Ten best TV shows?

The New York Times (gift links) is counting down what television people consider the 100 best shows of the twenty-first century. And readers are invited to pick their own ten best. My list would have to include Route 66 , Naked City , and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, but the Times is asking about shows released after January 1, 2000. Which of course wasn’t really the start of the twenty-first century. But anyway.

If you vote, the Times puts your picks in a tidy list. These are mine, in no particular order. But if I had to put them in order, Breaking Bad would be first, as it is here.

They also serve who hang around and wait

Brad (Wallace Ford), in Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941):

“Wonder if you’d do me a favor. Would you mind playing for me? Funny, a guy like me, how I go for music, yet I can’t play well. But then I never could do anything very well except hang around and wait.”

[See John Milton.]

Domestic comedy

“I hear thunder.”

“It was thundering downstairs too.”

“Thunder is general all over the house.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[See James Joyce.]

Got grapes?

[528 Sheepshead Bay Road, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just a short walk in from the beach, and you could get all the grapes you want. My first guess was that A. Cafiero supplied grapes to grocery stores. But then why have a sign touting low prices, and boxes of grapes on the sidewalk? Maybe these grapes went to home vintners. (My Brooklyn grandfather made his own wine during Prohibition.)

I found one trace of the grapes in Google Books, which holds a volume of a trade journal listing seven shipments of grapes to an A. Cafiero, all from Buenos Aires. For example:

[Fruit Trade Journal and Produce Record (1927). Why was a bank getting a shipment of grapes?]

I wish they all could be California grapes.

Bonus points for the laundry, the possible lurker at the second-floor window, the hatted pedestrians, and whatever is in the WPA man’s hand. Paperwork related to the work of photography, or a receipt for grapes? It must be paperwork, with a printed form similar to those used by census takers. I suspect that the WPA men are filling in address numbers and block and lot codes as they go.

And (I forgot to add it) the sign: ROOMS.

Today the Grapes address is part of a parking lot.

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

A Kennedy complex

Real news (Reuters): the current occupant now plans to refashion his proposed arch into “a complex to house and deploy drones and sniper ammunition.” And: it will sport “an eternal flame” on top so as not to endanger aircraft.

An eternal flame? Like the one in Arlington National Cemetery? This new detail, together with the destruction of the White House Rose Garden and the not yet complete destruction of the Kennedy Center, makes me think that in addition to his other maladies, cognitive and physical, the current occupant has a bad case of Kennedy complex.

Thanks to the reader who caught a bad typo in this post.

[The New York Times (gift link) has a long article today about how the occupant’s administration has gone about breaking the Kennedy Center.]

No more wicker furniture, ever!

At ProPublica, Alex Mierjeski tells the story behind the story: “‘Our Dear Friend Umar’: How We Uncovered That a Russian Oligarch Bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s Wedding.” A great example of online sleuthing.

Three scoops

“Trump’s anger at the press was probably fed today by three scoops”: in the most recent installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson suggests three reasons for the current occupant’s banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from his house.

[Yesterday I watched him almost say “my house” before catching himself and saying “the people’s house”: “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house” (The New York Times , gift link).]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is, to my mind, the best Stumper in many weeks. Difficult as #@&! and hugely satisfying to solve. I began with a gimme, 41-A, nine letters, “‘Break me off a piece’ snack.” The clue that began to break things open: 26-D, seven letters, “Among the top-five fastest production cars (270+ mph.)” I don’t know how the answer popped into my head.

There’s a convention of crossword construction that a word used as an answer should not appear in a clue for another answer. This puzzle breaks with that convention. But it’s okay by me.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Surname like Newhouse.” Starting off with a bang.

5-D, ten letters, “It’s ‘between theology and science,’ per Bertrand Russell.” The obvious answer, PHILOSOPHY, won’t work.

7-D, seven letters, “Escape route.” I’ve used it, often.

9-D, five letters, “French English affectation.” Clever.

12-D, eight letters, “Don’t hold back.” Williams’s Stumpers seem to always include a dowdy colloquialism. I like that.

23-A, five letters, “Mark on the curve.” Takes me back, but not to a classroom.

33-A, six letters, “Turkey topper.” GRAVY doesn’t fit.

35-D, eight letters, “Loudspeaker’s moving part.” A word I haven’t thought of in years.

39-D, seven letters, “Start to chase.” Crosses needed.

50-A, seven letters, “Subject of the Masakela song ‘Bring Him Back Home’ (1987).” No crosses needed.

56-D, three letters, “      Things Considered (bird blog).” Smiles.

My favorite in this puzzle: 30-A, four letters, “Personal space.” True that.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

x is the y of z s (Fetterman edition)

John Fetterman, offering a garbled echo of a Republican talking point about AI (i.e., there’s nothing Congress can do to regulate it):

“Now, you hear the word guardrails and a lot of those things, that’s just, then, that’s just a statement, you know, what does it really mean? You know, I don’t think, no one really knows exactly what a guardrail is because we’re talking about super intelligence, you know, and now we’re talking about even if we ever achieve the singularity, the singularity that becomes something that is even self-aware. And now, no one knows exactly why that’s gonna happen.”

John Fetterman is the Herschel Walker of Joe Manchins.

[You read it here first.]

Now that’s what I call pre-Code

An exchange between Blondie Johnson (Joan Blondell), a rising criminal, and Danny (Chester Morris), an accomplished criminal. From Blondie Johnson (dir. Ray Enright, 1933):

“I hope you notice I don’t take a back seat when it comes to boiling coffee.”

“You don't take a back seat when it comes to makin’ anything boil.”