[From another popular blog, md/news1: “I did not renew presenttension in time, and my payment has not gone through at this moment. Diary entry here instead, late on Sunday June 20, 2025.”]
Today I saw an old photo of Union Square with a very distressed billboard for Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. Well where the hell can I get good fish and chips? I found myself resorting to things like Yelp. I was guided to Judge Roy Bean, out the back door of my building. Where Moki and I spent many a lazy afternoon 1998-1999 and maybe beyond. We had a regular barman named Rudy. Lebanese, and I think he was or had been a student at Columbia. Great guy, could talk about anything. I got there today at noon. It was empty. I sat at the bar. Almost the same as the last time I was in there (around 2003 maybe, with Keith, both very drunk, and the place was unaccountably filled with niggers). But the bar is a lot longer now. They broke open the kitchen and made that a seating area.
The $22 fish and chips were okay, served up with malt vinegar, ketchup, tartar, et al. I made notes in Book 88 about the Buckley book. Things left out. Lack of focus in Tanenhaus. The bill was rather more than twice that $22 as I had two beers. Can’t do this again for a long time. Money very short. Rent. Con Ed. Bills.
Cagney, Cuddles, Whorf
Last weekend, on the day when I was not due out in Queens (that would be Saturday) I found myself watching Yankee Doodle Dandy. I had tried to rent it on the Fourth, but there was some Amazon glitch. But the rental was made anyway and it was available when I looked a few days later. Friday, Saturday. My, it was much much longer than I remembered, and I must have been raised on truncated editions on Million Dollar Movie and The Early Show. What I remembered were the Little Johnny Jones numbers (Yankee Doodle Dandy and Give My Regards to Broadway), somebody singing Mary It’s a Grand Old Name, and Forty-five Minutes from Broadway. And then the lights go off in an outside stage, but with the help of headlights they all sing Over There. And of course the story is framed with Cohan meeting an FDR impersonator in the Oval Office (which is upstairs in the WH, not by the Rose Garden in the West Wing, as it had been by FDR’s day), and at the end Cohan dances down the WH stairs. The Sam Harris character I barely remembered, did not remember at all it was played by Richard Whorf.
And I never saw, or blanked out, on the early scenes when young George M. is playing in Peck’s Bad Boy and gets beat up by the neighborhood ruffians. And then talks fresh to Mr. Edward Albee, the theatrical manager, who comes to the theater to lure the Cohans down to Providence. Cuddles Sakall is an early angel when Harris and Cohan go into business. That I did not recall. Or the four Cohans singing I Was Born in Virginia.
That’s the place that’ll win ya.
I unpacked the Waterpik Flosser today and used it three times. I’m very clumsy and uncoordinated and sprayed water all over the place the first two times. My old Waterpik in orthodontia days had a big tub receptacle that held about a pint of water. The handheld device, attached on a siphon, was controlled by a button that turned the squirt on and off. This new one is shaped like a cross between a dildo vibrator and an insecticide can, where the squirt nozzle goes into your mouth but you control the spray from an on/off switch on the side. I will adapt.
