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This isn’t about coffee or penises, but of course that’s what all you dirty-minded people care about.

It’s about:  stray advice from the ancient past that lingers in your mind, for no apparent reason.

Why do we remember things?  Why do we forget?

We accept the forgetting part with age; it’s commonplace.  The remembering part is eerie because, even as our brains age and begin to perforate like Swiss cheese, certain memories stick with us.  The following advice will be with me on my dying bed:

Coffee makes your pecker harder.

A friend told me this when we were high school freshmen.  We were running on a high school practice field.  It was a weekend day; school was not in session.

He told me that his uncle had said this–in those exact words.

I still remember the light of the day.  I even know that we were running west.

This wasn’t information that I was hungering for, either.  As a freshman, I had no need for pecker-hardening elixirs.  It had no personal significance.

I’ll go on a limb and theorize that a recess of my brain seized the information because it would be needed much later in life.  Our minds do the same thing when it comes to slipping on ice or getting shocked at an outlet.  Our minds store valuable information that will protect us.  Since we are animals that want to procreate, a primal part of the brain wants to protect those procreative abilities.

The uncle was right.  Caffeine temporarily improves vascular functioning.  You need good vascularity to help blood pour into the penis and erect it.  Or to put it more simply:

Coffee makes your pecker harder!

There’s well-known a scene in Citizen Kane called “The Bernstein Scene.”  The reporter who is trying to track down the mystery of deceased Charles Foster Kane’s past speaks with Mr. Bernstein, who had been Kane’s guardian.  Bernstein talks about memory and the past, but then breaks off into this startling reverie about a memory of his own which included a girl with a parasol:

 

From years of watching old movies I had heard the MidAtlantic accent but I had no idea what it was called.  I found it oddly repulsive and attractive, all at the same time.  It represented a kind of ivory tower British ideal, but because it distinctly had American tones, it was accessible.

It’s Not MidAtlantic States

First, let’s dispel the notion that it has anything to do with the MidAtlantic United States.  The MidAtlantic States, according to Wikipedia, are Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., New York, Virginia, and West Virginia.

What’s the common theme here?  Land.  Every state represented above is, obviously, on land.

MidAtlantic Accent Is In the Ocean

By contrast, the MidAtlantic Accent, sometimes called Transatlantic Accent, is located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

1,732 miles into the Atlantic, to be precise.  That’s half the distance between New York, NY and London, England.

The joke is that this peculiar accent is kind of American and kind of British.  It’s so “kind of” both that it’s easiest to place it right between the two nations.

It’s not a joke that I invented, either.  The term MidAtlantic Accent has been around for a long time.

How It Sounds

It’s rahther, not rather, but not in a wholly British way.  It’s a rahther flattened by American diction.

It’s very pronounced ever so faintly as velly, smoothing down those r’s until they begin to approach l’s.  But not too far.

It’s Katherine Hepburn.

It’s not Cary Grant.  While Grant does have an odd mixture of American and British accents, he also has that unique Cary Grantish hiccup.  Also, I believe that Cary Grant’s accent falls more in the British direction.

It’s stilted.  It’s posh.

It’s learned.  No one grows up speaking MidAtlantic.

It’s the authoritative voice of a newsreel announcer.

Why The MidAtlantic Accent Disappeared

Everything runs its course.  By the 1940s, the high point of the MidAtlantic Accent in the U.S., the British Empire was already in its death throes.  Britain was no longer the all-powerful imperialistic empire it had once been.  Hitler’s armaments had touched British soil.  The Huns had invaded.

Another reason is because the authoritative voice disappeared.  In the 1950s, authority was quietly being challenged; by the 1960s, openly so.  No one wanted to hear stentorian pronouncements–or directions–anymore.

Sources

The Atlantic.  “When Did Americans Stop Sounding This Way?”

 

 

At my high school was a teacher named Richard Trumbly.  It didn’t matter if you had him as a teacher or not–you knew Mr. Trumbly.  He was famous.

He was famous for many reasons, but to pick just one?  Well, he was famous for being nattily dressed and groomed–suits and pomaded hair–several full decades after dress standards for the entire world had relaxed.  A good thumbnail description:  Felix Ungar from The Odd Couple in a mossy-green suit and a precise MidAtlantic Accent.

He taught English and Theater in the large space above the grand and imposing 1930s, WPA-era auditorium.  I don’t know the circumstances of this classroom, but I like to think that Mr. Trumbly had slowly taken ownership of this space by force of will.

Yet he was a great teacher.  Not the “great” we use ten times a day, as in “Oh, this new pen is totally great.”  He was great in the larger sense, a teacher who inspires and molds.  You didn’t particularly like him.  As a teenager, how could you?  You were a smelly, prone-to-anarchy 17 year-old mangling the language at every turn.  Mr. Trumbly was the bulwark, the rock of civilization.  Mr. Trumbly never laid down the flag; never opened the gates to let the Visigoths through.

1.  Err is Pronounced “URR”

We all pronounce it air.  Wrong.  It’s pronounced urr.  Mr. Trumbly taught us that.  But I don’t want to be a total dick, so I say air if at all.

2.  Implosions Do Not Happen in Las Vegas

Not a Trumblyism, but I’m on the bully pulpit now and you can’t get me off.  Implosion.

I realize I’m fighting a losing battle on the correct usage of implosion.  An implosion is the opposite of explosion.  In an explosion, things go outward.  In an implosion, things go inward.

Best example:  break a lightbulb.  At the moment of implosion, the vacuum inside the bulb imperceptibly pulls the fragments inward.  Then they go outward.  Problem is, the impact of hammer, bullet, or table is a complicating factor that doesn’t let you see that inward motion.  Second problem is that the vacuum is so minute that it doesn’t do much to suck the fragments inward.

So when you put explosives inside an abandoned Las Vegas hotel and set them off, you are exploding the building.  Not imploding it.  Isn’t it a tipoff that those things you put in the building are called explosives?  It’s just by careful placement of explosives that the building happens to fall mainly inwards.

3.  Jibe and Jive

What the hell, people?  The meaning of jibe is “in accord with.”  Throwing out some examples of right and unright usage:

Right:  “This letter doesn’t jibe with my understanding of how I got fired.”

Wrong:  “He is one jibe honky-cat.”

Right:  “He is one jive honky-cat.”

Wrong:  “This accident report doesn’t jive with my understanding of how the piano dropped on his head.”

4.  And While We’re At It

I’m getting slowly madder, my face turning Trumbly-red.

Commas get omitted all the time.  OK.  But there is one instance that drives me bonkers:

Let’s get going people.

Tell me your secrets Jim.

Francis the talking mule is cute!

Whenever you’ve got a name or a person or a group or anything like that, separate it from the rest of the sentence with a comma, like:

Let’s get going, people.

Tell me your secrets, Jim.

Francis, the talking mule is cute!

Because you can also say “Francis The Talking Mule is cute!”  Different meaning.

Whew.  I’m tired.  Being a bulwark against Visigoths really drains a guy.

 

I’m obsessed.  It began a few weeks ago when, on an Internet auction, I purchased an original drawing called “Rocket Speedway,” by Sidney Howell, executed in 1935.  Howell was an artist who occasionally worked for Orton & Spooner.  According to the University of Sheffield’s National Fairground Archives, Orton & Spooner

major ride-builders and decorators based at Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Their worked spanned early carving through to construction of 19th Century Shows, classic Scenic Railways, up to the design and building of 1930s thrill rides such as the Ark and Dodgem.

I surmise that Howell was called into action to create this gift from one of the Ortons to a man named Norman Bartlett.  An inscription at the bottom reads:

To Norman Bartlett – February 1936.  In memory of a very pleasant association constructing the most thrilling ride we have manufactured in our sixty-years experience.  Tom Orton. (?)

After that, I began to get interested in illustration art from the 20th century.  I purchased one of the unpurchased, “Buy Now” items from a Heritage Auction, this one from the 1940s, an original painting used for a novel cover:

High-style pulp art it is not.  But it was my entry point into the world of original illustration art:  magazine covers, book covers, and advertisements.

Resources For Original Illustration Art

Prints of illustration art are a dime a dozen:  just check eBay.  But sources for original paintings are more rare.  Some of the best.

Grapefruit Moon Gallery:  A lively market for illustration art, pinups, and glamour art.

Graphic Collectibles

Taraba Illustration Art:  Purveyors of the highest quality illustration art out there.  Offers works by name artists such as Margaret Brundage, Walter M. Baumhofer, Harry Fisk, James Montgomery Flagg, and Arthur Sarnoff.

And to mention…

Bruce Palmer Galleries II:  This dealer has excellent pieces, but its online collection is located on the shitty AskArt super-site.

Girasol Collectibles:  Not a huge selection of original art, but what they do have is from name artists:  George Rozen, Walter Baumhofer,

Illustration Magazine:  Not a seller, but a great magazine with archives posted for free viewing.  This magazine is a must.