a specimen of the cashiers’ receipt

thrust upon my person unconditionally on the occasion of a cash transaction in exchange for a single United States postage stamp, purchased at an outlet post office. I can well imagine that the digital version of this declaration, commemorating this great moment in history, aggregates even more details, anecdotes and accolades.

the yellow nineties or zero shades of grey

 I listened to a delightfully funny and engrossing panel-discussion on the controversial but probably well-understood artist Aubrey Beardsley. Forever twined with the scandals of Oscar Wilde—though professionally, the two always tried to distance themselves, fearing their individual and different flairs might be cancelled out as a talent combined, Beardley’s prints were repulsively erotic and decadent, debauched and corrupting, and despite sensibilities that have grown a bit more tolerant and receptive, I think the black and white illustrations still shock and still nudged underground, despite the brilliance of the artistry, and have no place in polite society. Indeed, looking at them, one does have a sense of having uncovered something supremely smutty and checks to make sure that no one is looking over one’s shoulder. Many times there are surprisingly lurid doodling details hidden in the loops and swirls.
It’s hard to find a modern analogue, I think, because Beardsley was apolitical, though importantly challenging society’s dirty little secrets and however disgusting one might find the pictures everyone intuited exactly what they were about, but maybe John Waters and his troupe of Dreamlanders (Divine, Mink Stole, Patty Hearst and Traci Lords) in transgressive films like Mondo Trasho, Pink Flamingos, Hairspray and A Dirty Shame maybe comes close. Beardsley’s sketches are quintessentially Art Nouveau but I did not realise that his foundry was really the propagating force behind the style, contributing-editor to a quarterly magazine devoted to graphic design (the publication was bound in a yellow cloth cover, hence the name of the decade that vied with the other designation, the Gay Nineties). Moreover the cultural-exchange between Japan and England, whose woodcuts strongly influenced the young artist, and the way that the style that typified the era was reimported and reinterpreted is fascinating to consider.

you deserve a break today

One of my favourite correspondents, Bob Canada, editorializes on one fast food giant’s plan to counter slumping sales with the standard corporate contingency-plan—to introduce a new slogan.

I agree that many people may not understand the mathematical formulation and see the inequality symbol as broken computer code. Perhaps the confused can use this mind- bogglingly clever translation feature for smart phones, as one would for a foreign menu. Who are these Haters anyway? Are they shaming past patrons? The former advertising draughtsman even graciously offers a long list of alternate jingles.

churchillian drift

Mental Floss disabuses us of some of our favourite misattributed or completely made up great quotations with a studied collection of sayings that go rather deeply into the origins of those things we wish our heroes had said. One of the best stories is about how Abraham Lincoln supposedly proclaimed that “When you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will.”
This wise if not somewhat Pollyanna-ish line comes to us not from the great statesman but rather via the marketing geniuses at Disney studios, producing a film version of the book Pollyanna, whence at the treacly and campy conclusion, the little heroine opens the locket of her dead father to discover this inscription. The Disney Brothers love it and had hundreds of souvenir lockets commissioned and sold at gift shops. When the writer-director who’d made up the quotation discovered this misattribution spread, to his great dismay, the studio had the unsold trinkets recalled. Also Freud never said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” and was doctrinairely against the idea of suggesting otherwise.  What are your favourite supposed pithy quotes that turned out to be fictions?

jail-break or walled-garden

Though today’s conversation has adopted such colourfully metaphoric language, the same problems of communication dominated by a few industry giants, privacy and consumer-protection have a history, lively and just as shameful and grasping, that goes back at least to the advent of telephony and probably reaches much further back with the implements, tried and true, of blacklisting, censorship and charters. Before the United States recognised and rejected the monopoly that Bell conglomerate had on the public’s telephone lines, people and businesses did not purchase their telephones but rather rented units from Bell with a monthly subscription—pretty much the same situation we have today, being untethered physically but still locked into contracts that are bundled with gadgets and accessories tied to the service.

A pair of cases, first lodged against municipalities that used a central dispatch to communicate with police vehicles, fire truck and ambulances, and more irking to the phone company, to summon taxi cabs, via the Carterphone that allowed radio-messages to be delivered to cars by piggy-backing on existing land-lines, and then against the manufacturers of a mouth piece called the Hush-a-Phone, which actually did improve upon the standard-issue receivers’ design and made the callers’ conversation clear and made calls more private as claimed (presumably as people need not shout at one another to be heard). The courts rule that such innovations were the prerogative of end-users to purchase and enhance their calls, such as they did not interfere with the rest of the traffic. These precedential decisions eventual not only contributed to the statutory break up of Ma Bell (a move that was apparently never forgot and has reformed with a vengeance in the form of closely connected cartels and the same paucity of choice) but also other inventions that were allowed to infringe on that once tightly controlled territory, like fax machines, modems and the internet.