”Dine at the Ritz”

[27 Union Square West, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like the cheeky sign: “Dine at the Ritz.” Yes, let us dine at the Ritz, after which we can have our press conference at the Four Seasons. Just don’t bring along any gangsters.

Here’s another view of this Ritz, with the candy store and a shoeshine parlor to the side. A five-story building owns this corner today. A later Ritz Diner at 1133 1st Avenue appears to have recently closed. That restaurant’s website gives the address as 1079 1st Avenue, which is the address of another diner under the same ownership, the Tramway. Mixing up those two establishments would be considerably less embarrassing than mixing up one Ritz or Four Seasons with another.

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

”Are we having beer yet?“

[Zippy , October 4, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

On Friday, Zippy became Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon . Yesterday he turned into Lee Marvin, and he continues in that role today (in Point Blank ?).

When I read the dozen comics I read daily, I close read. So I embiggened to see what’s on Zippy Lee’s bottle: Google Zippy Lemon Ale . Yes, it’s real, 7.2 ABV (strong), available in Idaho and Washington. What did Bill Griffith ask for as compensation for the use of Zippy’s likeness? Two six-packs. The story is behind the link just above.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[The post title is part of the beer’s logo.]

Belated birthday

I missed the date: Orange Crate Art turned twenty-two on September 15. Twenty-two!

Elaine says that it’s okay to have missed the date. After twenty-one, she says, it’s all just adulthood.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Joel Fagliano of NYT Games. It’s the first time I’ve seen his name on a Stumper, and it’s a terrific one — tricky, amusing, with enough toeholds to get started and keep going. For instance, 29-A, four letters, “‘He was       , take him for all in all’: Hamlet.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, nine letters, “Tangentially.” I’m given to tangentiality.

2-D, nine letters, “What children make a stand for.” I was a little uncertain about filling in what seemed like the obvious answer. How could it be nine letters?

6-D, eight letters, “Leaves home.” Lovely.

12-D, five letters, “Friday the 3rd?” Groan.

20-D, eight letters, “Deal with your in-box.” See 2-D: how could the answer be eight letters? Perhaps (to my mind) the extra letters are to make the puzzle a bit trickier.

23-A, ten letters, “Short-term lab job.” Cute.

27-A, six letters, “Subject to slamming.” NOGOOD? A nice bit of trickery.

36-A, four letters, “Soul’s foregoer.” I tried to think of other Kia models.

39-A, five letters, “Edges of some calendar line lists.” I think I get it.

46-A, ten letters, “City near Manhattan not related to a sand bag brand.” I love it.

46-D, five letters, “Half a bubble gum brand.” Remarkable the way such stuff just sticks in my head.

57-A, six letters, “Loud buzzer.” I have lived it.

49-D, five letters, “Informal term of endearment.” I use this word often and typed it just yesterday.

My favorite in this puzzle: 61-A, six letters, “Layers of floors.” Just because.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

The folk process

Three wonderful granddaughters have each altered the venerable “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” substituting the fifth note of the scale (sol) for the second (re) in the song’s final line: “How I wonder what YOU are.”

One kiddo explained: “I like a little burst of excitement at the end.”

Yodeling

A great episode of 99% Invisible : “Tootle of a Devilish Song,” all about yodeling.

Two musicians missing from the episode who deserve mentioning: Emmett Miller, the minstrel show (blackface) performer whose “Lovesick Blues” (with yodeling) was taken up by Hank Williams, and Tommy Johnson, the Mississippi blues singer and guitarist with a signature understated yodel. As on, for instance, “Canned Heat Blues.”

[“Canned heat”: Sterno, an extremely dangerous subsitute for alcohol beverages. Johnson’s song is the source for the name of the blues-rock band Canned Heat.]

“Lightly edited,” but still wildly incoherent

Have you read the transcript of the current occupant’s September 28 interview with Time ? The transcript has been “lightly edited,” Time says, but it’s still wildly incoherent. With lots of lies. I wonder what it was like before editing. A sample:

Do you trust Sam Altman?

I like him. Do I trust him? Who do I trust? I like Sam Altman. Smart. Dario’s smart. They’re all smart. We’re dealing with a very high level of IQ. Very very high level. That’s a good thing. I like that. I like it. Did you see the story about my uncle?

The one who taught at MIT?

I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a — I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.

What I’ve done is I’ve created, for instance, these massive plants have no — We have no electricity in our grid. These massive plants now are allowed to make their own electric —

Are you worried you can’t bring the American people along with you on that?

I might not be able to. I don’t know.

The child-like appraisal of a person (“I like Sam Altman”), the obsession with IQ, the uncle story, the bragging, the weird JFK touch (“the new frontiers”), the preposterous claim to have created “massive plants,” the struggle to say something clearly (“We have no electricity in our grid”), the surprising moment of self-doubt. What a long strange trip.

For me, the biggest tell comes in two words: “I’m fine.” No, he’s not.

Sherry Turkle on the world she’d like

From a Here and Now interview with Sherry Turkle about her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines :

I'm not looking to a world where we evolve with AI into a posthuman thing. I'm not looking to a world where we leave to go to different planets and it doesn't matter what we did to the earth. I'm not looking for a world where robots raise our children. I'm really looking to a world where human beings, our species, maximizes what we are best at, which is caring for each other, loving each other, making communities, making culture, not leaving that all behind because computers can’t do it.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Big Jim

“Big Jim is a nearly 32-foot-tall aluminum statue of a fisherman, clad in old-style yellow oilskins, holding a giant can of Maine sardines”: you can see him in this report about the Penobscot Marine Museum’s SardineFest.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Sad: the newscasters make no mention of the sardine’s new status as a fad food.]

Educational malpractice

The most recent episode of This American Life , “An Argument,” is devoted to one story: the decision two affluent, Black Brooklyn parents made to send their daughter to a low-income, mostly Black public school, and the years of education (or miseducation) that followed. A 2016 New York Times article (gift link) told the beginning of the story. A Times article (gift link) published earlier this month brings the story up to date. The TAL episode adds details.

Reading the Times articles and listening to the podcast reminded me of what I used to tell my students: whatever form educational malpractice takes, it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. I think of the daughter in this story, Najya Hannah-Jones, crushed when she fails a statewide eighth-grade algebra exam. It turned out that despite her great grades and the confidence they inspired, she knew very little algebra. What’s more, she had great deficits in her knowledge of fractions and long division.

And I think back to the last freshman composition class I taught, many of whose students had taken AP English in high school. Granted, they hadn’t received test scores that would have exempted them from a college course, but still — I thought it’d be a great class. I began to think differently when I assigned some reading — Betty S. Flowers’s “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process” and an excerpt from William Zinsser’s “Writing English as a Second Language” — and some short writing.¹ So many of these students were lost. During conferences (that inflated word), I asked, Did you do much reading last year? Did you do much writing last year? No, and no. So many students disappeared from that class. The work, at least at that time, was beyond them.

Whatever form malpractice takes — and I assign far greater blame to teachers and principals and the shitstem in which they’re embedded, not to the Hannah-Joneses, who thought that they were doing the right thing and worked mightily to improve education for everyone in their daughter’s school — it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. And who, sometimes, is able to trudge their way to real improvement and set the bag down.
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¹ The class was not for second-language learners. I omitted Zinsser’s opening paragraphs about languages and began with “So what is good English — the language we’re here today to wrestle with?” Written English is in many ways a second language for anyone.