Woodstock and Warrior Potatoes

Two of the advertising inserts in yesterday's Sunday newspaper had some entertaining stuff.

The insert for the suburban big box store whose name is often pronounced with a French accent had a two-page spread for "Woodstock Exclusives" to "celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival ...." You, too, can now have the Woodstock logo (dove on guitar fret, with one human hand holding down some of the strings) on paper plates or napkins! Or a reversible picnic blanket, solid orange on one side, with a (non-psychedelic) repeating pattern of "3 days of peace and music" on the other side.

The "3 days" slogan is also on plastic tumblers and on some tees. However, in the upper left corner of the two-page spread is a bumper-sticker shaped box, with "Woodstock" and the trademarked logo on one line, followed by "Forty years of peace, love and music" on the second line. Presumably love was left out of the items for sale by the big-box store because someone recognized that in the Woodstock context love was the S in S, D, and R&R description of the sixties (here tactfully not spelled out.)

Meanwhile, in another ad from a big-box store that has a letter of the alphabet preceding "Mart"as its name, there was a two-page spread for Transformers tie-ins from the movie. All in dark colors, except, down in the lower right corner, there was a bright yellow figure, described as "Mr. Potato Head Bumble Spud Taterobt. No ordinary fries, these are POTATOES IN DISGUISE! tm." Only $8.99: I found this so funny I might go buy one. To heck with peace and love.

Wink wink, nudge nudge

A billboard on the SF Muni platform at the Embarcadero Station shows that one company knows some slang -- or has an ad agency that does. The ad is for combined cable and phone services, and says, as far as I can remember: "Check out our package. You know you want to," followed by something like "Proud to celebrate SF Pride." That's the clue as to the slang.

It resonates nicely with the one two billboards away touting solar panels, with something along the lines of "Stimulus packages on the roof." That wasn't intended to be slang, but now seems to be.

Sometime it pays to be semi-awake during ones commute.

I love old dictionaries

Jessamyn West has some interesting comments on ALA's new Connect site: http://www.librarian.net/stax/2773/i-feel-that-i-should-mention-ala-connect/#comment-124372

I added a comment to her post, and felt that I needed to check the spelling of "unfortunately," one of the words in my comment. I used a nifty 1934 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, unabridged, near the reference desk, and on the way to "unfortunately" I ran across "unforeskinned." Yes, it means circumcised.

Dictionaries: so much fun for simple minds.

An Extraterrestial Rosetta Stone?

Rosetta Stone is a company that sells foreign-language courses in a box -- probably on CDs, maybe on DVD. The only print ad I've seen shows a teenage boy in jeans, a white tee shirt, and a baseball-style cap, against a backdrop of a field. He's holding a Rosetta Stone box, settling his cap firmly on his head, and looking determined. The caption says something along the lines of "He's a hard-working farm boy. She's an Italian super-model. He knows he has just one chance to impress her." I find the ad both funny and sweet -- and sort of wonder about the back story: just where is he going to meet her? How did he find out about her?

Being without a tv, I only recently saw a tv ad for the same product while channel surfing during a motel stay. The tv version of the ad lacked the story line, but instead had a surprise in its list of customers: along with the US State Department (that makes sense) and the Department of Defense (that also makes sense,) there was also NASA.

NASA? Do the available languages include some extraterrestial ones? Let's try a print ad on that one: He's only a dedicated astronaut from planet Earth; she's a Venusian princess with 12 arms. He knows he has just one chance to impress her before being mauled to death by Venusian sabre dogs."

I love advertising.

Spiritual Endeavours in Olden Times

I just stumbled across an 1886 publication by the London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: Vocabularies of the Niger and Gold Coast, West Africa.

This is a short publication, with a small number of words and just a few phrases in separate sections for the Yoruba, Nupe, Kakanda, Igibira, Igara, Ibo, Ga (Akra,) and Obutu languages. The vocabulary list and phrases reflect every-day communication, not religious terms, and translate the same English words/phrases in each language.

One approach to spreading Christian knowledge is hinted at by the prominent number of words/phrases involving to beat. The English list of words: beat, to beat, beating, having beaten, I beat, thou beatest, he beats, we beat, you beat, they beat, I am beating, I had beaten, I may beat, I shall beat, I am beaten, I was beaten, I shall be beaten, Beat him well and bind him with ropes, I have beaten his son with many stripes.

A handy verb list, presumably all in the imperative, consists of: go, eat, sit, come, beat, stand, die (!,) give, run.

It wasn't easy being the object of conversion activities in the past.

Author's affection for alliteration is annoying

On BART this morning I started reading American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century, by Paula Uruburu. (New York: Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA, 2oo8.) According to the book-jacket, the author is an English professor. My impression is that she may have spent too much time in grad school reading Victorian three-decker novels.

The book demonstrates both a mania for alliteration and a dedication to adjectives and adverbs that scream for an editor. The four-page introduction alone includes, in part, "a winsome, waif-like, and wide-eyed Evelyn Nesbit," "class of calculating Calvinists," "priapic city over which the preternaturally and passionately inspired [Stanford] White," plus a number of shorter alliterative phrases: betrayed and broken-hearted, purveyor and pillager, minted mansions, magnificent mansions, empires of excess, creator whose corrupted Garden, and tiled and terra-cotta confines. Chapter one includes this phrase in a longer (believe it or not) sentence: "a thrilling and ingenious decade of crusaders and con men, cakewalks and coon songs, contradictions and coincidences, class wars and conspicuous consumption ...." Unfortunately, all of the foregoing examples are only a small sample of what's available.

Chapter one also includes this sentence, for a change with few adverbs and little alliteration, but still plenty of adjectives: "The anticipation of a new millennium was absolutely electric as the last minutes of the withering 1800s hung suspended in the frigid air, overripe and ready to drop." I'm up to page 38 and am, without being withered, ready to drop my interest in the book due to the overripe prose.

Where's the Index?

My new phone book arrived in late December. Last week I needed to use the yellow pages to look for a smog check station, and that's when I discovered that the yellow pages index has been done away with. I'm not sure if it was called an index, but it worked like one: you could look up the term you wanted, and find out what heading the phone company was using. I did find the section: auto smog brake and lamp inspection and repair. Good luck, however, to someone looking for a shop that specializes in brake repair, as there is no heading autro brake, and no cross reference. Ditto for "lamp" repair, but there is auto electrical. My general impression is that the phone company is trying to jack up the number of yellow page listings by making it necessary for a company to buy listings under different headings.

A few years back I needed to use the index to look up services for the elderly, and the index was a big help in providing a lot of category headings. Looking in the phone book today, there's a heading for "Elderly Care Product and Services," with one company, and no cross-references. That's really too bad. I needed the information then as my mother had just started the two-year decline that preceded her death, and I was new to the whole field of services for -- well, I guess, the elderly. It was daunting finding information at first, but ultimately I discovered the care company I used for those two years, and without which I couldn't have managed or kept my sanity. I can't remember if I found it through the phone book, or from a flyer at a restaurant in an area surrounded by senior housing and nursing homes. I do know that for some reason, it's not listed under elderly care. Thinking about it today, I'm not sure what all the phone book categories were, so I'm not sure where I would start if I had to do it again, other than looking under nurses of various types. (Just thinking about this has my stress level rising retroactively in what I think of as post traumatic stress from that period.)