Mary Miller and Fabrice Ambrosini

In Mother Jones, David Axelrod writes about Donald, Leon, and the German far-right:

“So where’s my German friends?” Donald Trump asked a fawning Mar-a-Lago crowd on Election Day, before flashing a grin and a thumbs up for a photo with a group of young men. The German friends in question: Fabrice Ambrosini, a former politician forced to resign after a video surfaced of him doing a Hitler salute; Leonard Jäger, a far-right influencer who has promoted the Reichsbürger movement, an extremist group behind a failed coup attempt in 2022; and Phillipp-Anders Rau, a candidate for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party.

And here’s a Guardian article with more photographs and more background on the visitors.

Mary Miller, our representative in Congress (IL-15), was there too. Here she poses with Fabrice Ambrosini:

[Mary Miller (R, IL-15) and Fabrice Ambrosini. Click for a larger view.]

This photograph, credited only to “Instagram,” appeared at MeidasNews, where Miller is misidentified as “Carol.” No, that’s our Mary, the one who said that “Hitler was right on one thing.”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Raindrop.io)

[I sent MeidasNews a correction in November, but the mistaken caption remains unchanged.]

Valves, Valvoline, and singing circuits

I borrowed Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk from the library. “I want to learn more about our next president,” I told the librarian. She laughed. Once home, I opened at random and read these paragraphs:

One unfortunate trend in the 1980s was that cars and computers became tightly sealed appliances. It was possible to open up and fiddle with the innards of the Apple II that Steve Wozniak designed in the late 1970s, but you couldn’t do that with the Macintosh, which Steve Jobs in 1984 made almost impossible to open. Similarly, kids in the 1970s and earlier grew up rummaging under the hoods of cars, tinkering with the carburetors, changing spark plugs, and souping up the engines. They had a fingertip-feel for valves and Valvoline. This hands-on imperative and Heathkit mindset even applied to radios and television sets; if you wanted, you could change the tubes and later the transistors and have a feel for how a circuit board worked.

This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. They never knew the sweet smell of a soldering iron, but they could code in ways that made circuits sing. Musk was different. He liked hardware as well as software. He could code, but he also had a feel for physical components, such as battery cells and capacitors, valves and combustion chambers, fuel pumps and fan belts.

In particular, Musk loved fiddling with cars. At the time, he owned a twenty-year-old BMW 300i, and he spent Saturdays rummaging around junkyards in Philadelphia to score the parts he needed to soup it up. It had a four-speed transmission, but he decided to upgrade it when BMW started making a five-speed. Borrowing the lift at a local repair shop, he was able, with a couple of shims and a litte bit of grinding, to jam a five-speed transmission into what had been a four-speed car. “It was really able to haul ass,” he recalls.

Clichés, cheap alliteration, corny phrasing, wild generalizations — all lurching toward utter inanity in that final sentence. “He recalls” — aaugh.

This book has many other pages. But I am hauling ass back to the library.

“What’s a magazine?”

In today’s Dustin : “What’s a magazine?”

See also “What’s a BVD?” and “What’s a cash register?”

Life and print in New Jersey

[Zippy, December 22, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is on the edge, the edge of a ledge, having decided that life is not worth living if it’s in New Jersey. Why? Because print is dying.

In Februrary 2025, The Star-Ledger will go digital and The Jersey Journal will shutt down.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Raindrop.io)

Nothing orange can stay

New York City subway cars will be losing their orange and yellow seats in 2025. Replacing them: blue and yellow seats.

[I’m not happy about linking to the New York Post, but its article has the best photographs of the old and new seats.]

Another disappearing pharmacy

[5027 3rd Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday I posted the tax photograph for a Sunset Park pharmacy, one of countless commercial and residential properties torn down to make way for Robert Moses’s Gowanus Parkway (later Expressway). Robert Caro tells the story in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, pages 520–525. Here’s a second Third Avenue pharmacy that was torn down, five blocks away, the Koblentz Pharmacy.

It’s not possible to know the date of this photograph, or any tax photograph (“1939–1941” is all we’ve got), but this one looks as if it was taken after work on the parkway had begun. Other tax photographs from this part of Third Avenue show the El tracks already gone. The pharmacy and the adjacent storefronts in this photograph look empty. And many of the windows of the apartments above the pharmacy have been boarded up.

The Moses project took out the pharmacy and the one-story storefronts on 51st Street. The rowhouses stayed. You can see them in Google Maps. And once again, a building that is now on a corner still bears scars from the removal of a neighboring building.

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor Stan Newman, composing as “Lester Ruff.” As usual, I didn’t find this puzzle significantly easier than a regular Stumper. Indeed, I stumbled around to find a couple of starting points that led nowhere: 60-A, three letters, “TV planet where humor is forbidden” and 22-D, three letters, “Easter precursor.”

And then I saw 1-D, four letters, “Romney’s former firm ___ Capital.” Elaine was working as a word processor there when we met, until she became horrified by what she was typing — pages about downsizing and outsourcing — and quit. All of which is to say that I knew 1-D, and I-D opened up the rest of the puzzle, each answer leading to others with nary a hitch.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

17-A, eight letters, “Glut.” Noun? Verb?

21-A, seven letters, “Polish place.” City? Furniture item?

15-D, three letters, “Tributary lines.” I was really thinking that there might be a very short word having to do rivers.

31-A, eleven letters, “Charles III greeter, 7/5/24.” Okay, whatever.

32-A, three letters, “2010s head of State initials.” Read carefully.

36-A, eleven letters, “Sportscast's replay ‘pen.’” A pretty macho name for what is, after all, a writing instrument.

36-D, seven letters, “First to commercialize laptops (1985).” How long ago that seems.

54-D, three letters, “____ Brum (auto accessory).” Brum? I thought this must be some foreign-car item.

55-D, three letters, “Continuously reduced.” Clever.

My favorite in this puzzle: 7-D, seven letters, “Needle holder.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

David Gergen on the country’s future

“On a recent afternoon as we were sitting together watching the migrating birds and capturing the last of the autumnal sunshine, my father awoke to more words of clarity.” Katherine Gergen Barnett, David Gergen’s daughter, wrote down her father’s fleetingly lucid thoughts: “My father, David Gergen, has dementia. Here are his reflections on the path forward for our country” (The Boston Globe ).

Fiorello La Guardia, a balanced ticket

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). Fiorello La Guardia was running for mayor:

La Guardia possessed qualifications for making the run beyond the fact that, half Jewish and half Italian, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran of German descent, himself a Mason and an Episcopalian, he was practically a balanced ticket all by himself.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

Jimmy Walker’s Versailles

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). The Central Park Casino was “a quiet little night club,” built for Mayor Jimmy Walker and friends in what had once been a “Ladies Refreshment Salon” in Central Park:

But the Casino was more than a restaurant or a night club. The Casino was Jimmy Walker’s Versailles. Friends joked that the Mayor spent more time there than he did at City Hall. When his limousine pulled into view, the doorman would scurry inside and signal the orchestra, so that when Beau James and Betty entered, it would be to strains of “Will You Love Me in December?” Holding hands with Betty, sipping champagne while she sipped beer, the Mayor would receive the parade of visitors to his table with careless ease, and sometimes, when Betty asked him to dance, he would even arise, pinch-waisted and slim in the tuxedo with the shiny lapels that people were beginning to copy, and glide with her around the floor.

Caro adds: “Mrs. Walker’s place was apparently Florida, the state to which she had been packed off for an extended vacation.” One person in Manhattan, one in Florida: shades of a contemporary couple.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

[Betty: Walker’s mistress, Betty “Monk” Compton.]