Recently updated

Separated at birth A reader suggests a missing triplet. The reader is right.

“Keys to the Past”

From the National Archives: Keys to the Past, an online collection of typewriter-related documents and photographs.

Time, it goes so fast

“What’s a BVD?”

[I.e., a DVD.]

Schaden meet Freude

The Washington Post reports that Project 2025 is ending its policy work (gift link). Why? The boss is angry:

Project 2025, a collaboration led by the Heritage Foundation among more than 110 conservative groups to develop a movement consensus blueprint for the next Republican administration, is winding down its policy operations, and its director, former Trump administration personnel official Paul Dans, is departing. The Heritage Foundation also recently distributed new talking points encouraging participants to emphasize that the project does not speak for Trump.

The former president has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025 after relentless attacks from Democrats using some of the 900-page playbook’s more aggressive proposals to impute them to Trump’s agenda since many of the proposals were written by alumni of Trump’s White House. While some participants in the project started avoiding interviews and public appearances, Trump advisers grew furious that Heritage leaders continued promoting the project and feeding critical news coverage.

And:

Vice President Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said Democrats will not stop talking about Project 2025.

“Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding,” she said in a statement. “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.”

Keats or Shelley

Maureen Duffy, That’s How it Was (1962).

Is Keats ”greater“ than Shelley? I‘ll quote myself from a previous post:

As T.S. Eliot said in “East Coker” about the work of the writer, “there is no competition.” Or as the poet William Bronk said, in response to a survey asking for the ten best books of American poetry published since 1945, “Don’t ask me. I believe the arts are not competitive.”

But there‘s nothing wrong with having favorite writers.

Also from this novel
“Oh all the things kids do” : Growing

A giant pencil

News from New York State: “Ticonderoga unveils giant pencil sculpture celebrating graphite heritage.” The graphite in Dixon Ticonderoga pencils once came from the towns of Ticonderoga and Hague. Now it comes from Sri Lanka. The pencils haven’t been manufactured in the United States in many years.

Related reading
All OCA Dixon Ticonderoga posts (Pinboard)

Zip’s Diner

[“Today’s Special.” Zippy, July 30, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

The diner in today’s Zippy is real. Sometime between November 2021 and July 2023 it lost its Zip signage. But the diner still says EAT.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Irony alert

From a Washington Post article about J.D. Vance’s conversion to Catholicism:

“I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old,” Vance said at a 2021 conference of the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic think tank. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.”

Ten movies, two series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Max, TCM, YouTube.]

Invitation (dir. Gottfried Reinhardt, 1952). Dorothy McGuire is Ellen Bowker Pierce, a rich young newlywed with a respiratory ailment that’s soon to end her life. Her greatest happiness is to see her husband Dan (Van Johnson) off to work (he’s “doing beautifully in business”) before planning the evening’s dinner. The couple’s happiness is threatened not only by the future but by what lies in the past: the machinations of Ellen’s father (Louis Calhern) and Dan’s inconclusive relationship with the venomous Maud Redwick (Ruth Roman). Soap opera with a difference, so weird and so good. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

23 Paces to Baker Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1956). A recently blind playwright (Van Johnson) overhears bits of a shady conversation in a London pub, and he, his ex-fiancée (Vera Miles), and his butler (Cecil Parker) join forces to figure it out. The police, of course, aren’t interested. Amateur sleuthing at its finest, with some clever deductions (Baker Street, get it?), a dip into Burke’s Peerage, echoes of The Lady from Shanghai and Rear Window, and a scene that must have influenced Wait Until Dark. Look for the indefatigable Estelle Winwood as a barmaid. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Make Haste to Live (dir. William A. Seiter, 1954). The backstory is daft: when a mobster’s wife (Dorothy McGuire) discovers what he’s all about and disappears to make a new life with a new name, the mobster (Stephen McNally) ends up taking the rap for her murder. And now the mobster is out of prison and making his way into his wife’s new life. The movie’s end is telegraphed early on, too early, and it’s difficult to think that anyone is ever really in danger here. The creepiest element in the movie: the mobster’s interest in his daughter (Mary Murphy). ★★ (YT)

*

Man in the Attic (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1953). Another take on Jack the Ripper, with a real Jack (Palance) as Mr. Slade (ahem), a pathologist who rents a room to live in and an attic in which to conduct unexplained experiments. The house in which he’s renting is owned by the Harleys, a pleasant couple (Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams) whose niece, the beautiful actress Lily Bonner (Constance Smith) comes to live with them. Did I mention that Mr. Slade’s mother was an actress who ended up a prostitute, and that he has removed all the pictures of actresses that graced the walls of his room? Lots of atmosphere, lots of fog (a “London particular,” as Dickens called it), and lots of menace. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Neo-Noir feature

Night Moves (dir. Arthur Penn, 1975). “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” A faded movie star hires a private eye (Gene Hackman) to find her runaway daughter (Melanie Griffith), and he uncovers a criminal scheme that will end up taking several lives. Some exciting moments, but an awful lot of painful dialogue, and I’m aware that I used up two sentences to give an example. ★★

Obsession (dir. Brian De Palma, 1976). I’m a Vertigo obsessive, so I’m surprised that I’d never heard of this movie before finding it at Criterion. It’s a brilliant homage, recasting Hitchcock’s Orpheus-and-Eurydice premise in novel and outrageous terms, with many deft touches to please a Vertigo fan. Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, and John Lithgow are the principals. A bonus: Bernard Herrmann’s last score. ★★★★

Eyewitness (dir. Peter Yates, 1981). When janitor Daryll Deever (William Hurt) discovers a dead body in the office building where he works, he claims more knowledge of the murder than he has in an attempt to establish a relationship with local-television reporter Toni Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver), the object of his long-standing obsession. Meanwhile, Deever suspects and fears that his friend and fellow janitor (James Woods) is the killer. Capable performances (the leads, Morgan Freeman, Christopher Plummer, Irene Worth) and some moments of genuine suspense, but also a considerable number of inanities (fleeting attempts to give minor characters more depth), plot holes, and a bonkers conclusion that might be meant to echo Strangers on a Train but feels laughable. And the movie never seems to allow that there’s anything stalker-y about Deever’s obsession. ★★

Absence of Malice (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1981). Sally Field is Megan Carter, a Miami journalist who writes a story asserting that liquor distributor and bootlegger’s son Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman) is under investigation in the disappearance of a union official. Yes, he’s under investigation; that much is true. Many complications follow; the plot becomes increasingly convoluted; and the movie struggles to make Carter and Gallagher’s off-and-on relationship appear plausible. That this movie has garnered so much praise amazes me. ★★

*

Ten Cents a Dance (dir. Lionel Barrymore, 1931). Taxi dancer Barbara O’Neill (Barbara Stanwyck) has a wealthy admirer in Bradley Carlton (Ricardo Cortez), but she falls for her luckless boarding-house chum Eddie Miller (Monroe Owsley), gets him a job with Carlton, and marries him, only to learn that he’s stolen from Carlton’s company to cover stock-market losses. Stanwyck gives a terrific performance — kind, seductive, desperate, indignant, and fiercely assertive by turns. Cortez and Owsley are, well, adequate. Fun to think about how the story might have developed post-Code. ★★★ (YT)

*

State and Main (dir. David Mamet, 2000). A struggling film production (“I need eight hundred grand”) comes to a small town in Vermont to shoot, but the old mill that was to give the movie its title burned down decades ago, and comic complications and a crisis of conscience ensue. I suspect that many a viewer watching this movie will think of Gilmore Girls (which began in 2000), but the inspiration there and here is Preston Sturges. A spectacular ensemble cast, with William H. Macy as an addled director, Alec Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker as troublesome stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a writer-naif in the world of pictures, and Rebecca Pidgeon as an adorable bookstore owner. My favorite line is about making your own fun, something anyone living in a small town should understand: “If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun — it’s entertainment.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Empire Falls (dir. Fred Schepisi, 2005). An adaptation of Richard Russo’s novel about life in a Maine town whose mill has shut down, with three generations of characters present and past. At the center of things is Miles Roby (Ed Harris), a divorced father with a daughter (Danielle Panabaker), an indentured servant of sorts presiding over the Empire Grill, a George Bailey who’s never broken away from Empire Falls, nor from Martha’s Vineyard, where he takes a modest vacation every year for reasons he cannot (yet) admit. Yes, he’s borne back ceaselessly into the past, a point made abundantly clear. This two-parter is more than slightly disjointed as it begins, with a considerable amount of exposition, but it gets better and better as it goes on, with considerable darkness and ample light. With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, Paul Newman, and many more, including Joanne Woodward as town matriarch Mrs. Whiting, the Mr. Potter to Miles’s George Bailey. ★★★★ (M)

*

Olive Kitteridge (dir. Lisa Cholodenko, 2014). A four-part miniseries from Elizabeth Strout’s stories, set in a town in Maine, focused on twenty-five years in the lives of a junior-high math teacher, Olive Kitteridge (Frances McDormand) and her pharmacist husband Henry (Richard Jenkins). Olive is no-nonsense truth-teller who seems (seems) righteously devoid of self-doubt; her husband Henry is the incarnation of kindness and patience, even if his kindness is at times colored by other impulses. Familial tensions, accusations, regrets, and, sometimes, the possibility of happiness. The best line: “It baffles me, this world; I don’t want to leave it yet.” ★★★★ (M)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Some Plymouth Rocks

Cole Porter, 1934, in the song “Anything Goes”:

Times have changed,
And we’ve often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got a shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today
Any shock they should try to stem,
’Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

Malcolm X, March 29, 1964:

“We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us.”

The resemblance popped into my head when I was putting water on to boil this morning. Coincidence, or no? The Internets now tell me that other people have wondered about it, though without thinking of the phrase “some Plymouth Rocks.”

Related reading
All OCA “some rocks” posts (Pinboard)

Childs

[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]

[285 Broadway, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Childs restaurants were once ubiquitous in New York. The 1940 telephone directories show one in Queens (at the World’s Fair) and a handful in Brooklyn. In Manhattan, they march up Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Broadway: 47, 196, 285, 351, &c. And they were elsewhere. Like Duane Reades, they were everywhere.

From the song “Manhattan”:

We’ll go to Yonkers,
where true love conquers in the wild.
And starve together, dear, in Childs.

Wikipedia has an excellent article about “Manhattan” that makes clear something I never understood when much younger: the song’s lyrics are about a couple without much money, seeking frugal delights. The Childs chain offered inexpensive food.

Wikipedia has a detailed article about Childs, complete with menus. A search for “childs restaurant menu” will return many more. Eat up.

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

“You can beat it just like I did”

From Letters of Note, a letter to an eight-grader from Joe Biden. Human kindness abounding.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff. In other words, it’s an easier Stumper from the puzzle’s editor Stan Newman. Easier, yes, and easier still if you don’t just glance at and misread the opening clue in the low-resolution printout. For 1-A, nine letters, the clue is “Metaphor for miscreants,” not “Metaphor for increments.” I thought BABYSTEPS would make a nice answer there. I think most solvers will find the southeast corner the toughest section of the puzzle. Seeing the answer for 60-A, nine letters, “Metaphor for mental mastery,” helped me a lot there.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “South Carolinian soprano role.” A giveaway, or is that just me?

10-A, five letters, “Dickensian dismissal.” And a word worth reviving, if only for comic purposes.

20-A, five letters, “Where many views are seen.” Nicely misdirective.

22-D, seven letters, “He’s got an impeccable image.” And an interesting life story.

32-A, four letters, “Name on the cover of Favorite Haunts cartoons.” Wonderful.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Only Bond villain on AFI’s Villains list.” Not difficult to figure out, but seeing the full name might be enlightening.

39-A, six letters, “Not readily bent.” Funny.

43-D, six letters, “Of certain scales and services.” A great clue.

3-D, three letters, “Erstwhile RFK” — and there the online print version of the puzzle cuts off the clue. I knew I had the answer, but I had no idea what the clue is asking for. Now I have the clue: “Erstwhile RFK Stadium pro.”

58-A, nine letters, “First-founded US capital.” I did not see this answer coming.

My favorite in this puzzle: 12-D, ten letters, “Loonie’s shape.” The twelve and ten add value here.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

How to improve writing (no. 123)

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 : this sentence has been standing as is since early this morning.

*

8:13 p.m.: I’ll be more expansive. What makes the sentence especially awkward is that you can't fix it by writing “the cracks of the bullets” — that sounds downright strange. I would choose something like this:

Three sounds are heard — crack, crack, crack — as the bullets pass the microphone that Mr. Trump speaks into.

Or simpler:

Three sounds are heard — crack, crack, crack — as the bullets pass Mr. Trump’s microphone.

The Times sentence is still standing as is.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 123 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

“Competitive floating”

From the BBC: “The extinct Olympic sport that was the ’dullest’ of all time,” the distance plunge, derided as “competitive floating.”

Apple Calendar

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.

Apple System Status

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.

Bad Faith

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.

Toumani Diabeté (1965–2024)

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.

Paul Harvey redux

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.

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.

“And yes, the soft, raspy old man’s voice”: it sounds as though Peter Baker is attempting to channel Paul Harvey.

I read these paragraphs aloud in the Orange Crate Art test kitchen. Elaine had the same gah! reaction.

[A belated thought: Baker’s prose is also reminiscent of H. V. Kaltenborn in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: “But those tired Boy Ranger legs are buckling.”

Saving our democracy

“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.

“It’s pathological”

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.

What did I think about Kamala Harris?

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.”

[And, yes, there was a “How to improve writing” post about campaign e-mails, which were certainly not written by Harris.]

Recently updated

Mott Street, in July Now with a passage from The WPA Guide to New York City. And pizza.

John Mayall (1933–2024)

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.”]

TV as radio or children’s game

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!)

“President Venn Diagram”

[xkcd, July 21, 2024.] The webcomic xkcd is on the case.

Goodbye, goo.gl

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 original thought

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.

A cartoon(ed) martyr

[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.]

OPEN [space] DOOR

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.”

“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!“

The screen shows the password as OPEN DOOR, space included.

“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.

Related reading
All OCA Murder, She Wrote posts (Pinboard)

Kamala Harris’s vinyl

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.”]

HCR on July 21

Heather Cox Richardson on yesterday’s big news.

Joe Biden has dropped out

“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.

Mott Street, in July

[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.

The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New York. 1939. (New York: The New Press, 1992).

Notice that the exotic food pizza has to be explained.

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

Asylum and asylums

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.”

And speaking of secure institutions, I’ll cite Chris Sununu, Republican governor of New Hampshire, speaking about Donald Trump: “I doubt that he’s so crazy that he should be in a mental institution, but if he were in one, he ain’t getting out.”

*

Here’s the X post. Thanks, Daughter Number Three.

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

[Sununu’s words appear in an introductory video for George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

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.

“The complete embrace of violence”

Mary Trump:

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.”

Comstock who?

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/
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).

And those two URLs — 1, 2 — have the relevant sections of the Comstock Act.

Growing

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”

Recently updated

A Honeymooners correction, still needed The New York Times won’t be making a correction.

Bob Newhart (1929–2024)

The New York Times has an obituary. From a 2019 interview with the Times (both gift links):

Do you ever think about death?

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.”

[Context: Shelley Berman wrongly accused Newhart of stealing the use of a telephone in stand-up comedy from him.]

In the news

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.

Recently updated

The banana man I misunderstood. Now with what really happened, which is even more ridiculous.

Separated at birth

[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)

“Oh all the things kids do”

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).

The banana man

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, multitasking

[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)

“Churches and synagogues” (Project 2025)

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.

More inclusive: “places of worship.”

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Names in school : “Leftist broadcasters” : Trump and Project 2025 : Librarians and teachers

“Black jobs”

“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.”]

Mystery actor

[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)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Librarians and teachers (Project 2025)

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.

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Names in school : “Leftist broadcasters” : Trump and Project 2025

Twelve movies

[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)

“One set of eyes” (Project 2025)

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.

Why “these passages” and not “this document”? Perhaps because these people know that Trump would never read the whole thing.

P.S.: You don’t want me.

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Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Names in school : “Leftist broadcasters”

Timothy Snyder on political violence

“What to make of the assassination attempt?” Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, has some ideas.

On old Delancey Street

[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)

News

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 Saturday Stumper

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.]

“Leftist broadcasters” (Project 2025)

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.

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.

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.

And what about this claim that Sesame Street (italics, please) is biased to “the Left”? Because it shows urbanites in all their human variety?

Fred Rogers, we need you. That link goes to his 1969 testimony before a Senate subcommittee considering a large cut to Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding. Mister Rogers, by the way, was a registered Republican.

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Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Names in school

Positive anymore on the screen

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.”

“I’m gonna be pretty busy here. I’d like to get some of this worked out.”

“Well, anymore you’re always busy.”

This exchange marks the first time I’ve heard positive anymore outside of real life.

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“Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead”

A lengthy piece from the New York Times editorial board (gift link): “Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead.” Read. Share. Vote.

Names in school (Project 2025)

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.

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.

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.

Practicalities: if such a policy were ever to be implemented, every Ash, Barb, Cal, Dee, &c., &c., had better bring a note from home.

Teachers, incidentally, are identified in this document as a special-interest group in the world of education.

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Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

You and *I, you and me

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.

Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles

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.

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.

Look at the details:

~ The federal government is to maintain a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family. But while marriage can be a religious institution, it is, in the United States, also and always a civil institution. And “biblically based” has an uncertain meaning. I trust that the Project 2025 idea of a biblical model does not allow for polygamy, concubinage, or death by stoning for disobedient children.

~ There’s no acknowledgement of the woeful life consequences that may befall children raised in dysfunctional heterosexual households.

~ If the average length of same-sex marriages is indeed half that of heterosexual marriages, that might have something to do the fact that same-sex marriage became legal in every state only in 2015. Many same-sex marriages can now be, at most, just under nine years old.

~ This document leaves little doubt that the only form of marriage it deems legitimate is marriage between a man and a woman (unrelated!). Marriage, the document says, is between “not just any two adults,” as if the partners in a same-sex relationship are just randomly paired people.

~ The roles assigned mothers and fathers are curiously retrograde: a mother provides “love and nurturing”; a father provides “play and protection.” Cannot any parent, male, female, or otherwise, provide all those possibilities?

The broad outlines of Project 2025 are frightening enough. Reading the details makes it all look much worse. Log Cabin Republicans, you’re kidding yourselves.

The document is available here.

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Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

Windows Notepad advances

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.

On Proust’s birthday

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.

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).

Louis de Robert (1871–1937), novelist and Dreyfussard. Proust listened to his nightly accounts of the trial.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Eleven suggestions from Robert Reich

Robert Reich offers eleven suggestions “to prevent America and the world from falling into fascism.”

Relative frequency (Project 2025)

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.”)

Project 2025

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.

Fran Lebowitz at the Morgan Library

“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”

”Huh?“

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.]

“Swims clings or crawls”

[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.

Bonuses: The neon fish. The kid’s hat. The face at the window. (Click for large and look closely.)

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

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.