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See? I told you we'd be done with Arizona soon. There is nothing left to say. We had a nice dinner then a nice brunch, then went to the airport. They've renovated the terminal used by Sun Country, and it's nice - bright and white and minimal and modern. The wifi was horrible, though, and the restrooms had no workable paper dispensers.
Oh, I'll be happy to do just that. Note, however, how easy they make it. Just included this location! I took the picture intending to do it later, and was so tired I found it impossible to memorize, but eventually sent it in.
The response, which you can tell was johnny-on-the-spot
So . . . they approve of the lack of paper dispensers?
The plane was an hour late taking off. The Uber fare to get home was $35, peak demand. At midnight? Sunday night? Yes, for the airport. So we took a taxi. The driver was playing VERY LOUD SOMALI MUSIC when we got in and continued to play it. He explained that it was from the 70s, really old stuff. Interesting, but it was literally A-A-A-A-A-A-A unto infinity; no variation. The language barrier made it difficult to get answers about who it was and what he was saying. At least I have a smattering of familiarity with 1971 Somali pop-funk now, anyway.
I am possibly on the verge of a cold. I’ll know tomorrow. To prepare, I bought soup. Since I’m writing a column about this I will probably repeat what I will say in next Sunday’s piece, but the newspaper column will not have the benefit of illustrations.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Soups of Cub, the most depressing grocery store in the area.
Here we have Traditional Soup, which is for people who like to hold to the old ways. The tradition includes rubbery nodules of chicken and soft vegetables.
If you're feeling as if you need something with more oomph:
Same thing, but Heartier. Not recommended for people whose delicate constitution can not handle Heartiness.
If you're looking something whose primary attribute is not a flavor or a folkway:
You'll note that the fype of chunk is a secondary charactertistic.
I had a big, big thing to put in this space today, Wedesday being Screed Day, but events got ahead of it. Tomorrow.
| This year I’m going to match the paper with the approximate time of the year. It’s 1937, and we’re in . . . |
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| Coosa? Loosa? It’s Centre, Alabama, near the Coosa River. Not a lot of current news on the front page, so let’s see what else filled the columns. |
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There was a lot of this at the end of ’36 and the start of ’37: we’re finally getting out of the slumps. Not the sort of image you expect from the 30s, eh? It was nothing but sepia-toned breadlines!
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Happy days are here again!
"By the spring of 1937, production, profits, and wages had regained their early 1929 levels.” High unemployment, still, but less than the nadir years. Alas:
The American economy took a sharp downturn in mid-1937, lasting for 13 months through most of 1938. Industrial production declined almost 30 percent, and production of durable goods fell even faster.
The response was totally rational:
“In November 1937 Roosevelt decided that big businesses were trying to ruin the New Deal by causing another depression that voters would react against by voting Republican. It was a "capital strike" said Roosevelt, and he ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look for a criminal conspiracy (they found none). Roosevelt moved left and unleashed a rhetorical campaign against monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the new crisis. United States Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes attacked automaker Henry Ford, steelmaker Tom Girdler, and the super rich "Sixty Families" who supposedly comprised "the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States”.
Left unchecked, Ickes warned, they would create "big-business Fascist America—an enslaved America".
This came after Roosevelt investigated journalists for anti-New Deal pieces, and tried to float a bill that would jail journalists for “fake news,” but that’s another day. |
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| Holeeeeey Sheet: |
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Those Shropshire lads didn’t play around. As for Glover Johnson’s magnificent theater, that would be the Cherokee. I can find no trace today. This shot, by the way, has something interesting:The Standard Oil logo with the brand name “Pan Am.”
No surprise - Standard bought Pan Am. More fun:
The novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair published in 1927 is loosely based on Doheney's life and the story of Pan American Oil! was in turn the inspiration for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood.
Nice to know these things. |
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Faces in the news. Let’s take the one on the upper-left:
Edith Maxwell (1914 - 1979) was a Virginian schoolteacher who, at the age of 21, was convicted of murdering her father in rural Appalachia, triggering a nationwide media sensation.
On July 20, 1935, the young teacher spent the evening with friends at "the Little Ritz" in Wise, Virginia. When she returned home late at night in Pound, Virginia, she had an argument with Trigg Maxwell, her coal miner father. Trigg attempted to whip his daughter for staying out late. According to Edith Maxwell, during the fight, she hit her father with a high heeled shoe, accidentally killing him. Other accounts asserted various alternate scenarios, including that she hit her father with an iron skillet, that he fell and banged his head on a butcher's block, or even that he had had a stroke and died.
Pardoned in ’41, died in ’79. |
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| Mrs. Charles Hilliker - God forbid she have her own name, right? - was, I believe, Dorothy Maxwell. |
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Yeah well my queens kilt more men’n your silly Jesse |
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Wikipedia, quoting comics historian Don Markstein:
His specific source of inspiration was Reg'lar Fellers, by Gene Byrnes, of which Just Kids was a blatant copy. This was part of the same trend as Tillie Jones's similarity to Winnie Winkle and Annie Rooney's to that other Annie. When a comic proved popular for another syndicate, Hearst usually wanted his own version of it. Just Kids even looked like Reg'lar Fellers, as Carter imitated Byrnes' art style as well as his character set-up, especially in the early days. But while the imitation was never as popular as the original, it still carved out its own place in the public consciousness.
Not a wide place, or a deep one.
Oh, btw: "While employed as a Brooklyn Eagle reporter, he met the cartoonist Clare Briggs, who encouraged him to submit a comic strip to a syndicate." |
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Ah, our old friend Dr. Miles: |
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It wasn’t aspirin.
Acetanilide was the first aniline derivative found to possess analgesic as well as antipyretic properties, and was quickly introduced into medical practice under the names of Antifebrin by A. Cahn and P. Hepp in 1886.
After several conflicting results over the ensuing fifty years, it was established in 1948 that acetanilide was mostly metabolized to paracetamol (acetaminophen) in the human body, and that it was this metabolite that was responsible for the analgesic and antipyretic properties
Acetaminophen! And boomers think that was invented in their day when Tylenol came along. |
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That'll do. Now it's time to start the Decades Project from the top - well, not exactly the top, since that would be the Oughts / Teens site. Lots of stuff to come from the Twenties -
- which were a hundred years ago. |
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