Diners face off

Count ’em. One diner:

[5117 4th Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

And right across the street, a second:

[5116 4th Avenue, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Look closely to see the Y and D design next to the Yankee Diner’s entrance, “Colored Revue,” “Scandinavian Home Cooking,” and many other details. Both diners are long gone. But the ghost of the Yankee Diner can be seen in no. 5117’s 1980s tax photograph.

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

Who was?

I caught by chance a minute of Jeopardy! yesterday. New episode? Old? No idea. Here’s what got my attention:

The category: American Poetry. The answer, for $800:

Poems by him include “Crowing Hen Blues,” "Po’ Boy Blues,” & “The Weary Blues”

No one buzzed.

See also Black Jeopardy Misses, a YouTube compendium of similar fails. For instance:

The category: That Is the Question. The answer, for $800:

In 1851 in Akron, Sojourner Truth delivered a speech called this 4-word rhetorical question

No one buzzed.

And I’m reminded of a moment in the documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine (dir. Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982), in which Hoyt Fuller tells James Baldwin about a moment from the classroom, when he asked a student to read a quiz question aloud:

“And she says, ‘I have no idea who Malcolm Ten was.’”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is “Extremely” (18-A, six letters) difficult. I left 1-A, eight letters, “Top drawer” alone and began with 60-A, eight letters, “Siege that named an SUV.” How do I know that?

A source of unhappiness in this puzzle: 24-A, six letters, “Cesky apoštol.” Printing the puzzle to fill a letter-sized page left apoštol looking more like apositol. So I looked online and found Český apoštol and figured it out. And then I discovered that the free online versions of the puzzle — 1, 2 — render the clue minus the mark.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-A, eight letters, “Greek who wrote Theory of the Passions.” Odysseus?

9-D, eleven letters, “Cups of tea.” Not sure about this one. Something can have be your 9-D without being your cup of tea.

12-D, six letters, “Luke’s unfortunate news.” I had to drop my certainty that this clue was a cryptic.

17-A, eight letters, “Spoils.” Just a cool word.

22-A, three letters, “Key duplication.” Now that I understand it, I still think it’s ridiculous.

24-D, eleven letters, “Overly optimistic.” Reviving an old-timey phrase.

32-A, seven letters, “Guess who?” Fun.

35-D, eight letters, “Posters, postcards, pamphlets, etc.” One of my cups of tea.

39-D, seven letters, “Talk over?” Clever.

48-A, four letters, “Word from the French for ‘small and detailed.’” Who knew?

My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, eleven letters, “Show-off.” For a moment, I’m in The Honeymooners 

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

But sometimes it’s a pencil

[A Zits cigar, modified.]

I decided to make the cigar in today’s Zits look more cigar-like. But my son Ben went me one better. Well done, son.

As Ben reminds me, Walt Duncan has sometimes been seen with a cigar, as in this 1999 strip.

A related post
Is this a cigar that I see before me? (Today’s Zits )

[Post title with apologies to Sigmund Freud.]

Catchphrases and all

Elaine and I have been made honorary characters, at least on paper, in the world of Animal Crossing.

Elaine’s clothing: green sweater and dress. Her catchphrase: “Isn't that cool.” Her personality: sweet.

My clothing: polo shirt. My catchphrase: “You always need a pencil.” My personality: smug.

These attributes were chosen for us, with the exception of smug, which I chose when presented with a small list of options. (Jock didn’t fit.)

Is this a cigar which I see before me?

[Zits, August 14, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

It looks a bit like a vaping device, but the puffs and the red suggest a cartoon cigar. At least Walt is setting his bad example outside the house.

Notice the shirt: Bucyrus is a town in Ohio, the Zits home state. There is no Hard Rock Cafe there. Jeremy Duncan has (or recently had) a summer job at Pipkin’s, a Cincinnati grocer. There is an HRC in Cincinnati.

Grandpa’s Cheesebarn, which appeared in a 2020 Zits, is also in Ohio.

*

My son Ben and I have each improved that cigar.

Simon Willison’s advice for bloggers

Via Daring Fireball: tech developer Simon Willison offers observations and advice about blogging.

Willison’s advice for someone getting started:

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog.

Excellent advice. It reminds me of what my daughter Rachel suggested when I started out:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Willison also suggests not worrying about readership:

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers.

Here too I agree. Thinking of a blog post as a message in a bottle can be a useful mental trick when putting something on the Internets. One sends off the bottle in the hope that somebody somewhere will find it. And that can happen. Bottle after bottle.

A piece of advice with which I can’t agree:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

I’m always tinkering with posts new and old, even when they may appear to be fine as they are. As I wrote in a 2013 post, I think about writing

as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

I’m with Aaron Draplin (quoted in that same post):

“I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

Besides, what example would I have been setting for my students if I believed in lowering my own standards? Gah!

And besides, not all flaws are invisible. I know, because I get comments: “No need to post this, but shouldn’t the third sentence read,” &c. And I’m always grateful for those comments.

Related reading
All OCA blogging posts (Pinboard)

Bean soup theory

From Merriam-Webster, an introduction to bean soup theory.

(Wait — should that be bean-soup theory? Nah, don’t overthink it, Michael.)

Here, from TikTok, is the recipe that prompted the theory. My favorite joke complaint: “What if you can’t eat solid food yet because you’re a newborn.”

And from Delish, some further context.

“Bob swore!”

Miss Mowcher bids goodbye to David Copperfield and James Steerforth:

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Poor billionaire

From NPR:

In California, tech billionaires are ramping up spending to defeat a wealth tax in the state.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent more than $100 million to blanket the state in ads and commercials condemning the ballot measure. The measure, known as Proposition 40, would impose a one-time 5% tax on California residents worth more than $1 billion. If passed, the tax would fund healthcare programs in the state.

Brin has compared the tax to the Soviet-style socialism his family fled in the late-1970s, and has moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe to avoid the tax.

Brin is also supporting two competing ballot measures in November that would effectively void the billionaires' tax.

When I heard this story on the radio, I tried to do some calculating in my head. If one had, say, an even billion, a 5% tax would take only $50 million. Brin has already spent twice as much fighting this tax. His estimated wealth when I typed this sentence: $260.1 billion. A 5% tax (which he will avoid anyway) would leave him with about $247 billion.