It was Show-Up Day at the office. We are going to be required to show up three times a week soon. Half a decade after Covid we might get up to four, but I doubt it. That ship sailed and ran right into Paradigm Shift Reef, which is off the coast of Torturned Phrase Cove.
But! We rolled out the new website today, which is reorganized for your viewing pleasure. Nice to see I have one column deep in the bowels of the Variety section, although of course the link has no name, as columnists usually get. I doubt the last two columns, the big goodbye, will get any website action.
All of this reinvention would be interesting if I felt connected to it. I am connected to it, inasmuch as I still work there, but it’s as if there was a revolution and the old regime has melted away, and while I still have a job in the imperial palace the old trappings and hierarchies are upended or dissolved. You greet the same friends but the word “comrade” does not spring to the tongue.
I think back now and then to the paper when I first joined, in 1997, and how the disruptions began almost immediately: we merged with another newspaper group, and I remember one snarky “friend” looking at me and saying “last hired, first fired” before I’d even gotten everything pinned on the wall of my cubicle. That was a stupid idea. Then we were purchased by a private equity firm, which bled us white; that was a stupid idea. There have been many hopeful moments and confident eras. Good editors who liked me and had ink in their veins instead of bits and bytes. I never, ever got the feeling that the place was going to go under the waves. Still don’t. But it will never be what it was when I joined, with thick papers and foreign bureaus and the sense of belonging to something solid and prosperous and essential.
Of course, even then, in 1997, the virus of the internet had worked its way into the marrow, and the host had no idea how to combat it. No, amend that - it had no sense that it had to combat it now, and quickly. There was a vast room of classified-ad takers, and it must have given them such confidence - why, look at all these people on the phone, typing away, we’re too big, we own this. The room would empty out in a few years. Could we have competed with Craigslist? I think so, if we’d slashed rates and developed an online mechanism that ported the Quality Imprimatur of the established “classified” section.
We lost department store ads, because the department stores failed, or retrenched. Somewhere along the line we lost the thousands of tiny ads that used to fill the pages, and that was partly due to the disappearance of the smaller merchants who populated the central business district. The drug stores stopped running big ads that offered socks and clothesline pins. But print maintained a steady stride, until it started to slow, and started to limp, then started to wheeze.
My problem is that I still believe in print. This is why I am on the wrong side of the revolution. I love online and I am online all day. But a thick beautiful magnificent print product that rewards attention, that invites you to stop and spend time with ideas and words and pictures - like the great Telegraph that appears on the King’s table every morning in Walberswick - is a mute idea in this market. Perhaps it’s apt that my column goes with it. The thing I loved is gone.
We’re all done talking about the Olympics opening ceremony, since people have settled into three camps: 1. blasphemous; 2 No it wasn’t because you’re misinterpreting it, 3. yes it was but who cares. The most clear-headed explanation says yes, it was intended to evoke the Last Supper - just like the Simpsons did and no one complained at that! - but then it morphed into a Bacchus Party. Obviously. There wasn’t any smurfy wine god at the Last Supper.
Interesting map of blasphemy laws here. More in enlightened Europe than christofascist USA.
It’s just garbage culture, huffing fumes from the pissoir. We’re decades past Anything Goes, guys. You’re boring. This is exactly what we expect.
On TV in the locker room I saw a CGI sequence that kicked off the network coverage of the Olympics, themed as a testament to French technological culture. A man with a torch ascended the Eiffel Tower (check) got in a balloon (Montgolfier, check) ascended into the sky past a rocket (Ariane, check), past a rock with a little guy on it (Saint-Exupery, check), then it switches to a submarine (Verne, check) and we go inside to find the sub run by . . . Minions. A reminder that they come from a French guy. I suppose your enjoyment of the sequence has a lot to do with your Minion-opinion.
It was all harmless, though. Which brings us to the heavy-metal part:
Festive!
Also, violence against women is never okay
Well, obviously it is, it they’re the wrong person. Wrong class. Wrong kind of woman. Wrong kind of social institution. Then you can do what you like.
At the moment, right now, it would still be considered a bit shocking if they had a synchronized dance sequence in which some drunken Bolshevik soldiers raped the Romanov girls before shooting them. Or after. But give them a few years.
Would that be weird, though? That’s the word of the week. Our governor used it to describe his opposition, and everyone loves it because it made the right MELT DOWN.
Okay, well, is this weird? Last year the Walz administration signed the Trans Refuge act, so minors can come to the state and get puberty reversal. There was a Trans Day of Visibility at the state capitol.
The rules - I know, I know, so boring, so predictable to talk about rules - forbid walking on the star on the floor of the great rotunda. It’s roped off. We walk around it out of respect. The entire building is an embodiment of the state’s virtues and ideals, and as such is probably criticized for its reliance on the imagery and concepts of Western Civilization.
The good parts, not the head-chopping purification rituals.
I mentioned the Tenement House, stocked with all sorts of detritus and ephemera from a bygone life. A hoarder’s stash is a museum’s treasure, if enough time passes and you’ve a big enough shovel.
J. P. Coats, eh? No doubt gobbled and hollowed out years ago, or just a local player that faded in an era of international competition . . . oh.
Coats Group plc is a British multinational company. It is the world's largest thread and structural components' manufacturer for apparel, footwear, and performance materials. Founded over 250 years ago, the UK-based company has operations across 50 countries with a workforce of over 17,000 employees.
Coats was a collector of Scottish coins, and his collection became the largest and most valuable of its kind. He wanted a catalogue of the specimens, and entrusted the work to Edward Burns, a Scottish numismatist. But in Burns's hands the catalogue swelled into an elaborate Coinage of Scotland (1887). It was unfinished at the time of Coats's death. Burns himself died suddenly, and the task of completion was entrusted to George Sim.
In 1850, the young financier Henry Christy returned to Britain after an expedition to Turkey. He brought with him an extensive collection of beautiful—and technologically unfamiliar—fabrics. Amongst them was a fluffy, looped cloth that fascinated Christy's brother, Richard, so much that he and an employee, Samuel Holt, worked our how to make their own.
He left a lot of stuff to the British Museum - so it's possible my eyes have fallen upon something he held.
Familiar to American eyes, except Persil. For me, anyway. It was a German brand. Still is, for that matter.
An ad:
The little boy would grow up to be lead singer for Duran Duran.
It’s 1904.
I think we can tell where the newspaper’s sympathies lie:
Or can we?
As the paper explains, they used to be called “scabs,” but now they’re “strike breakers.” The article was a look at the lives of these men, seen through the eyes of a Post reporter who answered an ad for Strike Breakers.
Fun times in the paper today
"His physicians fear he will die." Not something you want to hear while they're out in the corridor talking to reporters.
Aleksey Nikolayevich Kuropatkin (March 29, 1848 – January 16, 1925) served as the Russian Imperial Minister of War from January 1898 to February 1904 and as a field commander subsequently. Historians often hold him responsible for major Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905, most notably at the Battle of Mukden (1905) and at the Battle of Liaoyang (August-September 1904).
“The place was filled with drugs”
I love this guy’s style; I must find more.
Something of a hard turn there at the end, no?
It’s as if she was a dangerous subversive.
There’s about five houses in Warfield, so it shouldn’t have been too difficult.
More happy news from all over
And more. Just a bucket of grins, this paper
A lad on a grand adventure.
I OCRd it for you
The lad was picked up at the Grand Central Station early Monday by Railroad Watchman Bodine after he had stepped from the "blind baggage" of the B. & 0. train from the East. "This is my first 'pinch,'" the lad said, as he threw his shoe blacking outfit over his shoulder.
"It was this way," he said, "I wanted to see the country, and also wanted to see the World's Fair. We used to live at Columbus, O., about seven or eight years ago, and I thought I would go there and call on some of my friends.”
SAW THE FAIR
"I got to St. Louis all right and I saw the fair, and it didn't cost me a cent, either. I blacked boots and paid for my grub that way. When I got broke I would beg for my feed. I used to go up against kind-looking old ladies and offer to work for my feed. Well, they would look me over and feel sorry for me and feed me and tell me that I need not work. Yes, I made some money with my blacking kit.”
Pinched by the bulls, and held in the Grand Central Station hoosegow until is parents could make the trip and take him home.
You wonder how common this was. And whether it's just as common today, or less so. Or more.
There you have it, whatever it was. On to Gas and Oil.
