Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman. Its distinctive feature: five (count ’em, five) fifteen-letter answers. Yow!

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note, including those five:

2-D, fifteen letters, “Graze, say.” Hilarious, at least to me.

3-D, five letters, “King’s claim to musical fame.” I like that.

6-D, three letters, “Tall character in Son of Godzilla.” Quite a stretch.

11-D, fifteen letters, “‘Finally...’” I imagine a meeting going on and on. And on.

12-D, six letters, “Becomes a waiter, with ‘up.’” Didn’t fool me.

16-A, fifteen letters, “Kicks back, as boxes.” The first two words misdirect nicely.

21-A, four letters, “Capital consonants resembling two vowels.” I got it, but I need an explanation.

22-A, five letters, “Where rock bands hang out.” See 12-D.

26-A, five letters, “Multination org. named for its first five members (its ’23 summit included da Silva, Lavrov, Modi, Xi, and the ANC leader).” I suspect that the prolix clue is an acknowledgement that most solvers will have no idea what the answer is.

31-A, fifteen letters, “PVC product.” I didn’t see this answer coming.

34-D, eight letters, “Candide’s mentor.” I hadn’t thought of him in years.

49-A, fifteen letters, “‘Old Ironsides’ is the Army’s oldest.” Note: Army.

My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, five letters, “Possible response to ‘Don’t know.’” Coming after 26-A, it’s appropriate.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bacon, wind

[The Guardian, August 30, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

This headline alone makes me think that I should be supporting The Guardian.

University library or storage room?

The firing of librarians at Western Illinois University has drawn the attention of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles:

I hate to break it to the bean counters, but a university library without academic librarians is called a storage room.

A related post
Firing the librarians

NYT, sheesh

[The New York Times, August 30, 2024.]

From an article in today’s paper. Elaine saw it via someone else who’d seen it. Thanks, Elaine.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Smells

From a novel in the form of a college application essay: “Characterize, in essay form, your high school experience. You may use additional sheets of paper as needed.”

Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

Young Nifkin is applying to St. Leon’s College, Parnassus on Hudson, New York. Get it? That’s a pseudonym for the college Pinkwater attended.

This passage brings back to me the smell of my elementary school’s basement, a smell still there when I visited the school in 1987 and 1998. As I wrote in a 2018 post, “I always thought of the smell as years of spilled soup.”

I am the only person to have borrowed The Education of Robert Nifkin from my university library — twice in seventeen years. Sigh.

Other Pinkwater posts
“Nice, heavy notebooks” : “Pineapples don’t have sleeves” : The Snark Theater

[The college? Think Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson. President since 1975: Leon Botstein.]

Bushmiller pareidolia

[Nancy, September 12, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

The simplest things bring Sluggo joy: “The city has installed new parking meters — let’s go see them.” And he and Nancy run.

For Bushmiller pareidolia, see also this school.

Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

MSNBC, sheesh

Earlier this afternoon, a reporter spoke:

“He can also pretty regularly say things that drive a wedge between he and their support.”

Maybe someday a news organization will add a director of grammar and usage to the staff.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: trig

As found in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877):

Kate had evidently written to me in an excited state of mind, for her note was not so trig-looking as usual.

I think this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary explains this instance of trig: “Trim or tight in person, shape, or appearance; of a place, Neat, tidy, in good order. Chiefly Scottish and dialect.” Or perhaps this one: “Prim, precise, exact.”

I can hear a hundred compliments: “Your handwriting ... it’s so trig.”

Unwanted political spam texts

From Daring Fireball: What to do with unwanted political spam texts.

Not a joke — genuine advice to make them stop.

Advertisements for myself

This item gives new meaning to Norman Mailer’s phrase “advertisements for myself.” From the August 27 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

Sam Stein of The Bulwark reported yesterday that the Trump campaign is about to start running ads in the area around Mar-a-Lago. Trump insiders say the campaign has paid almost $50,000 to run ads to make Trump and local donors feel good. On August 14, Kevin Cate, former spokesperson for President Barack Obama, predicted that Trump would spend his first television dollars “in Florida (for his ego and against his team’s advice). And that’s how you’ll know we’re in landslide territory.”

They’d better start running these ads soon. A glance at Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts and reposts suggests that he’s becoming ever more unhinged, if he’s even still hinged at all: God, Q, and military tribunals.

Here’s a link to the Bulwark story.

Got Better Cotton?

Actual label text:

By choosing our cotton products, you’re supporting Walmart’s investment in Better Cotton’s mission.

This product is sourced via a system of mass balance and therefore may not contain Better Cotton.

I’m not surprised to discover a page about Better Cotton and greenwashing. And a page about greenwashing and “mass balance” more generally.

The Blogger comment form

Google has tinkered, unannounced, with the settings for the Blogger comment form. Thanks, Google. Your choices as a Blogger blogger:

~ With “Full page,” it’s impossible to see a post while commenting without switching between tabs.

~ With “Embedded,” comments look (to my eye) godawful. The line spacing is too tight (and, as far as I can tell, cannot be altered), text is awkwardly justified, and clicking on a Comments link takes the reader to the bottom of the comment form. Dumb. “Embedded” does have the advantage of allowing a comment to nest as a reply to a previous comment. But that detail doesn’t offset (for me) the ugliness.

~ “Popup window” provides decent readability and keeps the post in view. That’s what I’ve chosen for Orange Crate Art. [And as I discovered after writing this post, “Popup window,” too, allows a comment to nest as a reply to a previous comment.]

In all three formats, the option to preview a comment before posting is gone. Proofread carfully!

Why not comment today and take “Popup window” for a spin? Watch that window pop.

[“Proofread carfully”: in my teaching days, something I liked to include on pages going out with essay assignments.]

Domestic comedy

“His /ant/ or /ahnt/ was there — I’m not sure which.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

A transcription tip

If you’re watching TV and want to get down what someone is saying, you can, of course, rewind, pull out a phone, record, and hit play, pause, play, pause as you transcribe. But with a small stretch of text, there’s an easier way. Just write down the first letter of each word:

o b o e w s c o b w i t g n o e i a y n f p o t u s

Which you can then expand into:

“On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on earth, I accept your nomination for President of the United States.”

And then you can still rewind to check that you have it right.

Actual NYT opinion column

[The New York Times, August 26, 2024.]

It’s by Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.

And what does that photograph signify about the DNC? That it was entertainment? Or garbage? If I hadn’t unsubscribed from the Times last Wednesday, I think I’d be unsubscribing today.

Recently updated

A lost Clipper Now with 1950s film footage of the strangely shallow building on Doyers Street.

Curb your introductions

Larry David is widely credited as having introduced Cheryl Hines and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[Scene: An upscale restaurant. Wanda Sykes appears in the distance, walks toward Larry David. ]

Sykes: Larry David, you should be ashamed of yourself.

David: What? What did I do?

Sykes: Don’t act like you don’t know what you did. Why’d you go and introduce that little girl to that anti-vax worm-eaten bear-pranking whale-beheading no-account plug-ugly drug-addict conspiracy-ass Trump-flunkie?

David: Because it seemed like a good idea at the time?

Sykes: A good idea? That’s your idea of a good idea, Larry? Shame on you, Larry David.

[She begins to walk away. ]

David: [With stentorian patriotic fervor. ] But he’s a Kennedy! He’s a Kennedy!

[Cue “Amusement.” ]

Related reading
All OCA Larry David posts (Pinboard)

Clickbait

Why does macOS dictation capitalize clickbait?

Allow me to dictate and demonstrate:

I am baffled by the way macOS dictation capitalizes Clickbait.

More fun Dictation failures
“The nut free version” : “I mode the front lawn” : “Wrath scholar” : Spelling Glenmorangie : “F--k music” : “A concluding truck for belated pubs” : Edifice and Courson Blatz : Eight ways to spell Derrida : Nine ways to spell boogie-woogie : Stop and chat = Stop & Shop

[I italicized Clickbait by hand.]

A lost Clipper

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

This morning we find ourselves in Chinatown, right off the Bowery. Doyers Street has a substantial history. Here’s some more. And still more. I chose this photograph because of the strangely shallow building to the left, looking almost like a facade from a movie set. And then I noticed the sign to the right, at no. 3.

[“Real Chinese Dishes.” Click for a larger view.]

The China Clipper Restaurant has some history of its own. It was one of three restaurants owned by Wah Sun Choy, or Watson Choy, a restaurateur fascinated by aviation — more specifically, by the seaplanes or “flying boats” built in 1935 and 1936 for Pan American Airways: the China Clipper, Philippine Clipper, and Hawaii Clipper, first used for transpacific airmail service from San Francisco to Manila. Choy’s other restaurants were in Jersey City: a second China Clipper (menu included!) and the Plaza Tea Garden. It seems that the design of the Jersey City Clipper was meant to give patrons the feeling that they were aboard an airplane.

In 1938, Choy embarked on a flight from Alameda, California, headed for Honolulu, the Midway Islands, Wake Island, Guam, and Manila. Choy was — allegedly — carrying $3M in U.S. gold certificates, raised by his own efforts, to be delivered to Chiang Kai-Shek to aid China in the Second Sino-Japanese War. His plane, the Hawaii Clipper, disappeared on July 29, 1938, en route from Guam to the Philippines. No trace of the plane, its six passengers, or nine crew members was recovered. But the considerable speculation about what happened lies beyond the borders of a tax photograph.

“Distinguished Men on Board Clipper.” The New York Times, July 30, 1938.

*

A reader found a bit of film from the 1950s in which the strangely shallow building is visible, with a 7 Up advertisement on its side. Thanks, reader.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : More about the flying boats : More memorabilia from Wah Sun Choy’s restaurants

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stella Zawistowski, is another Stumper that I thought would have me beat. I started late Friday afternoon and had the puzzle less than half done when we went to our favorite (Thai) restaurant for dinner. We were lucky that we arrived shortly before a table of fourteen did. When I went back to the puzzle after dinner, the rest of the it fell into place. Thank you, pad woon sen and panang curry, both “spicy number three.” The scale goes from zero to five.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, six letters, “Phone battery saver.” Never heard of it.

6-D, eleven letters, “Unoriginal writing.” That’s pretty strained. I know, it’s a Stumper. But it’s pretty strained.

17-A, ten letters, “Circular skill.” Just one example of this puzzle’s obliqueness.

24-D, eleven letters, “Early target for Edison electrification.” Makes sense.

25-A, thirteen letters, “They act as a pair.” So not obvious, at least to me, and so clever.

25-D, four letters, “Transparent flute feature.” Nicely defamiliarizing.

30-A, five letters, “Ring figures.” ZEROS? Is that the plural of zero?

32-D, four letters, “European cardinal that sounds sapped.” I thought it had to be some four-letter bird.

38-D, four letters, “Hog’s grunt.” Ha!

39-A, five letters, “Word from the Hebrew for ‘one who understands.’” Surprised that this is what the word means. I thought it referred to would-bes.

40-A, thirteen letters, “Acquisitional power.” Lordy.

45-A, four letters, “Story starter.” My first guess was ONCE.

50-D, four letters, “Minor diamond.” I was thinking of baseball, or trying to.

My favorite in this puzzle: 11-D, ten letters, “Capital an hour’s drive from Vienna.” Because I knew the answer (thanks to music) and because the answer opened up a whole bunch of puzzle.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Pocket notebook sighting

Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin (John Turturro) uses a tiny datebook as a notebook to record chess games (or, at least, lines of play). Notice the partial cigarette saved between pages. From The Luzhin Defense (dir. Marleen Gorris, 2000).

[ Click any image for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA pocket notbook sightings (Pinboard)

Zippy collars

[“Collar That Perp!” Zippy, August 23, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy is just one more bit of evidence attesting to Bill Griffith’s draftsmanship. See also fedoras and sleeves.

It’s wonderful to think of Zippy as the work of a reality-based artist.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

“I accept”

“On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on earth, I accept your nomination for President of the United States”: Kamala Harris, a few minutes ago at the DNC.

And: “The future is always worth fighting for.”

And: “We are not going back.”

And: Harris is the only presidential candidate whose acceptance speech has namechecked John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin.

[The Emhoff children, Cole and Ella, are named for Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald.]

Country first

“Tonight, as a Republican speaking before you, I’m putting our country first”: Adam Kinzinger, a few minutes ago at the DNC.

[I’ve always liked this guy. He reminds me of some of my best students.]

Items in a series

“Why wouldn’t we choose the leader who‘s tough, tested, and a total badass?” Gretchen Whitmer, a few minutes ago at the DNC.

Reappropriation

The reappropriation of “Born in the U.S.A.” at tonight’s DNC — a song first appropriated by Ronald Reagan so many years ago — makes my head hurt.

Here are the lyrics.

Doones

We were in the cookie aisle, where the Nabisco man was bent down stocking the shelves. “Oh, you’re right where we’re need to be,” one of us said — something like that. And the Nabisco man reached up and handed us two boxes of Lorna Doones.

“That’s exactly what we need,” said I.

“Really?” he asked. “Two?”

“Yes,” said I. And I added that while Lorna Doones seem to get little attention, they are excellent cookies. He agreed, and he added that Lorna Doones are the cookies he has on the shelf at home.

It’s four little Lorna Doones a day for me. “I’ll fly to the moon for a Lorna Doone.”

An EXchange name sighting

[From Murder Most Foul (dir. George Pollock, 1964).]

Milchester is a place name in the Miss Marple world. MIlchester is therefore a real exchange name in a fictional world.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)

Never underestimate

“So there I was, a forty-something high-school teacher, with little kids, zero political experience, and no money, running in a deep red district. But you know what? Never underestimate a public-school teacher. Never”: Tim Walz, just now.

Brooklyn in the house

“Bro, we broke up with you for a reason”: Hakeem Jeffries, just now, speaking to Donald Trump.

And now I know what spin the block means.

NYT fact-check

[The New York Times, August 20, 2024.]

John Gruber nails it (Peter Baker)

The language of the barroom, pool hall, and street corner makes only infrequent appearances in these pages, almost always in something I’ve quoted. As will be the case here, as John Gruber comments on a passage in a New York Times article by Peter Baker.

Here’s Baker:

It is hard to think of a more bittersweet moment for a president who spent more than a half-century on the stage only now to be involuntarily shown the exit. The warm bath of affection in Chicago, real as it may have been, could go just so far to salve the wounds of the past few weeks.

Here’s Gruber:

Fuck Peter Baker. What utter bullshit the word “involuntar[il]y” plays in that lede. Of course it was voluntary. Joe Biden is the President of the United States and is comfortable with the power that title affords. He was, even after his disastrous debate performance, only a few points behind in the polls. It was his call and his call alone to step aside — for the sake of his party, and more importantly, for the sake of the country he so obviously loves. And it’s now obvious he made the right call.

Very few presidents have ever been faced with such a clear decision between the good of the nation and the drive of their personal ambition. Biden’s ambition is legendary. Biden’s response to this moment was heroic.

The Times can give Peter Baker as much ink as they want as a columnist. But they should stop calling him a “reporter”. He’s nothing of the sort, and hasn’t been for a long time.

I began reading that Baker story and gave up — I never made it to the paragraph quoted above. But I can add to what Gruber has to say. Look at Baker’s first paragraphs (which Gruber quotes but doesn’t comment on):

When the crowd members in the United Center first chanted, “Thank you, Joe! Thank you, Joe!” on Monday night, President Biden looked down, fought back tears and soaked in the admiration.

But he knew. He might not have wanted to admit it. But he knew. They were thanking him, yes, for what he accomplished during a lifetime in public service. But they were also thanking him, let’s be honest, for not running again.

How does Baker know that’s what the crowd meant? And how does he know what Biden was thinking? The ease with which Baker penetrates mental states here contrasts with his careful hesitation about hearing contempt in Donald Trump’s remarks about military service:

“Yeah, I mean, look, you know, he has continually and repeatedly said things that seem to denigrate military service” [my emphasis].

I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad about reading what John Gruber wrote. At any rate, it finally moved me to unsubscribe from The New York Times. I can read for free via my university, and in desperate circumstances, I can read via archive.today. I assume that my three-digit Wordle streak will vanish. But enough is enough.

Related posts
Paul Harvey redux : Seeming and appearing

[I can’t believe I misspelled John Gruber’s first name. Angry typing!]

A telegram, an actual telegram

[Click for a much larger view.]

Thinking about telegrams made me remember that I have one. It appears in Ted Berrigan’s “C” magazine, vol. 1, no. 10 (1965), pasted inside a telegram-sized outline with the words “When the mercenaries ran away ...” typed along one side. I wonder what made it onto other copies of this mimeographed page.

The telegram, from Galeria Bonino, a Manhattan gallery, was sent to the artist and writer Joe Brainard. From Brazilian Bulletin, January 1, 1964:

Those who are acquainted with the Galeria Bonino in Rio de Janeiro will be pleased to know that Alfredo Bonino and Emilio del Junco have opened a new art gallery in New York City, at 7 West 57th Street. Other Bonino galleries are in Buenos Aires, Rome and Toronto.

Did Joe Brainard ever have a show at Galeria Bonino? There’s nothing listed in the exhibition history in Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (2001).

Pop quiz: Why would a Manhattan gallery be sending a telegram to a Manhattan resident?

Related reading
All OCA Joe Brainard posts : telegram posts (Pinboard)

“Letters! Actual Letters!”

The latest episode of This American Life is all about real mail: “Letters! Actual Letters!” With enough human interest to fill a relay box.

Related reading
All OCA letters posts (Pinboard)

Feeling seen

Jonathan Capehart, as PBS closed its coverage of the Democratic National Convention tonight. For context: he was holding a handkerchief that was a present from PBS NewsHour co-anchor Amna Nawaz:

“Yesterday I said, in politics people want to be seen. They want to be seen in the way their politicans talk to them and talk about them. And when I pulled out my Amna hankie, it was when Michelle Obama said that Kamala Harris — we never have the grace of failing forward; we never have the benefit of generational wealth; if things don’t go our way, we don’t get to complain. That’s how Michelle Obama lived her life — lives her life; that’s how Barack Obama lives [his] life. That’s how I live my life. And to hear that, coming from the former First Lady, is just too — and I’m sorry, but I feel seen. And I think people in this hall feel seen. And I’m certain that millions of Americans feel seen. I’ll leave it there.”

*

Wednesday morning: You can watch and listen here.

Oof!

Michelle Obama, just now: “Who’s gonna tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”

Psst, David Brooks

I wasn’t going to make this post. But after reading David Brooks’s baffling appraisal of the speech Joe Biden gave last night, here I am.

David Brooks didn’t like the speech. In The New York Times he writes, “I was hoping for something in the spirit of the Harris campaign — ebullient and joyful.”

I noticed ebullient twice in Brooks’s comments during PBS’s coverage of the DNC last night, each time pronounced /EB-yə-lənt/. As Garner’s Modern English Usage notes, that’s a common mispronunciation.

Has David Brooks latched onto this word for use in talking and writing about Kamala Harris? If so, I hope he gets it right. (Perhaps Jonathan Capehart can clue him in.) I will be listening and watching.

[I left a comment about ebullient on the Times piece. Maybe Brooks will see it.]

Firing the librarians

From Inside Higher Ed:

Western Illinois University is laying off all nine of its library faculty — eight of them tenured or on the tenure track — as part of wider efforts to offset a $22 million budget deficit driven by rising operational costs and a 21 percent enrollment drop since fall 2019.

While the university said in an Aug. 9 news release that it’s “made every effort to minimize the impact on students,” the planned elimination of the library faculty by May 2025 has academic librarians both inside and outside the institution questioning how WIU’s library will be able to effectively serve faculty and students in the future.

“It’s quite alarming,” said Leo Lo, president of the national Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), adding that in addition to assisting faculty in their teaching and research, librarians are especially helpful to first-generation college students finding their footing in higher education. “Without libraries to help them, it may hurt student retention” and recruitment, he said.

But Alisha Looney, a spokesperson for WIU, wrote in an email Friday that the university “will continue to have adequate coverage in the library” after the layoffs.

Western is also closing a library at a branch campus, to be replaced by a service desk at which patrons can put in requests for materials, Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. It’s all part of “a new vision” for that campus.

Loony, indeed.

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)

Calendaring and efforting

Calendaring and efforting ? I learned about them just a couple of days ago, but they’ve been around for a while. Columbia Journalism Review has them covered: “When nouns are turned into verbs.”

What do I think about efforting ? Eff that!

Jackie’s in the house

“Higher and Higher,” playing at the DNC.

[Orange Crate Art is a Jackie Wilson-friendly zone.]

Extra strength

From Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York: New York Review Books, 2024), the story of a present, from Marcel Duchamp to Joseph Cornell:

It was a readymade, “done on the spot.” Cornell was almost beside himself with pleasure at how cleanly and swiftly Duchamp had made his present. He had picked up a red-and-yellow glue carton that said “strength” on one side and, admiring the American phrase, had written “gimme” above it and then signed the whole “Marcel Duchamp,” dated Christmas 1942.

On Saturday morning Elaine and I went for a walk after reading about Cornell and Duchamp. And where a road ended and a path through a meadow began, I saw this tiny Tarot card, 1 3/8″ × 13/16″.

You can see Duchamp’s gift via Google Books.

Related reading
All OCA synchronicity posts (Pinboard)

Hold the hold music

From Letters of Note, a plea to CVS: “Please change your hold music.”

A New Utrecht address

[New Utrecht Hand & Electric Shoe Repairing, 5515 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just another establishment in the old neighborhood, just up the avenue from Eddie’s Fish Market. The 5515 address makes several appearances in the newspapers collected at Brooklyn Newsstand. The earliest is grim:

["Wife Dies, Husband, Girl Hurt at Fire.” The Brooklyn Daily Times, June 26, 1916.]

“Unknown cause,” “empty store”: as the article says, the fire was deemed suspicious. Mary Fenis dropped her three children from the third floor to her husband George, who had jumped to the sidewalk. She then jumped, falling on her head and grievously injuring her husband. George Fenis or Feneis wrote to a civic group later in the year to plead for fire escapes on what he called “two-family firetraps”:

[“Women Ask for Fire Protection: Man's Story Leads to Request for New Laws.” The Brooklyn Daily Times, October 5, 1916.]

By 1925, the first floor was a shoe-repair business:

[The Brooklyn Daily Times, November 27, 1925.]

And in 1945 the building was for sale:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 28, 1945.]

By 1951, the first floor had become a liquor store:

[“Lone Thug Robs 2 Liquor Stores of $600 Total.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 10, 1951.]

In 1965, there’s another owner:

[Coney Island Times, February 12, 1965.]

After 1965 the newspapers go dark. Today 5515 is a real estate agency, Gold Realty: “List with Gold and have it sold.”

I chose this tax photograph for the “Ladies & Gents” sign. I wonder if anyone who isn’t reading this post knows of the tragedy that visited this address just over a century ago.

[“Ladies & Gents.”]

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

An elliptical FLOTUS?

The headline for a New York Times review of a biography of Pat Nixon: “A New Biography Attempts to Complicate an Elliptical First Lady.”

When it’s not characterizing a shape, elliptical characterizes a manner of expression. Merriam-Webster:

of, relating to, or marked by ellipsis or an ellipsis

of, relating to, or marked by extreme economy of speech or writing

of or relating to deliberate obscurity (as of literary or conversational style)

And J.I. Rodale’s Synonym Finder:

(all of speech and writing ) economic, terse, laconic, concise, succinct, concentrated, compact, neat

(all of speech and writing ) ambiguous, abstruse, cryptic, obscure, recondite, mysterious

It’s speech or writing that might be elliptical, not a person. I think the word the Times needed here is enigmatic.

[The Synonym Finder (1978) is the work of the strange fellow who founded Prevention magazine and died during a taping of The Dick Cavett Show. I don’t know what accounted for his interest in synonyms. I snagged a copy of The Synonym Finder in a used-book store some years ago. I sometimes rely on it for amusing strings of adjectives to describe Newsday Saturday Stumpers.]

Seeming and appearing

Peter Baker of The New York Times on MSNBC just now, when asked about Donald Trump’s assertion that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a civilian honor, is “much better” than the the military Medal of Honor, whose recipients are often wounded or dead:

“Yeah, I mean, look, you know, he has continually and repeatedly said things that seem to denigrate military service.”

Seem?

Hearing Baker’s response made me notice the evasion in his paper’s characterization of Trump’s remarks:

Mr. Trump’s remarks follow a yearslong series of comments in which he has appeared to mock, attack or express disdain for service members who are wounded, captured or killed, even as he portrays himself as the ultimate champion of the armed forces.

Has appeared to?

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Sally R. Stein and Anna Stiga (It’s Really Stan, Stan Again) are the pseudonyms that signal an easier Newsday Saturday Stumper by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. Today’s Stumper might be a bit easier than usual, but not much easier. I found obvious starting points in the northeast: 9-A, six letters, “Sumerian descendants” and 12-D, eight letters, “Un Louis très célébre.” The northeast came together, and so did everything else. The toughest part of the puzzle: the northwest. Brr.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Help for drafts.” See what I mean about the northwest? I didn’t know whether to think about beer taps, horses, or manuscripts.

7-D, three letters, “End of many record labels.” Great clue for a minor answer.

8-D, fifteen letters, “Recreates with a roundball.” I like the clash of diction between clue and answer.

15-A, eight letters, “Sticky situation risk.” Pretty Stumper-y.

27-A, three letters, “What dancing rushers celebrate.” Not especially difficult to figure out, but wonderfully defamiliarizing.

29-A, five letters, “Pianist echoing a peninsula.” Has the name ever been clued thusly?

31-A, six letters, “Magic word/ancient hero acronym.” I knew the word but had to look up the acronym after the fact.

32-A, fifteen letters, “Phillumenists’ collection.” Whose collection? What? Huh?

32-D, eight letters, “Whom J-Lo auditioned for, for MTV (1990).” Now here’s a throwback.

41-D, six letters, “Cold comfort.” Terrific clue.

44-D, five letters, “Quit lying.” Two types of ambiguity.

45-D, five letters, “Mathematician echoing a sort of ship.” I knew it had to be _____, but I didn’t know that’s how it’s pronounced.

55-A, eight letters, “What’s on Scrooge McDuck’s beak.” A word I always associate with a certain poem.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, six letters, “They often follow speeches.” I had it on crosses and was baffled, then delighted, when I looked at the answer.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Freedom and Honor

I was waiting to see if this story would ever show up in The New York Times. It did, finally, this afternoon:

Former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, as being “much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive the nation’s highest military honor are often severely wounded or dead.

Mr. Trump’s remarks follow a yearslong series of comments in which he has appeared to mock, attack or express disdain for service members who are wounded, captured or killed, even as he portrays himself as the ultimate champion of the armed forces.

At a campaign event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., billed as a discussion about fighting antisemitism, Mr. Trump recounted how he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Ms. Adelson, who attended the event, is among his top donors.

“It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.” Mr. Trump said, using a common misnomer for the military award. “She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.”

Standing in front of six American flags, Mr. Trump added that the honors were “rated equal.”

How to send a telegram

A Chicago-to-Los Angeles train pulls up to a station for a brief stop. Sandwiches, coffee, and telegrams await. From The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Click any image for a larger view.

[Det. Sgt. Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) walks into the Western Union office. That guy reading a newspaper: one Joseph Kemp (David Clarke).]

[It’s always busy.]

[Composing the message. Don’t even think of stealing that pencil.]

[All done.]

[The only problem is that bad guys like Kemp also know how to send telegrams.]

Related reading
All OCA telegram posts (Pinboard)

Old Bay

“I admit there’s nothing I’d like more than for Old Bay to take over the world”: in The New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about what she calls “the greatest condiment in America.” There’s also a recipe for Mr. Keith’s Crab Soup.

[In the recipe, “mixed vegetables” is a tad vague. A cursory search suggests celery, corn, carrots, green beans, lima beans, onions, and potatoes as among the possibilities.]

How to improve writing (no. 125)

Another sentence in need of repair, this one from The Washington Post, about Donald Trump’s repeated references to Hannibal Lecter:

He typically mentions the fictional serial killer in the context of immigration, claiming without evidence that migrants are coming in from insane asylums and mental institutions and often using dehumanizing language.

I tried out this sentence in the Orange Crate Art test kitchens, where it met with puzzlement. The false parallelism of coming and using is the problem. It’s so easy to fix:

He typically mentions the fictional serial killer in the context of immigration, dehumanizing migrants and claiming without evidence that they are coming in from insane asylums and mental institutions.

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

[This post is no. 125 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

How to improve writing (no. 124)

My son Ben pointed me to a awkward-sounding sentence in The New York Times. It’s about Nancy Pelosi’s friendship with Joe Biden:

What she did not say is that you can’t make friends of 50 years when you are in your ninth decade, the kind who knew you way back when.

Is this sentence as oddly phrased as Ben thinks it is? I think so. The two nots at the start are confusing, at least for a moment. And the kind falls strangely after ninth decade.

What I think this sentence wants to say is something like this:

What she left unsaid is that you can’t begin fifty-year-long friendships when you’re in your eighties.

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

[This post is no. 124 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Writing on a train

I knew I’d seen it somewhere in a movie. Here’s a train with a writing desk for passenger use. The desk accessory and the drawer below no doubt hold stationery.

[From The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Click for a larger desk.]

Possessive forms of Harris and Walz

Harris’ and Walz’s? Or Harris’s and Walz’s? “Grammar geeks are in overdrive,” says a New York Times article, which presents the choice as “apostrophe hell.” Not really. The best solution is to add ’s to make each name possessive.

Bryan Garner looks at Harris and Walz in today’s LawProse Lesson, “Possessive Anomalies.” The AP Stylebook, he points out, would have the possessive forms as Harris’ and Walz’s. But:

The better policy, followed by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is to reject the AP rule on this point and to follow instead the rule specified by The Chicago Manual of Style (followed by most book publishers). Just add ’s to any singular noun to make the possessive.

I’ll add that Chicago recommends ’s even for names from antiquity, which are often treated as exceptions: Euripides’s, Jesus’s.

Garner adds another reason to follow the Chicago rule. Both Harris’ and Harris’s are pronounced with an additional s, and with the Chicago rule, “what you see is what you get.” Though that wouldn’t be the case with Euripides’s.

The Chicago Manual of Style is a reference conspiciously missing from the Times survey of apostrophizing. As is Garner’s Modern English Usage.

[This latest LawProse Lesson is not yet online. I trust that it will soon be available here. You can subscribe to the (free) e-mails here. For the unusual exceptions to ’s, see Chicago 7.20–22. The plural possessives of Harrises and Walzes: Harrises’ and Walzes’. ]

WCBS Newsradio 880 to disappear

After fifty-seven years, WCBS Newsradio 880 is going off the air. Taking its place: ESPN New York.

One of the strange pleasures of driving late at night in downstate Illinois is pulling in WCBS 880 or WINS 1010. I always like hearing about traffic and weather from a distant land. You can still listen to WCBS 880 online, while it lasts.

WCBS newstime: 10:34. (It’s Eastern.)

Siamese connections

[“Pipe Down!” Zippy, August 13, 2024.]

Today’s Zippy honors a bit of urban design: the Siamese connection. Here’s a sampling, along with an explanation.

Attention, Zippy: “th’ 1860s” seems to be more accurate.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Earworms

Last Thursday’s word from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day was earworm :

1. A catchy song or tune that keeps involuntarily repeating in one’s mind.

2. An agricultural pest commonly known as corn earworm, of the species Helicoverpa zea or Helicoverpa armigera.

I did not want to call attention to this word last week, as I had an pernicious earworm raging: the Jardiance jingle. I dared not do anything to provoke it. But when my son asked me where “Hi-de-ho” came from, Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” stepped up and kicked that other worm out before it got to my brain. Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi.

Click on either of the Jardiance links at your own risk. They’re really swell.

Eleven movies, one mini-series

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

All My Sons (dir. Irving Reis, 1948). From the Arthur Miller play. Wartime manufacturer Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson) has let his business partner take the rap and go to prison for okaying defective plane parts, parts that led to the deaths of twenty-one pilots. That revelation, withheld until late in the story, is meant to be a surprise, but it isn’t, because without it, the story would be pointless. Robinson and Burt Lancaster (as Joe’s son!) do well, but the story is contrived, and the production is painfully stagy. ★★ (TCM)

*

A Hatful of Rain (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1957). From the Michael Gazzo play. A Korean war vet (Don Murray) struggles to hide his morphine addiction from his wife (Eva Marie Saint) and father (Lloyd Nolan) as he’s repeatedly saved from his dealer’s vengeance by his sad-sack brother (Anthony Franciosa). Saint, as a neglected partner who’s almost ready to quit, is the most persuasive of the principals; Murray is plausible as an addict almost ready to commit robbery to fund a fix; Franciosa and Nolan are loud in a way that suits a stage, not a screen. As the dealer and his henchman, Henry Silva and William Hickey are chilling. ★★★ (TCM)

*

A Touch of Love, aka Thank You All Very Much (dir. Waris Hussein, 1969). Rosamond Stacey (Sandy Dennis), a London doctoral student, is a magnet for men but avoids relationships — she’s sworn off men, she tells a friend. And then she finds that she’s pregnant. A deeply bittersweet story, with an actor whose expressive face was made for it: Dennis’s smile never seems far from tears. WIth Ian McKellen in his first film appearance. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Emile (dir. Carl Bessai, 2003). Ian McKellen stars as a celebrated academic returning to his native Canada to receive an honorary degree. There he attempts to establish some relationship with his sole surviving family members, a niece, Nadia (Deborah Kara Unger), and great-niece, Maria (Theo Crane). An understated, highly Proustian story, as Emile confronts things done and not done in his earlier life, with many matters left to the viewer to notice and figure out. Try to count the clocks. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor star in a suspenseful story with a simple premise: a police detective is hiding and protecting a mob boss’s widow on a train from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she will name names at a trial. Two thugs looking to prevent her from testifying are also on the train. A long game of cat and mouse ensues. One of the great train movies, and I cannot understand why it hasn’t already shown up in these pages. ★★★★ (F)

*

Trio (dir. Ken Annakin and Harold French, 1950). I’m not sure about W. Somerset Maugham’s ability as a novelist (I’ve never read him), but he was certainly a fine storymaker. “The Verger” is an O. Henry-like tale of an illiterate man’s (James Hayter) surprising good fortune. In “Mr. Know-All,” a jewelry dealer (Nigel Patrick) swallows his pride and tells a lie to preserve a relationship. “Sanatorium,” the longest of these stories, dwells on the lives of tuberculosis patients, with special attention to two (Michael Rennie and Jean Simmons) who fall in love. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Teen Torture, Inc. (dir. Tara Malone, 2024). A thoughtful three-part documentary about the “troubled teens” industry — the multi-billion-dollar array of residential facilities where young people (as young as ten), having been separated from the families and communities, are subject to various forms of psychological, physical, and, sometimes, sexual abuse. These facilities, often unregulated due to religious exemptions, are schools in name only: not one of the ex-inmates interviewed mentions a book or a classroom. Perhaps the most compelling story: a young woman who hid extra underwear under the insoles of her shoes when she attempted an escape. Two well-known faces in this documentary: the television personality Phil McGraw, who profited mightily from his relationship with one of these facilities, and Mitt Romney, co-founder of Bain Capital, a prominent firm in the industry. ★★★★ (M)

*

Murder Most Foul (dir. George Pollock, 1964). Loosely based on an Agatha Christie novel, it replaces Hercule Poirot with Miss Jane Marple (Margaret Rutherford), here the lone holdout on a jury. Ever skeptical, she begins her own investigation of the murder case, joining an amateur theater company to do so. Two more murders follow. DNA analysis of this movie suggests that it’s a not-distant ancestor of Murder, She Wrote: amateur female investigator, male sidekick (played by Rutherford’s husband Stringer Davis), clues galore, suspects galore, investigator in danger, touches of whimsy here and there. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Luzhin Defense (dir. Marleen Gorris, 2000). From the Nabokov novel. John Turturro is Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, a shabby chess master covered in cigarette ashes and sweat. Arriving in an Italian city to play a championship match, he meets and immediately falls for Natalia Katkov (Emily Watson), a wealthy woman who also somehow falls for him. Their relationship and the evil doings of Luzhin’s former tutor Valentinov (Stuart Wilson) form the stuff of the movie, which spreads itself thin trying to be a chess story (with multiple chess errors), a love story, a study of an obsessive mind, and a tour of opulent early-twentieth-century houses. ★★ (TCM)

*

Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird (dir. Steven-Charles Jaffe, 2013). The cartoonist Gahan Wilson was indeed born dead and brought to life by a persevering doctor, but there’s nothing particularly weird here: this documentary shows Wilson to be a hardworking artist, though I wish there were more about the artist, either talking about his art or doing the work. Instead we get brief commentaries from an array of artists and celebrity fans. My favorite scene: cartoonists having lunch on the day they come to Manhattan to pitch cartoons to Bob Mankoff, then comics editor at The New Yorker. My least favorite scene: cartoonists showing their work to Bob Mankoff, which is like watching students fail an oral exam. ★★ (CC)

*

Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy‌ (dir. Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, 2024). A documentary urgently worth watching. I’ve written about it in a previous post. All I’ll add here is that every reference to a Democratic candidate as “demonic” or “evil” is wholly literal for some Trump voters. And every reference to a coming civil war in wholly literal too. ★★★★ (T)

*

The Commandant’s Shadow (dir. Daniela Volker, 2024). A reckoning with the past: in this documentary we meet Hans-Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, whose family life is dramatized in The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023). We also meet Hans’s sister Brigitte (still given largely to rationalizations and denials about her father’s actions) and Hans’s son Kai, a minister perhaps more tormented by the past than his father. The documentary reaches a high point when Hans (who early on says “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz”) and Kai visit Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of Auschwitz, and her daughter Maya. Anita: “It’s very important to talk about these things.” ★★★★ (M)

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

Tim Walz’s military service

Two pieces about Tim Walz’s military service:

Adam Kinzinger, “The Swiftboating of Walz is Sick, Inacurate, and Will Fail.”

Stephen Robinson, “Desperate times: Trumpers launch Swiftboating 2.0.”

Trump, breaking?

From Forbes :

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed a crowd that gathered to see Vice President Kamala Harris arrive at a Michigan airport for a campaign rally was “fake,” insisting her campaign used artificial intelligence to mask the fact that “there was nobody there” — a claim refuted by images, videos and accounts of the event.

“There was nobody there”? It sounds to me as if someone might be having a psychotic break.

Charles Crumb (Robert’s brother, in the documentary Crumb ):

“When narcissism is wounded, it wants to strike back at the person who wounded it.”

If you measure out your life in crowds, someone else’s bigger crowds might be intolerable.

See also George Conway’s 2019 Atlantic article “Unfit for Office” and his Anti-Psychopath PAC.

Schrafft’s, plural

Two weeks ago I posted a tax photograph of a Childs restaurant. I realized after the fact that next to that Childs stood a Schrafft’s. You can see both restaurants, albeit at distance, in this tax photograph:

[Schrafft’s, 291-293 Broadway, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Like Childs, Schrafft’s restaurants were once ubiquitous in Manhattan: the 1940 telephone directory lists twenty-nine of them. When my mom and dad, not yet parents, worked in Manhattan, they would sometimes meet for lunch at a Schrafft’s. Noticing this Broadway outlet made me want to look for the Schrafft’s where my mom and dad may have eaten lunch.

So I called the Paul Drake Detective Agency and told what I know: my mom would walk from American Cyanamid (30 Rockefeller Plaza); my dad would walk from Johns Manville (22 E. 40th Street). Drake’s conclusion is that they must have met at the Schrafft’s at 556 Fifth Avenue: an eight-minute walk from Rockefeller Plaza, a ten-minute walk from 22 E. 40th. (Paul Drake is never wrong.)

[Schrafft’s, 556 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Wikipedia has a brief history of the chain. Vanishing New York has some good photographs. The New York Public Library has menus that take forever to load. Here’s one from 1955, when my parents, not yet my parents, may have been Schrafft’s-ing. And here’s a description of Schrafft’s from a 1964 guide to New York.

There’s a website for a revived Schrafft’s whose tone — “Where the Forward Thinkers and Life Seizers, the Night Owls and the Morning Dealmakers banter amongst the Famous and soon-to-be Famous, the Old Guard and their Tiny Titans to be” — and spelling — “fashionable not fadish” — leave me cold. The revival as yet seems to be more idea than reality.

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

Stack up with?

[The New York Times, August 9, 2024.]

Stack up with? Does the Times consider against too divisive?

In the Google Ngram Viewer, stack up against is about eleven times more common than stack up with in American English.

[Our household this week: ten of eleven answers.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Whenever I see Matthew Sewell’s name on a Newsday  Saturday Stumper, I know I am likely in for it, “it” being perhaps forty-five minutes or an hour of struggle. And so it was this week.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A and 62-A, four letters each, “Without a hem?” I thought the first of these had to be ASIS.

1-D, six letters, “Word from the Greek for ‘panting.’” My starting point.

10-D, eight letters, “What you can fix it with.” I’ve seen this trick before.

11-D, eight letters, “What’s put in infusers.” But not this trick.

16-A, ten letters, “Charger in an outlet.” MADSHOPPER? I was thinking of someone charging through the aisles in a Black Friday frenzy.

19-A, fourteen letters, “‘Dear me!’” Really?

25-A, five letters, “A whole bunch?” See 19-A.

26-D, four letters, “Directional letters.” I was sure it had to be OTOH.

29-D, four letters, “#1 reacher in each of the past seven decades.” Strange but true.

32-A, twelve letters, “Very badly.” A clue that leads everywhere and nowhere.

36-A, seven letters, “Put out.” See 32-A.

39-A, seven letters, “Have the chops, say.” Groan.

40-A, twelve letters, “Science practiced by multiple Nobel laureates.” My first guess was ASTROPHYSICS. Why not?

51-D, five letters, “Alpine trail.” Probably useful for future crosswords, not to mention sojourns in the Alps.

54-A, fourteen letters, “Nicely named beef/mozzarella dish.” I have to believe it’s real.

55-D, four letters, “Consciousness raiser.” Oh brother.

My favorite in this puzzle: 60-A, ten letters, “Book subtitled 100 Ways to Work Out With Your Dog.” Aww.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Harris Walz”

Elaine Fine has written a one-minute waltz for piano: “Harris Walz.”

Responses and non-answers

Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary on yesterday’s Trump “General News Conference” is worth watching in full. O’Donnell points out that most of the questions — mostly inaudible, as there was no microphone for the press — were wasted questions, silly, pointless, and that Trump’s responses (most glaringly, to a question about mifepristone) did not constitute answers. And that Kamala Harris’s speech yesterday received little or no airtime from news networks.

Here is a Trump non-answer of my choosing, his response to a reporter who asked for his “constitutional analysis” of Kamala Harris’s replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. The full question is impossible to hear, but I did make out the words “constitutional analysis.” I have made slight corrections to C-SPAN’s transcription (which — guess what? — doesn’t include reporters’ questions):

We have a constitution. It’s a very important document and we live by it. She has no votes and I’m very happy to run against her. I’m not complaining from that standpoint. And I hate to be defending him, but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win. They said you’re not going to win after the debate. They said you’re not going to win. You can’t win. You’re out. And at first they said it nicely and he wasn’t leaving and then you, you know it, you know it better than anybody. Wait a minute. So, uh, when you think about it, they said at first they were going to go out to another vote, they were going to go through a primary system, a quick primary system, which it would have to be, and then it all disappeared and they just picked a person that was the first out. She was the first loser. Okay. So we call her the first loser. She was the first loser. When, uh, during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit and she quit. She had no votes, no support and she was a bad debater, by the way, very bad debater. And that’s not the thing I’m looking forward to, but she was a bad debater. She did it — obviously a bad job. She never made it to lowa then for some reason. And I know he regrets it. You do too. He picked her and she turned on him too. She was working with the people that wanted him out. But the fact that you can be, get no votes, lose in the primary system, in other words, you had fourteen or fifteen people. She was the first one out. And that you can then be picked to run for president. It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.

How’s that for constitutional analysis?

Uh-oh

Donald Trump is having what he calls “a General News Conference” at 2:00 p.m. (EDT). I cannot imagine that his advisers have advised that. But the mess his campaign is in? He alone can fix it!

*

1:10 p.m.: He cannot bring himself to say “Kamala Harris.” It’s just “someone else,” “Kamala,” or “she.” Tim Walz is just “a man,” who is “heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds.”

1:17 p.m.: “I think she’s crashing.” (Projection.)

1:26 p.m.: Captain Queeg is at the microphone.

1:34 p.m.: With noticeable sniffs.

1:42 p.m.: “The Minnesota gentleman.” He cannot say the name.

1:45 p.m: In other countries, the government has encouraged people to buy guns, and crime has dropped 29%.

1:46 p.m.: Walz is now “her new friend.”

1:50 p.m.: That’s all, folks. I’m done.

[Fifty splatterings from the Trump Truth Social account as of 10:28 (CDT) this morning. It’s meltdown time.]

Deer!

[Deer in photograph is closer than it appears. Click for a larger deer.]

As a city kid, I will never tire of seeing deer as they make their rounds about our neighborhood. Elaine and I recently devised another daily walk, which goes from a street to a trail to a road to a path cut through a meadow of wildflowers. All public property. The meadow is billed as a park, accessible only on foot (no parking). Day after day, we’ve seen one or more deer on the trail, road, or path. And they’ve seen us.

Can deer recognize individual people as individuals? We’d like to that this deer can. It doesn’t bolt when it sees us, and it’s seen us (we think) many times. (The little bits of color on its right side match up from photograph to photograph.) Sometimes we’re the first to move on; sometimes the deer is. It’ll mosey into the woods. And then we start walking again.

Reaping the worldwind?

From tonight’s PBS News:

“The events in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are part of their worldwind tour of several key battleground states over the next few days.”

Or maybe it was whirled-wind.

You can hear the sentence at the 2:07 mark in this story. Our household listened four times to make sure we were hearing what we thought we were hearing. If indeed we were, I say “Sheesh.”

A quick search shows that worldwind tour is not unknown. I would guess that the influence of worldwide is to blame.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

That’s not Ida Lupino. So, then, who?

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if appropriate.

*

10:26 a.m.: No need for a hint. The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” So I use actor.]