times over.

The paper of record, The NYT just today printed a bylined obit. Mr Miller's appeard July 8, closer to when Mr. Bremen died, June 30th. Making it more of a scoop is that the WSJ only prints at best, one obituary an issue; the Times, several each day, all the time.

Regardless, Mr. Bremen is no longer with us. It turns out, he gave up being an imposter several years ago when he felt it might be too dangerous to tempt security people to mistreat him on being collared.

He portrayed himself as many different people, and even as the San Diego Padres' Chicken mascot. What's best about reading about him is seeing the 1979 picture the WSJ and the NYT both used in their pieces: Mr. Bremen wearing Yankee pinstripes and looking like Bobby Murcer (or is it Joe Pepitone?), albeit a
6-foot-4 version.

In the movie and the Broadway musical versions of 'Catch Me if You Can' the Frank Abagnales, father and son, remind us that getting away with portraying someone else can be easy when you make everyone else focus on the "Yankee pinstripes." Look the part, and you've got the part. Turns out a reference to pinstripes in a phone conversation with FBI agent Carl Hanratty becomes part of the puzzle piece that aids in Frank Jr. being collared. If you're unfamiliar with this, it's enough to say there's a happy ending.

The power of Yankee pinstripes might also help to explain why a young man with fresh debt of his own, who catches Derek Jeter's 3000th hit, a home run, in effect gives a winning lottery ticket to a millionaire: Derek Jeter.

By both obituary accounts, it seems Barry Bremen had a good time and hurt no one. And Christian Lopez, who if he doesn't do anything else noteworthy, will forever be known as the young man who gave Derek Jeter the ball.

Sounds like he's poised to have a good time as well.

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Eating

2011-07-08T14:23:00.000-07:00

Stories about eating are forever in the news. And July 4th can be counted on to give us news of the Coney Island hot dog eating contest at Nathan's. This is when the invited eat an ungodly number of hot dogs, each with a bun, and someone is declared a winner after 10 minutes of supervised and televised gluttony.

For the past several years the event has been won by Joey Chestnut, who for some reason is not a champion NASCAR driver, but rather a champion chomper.

But for the true followers of the sport, this year's story was dominated by the ex-champion, Takereu Kobayashi, who won the title six straight times between 2001 and 2006. Due to a dispute with the promoters, and after crashing the event last year and getting arrested, Mr. Kobayashi staged his own contest, simultaneous to the one held in Brooklyn. He ate more hot dogs than Mr. Chestnut, apparently under exact circumstances, but of course is not recognized as the winner. His was a non-sanctioned event.

The news stories were as much about him as they were about the main event at Surf and Stillwell Avenues. And in one of these stories the life of a champion eater is further revealed. They apparently don't just eat hot dogs, but compete with other forms of food, or at least what can be ingested, digested, and doesn't kill them. Yet.

The mental capacity of a cow is probably something someone has seldom thought about. You assume they might be dumb, but hey, they're so useful, in so many ways that the question of turning to them for teaching has likely never come up.

I don't have a basis for more comparative anatomy, but perhaps none is needed. In one news story Mr. Kobayashi is described as holding "the record for eating cow brains-57 in 15 minutes."

Mr. Kobayashi is a champion eater, but 57 brains in 15 minutes makes you wonder how big can a cow's brain be to begin with? No wonder they don't go very far.

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Open and Shut Case

2011-07-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

It was nearly a Mad Magazine moment.

Ever since newspapers started accepting advertising for their front pages it had to happen: the collision of a story and the ad. Or, at least the near collision.

Take today's WSJ front page picture with caption that shows what might be a naked man in a piece of unzippered rolly luggage. It's not part of a magician's act, although it does have to do with a wife trying to make her prisoner husband disappear from a Mexican prison after their conjugal visit. If the escape attempt were successful there would probably be no picture, even though it involves a Mexican jail.

Since it certainly looks like a piece of luggage with wheels, we have to believe that attention was not drawn to the bag because she was having trouble lifting it past the guards. Something else alerted them to check the contents.

Perhaps it was a routine check to see what was inside. After all, Home Depot looks inside garbage barrels going through the checkout for secreted unpaid items. Perhaps her lingerie was inadvertently left behind and someone put some numbers together and came up "let's check that bag." In Spanish.

Since the husband was already doing 20 years for weapons possession it is assumed some extra charges might now be added. Certainly she'll be charged with husband possession of some kind. A wife's nightmare.

You need no greater proof that the WSJ has changed than to take this picture in on its front page. And there is no accompanying story. That's called something in newspaper parlance, but I don't know what it is.

But what's the Mad Magazine moment you might ask. Well, it's nearly a MMM. Below the captioned picture is a 3" news story. But immediately below that, and therefore just three inches below the escape attempt picture, is an ad in the lower right corner of the front page. It's a financial-type ad, for iShares/BlackRock. The ad shows a sea shore vista with the headline "And just like that, you're in Australia."

It's certainly a destination the couple would have settled for.

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A View from the Bridge

2011-07-04T16:42:00.000-07:00

Pittsburg Phil would have loved it.

Phil of course was George Smith, who was written about a few postings back. He is the legendary horseplayer from whom all horseplayers, whenever temporarily smart, are descended from.

I haven't yet gotten my used edition of Phil's 'Maxims,' but I strongly suspect that one of the maxims is to never bet on a horse trying something for the first time. I know from my friend, who spent significant time being mentored by one of Phil's adherents, that betting on a horse at any odds, let alone short odds, in an event that represents something the horse might be trying for the first time, is never a good bet.

This usually relates to weight, distance, surface, and sometimes the actual track they're running at in the day's race. When these qualities present themselves at the same time, it is smart to look elsewhere in the field and see what other betting opportunities there might be.

Hindsight is not 20/20. It is 20/10. Even given that, yesterday's 9th race at Belmont, the Bed of Roses Handicap, could have been spotted as a bed of thorns, that could turn into a wonderful array of dollars and a lifetime of storytelling for some temporarily smart people. Geniuses, actually. And it did.

The favorite ran out of the money. And not just a lukewarm favorite, or a regular favorite-type favorite, but a heavy favorite, a so called "odds-on" favorite, a horse that was going off at significantly less than even- money, which meant on winning it was going to return less than a dollar profit for each dollar bet on it to win. This is a so-called "short price" horse, "chalk," and is often avoided by horseplayers as much as they might avoid work.

In the case of Hilda's Passion, the short price was 35 cents to the dollar, meaning an expected return of $1.35 for each dollar bet to win. As "short" as that is, if Bernie Madoff could have honestly returned money to all investors at that rate he would certainly not now be in prison and would be the subject of far more complimentary comments than he's lately been hearing. But that's finance, vs. horseplaying. And even after all these years, people continue to confuse the two.

That's the "win" payoff. Place and show routinely pay less, and when you start off with a short win expectancy, the place and show prices are just about guaranteed to pay even less, often only $2.20 or even $2.10 (the legal minimum). There are those who still see finance in this, and that truly, mathematically translates to a 5-10% return on "investment."

Looking at a four-legged animal with a head, heart and lungs carrying a human and trying to run fast as they can on spindle legs as an "investment" is viewed by many as a stupid thought, perhaps as risky as thinking Greece will repay the money. But risk drives the world, so we have situations like yesterday's 9th race.

Hilda's Passion does deserve to be a short price. In 2011 the filly has never been out of the money, meaning it's never been worse than third. And in Hilda's case, it's never finished worse than second, winning five times and finishing second three times. The horse is trained by Todd Pletcher, and is being ridden by John Velazquez, a trainer/jockey combination that regularly puts people in the winner's circle, where being asked to smile is never needed. Many, many positives that point to what some refer to as "the mortal lock."

But, the practical people will always remind you they run the race on the racetrack, not on paper. Hilda's Passion has never shown a win at today's weight, 124 pounds, picking up a pound from her last outing, when she ran half a furlong shorter than today's seven furlong distance. She has won at today's distance, but at lesser weights. She has won at today's track and surface, but not at today's track with today's distance. So, there are a few things she's being asked to do in the race that she hasn't done before. And the odds are short--very short. A recipe that would send Phil and others into another restaurant.

Extremely short-priced horse seldom run out of the money. I don't really know what the numbers are, but their tendency to at least finish in the top three tends to bring out those who are referred to as "bridge-jumpers." These are people who wager, "plunge" huge amounts of money into the show pool betting, "investing" that they will be returned at least the legal minimum that will guarantee a 5% return on their quick "investment." The "mortal lock."

In yesterday's 9th race there was a total of over $300,000 in the show pool, much of which was bet on Hilda's Passion, with the expectancy of an easy, minimum 5% profit. Cash. No 1099s.

The term "bridge-jumper" is attached to these people because it is theorized that if their bet doesn't return the hoped for result, they will become so depressed that they will suicidally jump off a bridge. What really happens to these people who lose is not reliably known, but the stories persist.

My friend and I used to meet a fellow at the races who mentored us. He had a name, but we nicknamed him Mr. Pace, for his devotion to his self-created pace figures. Anytime there was a short-priced horse, and it was generally a filly, who was set to go off at some un-Godly short price, Mr. Pace, Les, would just say "Twilight Tear."

We had become acquainted with the story of Twilight Tear, a filly Les told us that went off at 1-10 (10 cents to the dollar) and finished off the board.

Twilight Tear was a sensational filly that ran in the 1940s and would have certainly been a horse Les saw race. The horse had an outstanding record: 18-2-2 for 24 starts, thus leaving only two starts that didn't result in an in-the-money finish. Twilght's last start was its nightfall. The horse did not finish its last race, being eased before going over the finish line.

The other out-of-the-money finish has to be the race Les referred to. It was two back from the last race. Whether Les was there or not is another story, and if what he said happened did happen after the official sign was posted, is another story. But on that fateful afternoon, Twilight Tear encountered a muddy track at Laurel, in Maryland, on a surface condition it had never encountered before, let alone won on, and went off at 15 cents to the dollar in a six horse field. The distance was a mile and a quarter, something handled in her past with a win, but the 130 pounds was new a boundary. As was the "off-track" surface. Twilight finished fourth, with the past performance trouble line reading "quit badly." As for the gunshot, further archival research will be undertaken.

When odds-on horses finish out-of-the money funny things happen to the payoffs. Because of the pool system and the parimutuel structure, winning bets are paid off with money from the losers in their respective pool, after take-out taxes, of course. This can produce some very lopsided payoffs when there is heavy concentration on an expected result that doesn't occur.

Years and years ago I was at Belmont with a friend at the 1979 Beldame Stakes, a race for older fillies that had two great ones in it that day, Waya and It's in the Air. It's in the Air was heavily favored at 2-5 (40 cents to the dollar) in the seven horse field.

From a handicap point of view I liked Waya to win. It's In the Air had never won at today's one and a quarter distance or won over a sloppy track. My $4 bet on the 3-1 Waya was what today's wiseguys would call "value."

I explained my reasoning to my friend who declared he had put $2 "across the board" on Waya, meaning a $2 bet in the win, place and show pools. I questioned his wisdom because if the 2-5 shot finishes other than first, gets in there at second or even third, his non-win bets on Waya will return next to nothing. My $4 straight Waya win bet was a better bet.

Ask a short-priced horse to do something they haven't done before and the result can surprise you. Waya did win, and paid the expected $8 and change for the win bet. But It's In the Air, at 2-5, with heavy show money wagered by the suicidal, finished out-of-the -money creating some terrific place and show payoffs for Waya. I got back $16 for my $4 bet, and Tom got back something like $80 for his combination $2 across the board bet. Tom was a finance guy, by the way. I'm not sure, but I think I made him buy me a drink.

And as for yesterday's 9th at Belmont with Hilda's Passion finishing off-the-board? The winner, Tamarind Hall, a legitimate longshot at nearly 16-1, paid $33.80 to win, $13.80 to place, and a lopsided $53.00 to show because of the heavy, heavy show money that was NOT going to be returned, at any percent, to whomever backed Hilda's Passion.

And the show prices on the second and third place horses? Kid Kate paid $53.50 and Spa City Princess paid $64.50.

I wasn't at the races yesterday and was not part of this action. But others were, and I'm sure some were temporarily smart. Geniuses even.

They've got something to remember for the rest of their lives.

Pittsbug Phil is smiling.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

The Church Key

2011-07-02T17:53:00.000-07:00

The pun is irresistible. A house key cut to function as a bottle opener.

For those who don't get the pun, and that will definitely include the person who wrote the copy in the WSJ, a bottle opener/can opener was once upon a time referred to as a "church key."

I distinctly remember this era because whenever there were cans of beer in the vicinity of our neighbor and my father, the neighbor would ask, "whose got the church key?" Beer cans of course in that era of my childhood were heavy gauge steel made from spent WWII howitzer shells. You couldn't be a 98 pound weakling and crush one of those babies. Only riveters need apply.

Cans did not have easy opening tops, and bottle caps did not twist off. If you were at the beach and didn't bring the church key you really were a loser. That was worse than carrying a radio with dead batteries.

So, when I saw the featured item in the Gears and Gadgets weekend section of the WSJ I thought, gee, after all these years, there really is a church key, despite its apparent inability to open a can. No one really needs that nowadays, anyway.

Of course only someone about my age would think the pictured item is a church key. The person who wrote the descriptive copy claims "a man's got to drink, and it beats using a lighter or your teeth." The combined look of a key functioning as a bottle opener on your key chain will keep you from "looking like you're on spring break with your bros every time you open the front door." I know I couldn't have said it better.

Never mind. I'm sold. And at $11, it's got a look that will elicit the "church key" reaction when I give it to two of my friends, whose ages, combined with mine, subtracted from the current year, would put someone back around the time of the administration of John Adams.

And I'm hardly a Luddite. I logged on to order three. The Web site (http://www.makr.com/) doesn't work and nothing goes in my shopping cart. Point, click, change browsers, no luck so far.

Of course I could do something as provincial as call them up and place an order. Nah. What the hell. These days I only drink bottled water with twist off caps anyway.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

We're Taking Him to Bellevue

2011-06-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

A fairly recent blog entry referred to the practice of taking the publicly disturbed to NYC's famed Bellevue for psychiatric observation. The practice has been in effect for decades, and is freshly recounted when reading the story of Raymond Velasquez, 34, of Brooklyn, who recently spent two hours 25 feet off the ground on a utility pole in Times Square in the middle of the day rapping and performing calisthenics.

A large response was made, and a large audience ensued. According to the story in the NYT, "Mr. Velazquez finally surrendered shortly after 11 A.M., Tuesday. That afternoon he was evaluated, under standard procedure at Bellevue Hospital Center."

Certainly due to privacy regulations, his medical condition was not released. It's not even disclosed if he was released. Look up, I guess. But he is expected to be charged with reckless endangerment and other infractions. Screwy or not, closing Times Square down for several hours is still frowned on.

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The Current Front-runner

2011-06-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

Is Christine Lagarde, the first woman to head the International Monetary Fund, about to edge out Angela Merkel as the world's most photographed woman with clothes on?

Ms. Lagarde has just been appointed to head the Fund following the famous misstep of her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who resigned following allegations of sexual improprieties in a New York hotel involving a member of the housekeeping staff. After that resignation. Ms. Lagarde sprinted to the front of the pack of contenders, and now has secured the I.M.F. position.

Given that elevation, her picture is appearing in the paper. The NYT alone has her as a "reefer" twice: on the front pages of their main section as well as the Business Section, where a little further inside she is seen in a bit of peek-a-boo pose checking someone, or something out. Time will tell what to make of this Hanes underwear, boxer or briefs Michael Jordan look.

And Angela? Not forgotten whatsoever. According to the Times story, Ms. Lagarde has "nurtured a close personal relationship with the German Chancellor." Angela's picture appears in the same section, on the very next page, as part of another fiscal story, where she is seen inspecting an honor guard of troops in Berlin with the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao.

As they might say at Wimbledon: Advantage, still Ms. Merkel, for staying in the news on Christine's big day.

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When Lightning Strikes

2011-06-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

@obitsman has once again put out a Tweet that makes reference back to a news story. This one is from the Chicago Tribune and covers the statistical observation that way more men are struck by lightning than women. Reasons are offered.

Left out might be the real reason that more men are liars, and might be claiming that that they should be struck "right here on this spot" if they aren't telling the truth. The Lie Detector in the sky is only too happy to oblige.

This might be what was behind the golfer's Lee Trevino expalanation for what seems like a strange thing to do when running off a golf course during a thunder and lightning storm. For those who may not know, Mr. Trevino won several PGA tournaments, some majors, but started out in his game as a golf husler in the Texas, Mexico border areas. Hustlers are inveterate liars, but seen by many as colorful. Mr. Trevino was certainly in that category.

So, what else could explain Mr. Trevino's choice of running off a golf course during a lightning storm waving a One-Iron over his head for protection. To Lee, it was simple: "Even God can't hit a One Iron."

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Pittsburg Phil

2011-06-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

Pittsburg Phil proved to be the exception to the generally accepted wisdom that all horseplayers die broke. Of course "Phil," or George E. Smith, might have died broke if he had been given more time on earth, but he died at what now would be the early age of 43. It was 1905 and Pittsburg Phil succumbed to tuberculosis before his money ran out. Thus, before the United States passed the 16th Amendment allowing income tax, there was an estimate that Phil was worth $2 million at his demise, making the $30,000 mausoleum that he is buried in North Pittsburgh's Uniondale cemetery a fitting tribute to a man who actually made money betting on the horses and who truly gave birth to what is now the modern age of handicapping.

I had never heard of Pittsburg Phil until this past Saturday's Daily Racing Form did an extensive story on Phil and his accomplishments in their weekend insert. Yes, even the Daily Racing Form has a weekend section.

I mentioned Phil to a good friend of mine who cut his journalistic teeth working at a racing publication in the early 70s. He was shocked I had never heard of Phil. When he started at the racing paper he worked with a considerably older fellow, Howard Rowe, who was born in 1910. Howie was so in awe and respectful of Phil's achievements that he had a picture of Phil above his desk. Thus, in the early 1970s, Phil's legend was still so sufficiently alive in these working quarters that his picture graced an office wall like that of a president or a deity.

And after reading Ryan Goldberg's well-told story of Phil in the DRF, the upward look to Phil's visage was understandably deserved, certainly at least to someone whose interests were similar.

My friend and I still can get paper cuts from winning and losing tickets. Howard Rowe has only recently passed away. But Pittsburg Phil, who passed away 106 years ago, looks out in stone atop his grand mausoleum telling us all that we don't have to die broke.

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Come On On

2011-06-23T08:41:00.000-07:00

By now the news has reached many--certainly Whitey Bulger and his companion--that they are now in the FBI's custody. There are now TWO vacancies on the TOP TEN MOST WANTED list.

I really don't know how often this happens, but it must be like there being two Supreme Court vacancies at the same time. Certainly the Bureau wants to pick worthy successors, if only to get the most out of the lease they must have entered into for that Times Square billboard advertising that Whitey, after 16 years was still on the lam.

The billboard owner was surely looking at a good thing when approached by the Bureau to advertise a fugitive who has eluded capture since 1995. Despite Whitey being 81, I'm sure the billboard owner was licking their lips at a long-term rental. Possibly dead is not good enough to terminate the rental.

Hopefully, the Bureau will continue to use mass marketing in their effort to keep the TOP TEN list in a revolving door status. The real estate market is depressed enough without the rental of billboards going in the tank as well.

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The Top Ten

2011-06-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Most of us at this point have heard that the FBI has a 10 Most Wanted List. It is availalbe for viewing in the Post Offices, the old fashioned way, hard copy, or online. Perhaps there will be an app for it for your phone. Who knows.

As a kid I checked the postings out at the local post office. I was barely tall enough to turn the pages that were on the wall in a hoizontal loose leaf-type flip chart. No one looked familiar. The few that I did manage to read about all seemed to have something to do with armed robbery, principally banks, and always in the Midwest. John Dillinger types. It was the late 50s, so I realize now that there had to still be some of those guys around.

But now, in connection with the story that the FBI is openly and creatively advertising their desire to bring No. 1 in, James 'Whitey' Bulger, we read that even though bin Laden has been confirmed as deceased as of May 2nd, they still haven't gotten around to adding a replacement to the list.

The process of keeping this list has never been thought about before, but it is surprising to realize that right now, the Top 10 is composed of nine guys presumed alive, and one known dead guy. Seven weeks later. What does it take to move onto the list? An agent? A majority vote by the committee?

And although every spelling of bin Laden's first name has been seen to be 'Osama,' the FBI spells it as 'Usama.' You'd really hate to hear the wrong guy has been iced over a typo.

Nevertheless, why the delay in revising the list? Aren't there 'alternates' for the list? Or, a body of juniors ready to be seniors as soon as there's a graduation ceremony? It is a wonder.

Given what seems like a new way of thinking at the Bureau, when the newly annointed member of the Top Ten is known will they atart to appear on shows and things?

Of course that's silly. They've got to find them first. Then eventually take them off the list.

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The Red Carpet Greeting

2011-06-20T14:41:00.001-07:00

Scrutiny of German Leader Builds as Debt Crisis Rattles Europe

By ALAN COWELL
Published: June 19, 2011
BERLIN —

"Benny, I'm telling you. She's bigger than Krupp Steel."

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She's Back

2011-06-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

She's back in the news. With the European money crisis heating up again, and with Greece teetering toward insolvency, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is once again the world's most photographed woman with clothes on.

She's everywhere. She's seen with France's President Nicolas Sarkozy more often than his wife. She once again appears nearly everyday in the WSJ.

Do I notice her more now because there are photos in the WSJ? I don't know.

I do know she has a friendly looking demeanor and if the whole European crisis costs her her job, for whatever reason, she should be able to gain employment as their version of Captain Kangaroo.

I can't help it. She reminds me of Captain Kangaroo. And nobody didn't like Captain Kangaroo.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

Connected in So Many Ways

2011-06-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

I was sort of kicking around today, somewhat eager to write something, but had no fresh ideas. Of course I hadn't yet picked up the paper, so it was probably understandable. If you can't find something to write or think about after reading or viewing anything that's in front of you, delivered through any format, even something as old fashioned as paper and print, then you are somewhere else.

So when I saw the front page of the Paper of Record provide an advance on an obituary inside I read the blurb.

OBITUARIES B19
A Champion of the Bar Code

And when I realized that the teaser was placed squarely over the paper's own U.P.C. code in the lower right hand corner of the front page I suspected I knew who wrote the obit. I was right.

A highly informative obituary, six columns wide, is given the Margalit Fox treatment. This gives us some poetic alliteration (perhaps over the top, but fun nonetheless) as well as a solid history lesson in the development and adoption of what is now known as the Universal Product Code (U.P.C.).

And then there's that special something that I'm sure did not escape the reporter's knowledge. A few years ago they wrote the bylined obituary on Gerard Damiano, the director of one of the largest grossing movies ever made, the prono film 'Deep Throat.' Fame is achieved in many ways, and Mr. Damiano's was the movie. Ms. Fox merely recounted his passing.

But, here's where everything in the world sits inside of something else. Alan Haberman, the champion of the bar code as we know it, didn't invent it, but rather was notable for getting it accepted as the standard to be used by all forms of product manufacturers.

Ms. Fox uses a passage from a book that was written about the bar code and Mr. Haberman where his consensus building skills are recognized.

"Mr, Haberman's committee comprised more than a half dozen type-A businessmen, and discussion could be fractious...Mr. Haberman found a spectacularly good way to smooth dissent. First he organized a dinner at one of the city's finest restaurants. Then he took everyone to a local movie theater to see 'Deep Throat.'

"Not all afterward the committee votes unanimously for the I.B.M. bar code, adopted in April 1973."

To think that consumerism as we know it today was likely propelled along by pornography is to recognize how community standards can be achieved.

If only ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner's efforts had been so noble.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

Words In Play

2011-06-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

Aside from puns, the WSJ these days can go into overdrive when creating a play on words. Take two great examples from today's Marketplace section.

High-Hopes at Miracle-Gro In Medical Marijuana Field
Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. has long sold weed killer. Now it's hoping to help people grow killer weed.

For Wallboard Maker USG, Recovery Remains Elusive
USG Corp. has hit a wall.

I'm sure there are more. Just in today's paper alone.

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Ned Nefer

2011-06-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

@OBITSMAN in a Twitter Tweet has once again provided some humorous links.

The first involves his use of the word FRUITCAKE! to describe Ned Nefer, apprently a local lunatic from upstate New York who claims the mannequin he pushes around on a cart is his wife, and that he met her when she was just a head.

Fruitcake is a funny word all by itself, and can connotate the fairly dated reference to someone who is considered nuts, as in, "nutty as a fruitcake."

Russell Baker, once commenting on fruitcake as an edible, said that it was the one food that could be described as a family heirloom. This was a clever way to describe a fruitcake's durability. Since no one ever really eats any part of a fruitcake when it is given to someone at Christmastime, it lingers in the house for years, and has the potential to become part of an estate's distribution.

As for Ned Nefer claiming the mannequin is his wife, being called a fruitcake might be arguably a tad harsh. After all, I once heard that, "two can live as cheap as one, if one doesn't eat."

Ned just might be a genius.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/

The Reform Candidate from Prison

2011-06-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

If you didn't read this story from what most would consider a reliable source, you'd think it was the plot of some offbeat movie based on a fictional source. But front page in Saturday's NYT is the story of prisons in Venezuela and the unique way they're run. In short, the inmates run the place.

Reading the story you'd have to agree that the penal system, its housing, and its unique blend of creature comforts might do more to encourage crime than deter it. You might be better off in prison, than outside of it. Commit the crime, and be rewarded with the time.

The inmates' chief, Mr. Rodriquez, a thick-necked longtermer who barks orders into a cellphone, was interviewed as bodyguards shucked oysters for him. "There's more security in here than out on the street." Asked about his ambitions after incarceration, Mr. Rodriquez said he would consider politics.

Everybody's got to start somewhere.

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Norman Mailer Slept Here

2011-06-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Growing up when I did, the politically correct way to say that someone was "nuts" was to announce they should go to, be in, or be forced to go to, Bellevue. Bellevue was and still is a NYC hospital, treating all kinds of conditions. It was always large, and has gotten even larger. But the place became best known as a psychiatric center where the police took people who needed to be "observed" because of what they had done. They might have done it to themselves, as in surviving a suicide attempt, or, something that hurt others, perhaps even killing them.

If the person you were referring to was really around the bend there always was a reference to the key that should be thrown away that might otherwise someday be used to release them. "Throw the key away" was always reserved for special cases.

Occasionally as a teenager I had to deliver flowers to someone who was in Bellevue. Not someone locked up in the psychiatric ward, but the more general medical/surgery wards. At the time, these were large rooms with lots of beds filled with people who didn't seem to move. And there didn't seem to be anyone around to watch that nothing was happening, or to even make something happen. I wandered around until I found the person in Ward J, say, and placed the flowers on the night table. People in hospitals never tipped. They barely seemed to breathe.

Anyway, I was reminded of Bellevue when I came across a passage about it in the recently published book, 'The Mad Bomber of New York, The Extraordinary True Story of the Manhunt that Paralyzed a City,' by Michael M. Greenburg.

Yes, true, and the bomber, George Metesky, is quite a story, having been finally found in 1957, after starting his version of a reign of terror in 1940. After some police and court formalities, he was sent to Bellevue, for observation.

Mr. Greenburg quite delightfully and accurately describes the place, the circumstances that still place people there, while adding the names of other notables that have passed through its iron gates. Certainly revealing something of his own personality, Mr. Greenburg cites a jazz musician, a writer, a playwright and a fictional Santa Claus as being sent to the same place they sent "The Mad Bomber" to be observed.

The nine-story brick and limestone structure that housed the cheerless if not gruesome psychiatric division of the Bellevue Hospital stood against the gray winter skies of Manhattan like a dismal shadow--a harbinger of stormy weather. The fetid East River quietly flowed at the rear of the building while its decaying piers clung tenuously to wooden retention walls along its banks. Tough Bellevue Hospital Center--said to be the oldest general public hospital in the United States--was a cluster of hospital pavilions extending four city blocks along First Avenue and interconnected by a labyrinth of foreboding underground tunnels, the epithet "Bellevue" was often used to denote only its infamous and gloomy psychiatric division.

The red brick and wrought iron gates of the Bellevue asylum had, by the 1950s, been firmly ensconced in the public imagination. A temporary (and often longer) home to the wretched and the poor, the facility also hosted notables such as Charlie Parker, Norman Mailer, and Eugene O'Neill for observation following crimes or activities that defied sanity.

And for a while, George Metesky slept there.

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Huguette Clark: 1906-2011

2011-05-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

Imagine a woman whose father was born in 1839 and who likely told her of where he was when Lincoln was assasinated in 1865 when he himself was 26 years old, who up till Tuesday of this week could have possibly told us who she thought would be in the finals on 'American Idol' and 'Dancing with the Stars,' who has now herself suddenly passed away.

Where does the time go?

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Flip Wilson

2011-05-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've always thought there was poetry in prose. And when I come across it, I like to preserve it, commit it to memory. It can make for some great pieces of conversation when brought up at the right time. Image is everything. So is timing.

That fellow John Barlett surely thought along these same lines when he set out to compile his book of 'Familiar Quotations.' There have been many editions of this book, and I distinctly remember a story a few years ago by the then-current editor on what criteria to use to keep adding to the book. "Go ahead, make my day" is certainly not Shakespeare, but someone did write it, and someone did memorably say it. Why not include it?

While that academic debate likely continues, I set out a few years ago to compile my own quotation book, containing phrases I read or heard that I thought were especially memorable, profund, sounded good, or just plain made me laugh. Something is brought to mind.

I haven't been directly updating this "book" of mine much lately. Russell Baker once wrote me that Commonplace books were hardly ever published. But he also at the same time sent me examples of what he was compilng. I felt in good company. And the blog has somewhat taken over for memorializing phrases.

An example of something I added to the 'Personal Book of Quotations' (everything needs a title) was the following:

Sleek, slinky creatures crowd the bar at Vandam. With a Darwinian instinct for social display, they perch on the tall stools and preen, agreeably conscious that they have chosen a flattering setting.
--Restaurant review, NYT, July 21, 1999

There may have been a picture, but I thought this was a great way of saying there were some very long-legged, attractive women hanging out at the bar. You have to admit, it's a literary wolf-whistle. And then some.

The reaction to phrases continues, and I recently found one from what I would think might be considered a surprising source--James Balwin writing about boxing. But there it is, in 'At the Fights,' an anthology of essays and stories from a wide variety of writers, all having something to say about boxing. Mr. Baldwin's covers the first Floyd Patterson/Sonny Liston fight in 1962, held in Chicago.

Patterson's training camp scene is described. But the poetry really sets in when Mr. Baldwin describes some of the entourage filling up the place:

"There were hangers-on and proteges, a singer somewhere around, whom I didn't meet, owned by Patterson, and another singer owned by someone else--who couldn't sing, everyone agreed, but who didn't have to, being so loaded with personality--and there were some improbable-looking women, turned out, it would seem, by a machine shop, who didn't seem, really, to walk or talk, but rather to gleam, click and glide..."

Gleam, click and glide. That's all you need.

I date myself every day I wake up, but if anyone remembers Flip Wilson in the 1970s on his show doing his Geraldine imitation--the saucy lady who fresh-mouths the world--then you can remember seeing someone who "gleams, clicks and glides."

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The Urge to Pun

2011-05-18T11:12:00.000-07:00

The urge to pun can be something many people engage in. In some people, it might also be an involuntary reflex, something they can no more control than their breathing. Their medulla just sends out an automatic reflex signal that when a certain combination of words or images presents itself, they have to chime in with something, no matter how silly, profound, annoying, or perhaps even vulgar it might be. And since vulgar can be subjective, I usually take few precautions into letting my 'pun-side' take over in expressing myself. There is usually no one around, so I usually just wind up entertaining myself. But, sometimes I feel the need to share. Be prepared.

As previously mentioned, there is an entertaining book out about puns: 'The Pun Also Rises,' by John Pollack. It gives the pun scholarly and poplular treatment. Mr Pollack remarkably recounts that his own punning started at two and a half years old. Perhaps that kind of genetic hard wiring helped him win a World Championship title at punning. (Yes, there apparently is one; his title coming in 1995, at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships.)

But you don't have to be a punning prodigy to engage in the form. As Mr. Pollack notes in his book, it's been going on since there were cave drawings. Imagine that, as soon as mankind stood up, he did standup.

So, when @obitsman Tweets a reference to a legitimate news story coming out of Houston, well, the reflexes took over.

It seems a man in Houston took his neigbor to view something through a hole in his fence. Through this hole, the neighbor pointed out what he had done with a chainsaw to another neighbor, who he claimed was stealing from him.

This of course can only be described as someone being lead "to look through a knot hole and seeing someone who was not whole."

I'm not aware of any treatment for this condition.

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Not Really News

2011-05-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

WHAT ARNOLD MAY HAVE HIDDEN HERE
He's already admitted to one extramarital affair -- and this building may have been the site of others.

What new, sordid allegations reveal.

This is one of those silly teasers that AOL and others throw out there to draw attention to something that is not really a story. This is a picture of Governor Schwarzenegger's Santa Monica office, where, it is speculated he hid things.

Of course he did. He played 'hide the salami.'

Ultimately, all men are alike. Side effects may vary, however.

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Catching Up With the Newspapers

2011-05-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

Writing you don't get a chance to read anywhere else.

Jim Dwyer, on the funeral of Jimmy McElroy, 66, who died in a California prison while serving a life sentence for activities with the Westies, the notorious Irish-American gang that ruled the West Side of Manhattan for a good while through the 1980s:

The start of the funeral mass at the Church of Holy Cross on West 42nd Street was delayed a bit for a ring ceremony to complete for the eighth graders.

"Jimmy McElroy had himself once been an eighth grader, but not a ninth grader. He dropped out of school to work..."

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All the News All the Time Repeated

2011-05-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

Current employment circumstances have lately had me waking up in out-of-town hotel rooms, complete with multiple flat panel televisions and other niceties that help the stay become some fun.

When these instances present themselves, I always find myself giving in, just a bit, and watching early morning television. I consider it absolutely amazing that I can tune in to all three major network shows at about the same time and hit a commercial on each one. Everybody has a word from the sponsors

But when this subsides, just a bit, and I take in several days of this routine, I manage to absorb the news. Slowly, and repeatedly. This past week was revealing.

Every news show, network and cable, has someone standing in the flood-swollen Mississippi River, reporting that it's rising.

Osama bin Laden has been killed.

Henry Kissinger, hawking his forthcoming book On China, looks positively enbalmed next to the Today show's Natalie Morales decked out to the nines, looking better than anyone has a right to look that early in the morning. Sex sells, but Dr. K. needs more than Natalie can generate.

A Connecticut high school student has been banned from the prom because he posted an invitation to a girl on the side of the school using removable letters. No permanent damage was done to the building. This student has now appeared on more telecasts than President Obama.

It is hard to pick a jury for a murder trial for a defendent who is alleged to have killed her children/child. Details are incomplete because I was in the shower about the same tiime every day.

Osama bin Laden has been killed.

Navy SEALS need their privacy.

Robin Meade, the anchor on Headline News, is as cute as ever, despite putting on what looks like a few avoirdupois since the last time I was in this position. It took me two days to remember to start with that channel.

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For The Want of an 'S' The Kingdom Was...

2011-05-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

It's a great photo. The royal couple tooling away with the top down in the groom's dad's car. It's festive, and the license plate says JUST WED. How clever. No, wait! It clearly says JU5T WED. It looks like 'JUST,' but isn't.

I've seen enough of public broadcasting and English shows to think that this is an example of what our across-the-pond cousins would call a "cock-up." How do you explain the use of a number to replace a letter? If it isn't a cock-up, then what is it?

Explanations abound. The Royal Typographer got into the sherry a bit early. Maybe by a full day. Somoene else has JUST WED and they couldn't use the same plate. Now come on. The English monarchy can't buy a consonant for a day? Thing ARE bad.

They have to use a number somewhere in the plate. Huh? Unless Prince Philip reported the car stolen, it's unlikely it's a REAL plate. There's a real looking one on the front.

National health care in England is a complete disaster. Eye exams take forever to schedule and the people at RDMV (Royal Department of Motor Vehicles) are last, anyway.

The IRA is somehow involved. '5' is code for something. It's a Twitter handle. @JUSTWED was taken. In fact, it is taken, and Jennifer Conroy hasn't posted anything yet. Come on Jennifer, you're clogging up the show.

Explanations, inane or otherwise, welcome.

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The Hybird Word

2011-04-27T15:54:00.000-07:00

There is simply no doubt about it. You learn things when you read. Take the example of reading the book, 'The Pun Also Rises.' It is not simply a collection of puns, but rather a very readable, scholarly dissertation on all aspects of puns, from their origin, to how the brain processes words and meanings that have more than one meaning. The four-year IBM project that built Watson, the computer that trounced humans on 'Jeopardy,' but failed to recognize that Toronto is not a U.S city is not discussed, but you certainly become aware of what challenges the programmers faced with a multiple-meaning language such as ours.

Take the type of word that is called a 'portmanteau.' It is a word that is a combination of two or more other words, to come up a new word that has it's own meaning. I had never heard of the word portmanteau until I read a fairly recent obituary for Michelle Triola, the live-in partner of actor Lee Marvin who sued the actor for support after being his live-in partner for six years. The attorney who represented Mr. Marvin, Marvin Mitchelson, pioneered a defense for the actor that was successful. The newspapers dubbed the case the 'palimony' case, creating a portmanteau of the words 'pal' and 'alimony' to mean a divorce-type case involving people who weren't married. This gave flight to words like 'gal-pal' that have kept tabloids and private investigators busy for years.

The word palimony can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, and they use the Marvin case in their gray box for attribution. Scholarly stuff.

So, what does this have to do with puns? In 'The Pun Also Rises,' the author John Pollack discusses portmanteaus. He uses 'turducken' as an example. He's pulling my drumstick, right? This is something the broadcaster John Madden made up for an NFL halftime show that smashes a turkey, duck and a chicken into a roasted Dodo bird to bulk up linemen with undetectable growth hormones, right? No.

Mr. Pollack gives us history that traces the Howard Hughes Spruce Goose entree to a Frenchmen, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reyniere, who wrote about its origins somewhere in eight volumes of "recipes, restaurant reviews, gourmet shopping tips and food commentary" published between 1803 and 1812. Imagine, restaurant reviews after taking a stagecoach to the place. (If the driver can find it.)

So, is 'turducken' in the Shorter OED? No.

My only guess is the editors didn't consider John Madden and the NFL to be a worthy example for their gray box. That just makes them plain turkeys.

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Couric Set to Make Big Announcement

2011-04-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

Katie Couric is set to announce soon that she is leaving the CBS Evening News in order to join Sarah Palin as her vice-presidential running mate in the 2012 presidential election.

It is widely believed Ms. Couric will be an asset in helping candidate Palin understand New York by reading the New York Post headlines to her. Slowly.

Neither candidate could be reached for comment.

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Clock Work

2011-04-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures I get out of watching old movies on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is that I get to see what the world looked like to my parents when they were young adults and adults in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, before their life together raising a family and my own memory of what things looked like.

Aside for the obvious scenery, cars, clothes and other things that create dated settings, the dialog does as well. Consider 'The Glass Key,' A Dashiel Hammet story starring Brian Dunlevy, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, made into a 1942 movie. Brian Dunlevy's younger sister, Bonita Granville, fully dressed in the fashion of a 1940s office working women, hat, gloves and a woman's suit, (Lois Lane look) is miffed and starts to spit out how she's not just a kid, she's: "free, white and..." and before she can get to what is the '21' part of the in-vogue saying, Alan Ladd interrupts her and says '18.' Now she's really mad. It's like someone dumped cold water on her. Her adulthood has been pinched off. And why wouldn't it? Her nickname is 'Snip.'

There's another dated reference when the local bad boy, gambling honcho, Nick Varna, played by Joseph Calleia, complete with oily look and thin mustache--an early version of a Tony Soprano--is sarcastically referred to by Brian Donlevy's character, Paul Madvig as a "pop-eyed spaghetti-bender." That tells you all you need to know.

But for me the best part is when Ladd's character, Ed Beaumont, an assistant to the Donlevy's political boss, a crooked politician with scruples, confronts his boss putting on the Ritz in his office. Donlevy is nearly completely dressed in bib and tucker when Ladd spots his boss's socks as he has his feet feet up on the desk. The socks are dark but have an obvious white blaze down the center. Donlevy detects a forthcoming criticism and Ladd obliges: "The clock, it ticks too loud."

Only because I once encountered the reference of 'clock' in 'Angels and Toast' did I know what the hell Ladd was talking about. Clock refers to an ornamental pattern worked into the side of a sock or stocking. Imagine, getting fancy dressed and going daring with a pair of socks whose 'clock' was considered too loud? Donlevy follows Ladd's comment and discards the pair of socks for another.

In 'Angels and Toast' by Dawn Powell, published in 1940, the salesmen Jay and Lou are taking a train from Chicago to New York when Jay kicks his shoes off in the compartment before heading to the club car and exposes his stockinged feet revealing "crimson clocks in the gray hose that matched the herring-bone stripe in his blue suit. 'Paid four fifty for these socks,'" he tells Lou.

Four-fifty for socks in 1940! These guys are really dressed up riding a train. But it is 1940 and things haven't yet become what they have with North Face, T-shirts and baseball caps.

And one wonders. Does the term to 'sock' someone have anything to do with to 'clock' someone? In either case, someone is hit. Hmmm.

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Breeding the Best to the Best

2011-04-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

It might he hard to believe, but someone has produced a fair sized book on puns, 'The Pun Also Rises,' by John Pollack. I know this because I read two book reviews, and have just purchased the book, a scholarly hard cover edition that stretches 203 pages.

I haven't started the book, but the reviews are themselves interesting. Puns have been with us quite awhile, and sometimes don't even appear to be puns. Some you have to hear; some to have to see spelled out; some you just have to keep thinking about to realize they are puns. Some you will never get. No matter what.

One in particular, cited by in the book review by P.J. O'Rouke apparently appears in 'Macbeth' when Lady Macbeth (hardly one it would seem to be padding around the castle in jokey patter) says: "I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt.” Planting evidence never seemed like so much wordplay. I know my English teacher missed that one.

For some, puns cannot be resisted. Consider the Twitter tweet of @obitsman who surely couldn't sneak this one into his WSJ obituary of Jess Jackson, the California winemaker and champion thoroughbred horse owner who just passed away at 81, and expect to remain employed: "Jess Stonestreet Jackson dies at 81, Founder of Kendall Jackson winery. A fine life with an oaky finish." Cue the drummer.

For myself, Jess Jackson will be missed because he was one of the deep pocket horse owners who loved the sport that the sport desperately needs to keep the game going on a high level. People like Paul Mellon, Eugene Klein and Allen Paulson, all departed, and with them stables of great champions.

As a horse owner, Mr. Jackson got what he wanted. His middle name, Stonestreet, was the name of his stable. He already had complete control over Curlin, the horse of the year in 2007 and 2008. Early in 2009 Mr. Jackson purchased the filly Rachel Alexandra. As the racing year progressed, Rachel Alexandra made a name for herself by defeating male horses in the Preakness and the Woodward Stakes. She was Horse of the Year in 2009. Jess Jackson envisioned the dream breeding matchup of Curlin and Rachel Alexandra, which in human terms would be like the word war horse William F. Buckley, Jr. being mated with the fast filly Pamela Harrison. The offspring could hardly fail to be spirited and great.

Unfortunately, while Curlin has been bred to Rachel Alexandra, the live foal is not expected to be born until February 2012. Horses take 11 months. Thus, the result of breeding the best to the best and hoping for the best, won't be seen by Mr. Jackson.

Time will tell what we all eventually will see.

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So Things Go

2011-04-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

It must simply be a function of growing older, but I now find myself reading obituaries, as always, but also expecting to read something in the obit that I know about the subject, not because I've met them, but because they're familiar to me through reading or hearing something about them when they were alive.

This happens a little more often these days and has now happened again when I read Robert McFadden's NYT obituary on William Donald Schaefer, a former mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland, and later comptroller of the state.

It was a daily double for Mr. McFadden because his bylined obit on William Busher appeared in the same edition. Both subjects were well past 80, closer to 90, so it has to assumed that the morgue copies come out that McFadden had pre-written and the paper had on file already.

Each obit is a beaut, written in the clear McFadden style that always starts off with a lead that packs more information in it than an entire encyclopedia entry. Pure reporting, few curlicues and asides, but some color nonetheless. Somewhere between the Goat Man and 'just the facts.'

Despite living in New York my entire life I had heard of William Schaefer when he was mayor of Baltimore. He apparently was a manager by walking-around type who left the office and saw what there was to see. And reacted to it. One of the things I heard of was a piece in the book 'In Pursuit of Excellance' where Mr. Schaefer's style of observation and management was held up for praise.

Baltimore had lots of problems during Mr. Schaefer's terms. One of them was abandoned autos, stripped, burned and left at the curbs for months on end. When I lived in Flushing (part of NYC) we had the same problems. I was constantly calling them in and following up on their removal. Our own block had more than its share of the problem.

So when I heard of how the mayor of Baltimore was handling it I was envious. Mr. Scheafer apparently was driven around and noted where there several such abandoned vehicles. He told the proper commissioner where the abandoned autos were and expected to find the autos removed fairly quickly. They weren't. Quickly, or otherwise.

Mr. Schaefer was not happy. He set out again and noted where there were several abandoned autos. This time he told his commissioner about them, but said he wasn't going to tell him where the autos were. He basically said go find the ones I mean, but I won't tell you where they are.

The next shift saw at least 50 autos towed into the junk pound. Mr. Schaefer had made his point. Abandoned autos started to get attention. If only New York Mayors Koch and Dinkins acted like that!

This vignette wasn't in Mr. Schaefer's obituary, but there was another example of his style, complete with a picture of the mayor in the zoo's seal pool that sufficed. Mr. Schaefer was mayor for 16 years. All his exploits couldn't find their way into a life's summation. But a good one did. And I remember another one.

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Thank God for Bar Codes

2011-04-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

There are things that just hit your eye. It's not your fault, but when I see a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) seized property legal notice in a print newspaper that stretches uninterrupted across 12 columns of 4.5 point print containing nothing but names of perfumes, sizes and quantities, totaling nearly $1million in value, you just have to look into this further.

The names alone are all the bold face names we've ever encountered: Elizabeth Taylor, Britney Spears, Carolina Herrera, Calvin Klein, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Varvatos, Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, Nina Ricci, Jennifer Lopez. The list is not alphabetized: names, quantities, and sizes repeat across an agate type plain.

You have to wonder. No one types all this in, right? No one proofread this, did they? Not likely. But they probably did scan each cluster of bottles that were confiscated, and let the computer do the rest. What would life be like without UPC?

So, why does the DEA list confiscated perfume vs. the usual seized Hummers, weapons, ammunition and cash? Perfume is a controlled substance meant to induce uncontrolled behavior? No. Money laundering. BMPE to be official. Black Market Peso Exchange.

The link explains more, and shows that Quinn Martin may no longer be with us producing shows like 'The Fugitive,' 'O'Hara: U.S. Treasury,' but his way with words hasn't left at least the governement press corps people who create releases like: "...dirty money...with the scent of perfume;" "...even the sweetest-smelling money laundering scheme is no match for determined law enforcement."

But at least a sense of humor goes a long way. "...revealed the putrid odor of his illegal criminal activity..."

Fade to commercial.

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Poetry and Irony

2011-04-19T08:04:00.001-07:00

Poetry and irony are everywhere. You only have to look.

Consider the above picture. I've never seen this one, but it's been resuscitated in a current news story because of a landmark Mob trial in New York. The trial involves an "official" Mob boss who is giving testimony against another Mob boss. This is unprecedented.

The theme of the today's story is that food is a constant theme in the testimony. Well, we know people gotta eat, and Italians have made more than a living at it. It's a way of life. So why shouldn't some of the things that happen to people happen when there's food around? It's not like there are no cooking shows on TV these days. Or a food section in a paper that never had one.

The irony in the 1979 picture almost speaks for itself. I remember the graphic shot of the mobster who was plugged in the restaurant's garden, a shot Weegee would be credited with if he had still been alive. The freshly deceased is seen in contorted repose, with his cigar still firmly clenched in his mouth. The sheet has been pulled back. It's a mess.

But the one above is better. It's subtle. If you need help, just consider what you're looking at and read the sign above. "Outgoing orders" are a specialty.

You don't have to think like me, but it helps.

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A Bestseller (Of Sorts)

2011-04-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

A tweet from @obitsman once again has set the mind down memory lane. The latest has to do with a book that perhaps to no one's surprise has achieved a bestseller ranking. The book is about sex, and there is
A LOT of competition when it comes to that. I won't go into a time consuming review. Follow the link and judge for yourself.

Fair warning. The story about the book will take longer to read than the book itself. It is doubtful there will be a sequel, but a planet with 6 billion or so humans on it needs no sequels.

Years and years ago I heard or read one of those Monday newspaper statistics that the average teen-age boy thinks about sex every 14 seconds. I do not remember at all how the measurement was arrived at.

These kind of "study results" still show up in the NYT, below the fold, and to me seem to be oddly prevalent on Mondays, even after all these years. The movers and shakers were likely doing something else over the weekend other than making news, so the paper still needs to report on something. Memorably, I also once read of Baltimore school children having trouble digesting milk.

When I read the '14 second finding' I think I was past my teen-age years, so I didn't haul out a stopwatch and see if it might be true. I figured it could be, however.

And given that, I concluded males are not given enough credit for advancing in life, probably graduating high school, maybe completing college, even achieving an advanced degree, working, marriage, perhaps children raised successfully, or close enough that it counts--like in horseshoes--all those things achieved while being distracted at least several times an hour by variations on a constant thought.

Even slowing the interval down, you have to admit, like the lyric in 'My Fair Lady,' "by and large, we are a marvelous sex."

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Jacket (Not) Required

2011-04-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

The WSJ recently published a piece on the jacket/tie wearing habits and requirements of men around town. It has certainly changed. As you might expect, there are still places where both are required, but most have more often than not loosened their previous requirements to at least requiring a jacket, open collar or not. It's a great piece for anyone who does remember when people used to look at least a little dressier.

Pictures in the story feature probably the two most elegantly attired men about town: the writers Tom Wolfe and Guy Talese. Both are legendary natty dressers, and both are at least 79 years old. The devotion to their look will completely pass. But they'll be wearing suits right to the end. And a little beyond the end, for sure.

Not all is slovenly, however. Picture the talking heads of NFL football. There is a distinct competition going on with pocket squares on the Fox broadcast. Man, those guys can be sharper than Emeril's cutlery. And Tony Soprano wasn't without a pocket square, either. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, certainly cut a sharp courtroom presence with his suits, pockets squares, and double-pressed trousers. And basketball coaches? Male and female are outfitted to the nines. Especially college. Nice to see people with no visible tattoos.

Historically, there have been some slobs that stick out. When Jean Claude Talbot was a NY Ranger coach in the late 70s he seemed to be wearing pajamas behind the bench. The team then didn't seem to be wearing skates, but that's another story.

Frank Sinatra is said to become nearly violent if someone was in his presence who wasn't at least sporting a jacket. Willie Nelson stayed in a limo when asked to come into the NY Athletic Club. He balked at having to wear anything that resembled a jacket and tie just to go through the revolving doors. Times change. Clubhouse admission to a NY thoroughbred racetrack once required a jacket. My friend was once somewhat chased and made to wear a loaner jacket. It was hot. He carried it.

The WSJ story also shows a picture of a loaner jacket closet at the "21" Club restaurant. Courtrooms apparently don't require a basic dress code. Consider the current trial going on where a Mafia boss is giving testimony for the Federal prosecutor in the trail of another Mafia-linked defendant. The witness for the prosecution, Joseph C. Massino is described in news accounts as the first "official" Mafia boss to give testimony. ("Official" seems like a strange word to attach to the individual, but the NYT seems to insist. It's almost as if his name and picture appeared in an annual report.)

Mr. Massino is described as eschewing not only a jacket and a tie, but apparently a shirt with buttons. He took the witness stand "dressed in a black and gray jogging suit with a white T-shirt visible beneath." Full disclosure of his circumstances should include that he is currently serving several consecutive life sentences and is hoping to avoid a death penalty in another trial. Shopping may have been logistically out of the question. And no loaner jacket closet.

But in giving testimony as the first "offical" Mafia boss to do so against Mr. Basciano, another Mafia member, Mr. Massino is certainly guilty of two code transgressions, only only of which has to do with clothes.

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Dead Wood at Aqueduct's Wood

2011-04-10T07:18:00.001-07:00

And that's Uncle Mo,
He's movin' kinda slow,
With a lot more left to go.

The Last Words

2011-04-07T11:29:00.000-07:00

It takes a good obituary writer, as well as a colorful subject, to close the piece with something more memorable than the subject is no longer with us. A well placed one liner, generally at the end of the piece, will ensure even greater immortality.

The combination of Douglas Martin's piece on Ned McWherter, a popular Tennesee governor, and Mr. McWherter's apparently own outsized personality, create a memorable obituary closing.

Mr. McWherter seemed destined to become what he did, perhaps because of his physical size and personality, but also because of an early vocation that followed leaving several universities. After work in a shoe factory, he became a traveling shoe salesman in Tennesee. If Mr. McWherter's further life story through the obituary were set to music, Dolly Parton would sing it.

Ned, with what seems like the characteristic humility that can only come from confident people, basically predicted that no matter who you were, the attendance at your funeral is going to be guided by the weather.

But it's even better when you read how he said it.

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Merkel Media

2011-04-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

To continue to prove the point I made in a blog entry of December 2, 2010, Anna Merkel's picture is a mainstay of reporting the news from Germany. Ms. Merkel is of course the current Chancellor of Germany, but one whose hold on the job appears to be weakening.

As if to prove it is weakening, the newspapers are drawing metaphors that her government is limping as much as she is after her elective (get it?) knee surgery.

It hasn't been counted how many times her picture has appeared in the WSJ between the prior blog entry and this one, but it has been almost daily--on and off crutches.

Stay tuned. If the government recovers, she'll be seen on a rehab's treadmill.

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