These guitars are those guitars

He’s selling guitars. Quelle tromperie!

Lacking the patience to spell out the details, I’ll leave these guitars to your careful eye. I’d wager that this American Eagle electric guitar and its Presidential cousins are versions of this Chinese guitar. The American Eagle and Presidential guitars are going for $1500 each. The Chinese guitar: $144 each if you buy two from Alibaba. And the price goes down from there, down to $115 each if you buy a hundred or more.

I haven’t spotted ringers for the American Eagle and God Bless the USA acoustic guitars, but my guess is that these too are sourced from China.

The website offers fun disclaimers:

In-Stock Guitars:
We respectfully ask that you allow up to a few weeks for shipping due to a high volume of orders and the extra time it takes to ensure each guitar is carefully packed for successful delivery.

Pre-Order Guitars:
Please allow 5-6 months for manufacturing and delivery.

Somehow I get the idea that they’re aiming for that bulk-purchase price.

And as with those watches, what you see might not be what you get:

The images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product.

So these guitars might turn out to be some other guitars after all. But as the song says, you can’t always get what you want from a website bearing his name.

“Built on a lie”

Robert Caro knows how to use the occasional short paragraph to advantage. From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The official records of most public agencies are public records, but not those of public authorities, since courts have held that they may be regarded as the records of private corporations, closed to scrutiny by the interested citizen or reporter.

This was very important to Robert Moses. It was very important to him that no one be able to find out how it was that he was able to build.

Because what Robert Moses built on was a lie.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

Leonardo, no

I’ve never been much of a Ken Burns fan, and whatever affection I might have had for his work evaporated with Jazz. But I wanted to like his Leonardo da Vinci.

And I didn’t. It’s far too busy: split screens, with art on one side, nature on the other; unidentified artworks, by any number of artists, split-screen or full-, appearing and disappearing rapidly; art historians speaking as music plays behind them, or over them. The presentation defies any contemplation of art and makes it impossible, at least for me, to grasp the chronology of the life. The truly false note: yellow subtitles translate the abundant commentary of French and Italian art historians, but Leonardo’s own words are spoken, without attribution, in a deeply accented English by the Italian actor Adriano Giannini. It’s like listening to a commercial for an upscale fragrance.

And if the e-mails from my PBS affiliate are to be trusted, the fragrance would be called da Vinci. Not Leonardo.

It would be a good thing if this documentary were to bring about in its viewers a greater respect for the work of human intelligence: the eye, the hand, the mind.

[I’ve been grateful for many years now to the unknown hand at the British Journal of Aesthetics who changed my da Vinci to Leonardo, thus in a small way making me look smarter than I had any right to look. Post title with apologies to “Caroline, No.”]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll be on and off one device or another this morning and will drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

*

No hint necessary: the answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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Domestic comedy

“Proprioception — it's the sense of the body in space. I know about it from Charles Olson.”

“I know about it from Simone Biles.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard) : Charles Olson’s Proprioception : Simone Biles’s proprioception

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

A 2025 calendar, free

Free: a 2025 calendar, in large legible Gill Sans, licorice and cayenne (as Apple would have it), three months per page. The calendar includes all the days, weeks, and months of the year, with days painstakingly distributed across weeks and weeks painstakingly distributed across months. It’s artisanal!

Minimal holiday markings: New Year’s Day, MLK Day, Juneteenth, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas.

I’ve been making calendars with the Mac app Pages and tables since late 2009, when the idea of outfitting the house with Field Notes calendars felt unjustifiable.

You can download here (via Google Drive): a 2025 calendar.

[Link now fixed.]

More about Calkins

Two responses to Helen Lewis’s Atlantic article, “How Lucy Calkins Became the Face of America’s Reading Crisis”:

From Mark Seindenberg, cognitive scientist, neuroscientist, and psycholinguist, “Calkins Redux.” An excerpt:

Calkins is not the “scapegoat” for America’s failure to adequately teach reading. As the author of a popular but deeply flawed curriculum and a “thought leader” who cultivated a large, uncritical following, she contributed to those failures. She wasn’t alone, but she was enormously influential and an obstacle to change.

(With a link to an earlier piece: “This Is Why We Don't Have Better Readers: Response to Lucy Calkins.”)

And from Natalie Wexler, education writer, “Is Lucy Calkins a ‘Scapegoat’ for America's Reading Crisis?” An excerpt:

It’s hard — maybe impossible — to acknowledge that your life’s work, which you’ve seen as an idealistic endeavor on behalf of children, has actually prevented untold numbers of kids from realizing their true potential.

A related post
The (Lucy Calkins) empire strikes back

T SIDE and WEST SID

[591-593, 610-12 Something, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

I chose these photographs for the signage and for the fellow who appears to be iceskating his way into the frame. The 1940s.nyc website shows both locations on West Street, with nothing nearby that would make them identifiable. The Municipal Archives have nothing for these street numbers. The 1940 Manhattan telephone directory has nothing. Several sources in Google Books from the later 1940s give 801 Greenwich Street as an address for West Side Iron Works — perhaps that was a later address. Without placards showing block and lot numbers for these locations, I give up. As did, it would seem, the keepers of the signage.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

No TV news, then and now

I just rediscovered a post that I wrote on December 13, 2016: No TV news. At that point our household had gone thirty-five days with no TV news, save for one PBS NewsHour episode that paid tribute to Gewn Ifill. Now it’s been ten days with no TV news, save for one episode of the NBC Nightly News, when the whale-cutter’s nomination drew me back. Did I learn anything more from that “half-hour” than I already knew from reading words? No.

[Minus the commercials, I think it’s about twenty-two minutes. I’m watching The Late Show for comic relief, but I don’t consider that show to be “news.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, constructing as Lester Ruff. A very satisfying Stumper, and even if less rough, it still took me half an hour. Starting point: 9-D, three letters, “Coleridge’s ‘Poor little foal of an oppressed race.’” For me, a giveaway. The toughest part of the puzzle: the upper left corner.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Bowling center facility.” I’m amused by center — where I come from it was alley. And I’m amused by the answer, which I hadn’t thought of or heard, in any context, in a long time. It takes me back to my life as a part-time housewares-department employee during college.

2-D, five letters, “Middle of anything.” Weird but dictionarily accurate. And speaking of weird, I’ve decided to regard dictionarily as a word, even if the OED doesn’t.

4-D, four letters, “Schedule fillers.” ETAS? TBAS?

13-D, nine letters, “Brady-era image.” For me, a novel answer.

24-A, seven letters, “Goddess on the Medal of Honor.” Huh.

31-A, seven letters, “’What makes human progress possible,’ per FDR.” I like that, though reading The Power Broker makes me more disappointed in FDR than I would have expected.

33-D, nine letters, “In which krucvorto is ‘crossword.’” That word looks so unlikely — I thought it had to be what it turned out to be.

44-A, eight letters, “Pair of bumblers.” Silly.

47-A, seven letters, “They buy nasal dilators.” And sometimes even use them.

54-D, four letters, “What Meet the Beatles could be bought in.” Yes!

55-A, six letters, “Male name with two male name anagrams.” Just strange.

58-A, eight letters, “Poker variety named for its sinuous card shifting.” No idea yet what this means.

60-D, three letters, “Beverage or bus alternative.” I’m getting used to this kind of thing.

My favorite in this puzzle: 7-D, seven letters, “DMV, somewhat controversially.” It’s been years since I last entered a bowling center, but this clue is right up my alley.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.