Gee Whiz, Maureen

You can't help but let your brother Kevin's sentiments about President Trump seem like he came to bury him, rather than praise him.

You hide behind the word "threnody." which I had to look up. The one thing about reading your columns is that I usually get to expand my vocabulary. You must have been given dictionaries for Christmas growing up. The OED tells us:

threnody-A song of lamentation, esp. for the dead: a dirge.

And the headline writer, completely thinking that if the column has your name on it, and it's about Trump, then it must me a tearful goodbye. "Oh Brother! Tears for Trump."

Well, Kevin's column is hardly a dirge, and it's hardly a tearful goodbye, but rather a head held high cogent summary of what he feels what went right during his four-year administration.

As readers of your column know, you usually turn the Thanksgiving week column (you only write one a week) over to your brother during the family Thanksgiving gathering. Jason Gay in the WSJ annually writes a Thanksgiving column with instructions on how to play the annual touch football game families indulge in on Thanksgiving, even if their surname isn't Kennedy. He's been advising how to handle grandpa now for 10 years.

Jason has been doing this for a number of years now, but this year he had to adapt his advice because of Covid. It seems you've also altered your plans a bit and decided not to go to your family's Thanksgiving dinner and instead stay home, quarantine yourself in effect, and drink something called a French 75.

Something else I had to look up. What the hell is a French 75? Since I haven't been drinking for 35 years now, I know nothing of the boutique cocktails that apparently abound at the trendy places in town. I had to resort to Google. And when I did drink, it was always a Budweiser at a Blarney Stone, if it wasn't a Budweiser at home. (It was never just "a" Budweiser either.)

Turns out a French 75 is a combination of champagne, lemon, sugar and gin, and is a drink from WW I and is named after a 75mm howitzer. Maybe it was the drink and Rick and Ilsa were drinking in a French bar in the movie 'Casablanca' when they heard the booming of German artillery getting closer to the city. 

Maureen, you're such a romantic. Why a French 75? Paris (Washington) is going to be liberated come January 20th, no?

Of course President-elect Joe has to arrive at the podium in one piece. And the recent story about breaking his foot playing with his dog is not a good sign. The obfuscation has already begun. But that's another story.

Your brother Kevin proves he could be the other Dowd writing a column. "...but for the nearly 74 million people who voted for him, he already has fulfilled their hopes and justified their trust." This hardly sounds like a dirge.

Kevin quite nimbly points out the hypocrisy of the Dems saying they want everyone to get along now, (like Rodney King's plea years ago) when even before Trump took office the tomahawks were out being sharpened and flung.

Kevin rounds out his summary of praise with advice to Fox News and to the man himself about even thinking about 2024. (The book here is he's not thinking about 2024).

Maureen, I think it's a shame you chose not to be with your family, just after the object of your bile has been defeated. Family is family, and I'm sure they wouldn't have needled you to death too much that you got what you wanted and they didn't.

As for the French 75, if you called ahead to home and told them the ingredients, I'm sure you could have easily whipped up one or two for yourself.

After all, any president will always give you—and your brother— something to write about. 

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

1999

It was the annual trip to cut down a Christmas tree that put us on Interstate 95 yesterday, headed for Jones's Tree Farm in Shelton, Connecticut. We've been going there since 1977, and when my wife told that to one of the woman who was handing out the bow saws she exclaimed, "that's when I was born." It has been a while.

The difference this year is that after all those years of a live tree, my wife and I have mutually agreed to use an artificial tree, one my oldest daughter Nancy recommended, and one she bought for us, and one she is going to help us put up.

I am not missing the wrestling match a live tree requires. No, this trip was for the daughter Susan and her husband to now get a live tree for their new home, just like the one they got last year. The family tradition is alive and well.

The drive to Shelton is not a short one from Nassau County. It is nearly 90 miles in each direction and a commitment to an entire day out is required. The tree farm has expanded over the years and now offers wine from their vineyards, something my wife gets joy out of. There are arts and crafts gifts, ornaments,  wreaths, garland, hot chocolate and cookies.

The trip this year to the tree farm was altered by an accident on I-95. A person who was trying to repair something with their car was hit by another vehicle and wound up trapped under their car. Hours elapsed. and the road going north between Exits 16 and 18 was closed A detour onto U.S. 1, the Post Road, was necessary, treating us to a crawl through Westport and Southport and being delayed by all the traffic lights. At least we got to see a town we wouldn't have ordinarily gone through.

At some point we went over a small bridge that went over a body of water that I couldn't identify. I was struck by the year carved into the wall of the bridge: 1999.

Not hard to do the math and realize that 1999 is 21 years from today. Twenty-one years hardly makes the bridge historic and serving as a route for the Paul Reveres of the Revolutionary War era to have travelled on.

How odd to now see a year start with 19, followed by two more 9s.  It looks ancient. It looks like the numbers should be carved into "two vast and trunkless legs of stone."

For years we kept our 1999 Buick LeSabre as a second car that was handy for the girls to borrow when theirs were being repaired, or something. The car was inspected, registered and was a styling standout to what cars used to look like; no jelly-bean look. It predated Y2K!

Eventually, we had to get rid of the car because it could no longer pass inspection. A elderly neighbor had backed into it leaving her driveway and dented it ever so slightly. The damage was nothing compared to the embarrassment they suffered, and their desire to pay for a repair.

"No, please, forget it. This car predates Y2K. how much does your son-in-law want to back his truck into it and put it out of its misery for good?"

Why does 1999 look so ancient? Numbers carved into stone not yet eroded away, but soon to be. Is it because I'm reading a book that is about the murder of a grad student in Harvard's Archaeology school in 1969?

Paper checks for the longest time were always prefixed with 19 on the date line. As we got closer to the hardly cataclysmic year 2000, the 19 prefix disappeared. Okay, less chance of getting it wrong when we sail into year 2000.

But why now that we're 20 years into 2000 do the check printers still choose to keep any suffix off the checks? No prefix 20 is seen. There is going to be 80 more years starting with 20. An old convention has been eliminated.

1999 predates so much. Graduations, weddings, 9/11, workplace murders/suicide, new job, retirement, Ph.D, (not mine), elections, heart attack. 

So recent. So long ago.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Patton

No doubt war is hell. And nothing would be served here by trying to describe it. Figure it out.

In keeping with my habit of reading book reviews, and usually finding something that reminds me of something else, I had my own story to add to the WSJ book review of  'I Marched With Patton,' by Frank Sisson and Robert L. Wise.

Mr. Sisson is the one who marched with Patton, and Mark Yost is who reviewed the book in the November 19 print edition of the WSJ. I love WSJ book reviews, particularly because they are seldom about novels, and they are always located in the same place in the daily paper.

There will be books about WW II as long as there are people who write books, but eventually the books written by those who actually served in the war will one day dry up. There are no new books of memoirs about serving for the Union or Confederate forces in the Civil War, and soon enough, there will be no one around to write about their experiences during WW II.

But just before we reach the expiration date for those memories, along comes Mr. Sisson, an Oklahoma native who served  as a Third Army artilleryman under the ultimate command of General George S. Patton, Jr.

General Patton was larger than life, and ultimately our view of him is probably cemented by the 1970 movie Patton starring George C. Scott. The movie swept the Academy Awards and Scott was awarded the Best Actor Oscar, an award he turned down. No matter. The night of the Oscars there were so many awards for the movie that the orchestra didn't need to be queued to play the theme music whenever someone from the movie trotted up to receive the award. They knew it well from having played it so many times that evening. 

I will forever remember that I saw the movie 'Patton' as part of a double bill at the 14th Street Academy of Music in 1971.  The other film was 1970's 'M*A*S*H.' The ultimate war double bill.

Mr. Yost in his review acknowledges the highs and lows of the war as told by Mr. Sisson. If you've ever seen the movie you should recall a famous scene of Patton directing tank and armored vehicle traffic. Frustrated with the gridlock the unyielding soldiers gave each other at a crossroad, Patton gets out and stands in the center and breaks the logjam with well-practiced hand signals.

Whether the General actually did this is not known, but Mr. Sisson did direct traffic in such a manner and caught the appreciative gaze of Patton as he was driven by. Morale boosted from a grin by Old Blood and Guts.

One of our racetrack members of The Assembled tells the story of his working as a volunteer at the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn VA Hospital. He tells the story of someone like Mr. Sisson who served in the Third Army commanded by General Patton as it made its way to Berlin after the Normandy invasion.

The recollection of the General was a warm one. When there was a lull in the action the men were allowed to line up outside the nearest whorehouse and were treated to whatever expense there was gratis by the General. "Patton always took care of his men."

I don't know if there is such a remembrance in the book. We'll have to read it to find out.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Papers, Papers. Let Me See Your Papers

I have a cousin Heather who lives in Madison, Wisconsin who has found herself with extra time on her hands ever since the pandemic has made us all lie low. Despite her numerous grandchildren she has found time to start sharing with me her research into the family tree I'm part of from the Illinois wing—my mother's birthplace being Tampico, Illinois.

Tampico is still tiny. The census puts its population at under 1,000. It is in the Western part of Illinois in Whiteside County, and is notable for one thing: the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. Often reported in these postings is the absolute truth that my mother's oldest brother, Howard Cook, went to the same one room school house as The Great Communicator. There are photos to that effect.

In the 1950s I remember a trip with my mother to see Illinois relatives. We went through Tampico and I remember the visit with my mother's uncle Chris, a bachelor who was the caretaker of the American Legion's arsenal in a room I think above the firehouse.

I remember a room where there were tens of rifles standing upright on their butts, seemingly ready to be grabbed in case of invasion, or need to arm a posse to catch a bank robber. Later, the scene from the movie 'Jaws' when the men in town started grabbing weapons to kill the shark. I thought of them lining up outside the room where my great-uncle guarded the weapons.

Chris was a veteran of WW I and my cousin Heather sent me some family photos the other day, many of which I already had seen from ones my mother had. There is a studio shot of Chris in his doughboy uniform.

Tampico was a small town then, and has remained one. It now reminds me of  what Willie Nelson said of his birthplace, Abbott, Texas, whose population he claims has always remained the same: as soon as a baby is born, a man leaves town.

Heather's cache of photos and now some scanned documents has greatly enhanced what I know of my mother's family. There was one photo I had never seen, that of a sturdy looking woman, Elizabeth Hill Kirst.

Turns out she's my great-grandmother, as well as Heather's. Heather is my third cousin, our mothers being first cousins who grew up together in Tampico and who were quite close, sort of like sisters.

Great-grandmother Elizabeth emigrated from Germany in 1879, having been born in 1862 in Trier, Germany, hard by the Luxembourg border in the Rhineland-Palatinate state. She married Philip Kirst, who was born in England. 

Great-grandmother Elizabeth had five surviving children, Chris, Barbara, Elizabeth, John and Michael. Barbara was my mother's mother, my grandmother, who I always knew to have passed away when my mother was quite young. Turns out she was 39 and passed away from vascular heart disease, helping to explain the heart disease that runs through my mother's side of the family and came to give me problems on June 6th of this year. Medical family history means a lot.

Elizabeth married Herbert Messinger and had two children, Kenneth and Heather's mother Barbara, my mother's first cousin. Elizabeth was my mother's aunt and someone I remember staying with in her home in Aurora, Illinois where part of the family had moved. Aurora was where my mother went to nursing school before she entered the Army during WW II.

My cousin Heather tells me her grandmother Elizabeth, my mother's aunt, could speak fluent German, which I imagine would have been shown off when she visited New York in the '50s with her husband Herbert. My father took them to Joe King's famous rathskeller on Third Avenue and 17-18th Street, NYC on the same block as my father's family flower shop. 

I have one of those glossy black and white restaurant photos showing them at their table. The rathskeller was part of Scheffel Hall that housed the German-American Club, NYC at the time holding a significant German population. Joe King's is long gone, but the building it was in is still there, 190 Third Avenue, NYC and is a NYC landmark.

Joe King was a drinking buddy of Mayor Walker. When Joe passed away, the rathskeller was run by his brother Howard (Buddy) King who my father knew very well and who I remember as well. When I think of those black and white glossy photos now I think of how did they develop the film before you left? In those old movies you see the wandering photographer who cruised the floor taking photos, chiefly of any celebrities, but really of anyone who would pay for one.

I shared the scanned documents with my wife, who immediately recognized the Department of Justice Registration Card of Alien Female card that was issued to my great-great grandmother. The card is from July 12, 1918 and was required to be in her possession. My wife's mother came from Liverpool and had such a card until she became a citizen. My great-great grandmother became a citizen in the '30s.

I shared with Heather my posting about my grandfather on my father's side who was from Greece and who became a citizen, having first to apply to naturalization and foreswear anarchy and...polygamy!

This led Heather to rebound with more research she had done when she described finding the oath her grandfather's family, the Messingers, had to take when they came to Pennsylvania in 1732, the year of George Washington's birth.

You have to remember that in 1732 there is no United States, but rather what is a British colony. As such, the new arrivals had to swear to the following Oath of Allegiance upon their arrival at the port of Philadelphia.

"We subscribers, natives and late inhabitants of the Palatine upon the Rhine and places adjacent, having transported ourselves and families into the Province of Pennsylvania, a colony subject to the crown of Great Britain, in hopes and expectation of finding a retreat and a peaceable settlement therein, do solemnly promise and engage that we will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his present majesty, King George the Second and his successors, kings of Great Britain, and will be faithful to the proprietor of this province; and that we will demean ourselves peaceably to all his said majesty's subjects, and strictly observe and conform to the laws of England and this province, to the utmost of our power and best of our understanding."

That was 1732. By 1776, there were those who changed their minds. 

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Buddy Holly

Buddy Holly once had a hit song titled "Everyday," and it's as true today as it was in the '50s. Just when you think it can't get any better than something, it goes ahead and gets better than before.

"Every day it's a gettin' closer,

Goin' faster than a roller coaster..."

All this applies of course to the announcement that New York's governor Andrew Cuomo is going to receive an "International Emmy" for his Covid-19 leadership and communication skills. An International Emmy? This is a thing? Yes. Past winners have been Jim Henson, Roone Arledge, Oprah Winfrey, Al Gore, David Frost... 

There are many categories within the award. The guv is getting his award in the "Founders" category. Past winners have been Jim Henson, Roone Arledge, Oprah Winfrey, Al Gore and David Frost. The news is he's already prepared his acceptance speech that no doubt with be delivered on an Internet platform. The blurb for the announcement reads he is being cited for "effective use of television during the pandemic."

The guv of course already produced a book self-promoting his leadership skill, "American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic." You gotta hand it to someone who can come up with such a book about themselves while the pandemic is still raging. There are those who feel the governor caused needless deaths when early in the pandemic he ordered elderly Covid-19 patients to be admitted to nursing home, spreading the disease within that population and infecting thousands who had not contracted the disease. It was a major boo-boo. Yet the book, and the award. 

Because of the pandemic, award shows are virtual, taking place in studios and homes, patched through to the viewing audience via taped TV and the Internet. Thus, the red carpet glitz is gone, as are the sweeping entrances, and it seems even the glamor of the presenters.  Governor Cuomo has gained wide exposure due to his news conferences. My wife, who answers a help desk phone line for National Consumer Panel (NCP) gets calls from people who tell her New York has a fine governor, and we're lucky to have him. My wife bites her tongue and won't engage in politics over the phone. Good thing.

We've written many times already about Maria DeCotis. She is the fall-down, funny comedian who is making a career out of taking utterances by Guv Andrew, and even his CNN brother Chris, and turning them into hilarious lip synching sketches. She is all over YouTube and it is worth going down the rabbit hole with her as she gives us the guv as a family man who is protective of his daughters, as well as testy with reporters. He can be a tough customer.

Maria's routines remind me of Vaughn Meader, who in the '60s imitated President Kennedy's voice to a T. He'd do monologues, not lip syncs, of the whole extended Kennedy family, even First Lady Jackie. His album, 'The First Family' was a million seller.

Unfortunately for  Vaughn he didn't get to use his material for an extended time. After the JFK assassination, there was no market for imitating the voice of a deceased president.

Governor Cuomo's latest news conference utterance is drawing  a legion of detractors who find his 10 per table Thanksgiving attendance laughable. There is a great deal of fun being made of it.  But of course the governor explains he doesn't mean there's a way to rigidly enforce his 10 per household max, he's just hoping that people will self-police their gatherings. 

The WSJ has devoted space to his utterances in their "Notable and Quotable" feature on their op-ed page. When you read what he's really saying, you might realize it makes sense. Or not. The guv himself believes opposition to Executive Orders (EO) is politically motivated.

Back to the Emmy citation, they are acknowledging his communication skills in his widely broadcast news conferences. Maria of course does a bit on this when she portrays his three adult daughters as claiming he's a poor communicator.

My daughter Nancy broke the news to me that the guv has been awarded an International Emmy, as if there aren't enough awards already in the world. She provided the link and a comment that proves the apple doesn't fall from the tree, that she'd be on board with the award if Maria DeCotis gets to be the presenter. Even virtually, I think I'd pay to see that.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Dead Don't Talk, Right?

The dead don't talk, right? That of course means what you mean by dead.

If dead is defined medically and legally, you might be right. But what if you read their obituary only to find out they have something to say that makes the evening news, then what? Something like the famous Mark Twain quote, "News of my death has been greatly exaggerated."

The news lit up the other day when it was revealed that a French radio station mistakenly moved 100 of its pre-written V.I.P. obits to its website as if the deaths were the latest news.  Oh-oh.

Names such as Brigitte Bardot, Clint Eastwood, Queen Elizabeth and Pelé were all reported to have passed on. For 100 notables to have simultaneously been reported as dead is quite a haul. Life insurers the world over must have gone scrambling to shore up their losses.

But that wasn't really the case. The radio station had inadvertently shifted the raw, pre-written obits from one platform to another when doing some IT work. A click of the mouse, and violá, you're dead.

The news of their collective demises amused the subjects who got that rarest of opportunities to read what's going to be written about them before they really do leave us.

To some, it was surprise that obituaries were pre-written. But they are, to the greatest extent possible for notables so that when they do go to the hereafter the news agency doesn't have to start from scratch with basic information starting from their birth. When Alex Trebek passed away, the NYT and others was ready because it was known how sick he was.

The current NYT story about the premature notices was written by Aurélien Breeden, bylined from Paris. Mr. Breeden points out in his story how many such pre-written obits a newspaper such as the NYT has, ready to go, so to speak: 1,500.

When Marilyn Johnson wrote her now seminal book on obituary writing, "The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries" in 2006 she met with the then editor of the NYT obituary page, Charles Strum, who told her of 1,200 advance obits sitting in their files.

So, if you needed proof that we're living longer and that the definition of notable/celebrity has widened, consider the inflation of 1,200 to now 1,500.

When Ms. Johnson met with Mr. Strum she lovingly described the care that the NYT was taking in cocooning these advance obits. " It touches me to see them guarded so carefully, as if the obits were hearts that Strum will transplant to the obits page after their hosts are declared dead."

Ms. Johnson herself used to write obits for Life magazine, having written an elegant one for Katherine Hepburn when she passed away in 2003 at 96. She had a pre-written one for Liz Taylor, who on several occasions gave the world the belief that she was ready to go, and so was Ms. Johnson, with the last word. But each time Ms. Taylor rallied, perhaps to marry again, and kept the obituaries in the file cabinet.

When Liz finally did pass away, Ms. Johnson shared her Liz Taylor obituary in 2011 with the world from the perch of her website, and not a major publication. Stubborn Liz outlasted Ms. Johnson's employment at Life and then Life itself (the magazine).

As these obits rise to the surface, the obituarist has sometimes themselves predeceased the subject. Ms. Johnson's playfully calls these "double downs." Red Smith's bylined obit for Jack Dempsey showed up after Smith himself had passed on. Mel Gussow's obit for Liz Taylor appeared after Mr. Gussow had passed away.

It is the policy at the NYT that the obit's subject never gets to see the proposed obituary. So, for the brief window that the French radio station had obits on their website, the subjects, if they were quick on the draw, got to see what was going to be said about themselves. A rare opportunity.

As a bit of a safeguard against making the mistake of prematurely telling the world someone has passed away when they haven't, the NYT requires the obiturist to put somewhere in the obit, preferable right in the beginning, that so-and-so confirmed the subject's demise. (They did once screw up and make a premature notice) This of course doesn't help prevent the click-of-a-mouse file transfer.

The reporter Mr. Breeden tells us that from the French fiasco, one subject, Bernard Tapie, a flamboyant French businessman, has already on two prior occasions been reported as having passed away. He just got his third notice and is still breathing.

Some people just won't go quietly into that good night.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

In Guv We Trust

I'm tearing up with laughter already. Please make it stop.

If anyone has been following New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's news conferences, particularly as they've begun again with the spike in Corona-19 virus cases, then you will probably soon see the latest outtake from a news conference today turned into yet another comedic gem by Maria DeCotis. My guess is she's dropped everything, like repainting her apartment, put the roller and brush down and headed for the video equipment in the bedroom. She's working on it, guys.

Maria DeCotis has been at least all over the New York news for her pitch-perfect lip syncing of the guv's news conferences. Merely lip synching is not enough. The joy is in her gestures and clothes as she imitates New York's very own Prince Andrew.

Maria has already been written about in these postings, and now I'm anticipating yet another 30-second rendition of the governor's mannerisms as she absorbs and relays the latest utterances from Albany. 

In the space of perhaps 24 hours, Governor Cuomo has reestablished restrictions of movement and gatherings in New York State for bars, restaurants and gyms. Ten P.M. has been set as the hour at which the virus has to recognize the curfew on its potency and send everyone to bed safe and sound to rise yet another day and possibly transmit. This is the only virus that comes with its own Eveready batteries that can set the alarm clock to go into snooze mode.

In addition to the resuscitated pronouncements from the Mount, is the guv's mandate that Thanksgiving dinners should be limited to 10 people. Enforceable? What's your point?

In today's NYT there is a large two-column story, reported by Michael Gold that surveys the various law enforcement agencies in the state as to how they intend to enforce the governor's edict when it's dinnertime on the fourth Thursday in November.

As quaint as it sounds, once you get outside NYC you encounter law enforcement agencies run by the State Police and by a Sheriff's office. The article gets the responses from many sheriff jurisdictions about how they might be going to enforce the governor's latest health warning about the size of gatherings.

They're not.

The sheriff of Renesslaer County (alongside Albany County; think the city of Troy) thinks the governor's executive order is unconstitutional. A sheriff in the Southern Tier of the state (think Binghamton) said that entering residents' homes "to see how many Turkey or Tofu eaters are present is not a priority."

New York's guv is gruff and is not someone you would want to ever have a fender bender with. The potential for road rage coming from the man is not to be taken lightly. There is an outtake from a news conference that was held just a few hours ago that no doubt will serve to reveal all aspects of his personality. He can be difficult.

An announcement was made this afternoon that the New York City schools would close since a Covid metric has hit 3%, the line in the sand that has been defined as the one that if crossed will mean a cascading number of hospital admissions are now in the disease's pipeline, coming to overwhelm a hospital near you very soon. Plan ahead.

The governor was recently asked as part of his Zoom interview with Stephen Colbert about his book, "American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic." With a title like that you might expect someone else to have compiled a list of worthy examples.

The guv obviously is confident that he alone is capable of describing what those "Leadership Lessons" are and that they are all about him. Usually a politician produces their own puff piece prior to announcing a run for higher office, but the guv is planning ahead. Way ahead.

Toward the end of the Colbert interview, so riotiously captured by Ms. DeCotis, the guv is asked about the "boyfriend" who was living with them in the governor's Albany mansion.

Quick back story, one of the guv's three daughters. Cara, was seeing a state trooper who was assigned to the governor's security detail. By all accounts she still is, but the boyfriend has been reassigned to another barracks.

Colbert asked the governor if "the boyfriend was still living with you?" Prince Andrew (or King Cuomo) paused, and replied that, "let's just say, the boyfriend is no longer with us—here."

This piece of news touches off an animated response from Colbert who suggests "dragging the lake." The guv is beside himself with his laughter, inasmuch as "no longer with us—here," really means Trooper Dane Pfeiffer is now wearing thermal underwear, having been assigned to the state's northernmost eastern corner, Plattsburgh, hard by the Canadian border. They may have already had snow up there.

The boyfriend Dane might well have been banished from the Albany Eden in anticipation of the 10 person rule set out for Thanksgiving dinner. The Governor, as mentioned, as three daughters, and three daughters, three dates and perhaps other friends might have put the Albany groaning board over 10.  Cara might abstain and head upstate. The herd must be thinned.

Reporters and politicians can understandably get on each other's nerves. All questions are not great ones, and all responses do not show patience in answering. This afternoon's exchange between a reporter and the guv over what the reporter characterized as "confused parents" over school closings was rebuffed vigorously by the governor as something that the reporter doesn't understand, "no, you're confused."

The 30-second reply by the governor is straight out of an audition for James Gandolfini to play Tony Soprano. Of course "The Sopranos" is over as a series, and Gandolfini has passed away, but not the character Tony. My oldest daughter refers to our guv as Mussolini.

If you ever wanted to know what dialog in an Italian social club would look like in sign language, all you have to do is stare over at the fellow doing the sign language in the box to the right. 

I'm not confused. I understand every word. Like the guv, I grew up in Queens too.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Commonplace Book, Chapter 2

I really don't know why I didn't think of this sooner, combining my interest in culling quotes and in posting blog entries. (If I was really with it, I'd say...curating quotes, curating being the latest buzz word.)

After nearly two decades of being ignored, I'm resuscitating my Commonplace collection of quotes, spurred by the recent release of Dwight Garner's newly published book, 'Garner's Quotations: A  Modern Miscellany.'

I've already posted two entries about this, so this won't be a lengthy introduction, other than to say I welcome the opportunity to now transcribe utterances from my adult children who have successfully navigated higher education (in one case, much higher education), gained married middle age, decent professional employment and motherhood of two. There's nothing like hearing your kids say things you wish you had said. Art Linkletter, an eon ago had a segment of his daytime talk show, 'House Party' that was 'Kids Say the Darndest Things.' There was of course a book.

When they're adult kids, they can say the best things.

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For those who may not be aware of the back story, the founder of Amazon, the billionaire Jeff Bezos, 56, has left his wife and joined the A-List circuit showing up in warm weather locales with unbuttoned shirts showing off absolutely no chest hair, with Lauren Sánchez on his arm, a woman whose Wikipedia  entry would seem to have been written by her publicist that reads: "An Emmy-Award winning American news anchor, entertainment reporter, media personality, actress, producer, pilot and entrepreneur." (If anything has been left out, get in touch with Wikipedia.)

This is not a story of leaving the wife for an much younger woman. Lauren is 50, and would hardly qualify as being taken up with because of her Lolita charms. She has other charms, like also being incredibly wealthy, which of course will come in handy if Jeff wants her to pick up half the check.

Women are very opinionated about men and other women when it comes to their behavior when they move outside their first family. And my oldest daughter's opinion is hardly the exception. Simple. Nancy doesn't like Jeff.

"...Jeff Bezos...leaving his wife for an inflatable pool toy"

–Nancy O'Connor

Hey, Jeff and Lauren are both from New Mexico. That's gotta count for something.

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“The first opera and the first litter should both be drowned,” quipped some

19th-century opera-monger whose name escapes me.  It is awfully harsh on puppies, and it would be almost as harsh on Elliot Carter, who recently wrote his first opera at 90, a work that  received its New York premiere on Sunday with the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall.

--Kyle Gann, lead to a music review, NYT, March 7, 2000

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Tonya Harding pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges that he smacked her live-in boyfriend in the nose with a hubcap and bloodied his face with her fists.

--AP story, NYT, February 25, 2000

Sounds like she put a dent in the service for four.

--Anonymous

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The three men work together in the buzz of the lunchtime rush. The pickups, drop-offs, reaches and turns are the ballet of waiting on tables.  They are the unseen girders that support a successful meal.

--Alan Feuer, NYT, June 11, 2001, on the veteran waiters at Peter Luger’s steakhouse in Willamsburg, Brooklyn

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Remember the next time you need to mail a $46 million lottery ticket...we’ve had experience with delivering that sort of thing.

--Ad for the US Postal Service, June 22, 2001

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At times he had no pension or health insurance.  The riches evoked by his patrician manner turned out to be illusory, and he and his wife, Mary, lived for years in a one-bedroom apartment.

--Robert D. McFadden, NYT, February 2, 2000; Obituary excerpt for

 John V. Lindsay, 79,  two-term mayor of New York City, 1966-1973.

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Alec Campbell, the last survivor of 50,000 Australians who fought in the heroic, ill-fated campaign against the Turks at Gallipoli in 1915, helping forge their new nation’s identity, died May 16 at the age of 103.

Mr. Campbell, who will receive a state funeral, is survived by 9 children, 30 grandchildren, 32 great-grandchildren and 2 great-great-grandchildren.

--John Shaw, NYT, May 20, 2002, Obituary excerpt.

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Windsor, Ontario

During Prohibition, Americans rowed across the Detroit River to this border city to buy whisky. A generation later, young people drove across the river to buy marijuana.  But today, the border contraband run is to score a different kind of Canadian pot, one that gives a different kind of thrill—the forbidden flush.

“Why do I need the government to tell me what kind of toilet to buy?” Linda Walton, a visiting American, asked one hot Saturday after her husband, Tony, wrestled three 3.5 gallon-capacity toilets into their van.

The Waltons, and their two boys, Kyle and Ian, had made the five-and-a half-hour road trip from Indianapolis in search of suburbia’s new holy grail: the kind of old-style big-flush toilet that Americans took as their birthright until 1994.  That year, a federal water conservation law went into effect, mandating that all new toilets use only 1.6 gallons a flush.

--James Brooke, NYT, July 27, 2000

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When CIA headquarters was named for him, former President Bush says his wife asked: “Why would they name a building that has to do with intelligence after a 75-year-old guy who jumps out of a perfectly good airplane?”

--Minor Memos, WSJ, Edited by Ronald G. Shafer

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Comedian Argus Hamilton says [Al] Gore irritated women viewers with his heavy breathing and sighing into the microphone: “It only reminded them of why they had to get Caller ID in the first place.”

--Minor Memos, WSJ, Edited by Ronald G. Shafer, after the first Bush/Gore presidential debate.

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But pretty bulls are nothing more than well-dressed meat to Mr. Nelson, a wealthy Beaumont, Texas businessman.  As operator of something called the “Bad Boys Ultimate Challenge Bull Riding Tour,” the brawny 6-foot-6 promoter gets excited only by one that can buck like a blender full of ball bearings.

--WSJ “A-Head” piece.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

1-800-000-0000

I've seen lots of "golden phone numbers," usually in the golden age of cab companies. Now of course it's an app that connects you with Uber or Lyft.

A golden phone number is one that has a lot of repeating digits, or spells something out, like 1-800-FLOWERS. There are of course numbers associated with those letters, but you only need to remember the letters to get connected.

Before I retired in 2011, I rode the NYC subways nearly every day of life since I was probably 11. The cars were always filled with advertising placards right above the windows, on both sides of the car, stretching from front to back. The ads of course had a captive audience as either sitting or standing, you were sure to gaze on some of them. Better that than making eye contact with the perhaps wacko sitting across from you whose leg spread is taking up two seats.

In the good old days of subways ads there were all kinds of advertisers: those that claimed they could turn you into a speed writer, air conditioning technicians. police officers; rent you storage space,  vote for Miss Subways, get medical care, especially for your back.

My favorite medical ad was for a physician who advertised as 1-800-MD-TUSCH. Any native New Yorker knew that tusch is Yiddish for rear end or ass, and that the doc was all in to cure your hemorrhoids, polyps, whatever it was that hurt you when you sat down. Doc Tusch spent a lot on advertising. 

The doc was a real doc, with a real office. He was in the person of Jeffrey Lavigne, and he was always in trouble with regulators who accused him of deceptive advertising and incompetence. At one point he was spending $40,000 a month on transportation ads.

When I was working in health care fraud detection for a major insurer Doc Tusch was always under investigation. A retired NYC police detective who worked for us went undercover as a patient to get a feel for the practice. The clientele was dominated by the male gay community, and the doc had his hairdresser partner down the hall for appointments. You could get services from top to bottom. 

Dr. Lavigne eventually changed his calling card to 1-800-877-LASER, but was weakened by all the negative attention and eventually moved to Vermont, I believe. I always joked that he really should have changed his phone number to: 1-800-ASSHOLE.

These days, subway ads are nowhere near like what they were. They seem to have themes, with a product or service advertised throughout the car. A lot of them seem to be environmental. They tend to be more public service notices than product/service advertising.

Aside from doctors who might use golden phone number for advertising, lawyers also try to catch the wave of being clever. Every year there is a thick, glossy insert with the NYT that has ads and listings of what seems to be an endless array of legal specialties and whose who in the practice. It's basically a phone book with advertising.

Some of the ads are huge, and show off a team photo of the partners that prove the firm's diversity. I don't seem to see any ads for the high profile white shoe firms whose names you always seems to read  of when there is a high profile case. But the advertisers don't seem tiny, either.

Ever since in my prior life when I worked with two Assistant U.S. Attorneys office in Manhattan (the so called Sovereign District) when there was a health care fraud case that seemed destined to go to trial, I've always looked for the names of these individuals who are now in private practice, both with high profile firms.

I never find their names. That doesn't mean they are not good attorneys, it only means there is no advertising for them. I have come across some names I'm familiar with. The expanded phone listing that looks like one of those you see in the phone books (remember them?) carries Getnick & Getnick, with a Getnick at the helm.

This firm became the overseers of The New York Racing Association (NYRA) when there was deep financial trouble and internal fraud going on at that organization. You would go to the track, look up from the betting window and see their name, Getnick and Getnick in order to be in touch with them if you had something to report. NYRA has since moved on from being overseen.

I once did a posting about the word shyster, a bit of a derogatory term for an unsavory lawyer.  There was an episode in 'Elementary' when Sherlock, in the form of the actor Jonny Miller is in a conference room of a lawyer's office and in typical acerbic British fashion directs an insult to one of the lawyers he's just been talking to: "Did you know that shyster in German means to defecate?"

Well, I sure didn't. I knew the use if the word "shyster," but not its origins.  Off to the OED. Sure enough, that most reliable of dictionaries (I always use the hard copy version.) tells us:

[Origin uncertain perh. rel. to German Scheisser worthless person, from Scheisse excretment...] Yikes, Sherlock does know everything.

So, imagine that I've now leafed through the insert Super Lawyers | New York Metro 2020 and gotten to Page 55.

Lower right, a somewhat large ad for The Wallace Firm...Matrimonial and Family Law. Photo of Robert Wallack, looking like Cassius with a "lean and hungry look," white shirt, spread collar, dark jacket, and a dark tie with a badly tied schoolboy knot.

The banner bumper running at the bottom of the ad has a look as if it is from an entry in a dictionary (no, not shyster) that me thinks they wrote their own definition of.

kick-ass \ 'kik - as \ adjective slang: strikingly or overwhelmingly tough, aggressive, powerful, or effective. (Me thinks they wrote their own definition.)

The address is 777 Third Avenue, between 48th and 49th Streets (across the street from the Smith and Wollensky steak house) that I've never been in, but know there are probably more lawyers there then there were dentists at 1 Hanson Place in Brooklyn years ago. Press any button in the elevator (if they let you do that these days) get off, and choose.

Head for The Wallack Firm and ask for an ass-kicking attorney, if it's an ass-kicking you want to give someone. I'm sure you think they probably deserve it.

Oh, BTW, the phone number in the title is not the phone number for The Wallack Firm. My thought is if you do dial it you will get another ass-kicking lawyer. With a number like that, how could you not?

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Queen's Gambit

Can you make an entertaining miniseries about a female phenom chess player from the 1960s? In the immortal words of a now, nearly forgotten vice-presidential candidate from Alaska, Sarah Palin: "You betcha!" even if it is a work of fiction.

I find the fact to be quite telling that the latest series is from a book by Walter Tevis, the man who wrote "The Hustler," "The Color of Money" and "The Man Who Fell to Earth," all three of which were made into movies. Mr. Tevis's life reads like what you'd expect a successful writer's life to be: a teacher, drunk, inveterate gambler, pool player and chess player, traveling on the pock-marked dirt road of life. Mr. Tevis passed away at 56 in 1984 due to lung cancer.

The 1983 NYT book review of Mr. Tevis's book 'The Queen's Gambit' earned high praise. Interesting, that when you dive into the review it's on a page with the long-gone Robert Byrne chess column, as is Dylan Loeb McClain's from the chess beat. I don't think I see anything about chess games any longer in the NYT. Another subtraction.

'The Queen's Gambit' is a fictional and biographical story about a young woman from Lexington, Kentucky who becomes the world chess champion. Beth Harmon is orphaned at about eight years old when her clearly mentally troubled mother commits suicide by car, driving head-on into a truck. Beth survives without a scratch, but had no other relatives to raise her. It would seem Beth is the a result of an affair her mother had with a married man with family. Beth becomes a ward of the state and an orphanage looms in her life.

Through flashbacks, it seems Beth's mother was a gifted mathematician, a near Ph.D. Young Beth is painfully smarter than anyone else at the orphanage, and therefore doesn't quite fit in. The subjects are boring and certainly not mentally challenging.

She is sent to the cellar the "clap the erasers." If anyone went to grammar school in the era of the 1950s you would know of slate blackboards, white chalk and chalk dust build up on the erasers. The build up was addressed by taking an eraser in each hand and "clapping" the felt surfaces against each other to shake the dust out. Teachers usually always chose someone special to go out in the hall to "clap the erasers."

In Beth's case, it's in the cellar where she encounters the janitor who is playing chess by himself. How you play chess with yourself is not something I understand, but I can see how you might not have a ready opponent. A solitaire game of chess. 

The rest of the story is a straight-forward sports story of triumph over the demons of internal adversity, but exquisitely told with pitch-perfect detail of the 1960s. The casting, music, and accurate recreation of games and atmosphere makes watching chess being played exciting, even for someone who may not know what goes into a Queen's gambit opening.

Apparently an incredible amount of chess consultancy went into the making of series, a series that was snake-bitten ever since 2008 when Heath Ledger, who was supposed to be direct the property acquired in the early 1990s by the screenwriter Allan Scott died of a prescription drug overdose. The project hit the pause button.

Gary Kasparov, a former world chess champion and now Russian activist who criticizes Putin and has so far not been fed anything radioactive, took enough time off from his political agenda to do the technical consulting for the series. Just like how 'The Hustler' movie used Willie Mosconi, 15-time World Straight Pool Champion as a technical adviser, the producers have tapped into Mr. Kasparov's head, who will tell anyone who asks, 'The Queen's Gambit'  "is as close to possible to the authentic atmosphere of chess tournaments."

The Netflix production stars Anya Taylor-Joy, an Argentinian/British actress who at 24 has nothing but brightness ahead of her. Her expressive brown eyes, surrounded by egg-white sclera, move about like search lights. If they were butterflies, you'd be chasing her with a net.

The clothes, hairstyle, and makeup all scream '60s. In one scene, a Russian chauffeur blurts out that having Beth in the back seat is like driving Ann-Margaret around. He's got a point. It's almost an inside joke, since Anya Taylor-Joy is a dancer as well as actress.

Mr. Tevis is seems was an avid pool player and decent club-level chess player, living the itinerant life of pool and chess hustler. With references to the greats of chess and the outcomes of their games, you get a sense of the players who look at chess games as if they were World Series games, or scores from famous classical musicians.  

As for myself, I know the moves, have a nice chess set, but could never get into the game to the point that I wanted to read about it and learn how to play it decently. Because there is no doubt that the game is as much read and analyzed, as it is played. The openings, defenses, attacks, end-games, all have references to famous games played by world champions.

Beth instinctively knows what to do, but she also reads about the game. Devours the texts. She becomes a formidable opponent, knocking over other older plays, mostly males. Few females in that era, or even now, are chess superstars.

Beth gets adopted by a couple in a loveless marriage. The father leaves, and the mother is well-meaning, but drinks. She does however encourage Beth to play, since there is prize money, and money is something they have little of after the husband leaves on business and never comes back.

Beth matures, and boys enter the picture, but not strong enough to dislodge her focus on chess. Not only is Beth a chess wunderkind, she is good looking, and loves nice clothes. And the series promotes the clothes line vigorously with a costume designer, Gabriele Binder who puts Beth in more smart looking outfits than Lesley Stall can wear in one '60 Minutes' segment. She is "smashing," as you would say of someone in that era.

In one scene she looks like the Julia Robert character in 'Pretty Woman' who has had a very good day at the stores, leaving with lots of shopping bags with handles of yarn.

One male, Benny, extremely cool looking with his leather hat and golden hair, takes Beth under his wing and trains her in New York for an upcoming tournament in Paris. Benny lives a Spartan life in a basement brownstone apartment, no doubt earning money from hustling games in Washington Square.

Benny lights Beth's fire, but doesn't sustain it. He's too much in love with himself and chess to let romance distract him. Beth, long addicted to tranquilizers that were a regimen of the orphanage to keep the kids calm, and booze, does have a dependency problem, and fights through it.

The acting is superb and the attention to detail is the best of any chess story. If 'The Queen's Gambit' doesn't help spark a new interest in the game, it would be a bit of a surprise. Certainly Beth's wardrobe in the series, already sparking fashion news in the NYT, will spawn some copycat looks.

It is a long time ago that interest in chess in this country peaked, led by Bobby Fischer's Icelandic matches against Boris Spassky in 1972. Fischer was the brash Brooklyn-bred New Yorker who was a chess prodigy, winning major tournaments at 13. 

There was a story in my high school that Fischer visited the chess club at the school in the early '60s, played "simultaneous games" against I don't know how many opponents, and emerged the winner on all but one board. I don't know the kid's name who beat Fischer, but you can imagine the lifelong bragging rights he held after that.

The Fischer-Spassky matches created such an interest that when I left work for the day in 1972 and headed for my favorite watering hole, the Madison Avenue Blarney Stone, the guys at the bar were watching the games broadcast by the local PBS station, WNET, Channel 13. The cold war was still going on, and beating a Russian was always appreciated.

The broadcaster Shelby Lyman—who only recently passed away in 2019—had everyone's attention, explaining moves and moving the pieces around the TV set. You would have thought we were watching the Yankees. It was hard to order a drink.

It may take a turbo-charged boost to have chess gain new followers. When the 1961 movie 'The Hustler' hit the screen, based on Mr. Trevis's book, the sale of pool tables took off. Americans had cellars, and were willing to buy tables for recreation.

The movie, with its all-star cast of Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, George  C. Scott, Murray Hamilton,  Piper Laurie, Myron McCormack, with bartender bit parts played by the boxer Jake LaMotta and the Vincent Gardenia, was a gritty black and white success. After watching it, there wasn't anyone picking up a stick and chalking a tip who didn't imagine themselves sinking the break ball and running off 60 balls or so in straight pool as their opponent stewed in their seat.

I loved to play pool and spent many afternoon and evenings after high school in various pool parlors. I wrote of this in a posting in 2011

You have to admit that the placement of a chess set, game in progress, and a piano in the living room always add a certain amount of élan and class to the occupants who live there. If you've been watching the now airing miniseries 'The Undoing' on HBO starring Nicole Kidman, High Grant and Donald Sutherland, you can appreciate this. Kidman's character Grace Fraser, a high-priced Manhattan psychiatrist, is visiting her father in his obviously Fifth Avenue co-op with I'm sure a to-die-for-view of Central Park, moves a chess piece as she passes her father's setup board, then later joins him at the piano playing the right hand in a classical sonata. Grace has breeding.

As does Beth Harmon after she finishes her final game in Russia and glides into a park in Moscow, clad head-to-toe in a white fur ensemble with hat, and sits down and plays one of the old guys amongst the many who come to the park to seek opponents and play chess in the crisp Moscow air at one of the many tables arranged for the players.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

The Commonplace Book, Chapter 1

This is intended to be the first installment of the serialization of my commonplace book that never became a book, never had a chance of becoming a book, and will forever remain just something that was embryonic that gave birth to something I feel is even better, these postings.

As I mentioned in the previous posting, Dwight Garner in his NYT Rook Review Essay of today tells us about the genesis of his commonplace book. My prior posting told the genesis of mine.

Mr. Garner coyly tells us his will contain quotes from writers who've used four-letter words, pretty much the word "fuck." Mr Garner cannot actually have "fuck" spelled out in a newspaper, so he tells us f--- will be found.

Of course the NYT has already broken the expletive ceiling when they printed a blue response by a Congressman to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, known by her initials far and wide as AOC. But that's a whole other story.

In her book on New York speech, "You Talkin' to Me?" E.J. White (a pseudonym for Elyse Graham, a linguistics professor at Stony Brook) opens with the perhaps startling admission that she most appreciates having moved to New York from the West Coast because she's learned to appreciate the natives' use of the word "fuck" in all its word forms: noun, verb, adverb, adjective, transitory verb, participle, and whatever else you can find in a book on grammar.

Sir Richard Burton would tell anyone who would listen that the word is the greatest Anglo-Saxon word there is. And Sir Richard, twice married to hell-cat Liz Taylor, no doubt experienced all the iterations of the word in his Liz Taylor relationship.

Here is Ms. Graham's take on her deep appreciation for the utterance she finds so charming:

It was in New York I learned to tell people to fuck off, and I think I'm a better person for it.  New Yorkers are connoisseurs of the word "fuck." They use it as an obscenity, as an insult, as a qualifier, as a term of respect, as adverb as an interjection, as a method of asserting personal space, or simply as punctuation.

There is of course more: get the book; read the book.

"You talkin' to me?" is of course a famous slice of movie dialog from an early Robert De Niro movie, "Taxi Driver" where De Niro plays an Arthur Bremer-like character who stalks people and who feels compelled to rescue prostitutes from their servitude. He's a nut case, and talks into the mirror, practicing his confrontational speech. He also thinks taking the Cybil Sheppard character to a porn movie for a date is a good idea. The guy is whacked.

Why Ms. Graham feels the need to use a pseudonym is unknown. She is not in the Witness Protection Program and her book shouldn't be seen as a threat to anyone. The use of the initials E.J. do not give away gender, and there is no dust jacket photo or thumbnail sketch of her background. If it wasn't for a book reviewer's use of the female pronoun, you wouldn't even have that clue. No matter.

I don't think Ms. Graham looks into the New Yorker's use of the word "fuhgeddaboudit." That one became popularized by the soldier-mafia character Lefty played by Al Pacino in "Donnie Brasco." Lefty uses the term in many grammatical forms. What city on Earth would proclaim the word on its 'Leaving Brooklyn' sign on one of its highway signs other than New York?

As you come from Staten Island (a NYC borough) over the Verrazano Bridge (the Guinea gangplank) and go through Brooklyn (another NYC borough) you are greeted with the sign Entering Brooklyn, "How Sweet It Is" made made famous by Jackie Gleason as the bus driver Ralph Kramden, who lived in Canarsie with his feisty wife Alice, Audrey Meadows.

As you are leaving Brooklyn and are crossing the border into Queens, another one of NYC's boroughs, you are sent on your way with the sign pictured above, giving you a bit of raspberry sendoff. And in many way, you have left one country and are entering another one.

In 1968 I followed my Uncle Vernon back to Odell, Illinois to get away from my father. My uncle was an itinerant cook. My mother's side of the family came from Tampico, Illinois, the birthplace of Ronald Regan. My mother's oldest brother Howard was in the same one-room school house as the young Ronnie. Reagan's family moved to Dixon after a few years in Tampico.

Odell was a farming community, halfway between bigger towns of Dwight and Pontiac, where there was a state prison. Even in the dead cold of a January winter, farmers drove to the bar/restaurant atop their tractors.

So there I was, a certified New Yorker in amongst the flat midwestern vowels and somewhat nasal speech. I was never a "dee-and-doe" guy, but by uncle told me they all thought I was a young gangster because of the sound of my voice. Maybe I should have followed De Niro and Pacino into acting. Not.

It is amazing to me that Ms. Graham would still find examples of the so-called New York speech, considering the vast demographic changes in the city's population. What is it that makes New York's sound so impatient and possibly threatening?

Generationally, how can so many people become "New Yorkers" when so many of them consistently come from all over is a mystery. Maybe it's the density of the living spaces, the subway, the food, the politics, the subway, the schools. What engenders the fucking attitude? When people come here, it's unlikely that are so expletive laced as when they eventually leave here.

My father was born in the city in 1915 and passed away in 1987. If he came back today he wouldd have trouble seeing so many people with masks on and talking on cell phones. But he would recognize the attitude. The air here must be different.

I agree with Mr. Garner that Bartlett's and other quote collections fall short of being entertaining. They are a good reference, but do a poor job of setting the context of the quote.

Quotes need to be planted into a conversation that makes the speaker seem erudite, prophetic or funny. Funny works best. They need to be blended in as if they were just said. I once bought a collection of Bob and Ray's radio routines, two of the funniest guys to listen to, but in small doses. One of their well-planted riffs could last like an ice cream cone that was never finished. Taken as a whole they were a fire hose of wit that quickly lost its punch.

Right now I can only remember one routine, but I once blended Ray Goulding's final words about something..."would you like to see the bullet hole" into a conversation. It still cracks me up, and I hardly remember all of it.

If I were to continue to create the commonplace entries, I would certainly include Ms. Graham's opening ode to the word "fuck." So, with nothing more to say, here is the first installment of what would have been my commonplace book if there was ever going to be a commonplace book.

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I’ve learned all I need to know about the O.J. trial just by walking past a television.

--Russell Baker, The Observer, NYT

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On TV: It’s the yellow pages with pictures.

--Jack Parr, USA Today, June 11, 2002

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Boxing has always been the strip joint of sports.

--Dave Anderson, May 9, 2002, NYT: Prior to Lennox Lewis/Mike Tyson fight of June 8, 2002

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Reineman was correct, too, believing that, as talented a colt as War Emblem may be, his front-running victory in the Illinois Derby came on his home track, the unusually configured Sportsman Park and its paperclip-shaped oval, and was probably not a legitimate springboard to a Derby victory. Perhaps Reineman’s only mistake was judging his colt against history instead of against War Emblem’s unproven peers.

--Joe Drape, May 6, 2002, NYT

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I always tell the truth, unless I can’t.

--Matthew Troy; former NYC Councilman, Queens County Democratic leader, convicted felon on misappropriation of estate funds, and disbarred lawyer, speaking in front of a group of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield auditors, on the topic of integrity and ethics.

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Deep Throat, the 62 minute film, and one of the first feature-length pornography movies, produced in 1972, made money so fast that its producers joked they had to weigh their receipts each day.

--NYT Obituary, when Linda Borman, star of the film, passed away, April 24, 2002.

62 minutes?  It seemed a lot longer when you saw it three times in one sitting.

--Anonymous

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Mr. Berle was married in 1941 to Joyce Matthews, a showgirl. They were divorced in 1947, and he married her again two years later.  Why, he was asked.  “Because she reminded me of my first wife,” he replied.

--Lawrence Van Gelder, Milton Berle obituary, NYT, March 28, 2002

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Turn Left on Union Avenue—and go Back a Hundred Years.

--Red Smith, American Heritage magazine, on Saratoga

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There were but 11 Triple Crown winners in the last century, only three in the last 54 years.  And with Seattle Slew’s passing the other day, all of them are dead.  This we know because living Triple Crown champions are kept track of like ex-presidents and Titanic survivors.

--Mike Lopresti, USA Today, May 21, 2002

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I watched my uncle play, and I saw people giving him money.  I liked that.

--Efren Reyes, champion pool player, NYT, February 16, 2002

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http://www.onofframp.blogspot.spot

The Nightly Paradox

By now, everyone in the world has heard the news that Alex Trebek, the long-time host of the incredibly popular game show 'Jeopardy' has passed away at 80 from pancreatic cancer. Alex fought a very public battle with the disease and was still taping new shows despite being wracked with pain from chemotherapy. The game show Walter Cronkite has passed away.

Fittingly, the NYT ran his obit this morning on the front page, lower right, complete with a color photo of Alex in 2005, looking sharp and fit. 

The obit writer, Katherine Q. Seelye opens with a great lede about Alex being challenged by a stranger as if he were the contestant and was asked to provide the question to "the American flag flies here 24 hours a day every day of the year." Alex nailed it. Can you? I didn't.

Alex gets the full Monty. The obit jumps to page A16 and takes up two full pages, with a giant photo of Alex spreading across two pages. It's a masterful piece for a true American icon who happened to be born in Canada.

Most knew Alex was from Canada. I always assumed it was from the French speaking province of Quebec since Trebek and Quebec even rhymed. But no, Alex from Sudbury, Ontario, a mining town north of Toronto, which also happens to be where the New York Ranger Hall of Fame goaltender Eddie Giacomin is from, as well as my friend Tom Deacon from the Clarkson College hockey team of 1966. Small world, eh?

The history of Jeopardy is revealed, noting the show was cancelled twice, once in 1975 and again in 1978. It was revived in 1984 with Trebek as the host for all the years since.

And most people know Merv Griffin developed "Jeopardy," as well as "Wheel of Fortune," another long-running game show, that Alex was once even a substitute host for.  The story is told that Merv felt quiz shows were missing from American television, having fallen out of favor due to the rigging scandals in the 1950s when certain contestants were given the answers, with instructions to fake intense dramatic thinking in order to goose the ratings. The rigging worked, until it didn't.

In what became an "ah-ha" moment, Merv's wife Julann suggested giving the contestants the answers and have them come up with the questions. The contestant's answer had to be framed to as if it were a question.

An early iteration of show saw it titled as, "What's the Question?" And that's where we might have a completely unexplored paradox. The front page obituary tells us: "Unflappable Host Who Gave America the Answers."

Huh? He acknowledged the correct answer as a question to the answer that was asked. If your answer is in the form of question, are you answering a question or providing the question to the answer, as the original name of the show implies.

It would seem to me that the NYT missed a chance to have a New York Post moment and say something clever about answers being questions. It is not really their fault, since they're not trained to think like that coming from the top J-schools in the country, rather than the saloons of Manhattan.

Play around with it. I'm sure most of us could improve the headline. How about "Unflappable Host Who Got All the Questions?" "Unflappable Host Where the Answers Were Always the Question." The game show host always has the answers on his cards, even if the answers are the questions.

So, did he tell us the answer, or did he tell ask us a question? It's a slippery slope that I'm sure (I'm not really sure about this. Sounds good.) had the editors gnashing their teeth at the meeting when the next day's stories were discussed.

Perhaps The Times will do one of their Page Two pieces revealing how they came to decide the headline was about being given answers vs. being asked questions in the form of answers.

Who gets the throne after Alex? The Vegas money says Ken Jennings is the natural for being the next host. Ken is the GOAT, the Greatest of All Time contestants, beating Brad Rutter and the glint-in-his-eye, squinting professional sports gambler James Holzhauer, whose "all in" hand gestures appealed to the riverboat gambler in all of us willing to bet the farm, in the GOAT tournament early this year.   

Interesting note is that Trebek was noted for his precision in speech, his diction, and his expectancy of getting it as the answer (or is it the question?). He wouldn't consider the answer from a contestant the other night that "Iderondacks" was going to be acceptable for the word "Adirondacks." "Sorry, Ida."

One of the contestants last week, an immigrant from India, told the story of how he as a young boy watched "Jeopardy" with his father in order to learn English and how to say it properly. Together they admired Alex's diction. Gracious Alex thanked him.

So, the G.H.O.S.T, Greatest Host of Syndicated Television, as Jim Holzhauer called Alex early in the year, is no longer with us.

Because of the taping schedule, it is going to be strange to watch Trebek for the remainder of the year, seemingly from the grave, continue to give us the answers. Or is it the question to the answer that is the answer? Or is it the response?

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Four Years Ago

When the results of the 2016 presidential election became apparent and it was clear Donald Trump had won the presidency, I was worried for the staff at the NYT. The NYT is well-known for backing any Democratic candidate that comes along, and my fear was with Hillary Clinton losing to a perceived real estate mogul who outlasted 16 other Republican candidates at the outset of the primaries, and who could not even boast of being elected class president, my worry was that any number of coronaries and strokes would take down the staff and threaten the production of the next day's paper.

All you were going to hear were sirens of ambulances taking the stricken to area hospitals from the Eighth Avenue headquarters.

I don't remember how I conveyed it (probably a Tweet, since that has proved to be the primary method of communicating anything in America), but I congratulated the Sulzbergers, et al. for getting the paper out despite what had to be a funeral atmosphere in the newsroom. They did it, those troopers.

Fast forward four years and I had a similar worry that if President Trump were to prevail against Joe Biden, then surely the newsroom would be shaken as if a 767 had flown into it. Maybe two 767s.

I wasn't buying into a certain Biden victory as it was apparent the journalistic posturing was predicting. It is a very large county that if we were Europe, we'd probably be 4-5 separate countries. Professional sport playoffs would be greatly redefined.

As soon as the counting began and it was apparent that President Trump was going to gain Electoral votes, I Tweeted a reporter at the Times and expressed concern for the medical well-being of the staff. My fear that was once again, with another four years of a presidency that many believed was already the straw that was breaking the camel's back, there would be a tsunami of medical emergencies at the paper: strokes and heart attacks would abound, even if the staff was working mostly from home. Would Alec Baldwin be up to doing another four years as a Trump impersonator on SNL? Yikes.

As the counting proceeded and it became apparent that Biden would win, and did win the presidency, I Tweeted the same reporter and said that I understand the wall-mounted defibrillators throughout the building went unused. And that was a good thing, because with the pandemic, hospital beds were scare, and adding newspaper stricken employees to intensive care would surely put an unbearable strain on the health care delivery system.

This time I got a "LOL" reply and word that in the spirit of sharing medical resources, the NYT shipped its defibrillators to Long Island to help the Nassau and Suffolk county registered Republicans recover from the news. There is a grateful population out there.

Now, all is right with the world. The NYT is once again running the country (or at least thinking they do). Because it's never more true than in politics that what goes around, comes around.

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A Commonplace Book

I once started collecting out quotes from newspapers, movies, anything I read or heard that I considered worth remembering. I kept adding to it, and have it on one of my flash drives. I've since stopped adding to it, in favor of writing my blog, www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Since I've been writing the blog since 2009 that's how long it's been since I stopped adding to my commonplace book. In fact, when I started collecting the quotes, I knew nothing of anything called a commonplace book.

In keeping with my very intermittent correspondence with Russell Baker (who I will forever miss) I sent him my entries. I have a framed letter from him that goes back to 1967 when I wrote about his perhaps doing a column based on  the ads at the time for the Avis and Hertz car rental companies, acknowledging Avis for "We Try Harder." He replied that he was trying to work it into a column of how the two car companies reminded him of the Republicans and Democrats (he didn't say which). 

When I sent a sample of my quote entries he replied that what I was assembling was a Commonplace Book, and outside of Samuel Johnson's, they basically went nowhere in publishing circles.

I would have to strain going through several boxes to find the hard copy reply I received from Mr. Baker that gave me examples of his commonplace book entries. They were decidedly more scholarly than mine, although I cannot recall a single one now.

Since several of my entries were gleaned from obituaries, and I received advice from Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, to start writing a blog, I've been doing that ever since, using obituaries as a launching pad for thoughts and digressions, and then just about anything else that flies into my cluttered mind.

I've never looked back, and continue to post blog entries. I've long since passed 1,000. I read a good deal, usually newspapers and magazines, so when I read in tomorrow's NYT Book Review the Essay section by Dwight Garner giving the genesis for his commonplace book, I was truly surprised to hear one got published.

Quite honestly, I shouldn't be surprised, since Mr. Garner is a long-time mucky-muck book critic for the NYT and assuredly might have publishers' and editors' phone numbers tapped into his iPhone. He's probably got several entries under "Q."

Sure enough, he's found someone to publish his book of ragtag quotes, available soon in hardcover for what now seems to be the going rate for hardcover tomes, $26.00. (Always more in Canada.)

In Mr. Garner's NYT Book Review essay about his own book (It's not really a review. That wouldn't be right.) he tells us he's structured it along categories: "food," "conversation," "social class," and more. I would have never thought of categories, but that's why Dwight got published and I write a blog.

Mr. Garner nods to Samuel Johnson, as of course did Mr. Baker. He doesn't however give us any examples of what he might have included other than tease us that he's got the word "fuck" in there somewhere. Perhaps several times. 

The category idea is one I could see pursuing, but it wouldn't be by subject. It might be along the lines of obscure Grammy-like categories, or perhaps Best Four Word Utterance: Ring Lardner's "Shut up, he explained."

As already assembled, my commonplace book can contain passages from books I've read, like John Updike's collection of short stories, "Afterlife." There's a passage in there on page 115 about the "unseen giant" who subtracts the days from your life. It's a mountain of metaphor.

I'm fond of quoting Pete Hamill from his introduction to a collection of obituaries that "life is the leading cause of death." You can't get more profound than that.

Not all my entries are so focused on the passage of time, or death.  I've got a 2002 quote in there that's now out-of-date from Mike LoPresti, a sports reporter for USA Today:

"There were but 11 Triple Crown winners in the last century, only three in the last 54 years.  And with Seattle Slew’s passing the other day, all of them are dead.  This we know because living Triple Crown champions are kept track of like ex-presidents and Titanic survivors."

A sports category would be good, but I'd sub-divide mine further into specific sports.

Mr. Garner's book is not yet available, so I can't go to the book store and browse through it yet. It has all the appearance of making a great stocking stuffer for the folks in your family that probably read his reviews and otherwise enjoy words in general. The crossword puzzle crowd.

Since Mr. Garner admits he's been collecting his entries for four decade, having started in high school, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Mr. Garner is probably not a great deal younger than myself, at 71. But since he's got waaaaaaaaay more literary contacts than I'll ever have, I have no sudden illusions that I should ship my entries off to a publisher to sit on the slush pile.

No, I am however going to start a serialization of the entries I've compiled and perhaps start a weekly blog posting containing several, at least until I exhaust the supply on my thumb drive.

Perhaps Mr. Garner will then read my commonplace book. We might even have a few similar entries.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com