It is morning in the office. The coffee is fresh, because I just made it. I’ve been making it every morning since April 2020. Every day starts the same: dump bag, remove computer, walk through the empty office, past the hub, up the stairs, back to the kitchen, grind the beans, pour out the cold and the stale, push the button, and listen to the tortured whine. In the case of today, there was nothing to pour out; the tap on the urn went dry after a second, so I left my cup there, and made more. While it brewed I sat by the window, looked out, then heard a song in my pocket.
It was a video on Twitter that had started by accident. This is the second time I have inadvertently added a soundtrack to daily life. Yesterday while watching the Vikings I became convinced that the audio feed had a strange, nebulous ambient music playing in the background, barely discernible; I couldn’t figure out why they would add something like that. It was like having Brian Eno score a Roman chariot racing. No one else could hear it, so I bade the Giant Swede to pause, to see if it was coming from somewhere else. It was. My pocket. I had butt-activated the astronomy app, which has a New-Agey soundtrack.
The phone was pointed down, so it was looking at stars on the other side of the world. Which is where? Later I looked up the antipode of Minnesota, and the answer seems to be this collection of rocks off Antartica.
It is a French colony. About 45 people live there in the winter, and almost three times as many in the summer, when the temps go as high as 45 F above.
Anyway, the music today was from a video about our place in the cosmos. It’s one of those videos that zooms out from Earth - in this case, Venice - and keeps going until you’re looking at a galactic cluster of galactic clusters of galactic walls of galactic superclusters of galactic filaments. We are meant to contemplate our irrelevance or our special luck at being part of this - although those are not concepts in opposition. It did give me a smile, because I like contemplating these things.
Went I returned to the coffee urn I discovered that I had left the spigot open and everything had run into my cup and overflowed and filled up the spill-reservoir and sloshed onto the countertop. Because I was contemplating the scale of the universe I had caused a huge mess in a very, very small part of this great mystery. Well, it was easily cleaned.
Why did I go to make coffee in the first place? A) The Human Need to Create! Or, B) It is something to do. That’s the reason behind a lot of things we find ourselves repeating: it is something to do. The alternative is not doing something, and for many of us it is hard to imagine not doing something. I don’t know how anyone can not do something. Just sit? Stare? Woolgather?
I first encountered that word in a Thurber cartoon. (Did you know that Cole Porter had his leg off when he was 67, and never wrote another song? Makes you wonder if it was the source of his talent. Medieval scientists were always placing various moods and strengths and abilities in this organ or that; they never thought the shin might be the wellspring of musical ingenuity.) (WHAT, you say. WHERE did that come from? Well, I don’t want to get into a lazy etymology Bleat so early in the week, but I looked up woolgather, which led to a page of other words introduced in 1796. One of them was an American term for a door-to-door peddler of religious texts, a French-derived term: colporteur. I wondered if Cole Porter was born something else and changed his name to a cheeky jab at tract-sellers, which led to reading his bio.
(I also learned that “thingummy” is a synonym for “thingamajig,” and “bobbery” a synonym for “hubbub.” Interesting to see competing terms appear, and fail. No one says “bobbery.”
(What’s all the bobbery about? Oh, they’re trying to find a thungummy.)
Well, I’ve gone and done it, lazy bleat-wise. At least we learned something: Cole Porter was his real name, and if you have your leg off you might enter a PWS, or Persistent Woolgathering State.
You might ask: are they still doing The Color on the tv ads? They are still doing The Color.
A Nike ad that shows people being miserable because they are running in the rain, we have The Color in the city . . .
. . . and elsewhere in the city. Because we see this a lot. This is absolutely the color of modern cities.
Progressive: The Color is manifested on the vehicle and the stupid, simpering husband, who backs into a fence and destroys a bush.
His wise and capable family observes, and do not seem particularly bothered.
The wife condescends to the idiot husband, who simpers some more, and then she calls in Case Keenan to back up, which he does with casual ease.
In the Allstate commercial, an all-knowing brassy women schools a mild, confused male about commercial. The ice cream contains The Color. I do wonder what flavor that is.
There was another commercial that was absolutely saturated with The Color, but when I found it on YouTube it had been tuned down, and was much bluer.
I should also note that few of the commercials on Thursday Night Football had The Color. Possibly because it's too close to the color of Dolphins' jersey.
The Color is present in this brief Jameson commercial, which is obviously intended to extend the brand to the Woman Market.
Two other ways to market the brand, from years ago:
I'll be waaaay out here on this flimsy limb suggesting that the latter two are more effective for a whiskey.
It’s 1915. Just three today, because there’s so much here.
Notions and Fancy Goods is the trade publication.
Some of the many? Would seem to be one, and that’s steampunk eyepiece.
Jindřich Waldes (also Heinrich Waldes or Henry Waldes; 2 July 1876, Nemyšl – 1 July 1941, Havana) was a leading industrialist, founder of the Waldes Koh-i-noor Company, Czech patriot of Jewish origin and art collector.
Thank Puc:
In 1902 together with an engineer Hynek Puc (1856–1938) Waldes left Lokesch and founded his own company. A year later Puc invented a special machine that inserted a small spring into concealed dress fasteners, the main product of the new firm.
Now it gets fun:
The world-renowned Waldes trademark, Miss KIN, came about in 1912 when Waldes on his ocean trip met Elizabeth Coyne, who playfully put one fastener in her eye. František Kupka painted her portrait in oils and Vojtěch Preissig from it designed the firm’s trademark.
The company’s logo today:
She's still working.
More:
On 1 September 1939 Waldes was imprisoned by Gestapo after the Third Reich occupation of Czechoslovakia and kept in concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald, arriving in Dachau on September 10, 1939 and transferred to Buchenwald on September 26 of the same year.
In 1941 his family, who were sent to USA by Waldes before the war (he decided to remain in Prague as a Czech patriot) paid the Nazi authorities 8 million Czech crowns (about 1 Million Reichsmarks or $250,000 US) ransom. In Buchenwald he suffered a diabetic attack, and was in the prison hospital from 11 April 1940 until his release on 2 June 1941.
The Gestapo then transported Waldes by plane to Lisbon, Portugal, where he boarded a United States-bound ship. However, Waldes did not survive the journey to the USA and died under suspicious circumstances on the ship which stopped at Havana, Cuba in May 1941.
Then Koh-i-Noor was a famous diamond, by the way.
Mr Horrax assures you:
This was his store. The building went up in 1900.
Lovely details. They cared about these things.
If I’m correct, he had been dead for five years when this ad ran. Why do I think that? A 1910 Obit for a New York importer.
By the 1920's, the company diversified and began producing brake linings and clutch facings. By the 1940's, it was also making aero safety belts, parachute shrouds, solid woven transmission belting, ladder tape for Venetian blinds, and suspender, garter and corset webs. The company-owned dam at Crystal Lake broke in 1964, causing flooding in Middletown and litigation problems for Russell.
I’ll bet it did.
Feb 1960: the company says “hey, do you want the dam? Give you a good price.”
Apparently Russell wanted to be shot of the thing, what with the expense of it all, and locals wanted the dam to remain, to ensure the continuance of a public beach. People who had cottages on the lake wanted the city to buy the dam.
I can’t tell where the dam is today, but it looks like a lovely place.
The original factory . . .
A portion of the original factory remains.
But not much.
That'll do for today. Thank you for your visit. Now it's time for t1970 British comics!
