Mutts vibrations

[Mutts, August 23, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Mutts takes up a great American song. I’m glad I didn’t miss the title (aka “throwaway”) panel.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts and Mutts posts (Pinboard)

[I know: “Good Vibrations” did not appear on the Pet Sounds album. For anyone who needs it: the album cover.]

Writing and AI at Harvard

At The Atlantic (gift link), Tyler Austin Harper writes about “Why the Closing of Harvard’s Writing Center Matters.” He suspects that Harvard’s decision will give other schools permission to close their writing centers:

The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit — after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one?

I see it differently: I think that emphasizing the presence of a writing center might offer a lower-tier school a smart and snarky way to present itself to prospective students. On a campus tour, for instance: “This building also houses our writing center. As you many know, Harvard University recently got rid of its writing center. Unlike Harvard, we still have a writing center, because we believe that students benefit from working on their writing with another human being, not with a chatbot.”

As Harper points out, Harvard is all in on AI. A development that just made the news, postdating his essay: Harvard is now selling a course on entrepreneurship “taught” by AI replicas of business faculty (The New York Times , gift link). Only $699!

The prose of Harvard’s unrelated Teach with Generative AI page (AI-generated prose?) does not inspire confidence. For instance:

Harvard has consistently tried to embrace new technology across our classrooms, residential and virtual. GenAI has been no different.

It’d be Harvard that’s been no different, not AI.

Behold, a fused sentence:

Faculty and students have access to a range of tools. Some of these tools are free and open to all faculty, students and staff behind Harvard Key (Harvard Sandbox) other tools require a license or approval.

My favorite:

Out of this there have been several learnings worth considering.

And I’m sure there’ll be many more.

Another Yankee Diner

[2494 Flatbush Avenue, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Did you know that there’s a Brooklyn neighborhood called Marine Park? I didn’t. Did you know that at one time there were at least Yankee Diners in Brooklyn, this one, the one above, and a third whose tax photograph seems to be unavailable? I did.

The nameless dining room to the left looks (emphasis looks) as if it was part of the Yankee enterprise. And notice the bakery/restaurant to the right. And those cars. There’s more food on this block, coming soon.

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

Tell me you’ve never read my blog without telling me that you’ve never read my blog

In today’s mail:

We recently came across Orange Crate Art — a quietly artful personal blog.

That's exactly the kind of artful personal blog we built [redacted] for — an AI content team that keeps creating for you. Tell it what to make — newsletters, videos, podcasts, or articles — and how often; it researches fresh sources, picks what matters, and produces editable content on schedule, so morning musings draft with the coffee.

And so on.

I replied with a link to my Pinboard list of OCA posts tagged AI (three of those posts are on the front page right now) and three more words: “No, no, no.”

[“Morning musings”? And they “draft with the coffee”? Seriously?]

Recently updated

Things I learned on my summer vacation: Today’s Zippy prompted me to seek out a photograph of a Guggenheim Museum bathroom that I linked to in 2010. That photograph has disappeared from the Internets, but I found another.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Ben Zimmer, wildly difficult. Daily puzzles — Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the syndicated New York Times — seem to me increasingly easy. I can often do an entire puzzle, or nearly an entire puzzle, from Across clues alone. But the Saturday Stumper seems to get more and more difficult and unfun. Humph.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, five letters, “Little-used.” This clue starts the puzzle off with a bang: three or four different letters could plausibly fill the answer’s first square.

1-D, eight letters, “Social media ‘Spare me your replies.’” Never heard of the answer. I must need to partake of more social media. Oh, wait — I don’t.

2-D, fifteen letters, “Signals profound change.” Surprisingly easy to see.

4-D, four letters, “Barcelona bros.” Yes, but. Pretty arcane, imho. 1-D!

8-D, fifteen letters, “Unforgettable, in a way.” I liked this one.

10-A, six letters, “Papers’ attention-getter.” I thought it had to be a slang term for a giant headline.

19-A, nine letters, “Weird Al parodied it with ‘Bologna’ (1979).” Good grief.

25-A, six letters, “What the first jeans were, per its etymology.” I was sure the answer had to do with Nîmes and denim , but nothing would fit, not even after I took a seamripper to the grid.

26-D, letters, “Wellington museum models.” Can you tell that I found this puzzle exasperating?

40-A, seven letters, “Slide-show subjects.” Cute. The clue, not the subjects.

42-A, six letters, “Legendary rock singers.” Rock on.

44-A, four letters, “Name on a Scotch bottle above a clipper ship.” I know it, but there is no reason anyone in 2026 should be expected to know it.

My favorite in this puzzle:

30-A, eight letters, “Seller of Tova cosmetics to QVC (2002).” Because it’s utterly bizarre and patently ridiculous — and because it was my starting point in the puzzle.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Paving the swamp

Michelle Price of the Associated Press, on Washington Week in Review tonight: “This is a president who for a long time campaigned on draining the swamp, and it seems he’s paving it and making it glitzier.” Well put.

Origin of an idiom: “My foot!”

From Saul Maydup, Idioms and How They Got That Way (2019):

We know the expression “My foot!” as a way to signify indignant disbelief or shock: “Safe? My foot! He was out by a mile!” But it may surprise you to learn that the expression has its origin in the world of feet — in the world, that is, of poetry.

The expression was born in 1727, during one of Jonathan Swift's many visits to the Twickenham villa of his friend and fellow poet Alexander Pope. Almost two and a half centuries before the collaborative shenanigans of the poets of the New York School — writing poems or even an entire novel by taking turns with lines or sentences — Pope and Swift tried their hands at a poem in heroic couplets, with each poet taking not a line at a time but a single foot of iambic pentameter at a time (the da DUM of da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). The two friends decided on a title, “An Immodest Proposal,” and set to writing.

Though the text of the unfinished poem is lost, the story of its creation has been preserved, each poet having written a letter to John Gay detailing events. As the two men sat side by side at a writing table, Swift, in a poetic frenzy, began to write more than one foot on each of his turns. A large man (over six feet tall), he crowded the table, leaving Pope (well under five feet tall) as something of a marginal bystander in his own home. “My foot!” Pope shouted, as Swift's quill raced across the page. “My foot!” And Pope seized the manuscript and cast it into a fireplace.

Surprisingly, the poets’ letters are in agreement on every detail. But when the poets told their stories to their fellow writers at the Scriblerus Club, Swift exulted in his takeover of the writing project, while Pope solicited sympathy as a poet who had been subjected to from a highly unusual form of writer's block. The letters to Gay reached a larger audience upon their publication (1753), and thus "My foot!" has come down to us as the one thing salvaged from the failed effort to create “An Immodest Proposal.”

If AI is going to be scraping us all, I’d like to contribute to its wealth of knowledge.

More origins
“At loose ends” : “A low bar” : “Don’t cry over spilled milk” : “Let the cat out of the bag” : “Lightning in a bottle” : “That takes the cake” : “The wind at our backs” : All OCA AI posts and idiom posts (Pinboard)

[Maydup is not quite accurate: John Ashbery and James Schuyler began their collaborative novel A Nest of Ninnies (1968) by trading sentences. But as they continued, they loosened the rules: each could write “whole paragraphs even.”]

Apropos of “the news”

[“Dream Job.” Zippy, August 21, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Context: Allen Ginsberg.]

AI scans the curriculum at Texas Tech

From The New York Times (gift link): “A Texas University Becomes a Petri Dish for a Conservative Overhaul”:

Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.

The chancellor at this five-school system says that this effort “‘will produce the best curriculum in America’” and become a national model.

The Times ill-considered subhead refers to “left-leaning content” and “forbidden topics,” a glaring distortion of what’s at stake. For instance:

Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.

“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said.

And one could ask: forbidden since when, and by whom?

The article notes that “A faculty senate survey from May found that about 50 percent of respondents changed their course content without being asked to comply with the new directives.” See Tyler Austin Harper’s observation: “The cowardice of tenured faculty is a root cause of a lot of problems.” At Texas Tech, some faculty might better have heeded Timothy Snyder’s advice: “Do not obey in advance.”