In The New York Times today, in an article about the attempted assassination:
The crack of the bullets are heard as they pass the microphone that Mr. Trump speaks into.Subject and verb should always agree. Sheesh, Times : his sentence has been standing as is since early this morning.
From the BBC: “The extinct Olympic sport that was the ’dullest’ of all time,” the distance plunge, derided as “competitive floating.”
Does everyone already know that you can reschedule events in Calendar by moving them with a finger or a mouse? I just learned by doing.
A helpful page for Apple users: Apple System Status. That’s how I know there’s a problem with iCloud Private Relay right now. It’s not me; it’s them.
A documentary urgently worth watching: Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy (dir.
Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, 2024). It’s available from Amazon, Apple TV+, and Tubi. We watched via Tubi (for free) last night, with just three minimal commercial interruptions.
I was surprised by how many matters in this documentary were news to me. Just four: the role of Paul Weyrich, the so-called “Cyrus prophecy,” the hateful appropriation of the acronym LGBTQ, and the long-standing talk of a coming civil war. George Lang’s remark is just a recent instance. And the Christian nationalist emphasis on the conflict of light and darkness, the godly and the demonic (which includes anyone in government who is not “of God”), reminds me that Manichaeism is alive and well in these here United States.
I think that many people who will vote for Donald Trump understand very little about the future they’re voting for.
The kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté has died at the age of fifty-eight. The New York Times has an obituary.
Here is a sample of his artistry, with the guitarist Ali Farka Touré. It’s the kind of performance that should go on forever, if it could.
From a New York Times article by Peter Baker about last night’s presidential address to the nation:
He always knew that he would be delivering a speech like this. He just thought, or hoped, that it would be more than four years from now. Yet while it was not technically a farewell address, with six months still to go in office and more presidenting to do, it was the beginning of Joe Biden’s long goodbye.“And yes, the soft, raspy old man’s voice”: it sounds as though Peter Baker is attempting to channel Paul Harvey.
Mr. Biden’s address to the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday night was all Joe, love him or hate him — the paeans to American exceptionalism, the evocations of family, the selective boasting about his record, the favorite lofty phrases about an “inflection point” and “saving our democracy,” and yes, the soft, raspy old man’s voice that no longer commands the room the way it once did.
“Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition. So I‘ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation”: President Joe Biden, a few minutes ago.
In the news: a revelation from Fred Trump III that his uncle Donald told him that people with several medical conditions “maybe ... just should die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.” Fred Trump III has a son with severe developmental and intellectual disabilities. Fred says that on a later occasion his uncle told him, “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
The historian Eddie Glaude on MSNBC a little earlier this afternoon:
“It’s pathological. My sister — my mother’s been changing diapers for sixty years. Had German measles when she was pregnant as a young woman. My sister can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t hear. She’s never had a bedsore. She’s never been instiutionalized. My mother’s been changing her diapers for sixty years. And this man is going to say something like that to her? It gives you a sense of the depth of the depravity of him, right? — and how he thinks about the most vulnerable.”The story of Donald Trump’s attempt to end medical benefits for his nephew’s son is already well known.
I searched these pages to see what they (I) have said about Kamala Harris. Her name appears in thirteen — and now fourteen — posts. From a January 2, 2019 post:
The last thing Democrats need to do is to turn the 2020 presidential election into a battle between oldsters. Such a battle will do little to spark voter interest and much to spark parody. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren: no. What the Democratic Party needs is a candidate who offers a sharp contrast to Donald Trump not only in policy but in affect. Sherrod Brown, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke: yes.On January 27, 2019, I was happy to see that Harris was running. And on August 12, 2020, one day after Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate, I wrote, “she will (almost certainly) make a great nominee for president in 2024.”
Mott Street, in July Now with a passage from The WPA Guide to New York City. And pizza.
The New York Times has an obituary (gift link).
I wanted to find something with Mayall playing piano, solo. I got close: here’s “Bear Wires,” with Bob Hite of Canned Heat.
Later in the day: I found what I was looking for: “Milkman Strut.” That’s a door closing at the start. Explanation: a milkman’s arrival had interrupted recording.
[From the Times obituary: “In 1969, after recording the album Blues From Laurel Canyon and befriending members of the American blues band Canned Heat, Mr. Mayall moved to the Los Angeles area, where he lived for the rest of his life.”]
Often we watch a movie and then, at 10:30 Central or so, we turn on The Eleventh Hour and start from the beginning. As the show runs, we listen as we look at our devices. It’s television as radio.
Now and then we look up, and when there’s a panel of commentators across the screen, television turns into the children’s game Guess Who? “Is your person wearing a ridiculous hat?”
Or better, and meta: “Does your person look like they could be a person from Guess Who? ” The person in question: a mustachioed gentleman wearing a bowtie. (It‘s Charles!)
At Daring Fireball, Jon Gruber reports that Google is shutting down its URL shortener. After August 25, 2025, links with the form http://goo.gl/*/ will no longer return results.
Gruber asks,
How much money could it possibl[y] cost to just keep this service running in perpetuity? Tim Berners-Lee wrote his seminal essay, “Cool URIs Don’t Change” back in 1998. It’s bad enough when companies go out of business, taking their web servers down with them. But Google isn’t struggling financially. In fact, they’re thriving.I’ve used the Google URL shortener on the cumbersome links for pages in Google Books. Where are those shortened links? Scattered somewhere in these pages. Oh well.
One thought, not derived from commentary elsewhere: this clip makes me think that Andy Beshear would be an excellent vice presidential choice for Kamala Harris. He’d be the anti-Vance.
[Editorial cartoon by L.K. Hanson. Click for a larger view.]
This editorial cartoon was drawn to appear in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The artist, L.K. Hanson, explains that the paper decided that it was “too soon” and refused to publish it. Thus Hanson asks that anyone who wishes to pass the cartoon around do so.
It should be noted that Trump’s martyrdom complex began well before the July 13 assassination attempt.
[Found via Daughter Number Three.]
Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) has written the script for a virtual reality game, A Killing at Hastings’ Rock. After software developer James Lindstrom is killed (irl), young computer whiz Alex (Shawn Phelan) tries to hack into Lindstrom’s password-protected files to figure out the secret behind a mysterious locked door in the Hastings’ Rock world. Jessica is right by Alex’s side. From the Murder, She Wrote episode “A Virtual Murder” (October 31, 1993):
“Oh, man, this — it's unreal. I've run my random character generator, my password algorithm. I've never met a computer I couldn't crack in less than ten minutes.”The screen shows the password as OPEN DOOR, space included.
“Alex, James Lindstrom was a genius, right?”
“Oh, he told you too, huh?”
“Often what stymies the rest of us about genius is its ability to reduce the complex to the simple, to the obvious. I mean, what about something basic, like “open door”?
[Types.]
“That's it! We're in!“
“A Virtual Murder” is a hoot. In addition to extended glimpses of Jessica Fletcher wearing what purports to be a virtual-reality headset, there are repeated references to “source codes” (plural). Here’s an appreciative commentary on the episode.From May 2023, Kamala Harris leaves a D.C. record store. With Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s Porgy and Bess, Roy Ayers’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine, and Charles Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music.
[Billboard identifies the Mingus LP only as “a record.”]
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
The New York Times has the story (gift link).
I think it’s the right choice. But still I have tears in my eyes. Age, dammit.
[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]
[127 Mott Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
And tell me what street compares with Mott Street in July, sweet pushcarts gently gliding by. Please imagine the pushcarts gliding. See also Delancey Street.
Click for a larger view and see if you can see the four people at their windows.
*
July 24: A belated thought: check the WPA Guide:
The pushcarts on Mott Street from Canal to Broome, a block east of Mulberry Street, are relics of a thriving market that once embraced the four streets west of the Bowery. They sell ripe and green olives, artichokes, goats‘ cheeses, finochio (sweet fennel), and ready-to-eat pizza, an unsweetened pastry filled with tomatoes and cheese, meat, or fish.Notice that the exotic food pizza has to be explained.
The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New York. 1939. (New York: The New Press, 1992).
As reported on the platform formerly known as Twitter (which I’m unable to link to), Asha Rangappa suggsts a “missing link”:
When he hears the word “asylum” in connection with migrants he thinks it means insane asylums, not refuge from persecution. Hence Hannibal Lecter, etc. Omg.The word asylum comes to us from the classical Latin asȳlum, refuge, sanctuary, which derives in turn from the Hellenistic Greek ἄσῡλον, refuge, sanctuary. The still-familiar meaning (1596): “a secure place of refuge, shelter, or retreat.” The dictionary dates the meaning relevant to refugees to 1842: “Protection and (usually temporary) permission to stay granted by a state to a refugee, esp. a political refugee, from another country.” If Trump is indeed imagining insane asylums, he’s latching onto a later meaning (1775) that the dictionary labels “chiefly historical ”: “a secure institution or establishment for the confinement and treatment of people diagnosed with severe mental illness; a psychiatric hospital. Also: a prison for mentally ill criminals.”
[Sununu’s words appear in an introductory video for George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC.]Omg I think this is the missing link. 🎯 When he hears the word “asylum” in connection with migrants he thinks it means insane asylums, not refuge from persecution. Hence Hannibal Lecter, etc. Omg. 🤣😳 https://t.co/C58QDtHZpT
— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) July 20, 2024
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. It’s quite a crossword. I started with 29-D, five letters, “Tutta la ____ （till dawn),” which yielded 40-A, four letters, “Something solemnized.” And then a fingerhold here, a toehold there. I didn't think I’d ever get it all, until I did.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
1-A, four letters, “No pro bono battler.” One would think law, or at least I would.
2-D, four letters, “Mythical fire starter.” Clever.
5-A, four letters, “Lee alternative.” One would think LEVI, or at least I would.
14-D, six letters, “Pop icon who lived across the street from Neil Diamond.” I will have to take your word for it.
16-A, four letters, “Pop icon with an Our Way podcast.” Really out of the way. Sorry, 16-A.
20-A, fourteen letters, “Defiant non-apology.” Great answer, at least for a crossword, though perhaps not in real life.
23-A, six letters, “Part of a peak performance.” One would think ASCENT, or at least I would, complete with fingerholds and toeholds.
24-A, seven letters, “At-work gamer’s quick-change shortcut.” I remember reading about it, many years ago.
24-D, five letters, “Set off.” Ambiguity alert.
26-D, ten letters, “Fusion favorite with salmon-topped slices.” See 14-D.
30-D, five letters, “Whom Tiger tied for PGA Tour wins in 2019.” I think the conventions of crosswords require Woods in this clue.
47-D, six letters, “Ladylike?” Really clever. I was thinking something to do with ladybugs.
53-A, three letters, “Sound made by shakers.” One would think TSK, or at least I would, shaking my head.
54-A, fourteen letters, “Online source request.” A novel answer.
56-D, four letters, “Small torch bearer.” Stumpers gonna stump.
My favorite in this puzzle: 60-A, ten letters, “Desirable character trait.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
My uncle and his allies in the corporate media want us to believe, with absolutely no evidence, that he’s a changed man. They want us to believe he cares about unity and “lowering the temperature.” But the people he chooses to surround himself with make it crystal clear that nothing could be further from the truth.With special guests Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz, Hulk Hogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Paul Manafort, Mitch McConnell, Peter Navarro, J.D. Vance, and Dana White. Background music: James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.”
If you go looking in the Project 2025 Policy Agenda for the Comstock Act, the provisions in federal law now touted as a way to prevent sending mifepristone through the mail, you won’t find a single reference to it. But if you search just a bit, you’ll find this passage:
Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.[16]The endnote:
16. 18 U.S.C. 1461, https://www.law.cornell.edu/And those two URLs — 1, 2 — have the relevant sections of the Comstock Act.
uscode/text/18/1461 (accessed March 16, 2023),
and 18 U.S.C. 1462, https://www.law.cornell.edu/
uscode/text/18/1462 (accessed March 16, 2023).
Paddy, our narrator, has carried fallen branches home while riding her scooter. And then the branches hit a lamp-post and Paddy came tumbling down. Her mother Louey is cross: “Just look at you. You’re not going out on that scooter again.” And Paddy reminds her mother that when they were walking the day before, they saw lots of fallen branches and her mother said they’d save money if they could carry them home for firewood.
Maureen Duffy, That’s How it Was (1962).
Also from this novel
“Oh all the things kids do”
A Honeymooners correction, still needed The New York Times won’t be making a correction.
The New York Times has an obituary. From a 2019 interview with the Times (both gift links):
Do you ever think about death?[Context: Shelley Berman wrongly accused Newhart of stealing the use of a telephone in stand-up comedy from him.]
I think I know what’s on the other side, but I’m not sure. Maybe it just ends. Some people think you come back. Maybe I’ll come back as Shelley Berman and be pissed off at myself.
What do you think happens on the other side?
I think if you lived a good life, some people say it is rapture. You spend the rest of your life in a state of rapture. That’d be nice. What I’m actually hoping is there’s the Pearly Gates and God’s there and he says to me, “What did you do in life?” And I say, “I was a stand-up comedian.” And he says: “Get in that real short line over there.”
It’s not just Project 2025: “A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House.” Jonathan Blitzer’s “Inside the Trump Plan for 2025” is worth reading (The New Yorker ).
George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC looks like a PAC worth supporting.
The Seneca Project looks like a project worth supporting. The project’s video about what J.D. Vance thinks about women — in his own words — is worth watching.
The banana man I misunderstood. Now with what really happened, which is even more ridiculous.
[Lee Marvin and Jerome the Giraffe. Click either image for a larger view.]
Steven Hall suggested this frankly unsettling pairing. But who am I kidding? When I see these two side by side, I cannot help laughing.
Everyone knows Lee Marvin. Jerome the Giraffe appeared on the CBC children’s show The Friendly Giant (1958–1985). The show had some American distribution as well: Elaine watched on Boston’s WGBH. As Steven points out, YouTube has an episode from PBS Wisconsin.
The Lee Marvin connection is apparently not a coincidence. Man and puppet do sound similar. Steven suggests listening to this clip. And he mentions a “You Know You’re a Canadian When” list that included something like this: “you feel nostalgic for a man who hangs out with a hyper-kinetic rooster in a bag and a purple and orange giraffe with a sleepy-Lee-Marvin voice.”
I’ve drained the purple and orange and everything else from Jerome to make the photographs more uniform.
Thanks, Steven, for some unexpected amusement.
Related reading
All OCA “separated at birth” posts (Pinboard)
From a novel of a working-class girlhood in England before and during the Second World War.
Maureen Duffy, That’s How it Was (1962).
We were waiting at the register in Aldi, with many things to pay for. A man came up behind us with one banana. I insisted that he go ahead of us. He wondered if the cashier could ring up one banana. I said that since bananas were sold by weight, it shouldn’t be a problem. I was right and wrong.
The purchase took some time. The man put his card in the reader, but the reader didn’t bite, so he swiped. Several minutes of inaudible customer-cashier conversation followed, with the cashier opening the till twice. I tried to send Elaine a message by telepathy about good deeds and punishment.
And then we found out what had happened. The banana man had wanted cash back with his purchase — that was the whole point of buying the banana. And having received his cash, he wanted to return his banana for an additional eighteen cents.
I misunderstood. Here’s what did happen:
The banana man paid for his banana with his card and wanted cash back. The cashier told him that she couldn’t give him back cash that exceeded the amount of his purchase. The banana man wanted to return his banana. The cashier, now with more customers waiting, told him that she wasn’t going to run a return for eighteen cents. She gave him the coins instead. She told us that she didn’t think Aldi would mind. We told her that we would have her back if they did.
Note: The banana man could have asked about cash back before paying for his banana.
Thank you, Elaine, for straightening me out.
[Context, in case anyone is wondering: the customer was clearly not indigent. He was, I’d say, feeling remarkably entitled.]
[Nancy, August 5, 1955. Click for a larger view.]
I like that Nancy is able to speak (and what’s more, soliloquize) as she drinks water.
Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Just one sentence from the foreword to the Project 2025 Policy Agenda:
We cannot outsource to others our obligation to ensure the conditions that allow our families, local communities, churches and synagogues, and neighborhoods to thrive.“Churches and synagogues”: that’s conspicuously limited phrasing. But it’s not surprising in a document that refers to the “Judeo-Christian tradition” and to time and a half pay “for hours worked on the Sabbath.” “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest,” the document says. But the default Sabbath, no surprise, is Sunday.
“Folks, I know what a ‘Black job’ is: it’s the vice president of the United States. I know what a ‘Black job’ is: the first Black president in American history, Barack Obama”: Joe Biden, on fire this afternoon, addressing the NAACP convention in Las Vegas.
[Context, if you need it: Donald Trump’s claims that undocumented immigrants are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”]
[A television screen within a movie. Click for a larger view.]
Though I knew this fellow was in the movie, I didn’t recognize him at first. Do you?
Leave your guesses in the comments. I‘ll drop a hint if one is needed.
*
No need: the mystery is now revealed in the comments.
More mystery actors (Collect them all)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?
Here’s a passage from the foreword to Project 2025 Policy Agenda:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.No definition of pornography accompanies these declarations. The foreword says that pornography manifests itself in “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” The definition must be very broad indeed.
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Fandango, TCM, YouTube.]
The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell, 1972). When the grandmother of a Jamaican country boy (jimmy Cliff) dies, he comes to Kingston in search of a job. And a dream comes true: he gets to record a song of his own, “The Harder They Come.” Reggae plays in or underneath scene after scene, but the movie is in the end about capitalism and its discontents: economic exploitation in the music business and the ganja trade, and the paucity of opportunity that might prompt someone to seek fame as an outlaw. With handheld camerawork, many non-actors, and strong echoes of American movies — Little Caesar, High Sierra, Gun Crazy, and Bonnie and Clyde among them. ★★★★ (CC)
*
Grand National Night, aka Wicked Wife (dir. Bob McNaught, 1953). British horse racing is part of it, but the movie focuses on domestic turmoil: horse-centric husband Gerald (Nigel Patrick) and his horse-hating, philandering wife Babs (Moira Lister). When the partners clash and Babs is accidentally killed (trust me, that’s not a spoiler), suspicion falls on Gerald, who insists that his wife wasn’t home that night. This movie begins well, but its human interest drains away quickly. A trick at the end turns the story into something like a lesser episode of Murder, She Wrote. ★★ (YT)
*
Uranium Boom (dir. William Castle, 1956). In Colorado, prospectors Brad and Grady (Dennis Morgan and William Tallman) fight, make up, forge a friendship, and part ways when Brad marries Grady’s girlfriend Jean (Patricia Medina). Grady plots revenge, but everyone lives happily ever after. Unnecessarily snappy patter — “The old do-re-mi, that’s what I want, and plenty of it” —enlivens this rather dopey movie. My favorite line: “Bad day at Yellow Rock.” ★★ (YT)
*
The Midnight Story (dir. Joseph Pevney, 1957). A priest is murdered in a San Francisco alley, and Joe Martini (Tony Curtis), a rookie traffic cop and the priest’s best friend, resigns from the force to solve the crime. To do so, he ingratiates himself with the man he’s identified as a suspect, Sylvio Malatesta (Gilbert Roland), working for him and living in an extra bedroom in his house. And thus Joe falls in love with Sylvio’s sister Anna (Marisa Pavan). All three leads are excellent: Roland is especially strong, giving little indication of whether he is or isn’t the killer. The ending is quite a surprise. ★★★★ (YT)
*
The Choppers (dir. Leigh Jason, 1961). Inane junk that’s not quite bad enough to be good. We’re meant to understand that a gang of teenaged boys can siphon the gas out of a car, put back just enough gas to make the car run out on a deserted road, strip the car when the driver walks to a gas station, and sequester what they’ve stripped in the back of a poultry truck while one teen watches from a distance and warns of danger via walkie-talkie. My favorite line, apropos of nothing else in the movie: “She never puts anything on a sandwich to make it swallow easy — no butter, no nothin’.” These young hoods would pair well with the girl gang of The Violent Years. ★★ (YT)
*
Bodyguard (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1948). Lawrence Tierney was already known for off-screen brawling, so it’s no wonder that the movie begins with his character, suspended police detective Mike Carter, slugging his lieutenant and shouting “I can explain!” as his fellow cops restrain him. The story is thin: the suspended Carter serves as a bodyguard for the endangered head of a meatpacking company, and mayhem ensues. Much of the backstory speeds by in a few lines of dialogue, and the movie seems to have suffered significant cutting, reducing its coherence and removing what was likely a gruesome ending in a meatpacking plant. Priscilla Lane is on hand as Mike’s resourceful girlfriend Doris Brewster, though how she puts up with her feral beau is an open question. ★★ (TCM)
*
Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorcese, 1990). I’m not a great fan of Mafia movies, but the dark comedy of this one suits me. Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, and Paul Sorvino star in the story of a Brooklyn youth, Henry Hill (Liotta), who becomes a somebody in the world of crime before ending up a nobody — but an alive nobody. What led me to watch this movie for the first time in many years: a clip of Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito, telling a story in a way that I suspect spoke strongly to Donald Trump, who has named Goodfellas among his favorite movies. The picture of gangsterhood this movie presents, of outer-borough men who do whatever they want, take whatever they want, and brook no opposition would no doubt speak strongly to the disgraced ex-president. ★★★★ (F)
*
Jennifer (dir. Joel Newton, 1953). Undeservedly obscure, I think. Lonely Agnes Langsley (Ida Lupino) signs on a caretaker to a deserted estate whose last caretaker, Jennifer, seems to have disappeared, leaving behind a diary and other personal effects. What happened to Jennifer, and what might the estate’s owner (Howard Duff) or a schlubby grocery clerk (Robert Nichols) have to do with it? A modest, spooky production with strong Rebecca vibes and brilliant cinematography by James Wong Howe — just look at that shadow creeping snakelike up the steps. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Trial (dir. Mark Robson, 1955). Glenn Ford plays David Blake, a law professor who is told to beef up his credentials with some courtroom experience; thus he ends up defending Angel Chavez (Rafael Campos, Morales in The Blackboard Jungle), a Mexican-American teenager accused of causing the death of a white girl who fled and died of a heart attack after she and he necked. Racism and legal corruption are at the heart of the story, with Blake’s new employer (Arthur Kennedy) looking to exploit the case by turning Chavez into a found-guilty martyr to be exploited by an American Communist organization. I wonder whether Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) influenced Don Mankiewicz’s novel Trial (1955) and this screenplay: the picture of an organization exploiting and abandoning is unmistakably similar. With Dorothy McGuire as a sharp secretary and Juano Hernandez as a judge who takes no guff from anyone. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Gambit (dir. Ronald Neame, 1966). An amusing game of cat and mouse and cat and mouse and cat and mouse. Michael Caine is an aspiring criminal who hatches a plot to steal an ancient bust of a Chinese empress with the help of a showgirl (Shirley MacLaine) who bears a remarkable resemblance to the dead wife of the bust’s owner (Herbert Lom). The pleasure in this movie comes from seeing the many differences between the perfect criminal scheme, as Caine’s character envisions it, and its execution. Tricks abounding, all in an Orientalist “East.” ★★★ (TCM)
*
Convicted (dir. Henry Levin, 1950). “A man’s dead — somebody’s gotta pay for it”: that would be Joe Hufford (Glenn Ford), who killed a politician’s son in a bar fight and gets sent up for manslaughter. Joe’s life becomes more interesting when the DA who prosecuted him (Broderick Crawford) becomes the new, remarkably benevolent warden, and the DA’s adult daughter (Dorothy Malone) comes along to live on the prison premises (what?). The prison parts of the picture are solid, with Millard Mitchell as an inmate with nothing to lose. But long before the story is over, it spirals into romantic ridiculousness. ★★ (YT)
*
The Locket (dir. John Brahm, 1946). Childhood deprivation and humiliation help shape the adult Nancy (Laraine Day), a beautiful woman with a deeply disordered personality. She’s a destroyer of lives, one after another, in a story that takes shapes as a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. Robert Mitchum shines as a painter and Cassandra (unheeded prophet). Extraordinary noir cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. ★★★★ (TCM)
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
Here’s another excerpt from the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, this one from the foreword:
We want you! The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. Welcome to the mission. By opening this book, you are now a part of it. Indeed, one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States, and we hope every other reader will join in making the incoming Administration a success.Despite Donald Trump’s know-nothing disavowals, there’s ample evidence of his campaign’s deep ties to Project 2025. (His name appears on 194 of the policy agenda’s pages.) My point in posting this passage is that the project’s creators are themselves explicit about those ties, in the first paragraph of the first page following the acknowledgments.
“What to make of the assassination attempt?” Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, has some ideas.
[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]
[6-8 Delancey Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
It’s very fancy on old Delancey Street, you know. The fixtures charm us so, as tables sit below, in the snow.
I won’t let a discrepancy in numbering between the store fronts and the tax records spoil my fun. These storefronts are in fact 191 and 193 Bowery. But let’s imagine them on Delancey Street, nos. 6 and 8.
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
A $15 contribution to ActBlue will no doubt prompt cries that the attempt on Donald Trump’s life can be blamed on “the radical Left.” I don’t know what those who will blame “the Left” will say about the would-be assassin’s Republican voter registration. My suspicion is that the real issues will prove to be mental illness and access to weapons.
I like what Fresca’s friend Marz had to say: “I don’t want us to live like this. I want to be part of the calm in the craziness.”
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing as “Anna Stiga.” Like “Lester Ruff,” that’s a pseudonym that signals an easier Stumper. Easy indeed: writing this post will probably take longer than solving.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
7-D, fifteen letters, “Appliance store offering.” Like most of the puzzle, pretty straightforward.
8-A, six letters, “Literally, ‘already seen.’” My starting point.
13-D, six letters, “Free of obstruction.” Trickier than it looks.
14-A, eight letters, “It’s Amsterdam north of 59th St.” My mental map isn’t good enough to know it cold.
23-A, seven letters, “Take a turn for the verse.” Groan.
28-A, nine letters, “Fancy word for ‘#.’” It pays to know your typographical symbols.
33-A, fifteen letters, “‘Thanks for telling me.’” In the American idiom.
42-A, nine letters, “Circular bakeware.” BUNDTPANS?
61-A, eight letters, “They’re baked on 42-Across.” Making 42-A a little tricky, or a bit debatable.
My favorite in this puzzle: 44-D, six letters, “Pole vaults have them.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
[The post took a minute longer than the puzzle.]
Here’s another excerpt from the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, from Chapter Eight, concerning media agencies. The document calls for ending taxpayer fundng for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And what then?
Stripping public funding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting. They should no longer, for example, be qualified as noncommercial education stations (NCE stations), which they clearly no longer are. NPR, Pacifica, and the other radio ventures have zero claim on an educational function (the original purpose for which they were created by President Johnson), and the percentage of on-air programming that PBS devotes to educational endeavors such as “Sesame Street” (programs that are themselves biased to the Left) is small.Ads, yes. (And why? To bring in revenue as federal support diminishes.) But noneducational? All Things Considered? American Masters? Finding Your Roots? Fresh Air? And even if you’ve already restricted “educational” to programming for the very young, it’s extraordinarily dishonest to assert that the percentage of programming is small: PBS runs several hours of kids’ shows every day, and there’s a separate channel, PBS Kids, all kids, all the time.
Being an NCE comes with benefits. The Federal Communications Commission, for example, reserves the 20 stations at the lower end of the radio frequency (between 88 and 108 MHz on the FM band) for NCEs. The FCC says that “only noncommercial educational radio stations are licensed in the 88–92 MHz ‘reserved’ band,” while both commercial and noncommercial educational stations may operate in the “non-reserved” band. This confers advantages, as lower-frequency stations can be heard farther away and are easier to find as they lie on the left end of the radio dial (figuratively as well as ideologically).
The FCC also exempts NCE stations from licensing fees. It says that “Noncommercial educational (NCE) FM station licensees and full service NCE television broadcast station licensees are exempt from paying regulatory fees, provided that these stations operate solely on an NCE basis.” NPR and PBS stations are in reality no longer noncommercial, as they run ads in everything but name for their sponsors. They are also noneducational. The next President should instruct the FCC to exclude the stations affiliated with PBS and NPR from the NCE denomination and the privileges that come with it.
Tick Roby (Danielle Panabaker) is hoping that her father Miles Roby (Ed Harris) is up for a drive. From Empire Falls (dir. Fred Schepisi, 2005):
“Any chance we could go to Boston this weekend? The Picasso exhibit’s opening.”This exchange marks the first time I’ve heard positive anymore outside of real life.
“I’m gonna be pretty busy here. I’d like to get some of this worked out.”
“Well, anymore you’re always busy.”
A lengthy piece from the New York Times editorial board (gift link): “Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead.” Read. Share. Vote.
Here’s another passage from the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, from Chapter Eleven, concerning the Department of Education — which, this chapter says, should be eliminated. So much is left unaddressed in this chapter. Just one example: despite graphs showing declines in reading and mathematics, there are no suggestions to improve those outcomes. Let the states figure it out, I guess.
But this document is clear on several points. For instance, in all K–12 schools under federal jurisdiction:
No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate, without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.As always, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary kid called, again and again, a name or pronoun not of your choosing. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary teacher or staff member referred to, again and again, with the wrong pronouns. Imagine too the dilemma the first of these prohibitions would create for a sympathetic teacher who wants to honor a student’s choice of name. And notice too: even if a student has written permission regarding their name and pronouns, a teacher or other employee cannot be required to honor that request. Again, cruelty abounding, and I have to wonder what kind of “moral convictions” would prompt a person to be so unabashedly cruel. The deeply sinister message here is that individual identity is not one’s own to decide.
No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.
No public institution may require an education employee or contractor to use a pronoun that does not match a person’s biological sex if contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.
I was driving when I said it: “people like you and I.” And I couldn’t believe that I had said it.
Such is life when you hear it the wrong way again and again, and when you read writers telling you there’s nothing wrong with it.
I just kept driving — I didn’t slam on the brakes and pull over — but I immediately corrected myself. That’ll never happen no more, as the song says. I hope.
It is to laugh: Melania Trump just hosted a fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group devoted to LGBTQ+ rights. “This Republican Party is one for ALL Americans,” the group proclaimed.
Perhaps the Log Cabin Republicans should have a look at the Project 2025 Policy Agenda. Chapter Fourteen, devoted to the Department of Health and Human Services, leaves no doubt that these aspiring makers of policy view marriage as a heterosexual union. Here’s a passage from the plan for the HHS Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education for Adults initiative:
Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.Look at the details:
For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.
Daring Fireball notes that Windows Notepad is getting spellcheck and autocorrect: “Better late than never, but it’s kind of wild that Notepad is 41 years old and only getting these features now.”
Which reminds me of my pre-Mac adventures in “Amish computing” — writing in the Windows app Notepad2 and using a spellchecking script.
Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.
You know, perhaps, that ever since I have been ill, I have been working on a long book, which I call a novel because it isn’t as fortuitous as memoirs (it is fortuitous only to the degree that life itself is), and the composition is very severe although difficult to appraise because of its complexity; I don’t know how to describe the genre. Certain parts take place in the country, some in one kind of society, others in another kind; some have to do with family life and much of it is terribly indecent.Louis de Robert (1871–1937), novelist and Dreyfussard. Proust listened to his nightly accounts of the trial.
Marcel Proust, in a letter to Louis de Robert, between October 7 and 15, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).
In Chapter Fourteen of the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, covering the Department of Health and Human Services, the words addiction, birth control, and hunger do not appear; the word fentanyl appears once; the acronyms HIV and AIDS appear once each; and the word nutrition appears four times.
But the word gender appears twenty-two times, and the word abortion appears 143 times.
Among the anti-abortion strategies this project seeks to implement: the use of “every available tool, including the cutting of funds” to require each state to report “how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” The idea here is to counter what the document calls “abortion tourism.” And abortion is explicitly equated with “taking a human life.”
As for birth control family planning, this document addresses only “modern fertility awareness–based methods,” said to have “unsurpassed effectiveness.” (Planned Parenthood says they are “about 77–98% effective.”)
Did you know that there’s a Project 2025 website? And a thirty-chapter agenda?
My Project 2025 is to do what I can (with modest means, admittedly not much) to prevent their Project 2025 from being realized.
“When you look at manuscripts or letters and they’re written in the hand of the writer, you are closer to that writer, you’re closer to the person”: Fran Lebowitz looks at manuscripts and letters at the Morgan Library.
Related posts
A visit to the Kolb-Proust Archive : Gregory Corso’s poem “I Held a Shelley Manuscript”
At least I know I’m not alone in thinking it a problem: Why are the right- and left-quotation marks on iOS’s keyboard reversed?
[The post title is deliberate. RSS might not display the reversed quotation marks — ” “ — as I intended.]
[Eddie’s Fish Market, 5410 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]
I went roaming around the primal neighborhood and decided to take a look at the spot where 13th Avenue and New Utrecht Avenue intersect — at 54th Street. The car-and-train chase in The French Connection never made it that far.
I like the Eddie’s Fish Store slogan, and fortunately the second of these photographs has it complete:
If it swims clings or crawls we have it.Commas be damned.
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by “Lester Ruff,” or Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, offering an easier puzzle. Yes, this one’s easier. For instance: 47-A, seven letters, “Liked by a lot.” That’s as straightforward as it gets. The dazzling parts of the puzzle: horizontal and vertical stacks of twelve-, fifteen-, and twelve-letter answers.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
1-A, six letters, “Image enhancers.” A far less straightforward answer than 47-A.
5-D, twelve letters, “What might hold the mayo.” A stack begins. REFRIGERATOR would be far too straightforward.
6-D, fifteen letters, “They’re behind the wheel.” A stack continues. Not CASINOEMPLOYEES.
19-D, twelve letters, “‘How are you?’ ‘_____’.” A stack concludes. Nicely colloquial.
24-D, seven letters, “Author named for Emerson.” Yep.
29-A, twelve letters, “Spearmint or citronella.” A stack begins.
31-D, three letters, “One of DC's 35-Across (first spelled with its third letter moved to first).” The one awkward spot in the puzzle. The answer is out of the way but unavoidable, given the stack of Across answers. The parenthetical bit seems unnecessary. 35-A should be allowed to fend for itself.
32-A, fifteen letters, “Funds needed for ongoing costs.” A stack continues.
32-D, eight letters, “Film first called The Concert Feature.” Such a strange title.
35-A, twelve letters, “JFK and relatives.” A stack concludes. A really inventive clue.
39-D, six letters, “Its origin story is told in The Man Who Made Lists.” I’m tempted to look at it and the book about it.
48-D, four letters, “Colleague of Queen Bey.” I'm not sure how I know it, but I do.
49-A, three letters, “Caviar on a canapé.” A little tricky.
My favorite in this puzzle: 21-A, four letters, “Nonclassified letters.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
[The FBI Story (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1959). Click for a much larger view.]
That’s an FBI agent questioning a clothes presser about a hollow coin found in a pants pocket. I thought that the pencil might be a Blackwing, but no — it’s a mechanical pencil. Perhaps a Scripto, perhaps a Skilcraft.
See also: FBI agents and Dixon Ticonderogas.
Related reading
All OCA pocket notebook sightings (Pinboard)
A recorded voice, as heard on the phone:
“Please wait while I connect you with a crew member.”
[Nancy, July 21, 1955.]
We went for almost a month without having to mow our lawn, so a little rain is a welcome thing. And a dark and rainy morning seems appropriate on this Fourth of July.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1885).
The question is timely.
[UK publication: 1884. US publication: 1885.]
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Disney, Max, Netflix, a movie theater, YouTube.]
Live Fast, Die Young (dir. Paul Henreid, 1958). No one dies, and the movie is far better than the lurid title suggests. Kim (Mary Murphy) and Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt), a hashslinger and a high-school senior, are sisters living with their unemployed drunk of a father (Gordon Jones, Mike the cop of the Abbott and Costello world). When Kim leaves home for a career of petty and more serious crime (lived to a jazz and rock ‘n’ roll score and featuring Mike Connors), Mary follows to search for her sister and bring her back. Eberhardt, who affects a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, has the best line: “Nothing’s against anything until you’re caught!” ★★★★ (YT)
*
So Young, So Bad (dir. Bernard Vorhaus, 1950). Life at a “corrective school” for girls, with a know-nothing administrator, a sadistic matron, and Dr. John Jason (Paul Henreid), a newly hired psychiatrist intent on making a better life for the school’s inmates, who spend their days doing laundry and tending potato fields. A second administrator (Catherine McLeod) doubts he can make any changes. Sparks fly. Three actors make their first major appearance in movies here: Anne Francis as an unmarried mother, Anne Jackson as a butch gal, and Rosita (Rita) Moreno as a social isolate who finds refuge in dreams of escape. ★★★ (YT)
*
Lonelyhearts (dir. Vincent J. Donehue, 1958). A loose adaptation of Nathanael West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Montgomery Clift is Adam White, Miss Lonelyhearts, writing an advice column for a big-city newspaper; Robert Ryan is Shrike, the paper’s editor-in-chief, a man given to tormenting and tempting Adam; Myrna Loy is Mrs. Shrike, an alienated wife who likes the company of younger men (including Adam). Maureen Stapleton seems terribly miscast as a newspaper reader intent on seducing Adam. Adam’s backstory and the movie’s happy ending would have been enough to make West say “Look what they’ve done to my novella, ma.” ★★★ (YT)
*
Gun Crazy (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). I’ll watch this movie whenever it shows up. A delirious crime spree, with Bart Tare (John Dall), an army vet fascinated by guns but horrified by killing, and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) a sideshow sharpshooter who’s even crazier than Bart. Dominance, submission, and weirdness abounding. Look at Bart and Laurie lying next to each other after making an escape: they’re panting like partners who have just made love. ★★★★ (YT)
*
The Beach Boys (dir. Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, 2024). This documentary is most valuable as a visual history, with photographs, news footage, and what look like home movies. It’s telling that the first member of the group seen and heard in a non-archival interview is Mike Love, who’s given considerable screen time to talk (about how he was not given enough credit and how Murry Wilson sold the rights to his songs) and to choke up about what he would like to say to Brian Wilson (“I’ll see you in court”?). The documentary omits the deaths of Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson, Brian’s late-career renaissance, the completed SMiLE, and much more, and things end on a strange note: an intertitle reports Pet Sounds going gold and platinum in 2000 as “Kokomo” (gah!) begins to play over the credits. Endless Harmony (dir. Alan Boyd, 1998) is a much better introduction to the group’s history. ★★ (D)
*
Touch (dir. Paul Schrader, 1997). An American story of commerce and religion, from a novel by Elmore Leonard. Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich) is an ex-monk and stigmatic whose touch heals people. Bill Hill (Christopher Walken) is an ex-evangelist who sees Juvenal as a potential star and gets Lynn Faulkner (Bridget Fonda) to push him in that direction, even as a religious fanatic (Tom Arnold) is enraged by Juvenal and Lynn’s relationship. “Juvenal”: yes, it’s satire, but it’s meandering and sleepy. ★★ (CC)
*
The FBI Story (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1959). It starts out well, as a police procedural, with file cabinets, magnifying glasses, and switchboards, but it slowly goes downhill. James Stewart is FBI agent Chip Hardesty, whose peripatetic career finds him investigating Klan violence, murders of Native Americans, famous gangsters, a mass murder, Nazi conspirators, and Communist agents. It’s all set against a Capraesque story of marriage and family, with Stewart and Vera Miles as George and Mary Bailey 2.0, trading lines of creaky, corny dialogue. Best segment: the story of the hollow coin. ★★ (TCM)
*
Hilda Crane (dir. Philip Dunne, 1956). “In case you didn’t know, courtesan is a fancy word for tramp !”: so says Hilda Crane (Jean Simmons), back home with her mother (Judith Evelyn, Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window) after being let go from a job in New York. Hilda, whose years away include a spell of cohabitation and two divorces, finds herself pursued by two men: the louche professor (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who has pronounced her a courtesan, and a noble architect (Guy Madison) whose mother (Evelyn Varden, Icey Spoon in The Night of the Hunter) has definite ideas about her son’s future. But what does Hilda want as her future? Stagey in the extreme (from a play by Samuel Raphaelson), loopy in its lurch to a conclusion, and highly revealing of at least some people’s ideas about gender and sexuality at mid-century. ★★★ (YT)
*
The Human Comedy (dir. Clarence Brown, 1943). It began as a screenplay by William Saroyan that proved far too long for a movie. Life in wartime in the fictional Ithaca, California, with a high-school student, Homer (!) Macauley (Mickey Rooney), who works nights as a postal-telegram delivery boy to help his widowed mother get by. The movie moves from vignette to vignette, taking in the Macauley family (Ray Collins is the spirit of the dead father; Fay Bainter is the mother; Donna Reed is their daughter), the telegraph office (Frank Morgan is a hard-drinking but indefatigable operator), townspeople young and old, and visiting servicemen, with shifts now and then to Homer’s elder brother Marcus (Van Johnson), already away from home in military service and preparing to go overseas. For all its unabashed sentimentality, this human comedy makes considerable room for tragedy, and I can only imagine what it must have felt like to watch in 1943. ★★★★ (TCM)
[A well-known leading man made his uncredited debut in this movie.]
*
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, second season (dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2024). The second (final?) season of the The Jinx covers Robert Durst’s trial, conviction, and sentencing in the murder of his friend Susan Berman and his death four months later. The people on camera are an array of heroes and villains: a dedicated cold-case prosecutor, long-suffering members of Durst’s first wife’s family, Durst family members who did nothing when Durst’s first wife disappeared, friends who display a bewildering allegiance to a killer, and a second wife of convenience determined to keep Durst’s assets from going to his first wife’s family. And above all, Durst himself, quick and conniving on telephone calls, whiny and defiant in the courtroom, avoiding justice again and again (remind you of anyone?). As the credits for the final episode roll, the Jeff Beck/Joss Stone cover of “I Put a Spell on You” plays — aptly, aptly. ★★★★ (M)
*
Wicked Little Letters (dir. Thea Sharrock, 2023). Post-Great War in Sussex, with pious unmarried Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) receiving bizarrely obscene anonymous letters. Suspicion falls on her free-spirit neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), and an arrest and trial follow. An assiduous constable, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), has doubts about Rose’s guilt and enlists the help of other neighborhood women to set things straight. Wonderfully comic, at times suspenseful, with handwriting at the center of things, and based on a true story that seems like something out of Dickens. ★★★★ (N)
*
Inside Out 2 (dir. Kelsey Mann, 2024). Late in the film, we heard a young audience member ask a grown-up, “Why is Riley sad?” In this (not really for kids) sequel, Riley Andersen, now thirteen, is beset by Puberty, which arrives in the form of a wrecking ball that destroys her Sense of Self (capitals are fitting for this allegorical tale), after which a new array of emotions take control: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Envy. That old Sense of Self was a beautiful, symmetrical, silver structure, the work of a mind that could say “Mom and Dad are proud of me” and “I’m a good person”; the new one is a jagged, asymmetrical, fiery mess, whose main theme is “I’m not good enough.” But — and because it’s a Disney movie, it’s no spoiler — the kid is going to be all right, and more complicated. ★★★★ (T)
Related reading
All OCA “12 movies” posts (Pinboard)
From the Lassie episode “The Ring” (January 19, 1958). Ruth Martin (Cloris Leachman) has invited Uncle Petrie (George Chandler) to come work on the farm. Timmy (Jon Provost) takes an instant dislike to the newcomer. Ruth and Paul Martin (John Sheppod) are arguing:
“Who called Uncle Petrie in the first place? Not me.”The original Ruth Martin is not an especially likable character. She’s snippy, fretful, and prone to drama. And she’s always correcting pronouns. Ruth Two (June Lockhart) was a much steadier sort. Impossible to imagine Ruth One keeping her wits about her when threatened by a mountain lion. Ruth Two, too, corrects pronouns, but only those spoken by her son Timmy.
“Fine grammar for a college graduate – ‘not me.’”
“Don't change the subject.”
Heather Cox Richardson, in the July 1 installment of Letters from an American :
At his confirmation hearing in 2005, now–Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I believe that no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution, and statutes.”
In his 2006 confirmation hearings, Samuel Alito said: “There is nothing that is more important for our republic than the rule of law. No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law.”
And in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh told the Senate: “No one’s above the law in the United States, that’s a foundational principle…. We’re all equal before the law…. The foundation of our Constitution was that … the presidency would not be a monarchy…. [T]he president is not above the law, no one is above the law.”
Now they have changed that foundational principle for a man who, according to White House officials during his term, called for the execution of people who upset him and who has vowed to exact vengeance on those he now thinks have wronged him.
Geoffrey Pullum has a new book, The Truth About English Grammar. From a Guardian review:
Pullum constantly insists that all modern lexicographers, as well as all grammarians not called Pullum, are wrong about everything, which lends his book a slightly crazed tone of “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying dictionaries?”Related posts
Too easy to make and too easy to consume: Rick Beato explains “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse.”
Thanks, Elaine and Kirsten.
[“Figuring It Out.” Zippy, July 2, 2024. Click for a larger view.]
Today’s Zippy is all about cloth and clothing and the work of the “fine artist.” Bill Griffith is of course an artist and cartoonist both.
As you may know, there are entire books about how to draw folds in fabric. For instance. And if I remember correctly, Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb has a scene with Robert Crumb talking about drawing folds.
Synchronicity: there’s folding to be done in today’s Zits.
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
From Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent:
Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Korematsu v. United States , 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.From Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent:
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
For my part, I simply cannot abide the majority’s senseless discarding of a model of accountability for criminal acts that treats every citizen of this country as being equally subject to the law — as the Rule of Law requires. That core principle has long prevented our Nation from devolving into despotism. Yet the Court now opts to let down the guardrails of the law for one extremely powerful category of citizen: any future President who has the will to flout Congress’s established boundaries.Context: “Supreme Court Says Trump Is Partly Shielded From Prosecution” (The New York Times, gift link). The opinion and the dissents are here.
In short, America has traditionally relied on the law to keep its Presidents in line. Starting today, however, Americans must rely on the courts to determine when (if at all) the criminal laws that their representatives have enacted to promote individual and collective security will operate asspeedbumps to Presidential action or reaction. Once self-regulating, the Rule of Law now becomes the rule of judges, with courts pronouncing which crimes committed by a President have to be let go and which can be redressed as impermissible. So, ultimately, this Court itself will decide whether the law will be any barrier to whatever course of criminality emanates from the Oval Office in the future. The potential for great harm to American institutions and Americans themselves is obvious.
