Potrzebie
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
My entry in The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest for this week. The cartoon is by Liam Francis Walsh.
Labels: the new yorker
¶ 1:45 PM 0 comments
Thursday, March 08, 2012
My current entry in The New Yorker Cartoon Caption competition.
Labels: the new yorker
¶ 1:12 PM 1 comments
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Françoise Mouly on The New Yorker's triple cover
October 12 covers (The Food Chain) by Dan Clowes, Zohar Lazar and Mark Ulriksen
Labels: dan clowes, françoise mouly, mark ulriksen, the new yorker, zohar lazar
¶ 8:01 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Death of Newspapers
Control-click heading to hear Paul Whiteman playing a "Joe Palooka Medley" on the Kraft Music Hall (December 28, 1933).
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Maureen Dowd: "Slouching Towards Oblivion": "Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond. Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small."
This is an excerpt from an article by Virginia Combs that ran December 31, 2007, in The Kentucky Post. It provides a portrait of rural households minus radios during the 1930s when kids opened newspapers to the comics pages for entertainment. To read the entire article, go here.
It was with much regret and sadness that I learned The Cincinnati Post would be closing December 31. For more years than I like to admit, The Post has been part of my life six days each week.
I grew up on a small farm during the Depression in the foothills of Kentucky. We were poor and each penny (literally) was spent only for necessities - that is except for one item. At Dad's insistence our one luxury was a subscription to The Cincinnati Post.
We received The Post one day after it was printed (we didn't have a radio until 1939) and this was our connection to the outside world. Six days each week someone in the family would walk the half mile or maybe ride a horse to our one-room rural post office.
My dad would end each day - if in the summer in his rocking chair on the front porch or if in the winter with his long legs stretched out toward the fireplace - with The Post spread open and reading it intently. The Post kept him informed of state, national and world affairs and whomever he met he could discuss any of this with up-to-date knowledge.
I first took interest in The Post around seven or eight years of age when I heard my older brother mention that a new comic strip was coming to the "funny page" - Li'l Abner by Al Capp. I had to see what this was about so I made sure I read Li'l Abner the first time it was printed in the paper. Of course, this led to reading the other comic strips. So through the years I enjoyed reading Major Hoople, Out Our Way, Abbie and Slats, Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs, Alley Oop, Boots and Her Buddies, Tarzan of the Jungle, Nancy and many others I cannot recall now.
.
Maureen Dowd: "Slouching Towards Oblivion": "Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond. Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small."
April 8, 1906
October 23, 1921
September 26, 1926.
June 11, 1933
Roy Crane's first Captain Easy Sunday page
The Post Was Part Of Her Life
It was with much regret and sadness that I learned The Cincinnati Post would be closing December 31. For more years than I like to admit, The Post has been part of my life six days each week.
I grew up on a small farm during the Depression in the foothills of Kentucky. We were poor and each penny (literally) was spent only for necessities - that is except for one item. At Dad's insistence our one luxury was a subscription to The Cincinnati Post.
We received The Post one day after it was printed (we didn't have a radio until 1939) and this was our connection to the outside world. Six days each week someone in the family would walk the half mile or maybe ride a horse to our one-room rural post office.
My dad would end each day - if in the summer in his rocking chair on the front porch or if in the winter with his long legs stretched out toward the fireplace - with The Post spread open and reading it intently. The Post kept him informed of state, national and world affairs and whomever he met he could discuss any of this with up-to-date knowledge.
I first took interest in The Post around seven or eight years of age when I heard my older brother mention that a new comic strip was coming to the "funny page" - Li'l Abner by Al Capp. I had to see what this was about so I made sure I read Li'l Abner the first time it was printed in the paper. Of course, this led to reading the other comic strips. So through the years I enjoyed reading Major Hoople, Out Our Way, Abbie and Slats, Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs, Alley Oop, Boots and Her Buddies, Tarzan of the Jungle, Nancy and many others I cannot recall now.
January 5, 1936
September 6, 1936
1937
November 3, 1940
May 17, 1942
October 10, 1943
1947
December 21, 1947
June 4, 1950
June 9, 1956
December 18, 1964
November 27, 2006
Chris Ware
Labels: abbie an' slats, al capp, alley oop, captain easy, chris ware, coulton waugh, death of newspapers, maureen dowd, roy crane, smokey stover, tarzan, the new yorker, wash tubbs
¶ 8:54 AM 11 comments
Monday, March 24, 2008
SI Vault
Control click heading above to hear audio of Howard Chace's "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut."
As far as I know, only three magazines have made their entire back issue archives available on discs. These are Mad, National Geographic and The New Yorker. Now here comes a whole new ball game.
Sports Illustrated just made its archives available online with an easy-access reader employing scrolling thumbnails and a simulation of page turning. One can read straight through an issue with easy zoom or search. Type Favre into the search engine, and you'll get back over 1656 results (436 articles, 181 photos, 24 galleries, 1000 videos and 15 covers). The SI Vault has some 50,000 stories, 2,800 covers, 500,000 photographs and a Wiki for entering corrections and "building a world-class sports encyclopedia" plus video clips from ESPN, NBC Sports, NFL, AOL and other sources.
I decided to test the advanced search function. I remembered that the first issue in the mid-1950s had a short item about Howard L. Chace's "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut." I tried both his name and the title of his book, Anguish Languish (Prentice Hall, 1956). I got an August 17, 1959 issue with an article on Chace but not the first issue of Sports Illustrated. However, the 1959 article enabled me to figure out the date of the debut issue (August 16, 1954) and going through the first issue page by page, I found the Chace item, titled "Parlor sport," on pages 25-26.
If you begin at the first issue, you can click through each of the 1954 covers and also email covers.
This is all so impressive that one is left hoping they will do the same with Life, and sure enough, at the Life site it appears they are about to turn Luce a similar set-up. The site has a large notice:
Who was Howard L. Chace? In addition to providing organ music accompaniment for silent film screenings, he was a professor of Romance languages at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) who stumbled onto the fact that virtually any syllable in the English language can be replaced by a similar sounding syllable. As Chace later explained, "an unbelievable number of English words, regardless of their usual meanings, can be substituted quite satisfactorily for others."
With that realization, he began to write familiar nursery tales and rhymes into what he called Anguish Languish. Chace's creation first surfaced in Gene Sherman's "Cityside" column in the Los Angeles Times and moved on to the San Francisco Chronicle before it was picked up by Sports Illustrated.
In 1995, Dorothy Behlen Heinrichs recalled that "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" was "written by my great aunt Iola's second husband, Howard Chace, a professor of English at Miami University. I have a copy of it somewhere that he gave me one Thanksgiving. He was also a gifted organist. He used to play organs during silent movies to provide the excitement. My father was crazy about him and gave him the key to our house to come over and practice on our organ anytime."
With publicity from Sports Illustrated and Arthur Godfrey (who read "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" on his program) there soon was such a demand in 1955 that it led to Chace's book, Anguish Languish. The somewhat inert and passive cartoon illustrations were by Hal Doremus, who usually illustrated cookbooks. Chace never became a media personality and never explored the merchandising possibilities, so interest in Anguish Languish faded away until some of his writings were revived on the Internet during the 1990s. Another Chace tale, "Slipping Booty," begins like this:
Control click heading above to hear audio of Howard Chace's "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut."
As far as I know, only three magazines have made their entire back issue archives available on discs. These are Mad, National Geographic and The New Yorker. Now here comes a whole new ball game.
Sports Illustrated just made its archives available online with an easy-access reader employing scrolling thumbnails and a simulation of page turning. One can read straight through an issue with easy zoom or search. Type Favre into the search engine, and you'll get back over 1656 results (436 articles, 181 photos, 24 galleries, 1000 videos and 15 covers). The SI Vault has some 50,000 stories, 2,800 covers, 500,000 photographs and a Wiki for entering corrections and "building a world-class sports encyclopedia" plus video clips from ESPN, NBC Sports, NFL, AOL and other sources.
I decided to test the advanced search function. I remembered that the first issue in the mid-1950s had a short item about Howard L. Chace's "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut." I tried both his name and the title of his book, Anguish Languish (Prentice Hall, 1956). I got an August 17, 1959 issue with an article on Chace but not the first issue of Sports Illustrated. However, the 1959 article enabled me to figure out the date of the debut issue (August 16, 1954) and going through the first issue page by page, I found the Chace item, titled "Parlor sport," on pages 25-26.
If you begin at the first issue, you can click through each of the 1954 covers and also email covers.
This is all so impressive that one is left hoping they will do the same with Life, and sure enough, at the Life site it appears they are about to turn Luce a similar set-up. The site has a large notice:
Who was Howard L. Chace? In addition to providing organ music accompaniment for silent film screenings, he was a professor of Romance languages at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) who stumbled onto the fact that virtually any syllable in the English language can be replaced by a similar sounding syllable. As Chace later explained, "an unbelievable number of English words, regardless of their usual meanings, can be substituted quite satisfactorily for others."
With that realization, he began to write familiar nursery tales and rhymes into what he called Anguish Languish. Chace's creation first surfaced in Gene Sherman's "Cityside" column in the Los Angeles Times and moved on to the San Francisco Chronicle before it was picked up by Sports Illustrated.
In 1995, Dorothy Behlen Heinrichs recalled that "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" was "written by my great aunt Iola's second husband, Howard Chace, a professor of English at Miami University. I have a copy of it somewhere that he gave me one Thanksgiving. He was also a gifted organist. He used to play organs during silent movies to provide the excitement. My father was crazy about him and gave him the key to our house to come over and practice on our organ anytime."
With publicity from Sports Illustrated and Arthur Godfrey (who read "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut" on his program) there soon was such a demand in 1955 that it led to Chace's book, Anguish Languish. The somewhat inert and passive cartoon illustrations were by Hal Doremus, who usually illustrated cookbooks. Chace never became a media personality and never explored the merchandising possibilities, so interest in Anguish Languish faded away until some of his writings were revived on the Internet during the 1990s. Another Chace tale, "Slipping Booty," begins like this:
Lessen, poisoned gulls, ditcher wander hair annulled furry tell a boarder Slipping Booty? Hoecake? Wail, heresy starry. Wants dare worsted putty ladle prances hoe hat ban putter slip furry hunter cheers buyer wicket an shellfish furry gourd murder. Dish putty gull, pimple set, worse line honor bet, sounder slip, inner bet rum off annulled gloaming casserole, saturated inner lodge, dock florist.
"Slipping Booty" is copyright ©2008 by the Howard Chace Estate
Labels: archive, chace, life, mad, national geographic, sports illustrated, the new yorker, time
¶ 8:27 AM 2 comments
