February 20, 2006
Memory
The New Yorker Magazine celebrates its anniversary sometime in February each year by running a picture on its cover of Eustace Tilley, a rather foppish aesthete, imagined to be, I suppose, a rather typical New Yorker. A number of OoN’s readers will surely know exactly when and why.
It’s the sort of thing one might ask Google back in the days before Google went to China and before Justice discovered it. But I’m leaving it up to somebody else to ask because I’m not so at ease as once I was with Google. Or, should I say, I exercise more care what I ask them, now that I know the Department of Justice has discovered them and is busier looking over my shoulder than after my liberty.
But whenever The New Yorker began, OoN began last summer three years ago and started its archive about the same time (www.covpubs.org) as proof. Unlike The New Yorker, we have no patron like Eustace to celebrate once a year, but we do have a Matron of Inspiration. Parson extraordinaire Barbara Cawthorne Crafton is she, but we can hardly expect her to confess it. We’d run her picture had we the cybersavvy and if, as well,we had a prissy caricature of her.
Anyhow, BCC, as Bob Hope might say, Thanks for the memory.