The current occupant is telling a new and improved version of his ever-shifting 9/11 saga. Aaron Rupar has the video. The occupant now claims that he went to the site of the World Trade Center with a construction crew on September 11, 2001, and that as the U.S. Steel Building creaked and appeared ready to come down, two firefighters lifted him up and ran with him from the danger.
There is, of course, no evidence for any of this. Is the occupant blurring events of 9/11 and his exit stage left in Butler, Pennsylvania? Is he blurring events of 9/11 and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he was shuffled off the dais? Is his story unrelated to either of those events? There are so many ways to slip the surly bonds of reality.
In a sane country, this sick, shameful story would be front and center at every news outlet.
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
Slipping the surly bonds
A six-year-old on reading
“I feel like reading has changed my life. There were so many things I couldn’t do before. But now that I can read, it’s like, everything changed!”
Act of faith, or trick of grammar?
A striking sentence from “An Approach to Style,” the E.B. White-authored final chapter of The Elements of Style :
Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.”I long suspected that the elderly practitioner might have been White himself. Heber Taylor’s post quoting the practitioner’s sentence prompted me to find out. Yes, it was White, in “Calculating Machine,” a short piece in The New Yorker (February 24, 1951). The subject: Rudolph Flesch’s Reading-Ease Calculator (“a celluloid card with a dial,” White calls it, developed by General Motors), a device to score readability by counting words and syllables:
Communication by the written word is a subtler (and more beautiful) thing than Dr. Flesch and General Motors imagine. They contend that the “average reader” is capable of reading only what tests Easy, and that the writer should write at or below this level. This is a presumptuous and degrading idea. There is no average reader, and to reach down toward this mythical character is to deny that each of us is on the way up, is ascending. (“Ascending,” by the way, is a word Dr. Flesch advises writers to stay away from. Too unusual.)I have sometimes thought that a good way to salvage The Elements of Style would be to package its final chapter as a short, beautifully designed book, omitting all the prohibitions (e.g., flammable for inflammable ) and outdated guidelines (margins, hyphenation, citations). But the book as is continues to sell, and sell, and sell. Maybe someday.
It is my belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feebleminded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following a calculating machine downstairs is not ascending — if you will pardon the expression — and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer.
Related reading
All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)
[Flesch’s invention lives on in the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests. Try an online version. I found “Calculating Machine” in White’s Poems and Sketches (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). And yes, I shared my discovery with Heber several weeks ago.]
Monday, September 7, 2026
QR1777
“We put the Q in QR1777”: “Fake AI ads in the West 4th Street subway station unite commuters in hatred of AI ads” (Gothamist ).
Here’s a short video of ads going up.
Farther and further
My brother Brian called attention to the Bobby Bland song “Farther Up the Road,” sometimes mistakenly titled “Further Up the Road.” And sometimes performed thusly.
There’s also Bruce Springsteen’s “Further On (Up the Road).”
Taj Mahal has it both ways, with a song titled “Farther on Down the Road (You Will Accompany Me).” But he sings “further.”
[Context: the comments on this post. Composer credit for “Farther Up the Road” is uncertain. “Farther on Down the Road” is credited to Taj Mahal, Jesse Ed Davis, Gary Gilmore, and Chuck Blackwell.]
Labor Day
[Nancy, September 7, 2026. Click for a larger view.]
Today’s Nancy borrows from Ricardo Levins Morales’s original, which itself borrows an old labor slogan.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
[I can’t say that I’m a fan of Caroline Cash’s Nancy. But I like today’s strip.]
Sunday, September 6, 2026
“The Moon Is Ours”
Anyone who doubts that the current occupant has slipped the surly bonds of reality should take a look at his afternoon efforts in his TЯuth Social account. Thirty-six posts in two hours, nutty and nuttier.
One restaurant, three names
Okay, if you’ve skipped the Yankee Diner and you’re not in the mood for Pure Food, take a walk on the wild side — in other words, a little farther down Avenue U. Where are we going for lunch? Is it to the Airport Oyster & Chop House? Or is it to Pete’s Airport Clam Bar? Or both?
[4200 Avenue U, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
The 1940 directory keeps it simple.
The airport would be Floyd Bennett Field, used by the United States Coast Guard and Navy.
Notice the sign for Love Nest candy, much smaller than the one atop this Manhattan diner.
And notice this guy, looking pretty rough.
[Click for a larger view.]
Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
“How Do You Talk?”
“How Do You Talk?” is an American accent quiz. I took the full quiz (122 questions).
The biggest tells: I stand on line ; I pronounce bag more like baieg ; I distinguish between Mary , merry , and marry; and I say Flah-ri-da (though it’s really more like Flahr-i-da.
This quiz seems to be everywhere, but I learned about it from Daughter Number Three.
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, constructing as Lester Ruff. Indeed, today’s puzzle was Les than Ruff. It’d be a good one for someone who wants to sample the Stumper.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
2-D, nine letters, “Sicilian kin.” My first thought was SARDINIAN.
6-D, six letters, “Collect, as condensation.” New to me.
15-A, six letters, “Paid, in a phrase.” I wonder where it comes from.
17-A, six letters, “Not quite perfect.” Heh.
18-A, eight letters, “Greyhounds’ home.” Territory I know only from the black-and-white world.
26-D, four letters, “Diamond Head’s surroundings.” “Diamond Head” is the name of a beautiful instrumental by Brian Wilson. But that has nothing to do with the answer.
28-D, seven letters, “Pioneer of the ‘howcatchem’ drama.” When you know from the start whodunit.
37-A, fifteen letters, “Walt’s early name for Disneyland.” Eww.
43-A, seven letters, “His songs are seen by many musicians as a badge of honor.” Meaning that they’re so complex that it’s a test of one’s ability to perform them? No.
43-D, three letters, “Poacher, at times.” I caught on.
My favorite in this puzzle: 48-D, five letters, “Scroll successor.” Just because I like the word.
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
