The original Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (OTBKB) began on September 18, 2004 on Blogspot. But it was different then. There was no No Words_Daily Pix, no Scoop Du Jour, and no Postcard from the Slope.
The old OTBKB, which is sporadically updated, is now called Third Street . It features the adventures of Smartmom, Hepcat Daddy-O, Teen Spirit and the Oh So Fiesty One, as well as other local characters. Smartmom now has her very own column in The Brooklyn Papers.
The new OTBKB started on January 31, 2005 (see first post of that below). Here’s the September 18th post of the old OTBKB.
This morning, Smartmom took care of some recent kitchen problems. The
old man who fixes stoves came by to fix the oven which hasn’t been
working in weeks. Later, the cheerful exterminator stopped by. Smartmom
told him about the wheat moth problem but he said there’s nothing he
can do about it — he specializes in roaches and mice. "You got to go
to the sauce," he said. Smartmom thought he meant that there was some
sauce that is especially delicious to wheat moths. Actually, he was
saying THE SOURCE in thick Brooklynese and pointed to a box of rice,
and other boxes of grains. "If you see nests in there, they gotta go in
the garbage," he said. Note: Smartmom had already thrown out ALL open
boxes of grain and had emptied and scrubbed the cabinet. She’s also
using Pantry Pest traps bought at the PARK SLOPE FOOD COOP.
Oh, that is too funny. When my family moved to Queens from California when I was 9 years old, I had some trouble with the accent at first. I was quite upset, in fact, when I got marked down on a spelling test because I misunderstood “source” for “sauce.” They both sounded like SOACE (or SOAWCE) to me. (Not sure how to represent that strange sound phonetically!) The teacher said to spell the word and use it in a sentence. So I spelled S-A-U-C-E and wrote a sentence about tomato sauce. When I got back the spelling test and questioned the teacher about why she had marked it wrong, she said the word was SOACE, not SOACE, but I still didn’t understand, so she said it was like the SOACE of the RIVAH! When I explained the misunderstanding, she still wouldn’t give me credit. I still really haven’t gotten over it….