There’s a new eatery opening up in the burbs, in a strip mall I pass often. It has a one-word name so it’s easy to remember. (I don’t remember it.) It occupies the space left by a defunct Chinese restaurant called Red Pepper, a name that always struck me as simple and somehow unique, and effective. (Never ate there.) Its competition will be another eatery just a few yards away, which seems to be a favored spot for suburban moms to meet friends and have a glass of wine at 3 PM. (Can’t remember its name.) I do know the words that are under the name I can’t recall:
Cafe & Coffee.
It might be the other way around. I think they missed an opportunity here. If it’s a cafe, it has coffee. There is no way in God’s Green Suburb that a cafe would not have coffee. It’s as if the owners had a terrible experience the one time they went to a cafe somewhere, and they were out of coffee. Or the clerk gave them a blank look: cawf-fee? What is cawf-fee? And the person vowed Damnit, when I open a place, people are going to know they can get a good cup in there.
What would be a good name to assure the passersby that coffee was, indeed, available? AMERICANO, perhaps. BISTRO AMERICANO just to irritate the purists. Unless the other restaurant in the strip mall is a Bistro, which I think it might be. Googling . . . no, it’s a bakery and cafe. So Bistro’s right there. Pick it up.
I’d like to open a low-frills coffee shop, or a Caffe Nero. But I don’t have the loose scratch. There’s only about 40 in the US, mostly in Massachussetts. Best chain coffee you’ll ever get, without question. Old-world vibe. Some of the happiest moments of my life consist of being jet-lagged in London with Daughter having a cup at our usual Nero.
I’d like to open a bar, too. A neighborhood snug. Someplace people can walk to, and enjoy a fresh ale or a good whiskey. Neighborhoods don’t want - no, require those places anymore. It’s rather pathetic that the only place where they know my name, Cheers style, is 4,501 miles away.
Anyway, I just remembered the name of the new place, the one that's a cafe but also has COFFEE in its name in case you didn't think the CAFE had COFFEE. The name?
BRIM
So I can't wait until they open and I can walk in and ask if they have any coffee. It will also be tempting to say "Fill it to the rim," and then have an expectant look on my face as I wait for everyone else to complete the catch phrase.
Which, of course, they won't.
You can, can't you?
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Finally watched the season premiere for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Ohhhhhyes. The opening sequence, the pre-credit part, consists of hectic battle and the Enterprise ramming a Gorn ship. Well, we can only go up from here, right? Then swells the theme, built on the DNA of the classic Trek theme.
This show is getting a ton of hate all of a sudden on the r/startrek subreddit. It’s mystifying. It’s not perfect, but I don’t know what else you want from Trek. If you worship the original, complete with Kirk over-emoting about the Constitution being not just for Yangs, but for Coms, I suppose SNW is too shiny and lacks that deep, deep philosophy for which the original was known.
The crew feels right: the original characters are recast, of course. Uhura is bit more green. Spock isn’t played for camp; he’s a total stoic. Nurse Chaplin has an upgraded role, and she’s interesting, capable, vulnerable, wary, and likeable. There’s Number One from the pilot, with the same confident cool. The first season’s Chief Engineer was a blind Andorian, and he was great - I don’t understand why he was knocked off. The cliffhanger of the second season introduced a character named “Montgomery Scott” who might play a role in the show going forward, can’t say. (/s) He has a bit more comic brio than the solid Scotty of old, but less jittery irritation than Simon Pegg’s movie version. (And I liked Pegg in the role.)
Then there’s the captain. Christopher Pike, who old TOS fans know as Blinky McScarface, locked in a mobile wheelchair. We know how he’s going to end up. And so does he. Pike’s a bit of a Boy Scout, Kirk-confident and effortlessly capable. He’s now tied for Second Favorite Captain.
Lore? You have lore. In S3E1 Nurse Chapel says to Spock - they’re having issues - that she is still going off to study with Roger Corby. You have the Gorn, who are horrifying - not just the guy in a lizard suit going after sweaty desperate Kirk. (They’re also borrowed from Alien, if the xenomorphs had a civilization and were warp-capable.) Pike has an interesting attitude towards them: they’re monsters and we need to kill them. Chris, they’re a highly sophisticated species capable of interstellar travel! They are monsters and we need to kill them.
Every ST show reflects its era. TOS: the New Frontier. TNG: transnational universalist goodwill mission, with everyone driving around in a Space Hilton. DS9: embassy in post-Soviet liberated territory. Voyager: End of History, so we it has to take place in a tabula rosa. Enterprise: early 21st century uncertainty that wants origin stories for its myths, turning quickly into a post 9/11 analogue. Discovery: All DEI, all the time. Picard, which ended up as the most sustained piece of fan service in Trek history (Enterprise season 3 was the standard until Picard season 3), coexisted with SNW. Both look backwards. Picard was about wrapping up old stories. SNW is about laying down the groundwork for the stories told in TOS. I have absolutely no patience for nitpickers and purists. SNW, more than any other iteration, is the direct inheritor of everything we loved about TOS.
Which was, let us remember, is beloved in spite of itself. Cheap sets and too many parallel worlds. It’s the Indian planet! It’s the Roman planet! It’s the Greek God planet! It’s the obvious socioeconomic parallel planet! It’s the plague planet that looks exactly like Earth! It’s the gangster planet! It’s the post-nuclear-war Earth planet with Yankees and Communists! We all love it. But C’mon.
In the opening episode of season 3, Pike has . . . a moment. He’s driven in the S3 open by the tripartite need to beat an invader, rescue colonists (a classic Trek imperative) and also find his love interest, and that shifts him into this unexpected Ahab mode; he wears his away / combat outfit on the bridge and does a little neck-crack screw-it move before he starts his attack. It’s a nice little move that tells you the actor loves playing this character.
I want to leave you with this. The battle has been won, but Pike’s love is still in peril. What follows is something that has never been done in Trek, I think. Ever, at all. Just for a moment. Just a few words. But there it is.
It wasn't until I watched it again that I realized who he was addressing when he said "You win."
It’s 1910.
These are from a 1910 book about the virtues and techniques of big advertising posters, intended for the industry. It’s rare we get color from that era, so let us enjoy this glimpse into the commercial vernacular of the day.
The collar for the modern high-tech man of the world:
Hmm: Cluett, Peabody & Co. Why the comma? The company was Cluett Peabody, and it merged with Arrow in the late 1880s, says wikipedia. The article places a comma between Cluett and Peabody sporadically, so this could be an error on the author’s part.
What better example of business survival than Cluett, Peabody & Company? Seemingly overnight, demand for its product — an elaborate and successful line of stiff, detachable shirt collars —had dried up. Its survival at stake, Cluett responded by introducing the Arrow shirt — and invented Sanforized to make it work.
Except the Arrow shirt, with a detachable collar, was already around.
Well, the Arrow collar. They transferred the popular name to the shirt.
Again with the Turkish tobacco. Well, that won’t last forever.
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Was it the same guy who did the other Turkish smokes? Googling . . . ah. Found a package that said:
This Band Guarantees the Consumer Against Substitution Of Inferior Goods./ Anargyros/ P. Lorillard Co., Successor.
Lorillard being the big cigarette concern. It seems S. Anargyros had sold his name ten years before, according to this lawsuit against another company using the name in conjunction with Levant-named smokes.
Well that doesn’t look safe
I found a news story about the 13th annual tournament, in 1909. Odd, but I have no wish to pursue the matter any further.
Pal, I think you got a pretty good start on happiness if that’s the pile where you park you spats.
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Little girl, running to dad, who has chocolates. Timeless.
Unless that’s the butler, and dad phoned in from the office because he wouldn’t be leaving the city. Big deal in the works, he’d sleep at the club.
The factory: big operation.
I imagine so, yes
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Damnedest thing, Cottolene. It’s for cooking. NO HOG FAT
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Yes, you get oil from cotton, I suppose, but you say Cotton, and people don’t think of something you put in the pan on the stove.
It was the first mass-produced and mass-marketed alternative to cooking with lard, and is remembered today for its iconic national ad campaign and the cookbooks that were written to promote its use.
Cottolene remains in the public consciousness, in part thanks to the lasting impact of its advertising campaign and the accompanying cookbooks it produced.
No, it doesn’t.
They were, at one time, quite the new sensation.
From the absolute mess of a Wikipedia article:
It was mentioned in the Saturday Evening Post in 2019 that as of 2016, Chiclets was discontinued by Mondelez in the United States.] It has re-appeared as of 2019, manufactured in Mexico. In 2020 the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board held that the Chiclets trademark had not been abandoned. To further confuse the issue it was noted in an article on the Mashed website that Chiclets, identified as Adams Chiclets, were available at Walmart, Kmart and Amazon in the US.
Adams, because that was the original brand.
Thomas Adams (May 4, 1818 – February 7, 1905) was a 19th-century American scientist and inventor who is regarded as a founder of the chewing gum industry. Adams conceived the idea while working as a secretary to former Mexican leader Antonio López de Santa Anna, who chewed a natural gum called chicle. Adams first tried to formulate the gum into a rubber which was suitable for making tires. When that didn't work, he turned the chicle into a chewing gum called New York Chewing Gum.
In 1870, Adams created the first flavored gum, black licorice, which he named Black Jack. In 1871, Adams patented the first chewing gum making machine. In 1888, his gum was the first to be sold in vending machines.
But did he invent Chiclets? The wikipedia article says there are many claimants to the product, including Frank Fleer.
There’s a familiar moniker. He invented bubble gum! Well, with some help. His first try was . . .
Blibber-Blubber was the first bubble gum formulation, developed in 1906 by American confectioner Frank H. Fleer.[1] The gum was brittle and sticky, with it containing little cohesion; for these reasons, the gum was never marketed.[2][3] It also required vigorous rubbing with a solvent to remove from the face after the bubble had burst.
This isn’t made any more . . .
But Glidden Paint, like Arrow shirts and Chiclets - and the Army, for that matter - are still around.
That will do for today, except of course for the updates (free as ever like all this stuff for now) and the latest chapter in the Joe Ohio story, over at the paid section of the Substack. Thank you for your patronage, as always.
