In The Bulwark, Will Saletan offers eighteen reasons to say that Donald Trump is running as a fascist:
A president who tried to impose elements of fascism in his first term — and who then deployed mob violence in an attempt to stay in power — is seeking a mandate to go much further. And half of the electorate is on the brink of giving him that mandate.Read it all.
“Here’s the college campus --- let’s go to the phone booth.”
“Why do you always go to the phone booth here?”
[Nancy, April 20, 1978. Click for a larger view.]
Thanks, Brian.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
[The Bushmiller dash is always made of three hyphens. Though he was done drawing Nancy himself fby the time this strip appeared.]
[Nancy, March 6, 1962. Click for a larger view.]
This strip reminds me of a Bryan Garner story that explains his interest in guides to English usage:
When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.And I like that half of Sluggo’s big words are food-related.
Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.
It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.
I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had.
[1013 38th Street, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
I always like seeing kids in these tax photographs, standing around while the WPA fellows take their pitcher. This photograph struck me because of the words written on the door: NO KIDS UNDER 16 ALLOW. The sign above the building reads JUNK SHOP. I can understand why a junk-shop proprietor would keep the younger set out. But that hasn’t stopped these kids from making the sidewalk scene.
What happened one day on 38th Street: those three kids followed the photographers down (or up) the block. These kids would not be denied, though I doubt that anyone was trying to deny them. Click any image for a larger view.
[1001 38th Street.]
[1003 38th Street.]
[1005 38th Street.]
[1013 38th Street.]
[1023 38th Street.]
And down at the end of the block, still-younger kids have taken over.
[1071 38th Street.]
The three stars of these photographs appear only on the north side of 38th Street. Why? No doubt because they were too young to cross the street by themselves. If they’re still around, they’d now be close to or over ninety, and perhaps too old to cross the street by themselves. Who knows? My wild hope is that someone with an older relative who lived on this block will go browsing at 1940s.nyc and see someone they know. You never know. That kind of thing does happen. More than once.
“And that's why I have a blog.”
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Frank Longo. Sigh: it sparked no joy. Too much trivia. I give you 12-D, nine letters, “Pair on Namibia’s coat of arms.” And 18-A, five letters, “Metropolis on the Ganges.” And 34-D, nine letters, “1930s Safety Director of Cleveland.” C’mon, man. And with a printer out of ink, I had to solve online (here). Cursor-cursor-cursor-touchpad, et cetera.
My favorite in this puzzle: 1-A, nine letters, “Left-leaning member of the board?”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
[Pressed for time, minimal commentary.]
From Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). Alone in the city and down on her luck, Sadie (Joan Crawford) visits the Automat. Click any image for a larger view.
[Unless you have the free time and financial wherewithal to track down an original, this is as close as you’ll ever get to an Automat coffee spigot.]
[Coffee cost a nickel.]
[And the twin spigots dispensed both coffee and cream.]
[Civilization = cup and saucer.]
[I like that lettering. And I like the pedestals. I think that they were still around when I made what I remember as my one and only visit to an Automat, in the early 1980s with my friend Aldo Carrasco.]
This scene comes to a bitter end: Sadie sees a half-eaten piece of pie — food! — and the man who’s leaving it behind crushes out his cigarette in it. Is he nasty, or merely oblivious? Hard to say.
Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)
From Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). That young couple (Joan Crawford and Gene Raymond): what are they looking at?
They’re looking at food, glorious food.
No restaurant name is visible, but for a Depression audience, the cook in the window flipping pancakes would have undoubtedly meant Childs, a chain that offered inexpensive fare. In Sadie McKee, it’s 30¢ for corned beef hash and poached eggs, 5¢ for coffee.
A related post
Childs
From KQED, Charles Schulz, writing in 1970 to ten-year-old Joel Lipton, who asked, “What makes a good citizen?”:
I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen then it has ever been before. Certainly all any of us can do is follow our own conscience and retain faith in our democracy. Sometimes it is the very people who cry out the loudest in favor of getting back to what they call “American Virtues” who lack this faith in our country. I believe that our greatest strength lies always in the protection of our smallest minorities.[Found via kottke.org. “Then it has ever been”: as in the original.]
[Click for a larger view.]
Clark Gable as Eddie, in Hold Your Man (dir. Sam Wood, 1933). I was tempted to use this screenshot for a mystery-actor post, but I suspect the mystery would be permanent.
[From Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Click either image for a larger view.]
Mary Martin (Loretta Young) tries to get on the straight and narrow by going to secretarial school. These two brief glimpses of typing show her progress. By September she’s typing a passage from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605):
And to speak truly, “Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi.” These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.[Post title with apologies to the imaginary Mavis Bacon. “Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi”: the age of antiquity is the youth of the world. “Ordine retrogado”: in retrograde order.]
It was smart to end up watching Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016) for a second time, last night with friends, one day after posting a review of Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. In a closing scene at the Great Falls, a Japanese poet visiting the city of Paterson (Masatoshi Nagase) takes out a bilingual paperback of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and asks Paterson (Adam Driver) if he knows Williams’s work. Yes. Is Paterson a poet? No. (As the viewer knows, Paterson is a poet, but the notebook with all his poems has just been torn to shreds by his dog). After some further talk of Jean Dubuffet and Frank O’Hara, the visiting poet hands Paterson a notebook:
“A gift?”How about that?
“Sometime empty page present most possiblities.”
“Save your wind, save your wind. You might want to go sailing sometime”: Lorry Evans (Constance Bennett), in Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933).
Snappy patter FTW.
[From Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933). Click for a larger view.]
Mr. Stephen Paige (John Halliday) has no telephone number, so Lorry Evans (Constance Bennett) will call on him in person.
Note the typo: Andobon.
Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]
From the Criterion Channel feature Rebels at the Typewriter: Women Screenwriters of the 1930s
Working Girls (dir. Dorothy Azner, 1931). Sisters Mae and Hune (Dorothy Hall and Judith Wood) arrive in New York City, take up residence in a home for homeless young women, and seek work and romance. Paul Lukas plays a scientist in need of a secretary and a wife; Charles “Buddy” Rogers plays a lawyer in love with a socialite — at least for a while he is. Rigid class distinctions, enforced and overcome. Screenplay by Zoë Akins (friend of Willa Cather). ★★★
*
What Price Hollywood? (dir. George Cukor, 1932). The rise of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) from waitress to movie star, “America’s Pal,” and the fall of Maximilian Carey (Lowell Sherman, who reminds me of Nathan Lane) from witty director to destitute drunk. This movie must have thrilled contemporary audiences with its scenes of work on movie sets. Some remarkable cinematography by Charles Rosher of Sunrise, particularly the desperate montage that comes late in the story. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, Ben Markson, and Allen Rivkin. ★★★★
*
Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933). Constance Bennett stars as Lorry Evans, a prostitute on parole who poses as a journalist in order to seduce a wealthy bachelor (Stephen Paige) and get herself set up in her own apartment, sleeping in, yes, a bed adorned with roses. But Lorry’s heart belongs to a lower-level capitalist, a cotton-barge owner (Joel McCrea), to whom she is afraid to reveal her past. A remarkably frank pre-Code story about sexual autonomy and class, with Pert Kelton (the first Alice Kramden) as Lorry’s sidekick and Franklin Pangborn as a floorwalker. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Gregory LaCava, and Eugene Thackrey. ★★★★
*
Finishing School (dir. George Nicholls Jr. and Wanda Tuchock, 1934). Frances Dee is Virginia Radcliff, of the New York Radcliffs don’t you know, dumped by her mother (Billie Burke) at Crockett Hall Finishing School in New Jersey, where free-spirited roommate Pony (Ginger Rogers) revels in booze, cigarettes, and city weekends with louche Ivy League men. On one of those weekends, meek Virginia meets and falls for Ralph McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an interning doctor and all-around good guy who’s supporting himself as a hotel waiter. The relationship (which includes a night together in a boathouse) meets with the disapproval of mother Radcliff and the witch who runs Crockett (Beulah Bondi), but Virginia rebels, and Ralph tells off the classist authorities with the movie’s best line: “Maybe you don’t realize that the world’s too busy earning its three squares a day to worry about what fork to eat ’em with.” Screenplay by Laird Doyle and Wanda Tuchock. ★★★★
*
Rockabye (dir. George Cukor, 1932). Stage star Judy Carroll (Constance Bennett) is beset by trouble: with a former lover, an adopted toddler, an alcoholic mother, an agent who’s in love with her (Paul Lukas), and a married man she loves (Joel McCrea). A few moments of pre-Code eros, many moments of comedy (mostly via Jobyna Howland as Judy’s mother Snooks) and many moments of great pathos and stoic strength. This movie tears one’s heart out and then plays keepaway with it — just when it seems within reach, it’s gone again. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, from a play by Lucia Bronder. ★★★★
*
Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Loretta Young as Mary Martin, a woman who from her orphan childhood has had nothing but bad breaks, with her life told in one long flashback as she awaits the jury’s verdict in her trial for murder. Ricardo Cortez and Franchot Tone appear as polar-opposite love interests in a pre-Code story full of mayhem and sex. Best scene: the dead body against the rattling door. Screenplay by Anita Loos, Gene Markey, and Kathryn Scola. ★★★★
*
You and Me (dir. Fritz Lang, 1938). A charmingly loopy effort, with Harry Carey is a department-store owner and altruist who employs ex-convicts, among them, one Joe (George Raft), who falls for shopgirl Helen (Sylvia Sidney). All’s well until the old gang wants to bring Joe in on a plan to rob the store. With familiar faces old and new: Roscoe Karns, Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and a young Bob Cummings, who might have been good for a mystery-actor post, save that he already looks like Bob Cummings. Screenplay by Virginia Van Upp, Norman Krasna, and Jack Moffitt. ★★★★
*
Blondie of the Follies (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1932). Marion Davies stars as Blondie McClune, who rises from a three-generation-crowded Brooklyn apartment to a Broadway career and swank Manhattan digs. There’s one problem: Blondie and her best pal Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove) are both after the same fellow, Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery), and as with Betty and Veronica, the rivalry goes on and on and on, and on. Weirdest moment, Davies and Jimmy Durante spoofing Grand Hotel (which Goulding directed). Screenplay by Frances Marion, Anita Loos, and Ralph Spence. ★★
*
Hold Your Man (dir. Sam Wood, 1933). Ruby (Jean Harlow) and Eddie (Clark Gable) meet when he ducks into her apartment and bathtub to avoid the cops. Ruby and Eddie are instantly attracted to one another, though many complications will follow, and Ruby will be sent off to a reformatory before the story comes to its end. Wildly funny, with poignant moments, slaps and punches, and plenty of snappy dialogue: “I got two rules I always stick to when I’m out visitin’: keep away from couches, and stay on your feet.” Screenplay by Anita Loos and Howard Emmett Rogers. ★★★★
*
Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). “Every gal has her price, and mine’s high”: so says Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford), daughter of a maid to wealthy business owners, one of whom, lawyer Michael (Franchot Tone) has been Sadie’s pal from childhood. When Michael fires Sadie’s boyfriend Tommy (Gene Raymond), the young couple flee to New York City, where many challenges await. Wealth comes back into the picture when Sadie meets the kind, shambling alcoholic Brennan (Edward Arnold, in a brilliant performance), but the lasting images in this movie are of deprivation and want: a miserable furnished room for rent, an abandoned piece of Automat pie rendered inedible with a cigarette butt. Screenplay by John Meehan, Viña Delmar, and Carey Wilson. ★★★★
*
Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor, 1929). An all-Black cast in a story of transgression and redemption: Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes, in a role meant for Paul Robeson), the oldest son in a family of sharecroppers, falls in with bad company in the form of Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), shoots his own brother in a barroom fracas, and finds redemption as the preacher Brother Ezekiel — though only for a while. As a story, it’s hackneyed, full of stereotypes and improbability (two stars), but as a record of folk forms on film and with sound, it’s invaluable (four stars): we see dancing, dicing, praying, preaching, mourning, and baptisms. The best scene: the train to hell. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Richard Schayer, and Ransom Rideout. ★★/★★★★
*
Tugboat Annie (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery are Annie and Terry, operators of the tugboat Narcissus; she, a dedicated captain; he, a hapless alcoholic. Their son Alec (Robert Young) grows up to be a dashing young captain, engaged to the pretty cipher Pat (Maureen O’Sullivan). The comedy here is very thin — seeing someone drink hair tonic and stumble just isn’t funny — but the movie is partly redeemed by an exciting ending, when a storm rages and Terry risks his life to make repairs to the Narcissus. Screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine, Zelda Sears, and Eve Greene. ★★
*
Dinner at Eight (dir. George Cukor, 1933). It’s a big picture, à la Grand Hotel: “MORE STARS THAN HAVE EVER BEEN IN ANY PICTURE BEFORE,” screamed an advertisement, with John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Billie Burke, Marie Dressier, Jean Harlow, and many others on hand. But I found it dreadfully dull: a strained, stagey examination of the problems of the rich and the formerly rich, with some bright moments from John Barrymore, Dressler, and Harlow. Sometimes I felt that I was watching a 111-minute-long New Yorker cartoon: “I particularly wanted the aspic — it’s so dressy!” Screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and George S. Kaufman. ★★
*
The other movies in this feature: Back Street (dir. John M. Stahl, 1932), Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937), and Red-Headed Woman (dir. Jack Conway, 1932). I’ve seen and can recommend them all. Make Way for Tomorrow is the movie that Orson Welles said “would make a stone cry.”
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (New York: Biblioasis, 2024). 416 pp. $19.95 paper.
Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!
Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended
Mind”
The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, quoted in the final pages of The Notebook, have made a compelling case that the materials of our thinking — say, a calcuator, or a Filofax — are rightfully considered parts of our cognitive processes, parts of an extended mind. Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a similar conclusion sans analytical argument:
“Thinking takes place in the head” really means only “the head is connected with thinking.” — Of course one says also “I think with my pen” and this localisation is at least as good.And, of course, a pen needs something to think on, or in — say, a notebook.
Related readingOne of several meta moments in this detective story.
Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger. 1971. Trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).
Two more Sciascia posts
From The Day of the Owl : From To Each His Own
[56 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
On the Lower East Side, another 56 3rd Avenue. I was ready to write that as in Brooklyn, a large building now bears the 56, but this Manhattan building and its neighbors are still standing. At no. 56 today (or at least recently), Saki, a “sushi restaurant in minimalist digs.” They’d be unlikely to offer the sauerkraut cocktail that William Lins, successor to L. Reinken, offered. (Look closely.)
At no. 52, Sig. Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop. Could this be where Ed Norton bought the spats he gives Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners episode “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”?
[Click for a larger view.]
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
From the Washington Post Department of Data (gift link): “Who uses public libraries the most?”
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, offering an easier Stumper of his own making. Easier it was. I took me twenty-odd minutes, with some difficulty in the northwest that cleared up with 4-D, three letters, “Traffic stopper.” Note to self: read every clue.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
1-D, six letters, “Go downhill fast.” Wonderful word.
From The Guardian, “Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval”:
A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.The article notes that a spelling guide used in schools and public institutions gives “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as acceptable spellings but proscribes “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”). Because Brille is plural?
Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession....
However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.
As I discovered this morning, the Background Sounds feature in macOS Sequoia shuts off for no apparent reason. At least I know it’s not just my problem.
An alternative: the free app ColorNoise: white, pink, and brown noise, available from the menu bar. But you won’t see that Neapolitan ice-cream icon in the menu bar: up there it’s just in black and white.
Note: this app works only from the menu bar. The icon in the dock won’t do a thing. So add the app to your login items and you can then run ColorNoise (and hide the dock icon) via the menu bar.
Thank you, Peter Hafner!
A related post
Noisy macOS, noisy iOS
[In a grocery aisle.]
“I’ve heard of those Oreos.”
Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
From an editorial:
What marks Florida out is the disparity between the concern rightly given to the consequences of the storms and the widespread unwillingness of many there to acknowledge the causes of extreme weather – still less the role in it that the US plays. It has the greatest planet-heating emissions per capita of the top 10 emitters. Global heating makes preparing for such events, and recovering from their consequences, more essential than ever. But it is ludicrous to take such steps without also addressing what is making them more extreme and more frequent.Clarity itself. Nothing yet from The New York Times editorial board.
Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).
This image of an empty house being done in by the weather makes me wonder if “Time Passes,” the middle section of To the Lighthouse, owes something to this novel. And Deephaven has a lighthouse. But I see no evidence that Deephaven ever came to Virginia Woolf’s awareness.
Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts
Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).
I can understand why Truman Capote told Willa Cather that Sarah Orne Jewett wrote “one good book,” The Country of the Pointed Firs. But Deephaven is a remarkable book: a picture of female friendship — partnership, really — in a faded fishing village.
Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts
[Cather thought that The Country of the Pointed Firs was one of three American works of literature likely to have a long life. The other two: The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.]
[As seen on a walk. Couldn’t get any closer.]
I like seeing this sort of notice. Some people might find it intrusive. To me, it’s a sign (sorry) that humans have been here. The (syntactically awkward) text reads
UNDERGROUND CABLEDug.
BEFORE DIGGING TRENCHING OR
PUSHING PIPE IN THIS VICINITY
CALL BEFORE YOU DIG
From xkcd: “The Oxford one is the most famous, but many
major universities have their own comma.”
*
I was won over by the joke. But as shallnot points out in a comment on this post (and as I should have remembered), the Oxford comma takes its name from the press, not from the university.
Related reading
All OCA Oxford comma posts (Pinboard)
Did you know that you can get distraction-covering noise from macOS (Ventura and above) and iOS (15 and above)?
In MacOS, go to System Settings > Accessibility > Audio > Background Sounds.
In iOS, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Background Sounds.
You’ll find the same choices for each: Balanced, Bright, and Dark Noise; and Ocean, Rain, Stream, Night, and Fire. That’s a campfire — no sirens.
In macOS, you can add Background Sounds access to the Menu Bar or Control Center. Go to System Settings > Control Center > Hearing and and choose Show in Menu Bar or Show in Control Center. In iOS, adding a button to the Control Center offers similar ease.
I’ve used a variety of noisemakers on Macs. And a dozen years ago, I relied on an hour-long .mp3 of pink noise. I will quote myself from my teaching days: “Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.” Times change. The need for noise remains.
In The Guardian, John Naughton writes about blogging and the thirty-year effort of Dave Winer: “The blogosphere is alive and well and thriving. In fact it’s where much of the best writing — and thinking — of our era is to be found.”
I know I’ve “seen” Dave Winer’s blog Scripting News every now and then (via someone’s link). It’s not really my cup of Irish Breakfast (it’s a lot of tech), but it’s now in my RSS — a technology that Winer helped develop.
Voter registration deadlines are approaching soon. Find them at https://vote.gov/register.
From the latest installement of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, someone’s “primary rules”:
Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.Sounds like Donald Trump, but it’s not. Can you guess who?
At The New York Times, they’re finally willing to say something, sort of: “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.”
But as the clinical psychologists Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal have pointed out week after week on the podcast Shrinking Trump, it’s not really, or simply, a question of age. Joe Biden’s brain, they have said, is aging. But Donald Trump’s brain, they have said, is dementing.
[56 3rd Avenue, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
I like seeing a diner wherever there’s space for one. Yeah, it oughta fit. See also the Loring Grill, the Tiny Diner, and the Unique Diner.
At this address today: a large building. (What did you expect?)
[From the 1940 telephone directory. Click for a larger view.]
The WPA fellow at the placard looks as if he might have time-traveled in from the Nouvelle Vague. But I could be wrong.
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
]
A pangram from the dowdy world, in yesterday’s New York Times Spelling Bee. And from June 6, 2021. Is the Spelling Bee in reruns?
A handful of pay phone posts
A Blue Dahlia pay phone : A Henry pay phone : A Naked City pay phone : A subway pay phone, 1932 : Chicago pay phones : “If your coin was not returned”
[Pay phone is dowdier than payphone.]
[Caution: there’s one spoiler, for 49-D.]
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, has nifty clue-and-answer pairs to begin and end the Acrosses: 1-A, five letters, “Rulers from either end” and 61-A, five letters, “Holds from either end.” Can across be plural?
Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:
9-D, five letters, “Homeric hound.” A faithful companion, though I’d like to see the “desperate, womanizing pretty boy” PARIS as an answer.
10-D, four letters, “Kind of mouthpiece.” For a zany moment, I thought OPED?
14-A, eleven letters, “Spring roll filling.” I was torn between thinking food and thinking sod.
19-A, six letters, “Calliope close kin.” I was not fooled.
25-A, five letters, “Great start.” Groan.
25-D, four letters, “Multifunction metaphor.” Though I’m not sure that it applies to things that function.
27-D, ten letters, “Pixar furniture merch.” Novelty itself.
38-A, six letters, “Potable Poe wrote about.” Yes, sort of.
42-A, three letters, “Pen name derived from Moses ‘with a head cold.’” I had no idea.
44-D, six letters, “Manufactured mouse manipulator.” Is it the mouse that’s manufactured, or the manipulator?
49-D, four letters, “They’re ‘made to make debt,’ per Pound.” Ezra Pound did say this, at least three times, in his wartime radio speeches from fascist Italy. An example:
Will you folks back in America NEVER realize that you are fightin’ this war IN ORDER to get into debt? I mean just that, you have been dumped into the war IN ORDER to get into debt. To get in further, to get in up to the chin, the throat. To get into the morass up to your eyebrows and no man living can see WHEN you will get out of it.You can see all three statements at the Internet Archive.
Wars are made to make DEBT.
“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978).
The Oklahoma Department of Education is looking to purchase 55,000 Bibles for classroom use:
According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.As they say in Brooklyn, Jesus Mary and Joseph.
A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters.
But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement.
Mardel doesn’t carry the God Bless the U.S.A. Bible or another Bible that could meet the specifications, the We The People Bible, which was also endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. It sells for $90.
“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”: from an Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
Related reading
All OCA reading in college posts (Pinboard)
From the Criterion Collection: Paul Giamatti’s Closet Picks. His first pick: Carnival of Souls (dir. Herk Harvey, 1962) [add exclamation points to taste]
At harvest.ink, a song lyric after “Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt”: “Tell Me Why You Like Kamala.”
Better late than never: “An 85-year injustice has been rectified at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey with the corrected spelling of one of the greatest of all literary names” (The Guardian ).
Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts (Pinboard)
Do you drink Silk Soymilk? If so, you may have noticed — how could you not? — that the cap is extremely difficult to remove on first use. I’ve sometimes used pliers.
The cap has now been improved. It’s larger and turns easily on first use. And the sharp, narrowly spaced ridges have been replaced by larger rounded ridges. The cap is now less like a half-inch-thick coin, more like a knob.
[The Silk website says soymilk, but the carton says soy. I suspect that’s a defensive move given legislative efforts to restrict the use of the word milk to dairy products.]
As you may have noticed, Quaker Oatmeal Squares disappeared from supermarket shelves earlier this year, along with many other Quaker products. The reason: salmonella.
Quaker Oatmeal Squares have now returned. They are a sentimental favorite in our fambly (a food of a certain person’s childhood), so we’re glad to have them back.
I suppose that other Quaker products have also returned. But I care only about the sentimental favorite.
I find some of the details of Mike Pence’s efforts to persuade Donald Trump to accept an election loss bizarre and illuminating. These moments make me think of a parent trying to soothe an angry, tantrum-prone toddler:
A call between the defendant and Pence on November 7, the day that media organizations began to project Biden as the winner of the election. Pence “tried to encourage” the defendant “as a friend,” reminding him, “you took a dying political party and gave it a new lease on life.”And on January 6, when Mike Pence’s life was endangered:
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A private lunch on November 12 in which Pence reiterated a face-saving option for the defendant: “don’t concede but recognize process is over.”
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A private lunch on November 16 in which Pence tried to encourage the defendant to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024, to which the defendant responded, “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off.”
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A December 21 private lunch in which Pence “encouraged” the defendant “not to look at the election ‘as a loss — just an intermission.’” This was followed later in the day by a private discussion in the Oval Office in which the defendant asked Pence, “what do you think we should do?” Pence said, “after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, [the defendant] should ‘take a bow.’”
Upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Pence had been taken to a secure location, [Person 15] rushed to the dining room to inform the defendant in hopes that the defendant would take action to ensure Pence’s safety. Instead, after [Person 15] delivered the news, the defendant looked at him and said only, “So what?”You can read and search the document via The Washington Post.
The vice presidential debate will be a main topic of political conversation today, but far more important (and disturbing) things happened before it took place.That would be Donald Trump in Wisconsin, lying, rambling, and rasping his way through the day.
I can think offhand of one other FDR-themed song: Raymond Quevodo’s “FDR in Trinidad,” recorded by Attila the Hun and, years later, by Ry Cooder and Van Dyke Parks. And of course there’s Milton Ager and Jack Yellen’s “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which became Roosevelt’s campaign song.
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Another, suggested by Kevin Hart at harvest.ink: “Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt (Parts I and II),” by the Evangelist Singers, and covered by Jesse Winchester. Thanks, Kevin.
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And Stefan Hagemann mentioned Steve Earle’s “Christmastime in Washington,” which mentions Woody Guthrie. Thanks, Stefan.
Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : “My Heart’s Own Love” : “The Devil’s Nine Questions” : “William Blake’s Dead” : “Lonesome Pine” : “Tom Paine’s Bones” : “You Were on My Mind This Morning” : “The Hills of Isle au Haut” : “Treehopper” : “I’d Jump the Mississippi” : “What Will Become of Me” : “Early” : “When I Stop Dreaming” : “Taxman Salamander” : “Cheese Closet”/“Billy in the Lowground” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp
“Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.”
[“An obnoxious, offensive, or disgusting person”: that’s J.D. Vance, all night long.]
I knew I knew it: The Late Show opening bit last night borrowed the storefront of Frankie & Johnny, the now-defunct New Orleans furniture store whose television commercials became an Internets sensation. Someone in the writers’ room was having fun.
[Click for a larger store.]
[Click for a larger store.]
Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : “My Heart’s Own Love” : “The Devil’s Nine Questions” : “William Blake’s Dead” : “Lonesome Pine” : “Tom Paine’s Bones” : “You Were on My Mind This Morning” : “The Hills of Isle au Haut” : “Treehopper” : “I’d Jump the Mississippi” : “What Will Become of Me” : “Early” : “When I Stop Dreaming” : “Taxman Salamander” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp
College Matters is a podcast from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s an episode that seems urgently relevant: “Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students?” But the light, cheery tone is often weirdly at odds with the topic.
Listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos — two suggestions offered in this podcast — don’t replace the work (and joy) of reading. Podcasts and YouTube videos might, on occasion, supplement the work (and joy) of reading in worthwhile ways. But without the reading, what’s the point? If instructors are unwilling to assign “an entire novel,” exactly what are podcasts and YouTube videos supposed to be supplementing? And what happens when the work of listening and watching becomes odious?
One more question, unasked in this podcast: how can students be passing classes if they don’t do the reading?
In my last year of teaching (2014–2015) an ace student of mine told me about being in an American lit class in which she was one of just two students who did the reading from class to class. The other reader: another ace student (and former student of mine). People, it’s bad.
Related reading
All OCA reading in college posts (Pinboard)
The historian Timothy Snyder writes about “Trump’s Hitlerian month,” or “a September to remember.” With a discussion of the objection to making comparisons.
[Drawing by me. Click for a larger view.]
Elaine and I were married forty years ago today. Our son Ben recently told us that he thinks of me as forty and Elaine as thirty-five. Which would mean that when we married, I was a newborn — zero. And Elaine was negative five.
Happy anniversary, Elaine, at all ages.
[I made this drawing with an Apple Pencil and and iPad last year. I’ve altered it to remove my glasses. I’m still not sure how to draw myself minus glasses.]
With AI-generated lyrics!
Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : “My Heart’s Own Love” : “The Devil’s Nine Questions” : “William Blake’s Dead” : “Lonesome Pine” : “Tom Paine’s Bones” : “You Were on My Mind This Morning” : “The Hills of Isle au Haut” : “Treehopper” : “I’d Jump the Mississippi” : “What Will Become of Me” : “Early” : “When I Stop Dreaming” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp
[107 Flatbush Avenue, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
Walk down Flatbush Avenue from (what I’ve dubbed) the Leaning Tower of Brooklyn, and you woul have found The House of Pets, aka Altman’s Long Island Bird Store.
I’ll let this ad speak (at length) for itself:
[Brooklyn Times-Union, May 29, 1933.]
Do click for a larger view of the tax photograph for many choice details. The capped fellows looking at the window make me think Sam (Tom D’Andrea), the cabdriver in Dark Passage (dir. Delmar Daves, 1947) who wants to buy a pair of goldfish for his room: “It adds class to the joint.” Though these guys seem to be contemplating birds. Or maybe puppies. Different scenes attracted crowds at other times:
[“Pig-Tailed Monkey Wrecks Pet Store in Berserk Spell.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 23, 1930.]
[“Snake, Loose in Pet Shop, Crawls into Window with Pups, Kittens.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 29, 1941. Click for a larger view.]
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October 1: A reader found evidence of further mayhem. Thanks, reader.
[Daily News, May 13, 1951.]
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. I started with 13-D, seven letters, “Ceres’ Greek analog” and began shopping around. It was a tough puzzle.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
2-D, six letters, “Sequenced.” CUEDUP? Nope.
9-D, eight letters, “Bostonian’s rubber bands.” Never heard of the term, but I’m assured that it’s real. When I lived in Boston, I used binder clips, paper clips, and staples to keep things together.
12-D, seven letters, “Term in environmental law.” I was tempted to guess early on but didn’t. Coming next to 13-D, my guess would have helped a lot.
14-A, ten letters, “Certain baker’s dozen.” I’m in.
17-A, ten letters, “Digressive.” The answer needs to be more in the news.
36-D, seven letters, “Ironmonger?” Groan.
37-D, seven letters, “Thundering.” Fun with the parts of speech.
46-A, five letters, “Americas’ ‘mother culture.’” I don’t think I’ve ever seen the answer in a crossword.
47-A, four letters, “Huron, Ohio’s county (no kidding!).” In other words, the Ohio county that the city of Huron is in. Wacky geography.
48-D, five letters, “Where Beowulf begins.” Oddly and some might say ridiculously specific.
49-A, four letters, “Pedal pusher’s apparatus.” I thought I was reading a tricky clue about the piano, but I wasn’t.
55-A, ten letters, “Was all over the place.” A wild and crazy clue.
56-D, three letters, “Unheard howl.” Clever.
My favorite in this puzzle: 18-A, four letters, “Gym ball.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Jonathan Last and Mary Trump offer commentary on Donald Trump’s latest grift.
Last’s estimate of the cost of producing the $499 Trump watch: $60. The $100,000 watch: $20,000.
[Sidney James as Banky’s ghost. From Joe MacBeth (dir. Ken Hughes, 1955).]
The movie is available to watch at the usual place for out-of-the-way movies.
Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : “My Heart’s Own Love” : “The Devil’s Nine Questions” : “William Blake’s Dead” : “Lonesome Pine” : “Tom Paine’s Bones” : “You Were on My Mind This Morning” : “The Hills of Isle au Haut” : “Treehopper” : “I’d Jump the Mississippi” : “What Will Become of Me” : “Early” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp
Donald Trump, in one variation on a theme: “They are coming after me because I am fighting for you.”
I hear that same narcissism in Eric Adams’s words: “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target, and a target I became.” Here’s a man who in 2023 proclaimed,
“I am the symbol of Black manhood in the city, in this country, and what it represents. I’m the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe, and people need to recognize that.”And now, charged with multiple serious crimes, he’s taking up the Donald Trump cry of victimhood.
Now through Monday, September 30: the Criterion Channel is offering 20% off new annual subscriptions. Use the code FALL20.
The Criterion Channel launched on April 8, 2019. I’ve been a subscriber since the get-go. If every other streaming service in the world were to disappear, I could be happy with the Criterion Channel alone.
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If you share your Strands results as a foursome, trying for Four Corners adds an element of tension to the play. The corners need not be in order. Good luck to the person who ends up with the challenge of getting Corner No. 1.
I will cite Annie Black, the bookstore owner (Rebecca Pidgeon) in State and Main (dir. David Mamet, 2000): “If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun — it’s entertainment.”
Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : “My Heart’s Own Love” : “The Devil’s Nine Questions” : “William Blake’s Dead” : “Lonesome Pine” : “Tom Paine’s Bones” : “You Were on My Mind This Morning” : “The Hills of Isle au Haut” : “Treehopper” : “I’d Jump the Mississippi” : “What Will Become of Me” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp
Nick Lowe, interviewed on the PBS News Hour last night:
“Johnny Cash once said to me, incredibly disappointingly, I thought at the time, ‘Nick, what you have got to do is figure out how to be yourself.’A related post
“I didn’t really know what he meant. I thought, ‘Is that the best you can do, John?’ But actually, now I do. Because when you’re young, you’re trying to sort of cop an act, you’re trying to be — always trying to be somebody that you’re not. And you’ve got to sort of welcome in the things that you don’t really like about yourself, you know, but welcome it in. Because if you can figure out how to be yourself, it makes things so much easier.”
