Recently updated

Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing: She’s out.

Sold a Story returns

“Our team at APM Reports dug up a whole new story about teaching and learning — and what happens when deeply held beliefs clash with evidence”: there’s now a second season of Emily Hanford’s podcast Sold a Story that focuses on teaching itself and investigates Direct Instruction, an approach to teaching created by Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann. (I know: who?)

Natalie Wexler has had access to the first four episodes and suggests that what’s missing from Engelmann’s approach is an emphasis on knowledge, or what E.D. Hirsch calls cultural literacy:

Both Engelmann and Hirsch had keen insights about what has been missing from American education, with Engelmann focusing on how to teach and Hirsch on what to teach. Neither model is complete, but if applied judiciously in tandem, the two approaches could be hugely powerful.

Related reading
Some OCA Sold a Story posts

Tenuously related reading
Fluke life (How I got on the tenure track, with an appearance by E.D. Hirsch)

Block that metaphor

From an NPR story:

So if you’ve got 20 minutes this week, think about a strength that you’d like to invite into your life and take a baby step to lean into it.

And all fall down?

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Fancy groceries, anyone?

A second curious term in the signage at Sam’s Dairy: fancy groceries . Like table luxuries , the term is missing from the OED and from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third. My casual browsing suggests that the term was typically paired with staple groceries . Here’s an explanation of the fancy from Proceedings of The Second Pan American Scientific Congress (1917):

The fancy grocery. — To solve the problem of the downtown store two means have been tried — one, to secure larger margins; the other, to seek greater volume. The former has given rise to the fancy store. In nearly every community there are some exceptional people who will pay an extra price for the best, and there are many people who will buy extra-priced articles for exceptional occasions. This trade, like the shopping trade of the textile lines, tends to concentrate, but unlike the shopping lines, the goods are bought without comparison of value, hence there is nothing to prevent a single store securing a monopoly and frequently a single grocer does secure a marked leadership if not a positive monopoly of fancy lines. The chief difficulty with these stores is to secure sufficient volume and to supplement the rather limited trade in fancy groceries. In many large cities the fancy grocers have added wines and liquors.

Though the term has long since fallen out of use, specialty shops, with high-end items in tins and jars and bottles, carry on in the spirit of the fancy grocery.

Here’s a sampling of fancy groceries, in an extraordinary Macy’s advertisement from 1927:

[The New York Times, February 10, 1927. Click for a larger view.]

Do click for a larger view: the oh so precious text is worth reading. Then reach for the bicarb.

A related post
Table luxuries, anyone?

Zippy and Proust

[“Quote Slam, Cont’d.” Zippy , October 15, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Zippy is spending a second day visiting the Père Lachaise. Yesterday he was trading remarks with Edith Piaf.

The words from Proust appear in Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way ] (1920). Dr. du Boulbon is speaking to the narrator’s grandmother:

«Supportez d’être appelée une nerveuse. Vous appartenez à cette famille magnifique et lamentable qui est le sel de la terre. Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d’autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d’oeuvre.»

In Mark Treharne’s translation (Penguin, 2002):

“Feel comfortable to be called a neurotic. You belong to the splendid, pitiable family that is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art.”

Strange: when I opened my copy of The Guermantes Way and began to thumb pages, I landed almost immediately on page 299 and this passage.

Venn reading
All OCA Proust posts : Proust and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

One more MacGuffin

I missed this one. From Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that’s raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, “What does he do?”

The counterintelligence man replies, “Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter.”

“But what does he sell?”

“Oh, just government secrets!” is the answer.

Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!

I must note: Phillip Vandamm, James Mason’s character, was not an importer or exporter of table luxuries.

Related reading
Egg MacGuffin : All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Mike Love on stage

My daughter Rachel warned me that it’s painful to watch. It is.

Musicians, like boxers, need to know when to stop.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Table luxuries, anyone? Now with a familial connection, albeit a tenuous one.

Egg MacGuffin

From a movie review:

[Graham] Moore throws in a Hitchcock-style McMuffin in the shape of a secret tape recording which will reveal just who has been betraying the gangsters. The problem is that no-one has a machine on which to play it.

The writer has egg on his face, or ought to: the Hitchcock device was called the MacGuffin. He explained it to François Truffaut in one of the conversations preserved in Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

Well, it’s the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after. I’ll tell you about it. Most of Kipling’s stories, as you know, were set in India, and they dealt with the fighting between the natives and the British forces on the Afghanistan border. Many of them were spy stories, and they were concerned with the efforts to steal the secret plans out of a fortress. The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So the “MacGuffin” is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever.

You may be wondering where the term originated. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”

And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”

The first one asks, ”What’s a MacGuffin?“

”Well,“ the other man says, ”it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”

The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!” So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

Hitchcock and Truffaut mention the formula for the construction of an airplane engine in The 39 Steps (1935), the little tune in The Lady Vanishes (1938), and the secret clause in a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940). Each a device to propel a narrative, each egg-free.

Thanks, Seth!

Related reading
All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing

Good Lord, it’s painful. Don’t miss the journalists turning to one another with smiles at the end.

But if you can’t take it, Aaron Rupar has selected moments.

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October 16: I learned from a comment on this post that she’s out. Now I wish I had followed my snarky impulse to add a parenthetical “and last?” to this post’s title. The New York Times has the news, served with pointed understatement: “She was not a deft communicator.”