Happy Monday! I should probably put this at the top, in case you drop dead from exhaustion before you get to the end:
You awake at 5:30 AM from a fevered dream, hot, and realize you cannot stay in bed. In the room of the porcelain you consider which aperture the evacuation will chose - it’s a toss-up if you toss-up first, in other words. Whither this malaise? Food poisoning? Norovirus? Well, we’re in for it now.
Wasn’t as bad as I thought, and I was right as rain by morning, but I remember thinking “this is going to spoil the joy of the weekend breakfast. And I had my heart and stomach set on that croissant.” I’d bought it the previous evening, thinking back to the croissants of the Black Dog or Mucky Pup in Walberswick, how they were warmed up and spread with butter and a lomtick of jam. I’d only bought one, because I remembered that my wife wasn’t much of a croissant enthusiast.
But you never know. So I’d explained it to her the previous night, and said that I was going to speak the absolute truth, and there was no secret message, no hidden implications in what I was about to say. This was not a test. This is just simply how it is.
“I bought one croissant. I intend to have half. But if you have breakfast before me, and you want the whole thing, you can have it. I didn’t buy two because they’re $3.00 each, and -“
“That’s okay, I don’t really like croissants.”
“That’s what I thought. But you never know. Sometimes you just want one, and if you want it, it’s all yours. I will be just as happy with an English Muffin. But really? You don’t like croissants? You, with the elegant tastes and the Francophile tendencies? You read Paris Match in the original language and you don’t like croissants?”
“If I’m in a patisserie with a cafe au lait and it’s fresh, sure, but otherwise no.”
“Oh! Oh! No buttered scones for me mama, I’m off to play the grand piano in a patisserie with a cafe au lait.”
(I have been saying some variant of this for years and everyone in the house knows what I mean but none of them know the reference)
Eventually I went back to bed, the worst having not happened, and slept hard. Woke with the alarm, put it on snooze for the first time in years, had a fast dream, woke, dictated the dream to the phone, went downstairs and made breakfast. I warmed up the croissant, made eggs, sausage.
The croissant just didn’t hit the spot I thought it would. For a second I wondered if she’d somehow spoiled the concept, but dismissed it.
“How was your croissant?” She asked later.
“Eh. I didn’t really enjoy it.”
“Oh no! Did I spoil it for you?”
“Honestly? No. I expected flaky and buttery and perfect and it was more like . . . fresh newspaper.”
But the rest of the breakfast was delicious, and since I wasn't shaky anymore, this day was only getting better.
In related food news: I was looking for simple instructions on making hash browns in an air frier. The first hit produced a page that was chatty, didn’t have a long history of the author’s personal and emotional involvement with hash browns, or a recollection of Grandma bent over the counter grating tubers, or anything else that’s supposed to produce Relatable Emotions.
It’s interesting that recipe sites are full of this, but DIY car repair site aren’t.
Hmm. I think there’s a column there.
Anyway. Look at this crap. Look at this unreadable, unusable crap. I accidentally brushed one of the huge ads and went off an astrology site. I have contempt for everyone involved in this.
It’s a Raptive Partner site, though! Meaning? It’s part of an ad network that pumps out all kinds of crap like this.
Anyway. Look at this crap. Look at this unreadable, unusable crap. I accidentally brushed one of the huge ads and went off an astrology site. I have contempt for everyone involved in this.
It’s a Raptive Partner site, though! Meaning? It’s part of an ad network that pumps out all kinds of crap like this.
I think we need a new internet.
Start from scratch. It costs money: say, $25.00 a month. In exchange you get nothing but high-quality sites without the linkchum infestation or sites that bob to the top of the search results because they either gamed the SEO or slipped baksheesh to Google. It would be a smaller internet, but better.
Our new Monday feature! The Gazettes provide a look at the commercial vernacular from 90 years ago. Sometimes they look forward, and just as often as not they reach back decades for a familiar look.
Are any of these brands still around? We'll find out.
Will Covermore:
It was a brush company, obviously. I found a color catalog at archive.org:
I would've gone with a non-severed hand, but that's just me. The company does not appear to exist anymore.
Ratio of live brands to dead brands so far: 3:7.
It's the retelling of a famous nerd-duo child murder.
I wouldn't say it's "period lettering."
The music’s wrong, too. It’s like doing something about Charles Manson and the soundtrack’s techno. But this is the soundtrack of the Juvenile Delinquent, and I guess these guys were the OG JDs.
We’re doing the craaazy angles to show that the kid’s a bit off.
He’s brilliant but cold and arrogant, and his teachers are appalled:
One of his classmates is also a stringer for the local newspaper, before he became an LAPD cop:
Oh, look! His editor, Frank Lovejoy. Radio guy, a familiar voice.
Kidding. Everyone thinks he’s Frank because he sounds like him. Yes, EVERYONE! Ed Binns. He had a TV show in the same year, called Brenner.
The movie has a jerky start - the murder of the boy isn’t shown. We see the two lads running around on an Ubermensch errand (They steal a typewriter and try to run down a drunk) but bang, the next scene there’s a dead kid in the morgue. It takes almost 45 minutes to get into the crime, with E. G. Marshall on the case. This makes the movie . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? Several: Laggy and dragging and oddly unfocussed.
Until the lawyer shows up: Orson Darrow.
Then it’s just a matter of waiting for the Big Speech, which argues for mercy instead of hanging.
Really makes you think, man
It’s manipulative, of course and moderately effective, thanks to Welles. But it’s also a bit dishonest. We didn’t see the murder, which has the effect of making the lads just seem like they were being accused of . . . of something bad, but (hand waving) isn’t the state being just as bad and premeditated?
(No)
They couldn’t use the guys’ real names, lest Leopold sue them. That was the fear. He did anyway, but “Eventually the Illinois Supreme Court ruled against him, holding that Leopold, as the confessed perpetrator of the "crime of the century", could not reasonably argue that any book had injured his reputation.”
