The case of the slipaway sidebar

As you may notice, the OCA sidebar is gone, which means that I’ve likely messed something up in the HTML for a post. Paul Drake is on the case.

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Fixed! A post to the Blogger Help Community has an easy way to spot the source of the problem: open the latest posts one by one until you find a post with the sidebar where it should be. And the post that came after that one (i.e., later in time) will be the culprit. In this case, it was a stray bit of HTML for an image — the annoying div stuff I am almost always careful to delete — that pushed the sidebar to the bottom of the page.

If you’re given to tweaking older posts — a word here, a spacing problem there — you’d best be careful, or you might be opening years of posts to find the problem. DIY: Drake doesn’t work cheap.

The New Grown-Ups: “The Devil’s Nine Questions”

As these videos drop, I’m not going to hesitate to copy and paste:

Our son Ben Leddy is a member of The New Grown-Ups, who just took first in a new-band showcase at the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Brunswick, Maine. That’s a sample above.

Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : “My Heart’s Own Love” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp

Recently updated

Just some diner? Now with an electric delivery-truck.

Zippy Hopper Now with more Hopper.

Zippy Hopper

[Zippy, September 15, 2024. Notice the E.H. in the corner.]

Today’s Zippy is a thing of beauty. The source: Edward Hopper’s Excursion into Philosophy.

Hopper’s work appears a number of times in Zippy. You can do a strip search to see them all.

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September 16: More Hopper today. Maybe it’ll be Hopper Week.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Twenty years of blogging

Orange Crate Art began on a Wednesday night, shortly after dinner, September 15, 2004. My children, Rachel and Ben, helped me get started. Rachel told me what to say for a first post.

Keeping this blog has brought me more possibilities of thinking and learning and sharing that I could have imagined. It’s made writing — work that always put my academic self in a state of high anxiety — a pleasure. More importantly, it’s kept me off the streets and out of trouble, at least for some chunk of time every day.

And now, onward.

Just some diner?

[553 Union Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

No, not just some diner. It’s Frank’s Diner. Or (look closely) Frank’s Union Diner. As in, “Say, how’s about we grab a cup o’ java while they’re changin’ th’ erl?”

Many details to notice in the photograph. The most interesting one: the advertisement for a radio show with Joe Penner (1904–1941), a comedian in vaudeville, radio, and film. His work is well represented at YouTube. You just have to watch a bit to notice a resemblance to Pee-wee Herman. You don’t even have to read his Wikipedia entry.

Thanks, Brian, who pointed me to this photograph some time ago. Now I'm there, and the java is great. The Joe (Penner), not so much.

[Click for a larger view.]

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September 16: As jjdaddyo suggested in a comment, that appears to be an electric truck. I’d say that that’s the most interesting detail in the photograph. Strange: both a bakery and an electric vehicle company were named Ward.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : 557, 561, and 571 Union Street

How to improve writing (no. 126)

[The New York Times, September 14, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

I no longer subscribe to the Times, but I’m still willing to look at the paper. I hesitated to post this bit, but I ran it past Elaine, and she had the same — instantaneous — response:

Why but ?

The conjunction makes no sense, because there’s no contradiction. What might work better:

The Democratic vice-presidential nominee has lamented the angry splits within families over politics. Indeed, he and his Republican brother rarely speak.

But (ahem) if you read the article, it’s easy to understand that it’s Tim Walz’s brother Jeff who’s on the outs with siblings:

The breach in the Walz family has been painful, according to the men’s sister, Sandra Dietrich, who lives in Nebraska, where the siblings were raised. Jeff Walz has said he has not spoken with his brother, beyond a brief phone call, in years.

“They all have their own opinions, and I have mine,” Ms. Dietrich said. “They’re my brothers and I love them.” She added that she was a Democrat and planned to vote for her brother and Ms. Harris.

“We’ve always agreed to disagree,” she continued. “That’s where I’m at with Jeff. I just wish things were different — that it didn’t wreck people.”

A cousin is quoted as saying that in 2016 Ms. Dietrich and Jeff Walz were not on speaking terms.

I’m not sure how to rewrite to remove the suggestion that the enmity here is mutual. Perhaps it is. But the article strongly implies that it’s Jeff Walz who at one point or another has cut off contact with his siblings. Here’s a possible revision if that is the case:

The Democratic vice-presidential nominee has lamented the angry splits within families over politics. Indeed, in recent years his Republican brother has had little contact with his Democratic siblings.

Pinboard
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 126 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. I began with 1-D, four letters, “Intro to a classic dilemma,” which seemed to be a giveaway but gave away nothing. But the clue was indeed the intro to a classic dilemma, the dilemma of how to solve a Saturday Stumper. I chipped away, here, there, everywhere, to get the rest of the puzzle.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

10-A, five letters, “Spot strife.” This clue stretches the meaning of strife, but this is the Stumper.

13-D, six letters, “On a higher plane.” A little woo-woo.

17-A, nine letters, “Slight manscaping.” Oh, okay. (Sigh of relief.)

24-D, five letters, “Take a second.” Very Stumper-y.

25-D, eight letters, “Time for a throwaway line.” It took me some time to see the point of line.

33-A, eight letters, “Restraining order.” Nicely colloquial.

36-A, fifteen letters, “Vodka/coffee concoction.” No thank you.

38-D, eight letters, “‘No thank you’ follower, perhaps.” Silly.

40-D, three letters, “Graph add-on.” Yes!

52-A, three letters, “Preceder of up or down, in or out, off or on.” A value-added clue. At least four words fit.

59-D, three letters, “Money-making machine.” Raise your hand if you thought the answer would be ATM.

63-A, five letters, “What some 90% of all people possess.” The answer is definitely not “the answer to this clue.”

65-A, five letters, “Subject of the biography The Right Word.” Easy to guess, but I’ll take it.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-A, three letters, “Dose, taken another way.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Blood libel redux

It occurred to me only this morning, reading a post by Daughter Number Three, that the eating-our-pets lunacy, is, like Pizzagate, a new version of the medieval blood libel. This time with Haitians, not Jews or Democrats; and with animals, not children.

It’s difficult to imagine that Donald Trump knows about the history of the blood libel. J.D. Vance, with his love of traditional Catholicism, likely does. The neo-Nazis who marched in Springfield, Ohio, likely do.

In his shambolic golf-course press conference this afternoon, Trump, ever the opportunist, declared that mass deportations would begin in Springfield and in Aurora, Colorado. What no reporter pointed out when Trump made that seemingly impromptu declaration is that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, as the city’s website makes clear.

Donald Trump has long been a stochastic terrorist. And now J.D. Vance is now one too. Springfield public schools and driver’s-license facilities are closed for a second day because of bomb threats.

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As DN3 suggests, calling your senators and asking them to censure Vance is appropriate.

The New Grown-Ups: “My Heart’s Own Love”

As these videos drop, I’m not going to hesitate to copy and paste:

Our son Ben Leddy is a member of The New Grown-Ups, who just took first in a new-band showcase at the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Brunswick, Maine. That’s a sample above.

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Oops — the song is “My Heart’s Own Love.” Post title now corrected.

Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp

The zibaldone

The mid-fourteenth-century word zibaldone, a bit of Florentine slang, came to signify a personal notebook of miscellaneous contents. From Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (New York: Biblioasis, 2024):

The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook. You could copy out as much or as little as you wanted, neatly or not, and refer to it a little, or as much, as you wanted. The collection could be poetry or prose, fictional or factual, thematic or random, religious or profane, in Latin or Tuscan, or any mixture of any of these components; you could even draw pictures in it. The notebook itself could be large or small, luxurious or utilitarian....

Zibaldoni, although always idiosyncratic and personal to their owner, were not necessarily private, or intimate: you would share the highlights of your own with your friends, and if you saw something that you liked in theirs, you’d copy it over.

Sounds a lot like blogging to me.

I am seventy-one pages into this book, and it’s a joy.

Also from the book
Moleskine: seventy-five words

Rocks, unnoticed

An Atlantic crossword clue baffles

In today’s Atlantic mini-crossword, 5-A, three letters, “11-character fig. on a form.” The answer, of course, is SSN. But a Social Security number has nine digits.¹ And why does the clue read characters ? Am I missing something?

*

Elaine, who does not do crosswords, just explained it to me: nine digits and two hyphens: eleven characters. Sneaky, sneaky clue. Good thing I'm married.

            
¹ Nine digits, unless you’re Ralph Kramden, whose number has only seven.

Parataxis (with cats and ducks)

[Drudge Report, September 12, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

I can’t imagine that the placement of the Adderall-psychosis-mania headline is accidental.

[Parataxis : juxtaposition without explicit connection. An organizing principle in modernist literature. There’s nothing certain but death and parataxis.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll be on and off the computer this morning and will drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

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A hint, dropped: This actor is best known for a television role, reprised in film, playing a character with no known first name.

*

I think this one is going to remain a mystery. I’ve put the answer in the comments.

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

The Last Republican

The story behind The Last Republican, a documentary about Adam Kinzinger: “‘Do you have contempt for my views?’ How a leftwing film-maker and a Republican came together” (The Guardian ).

Irony alert

J.D. Vance:

“We admire Taylor Swift's music, but I don't think most Americans, whether they like her music, are fans of hers or not, are gonna be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.”

See also a previous J.D. Vance irony alert.

Some field

[Photograph by Elaine Fine.]

Just some field. Whatever you do, do not click for a larger view. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

About last night

In the lastest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson offers an astute analysis of last night’s debate:

The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people.

She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television.

Swift FTW

As just reported on MSNBC: Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

Here it is, on Instagram.

Cleanup on aisle 45

Kamala Harris: “What we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”

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Donald Trump: “They’re eating the pets.”

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Kamala Harris: “World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”

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Donald Trump, about offering an alternative to the Affordable Care Act: “I have concepts of a plan.”

The New Grown-Ups: “Cumberland Gap”

Our son Ben Leddy is a member of The New Grown-Ups, who just took first in a new-band showcase at the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Brunswick, Maine. That’s a sample above.

Notice the New Grown-Ups logo, top left. Ben is a clever guy. He’s on mandolin. All said and done.

A related post
The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp

EXchange names sighting

The Great Bernzini (Joe Pesci), a photographer loosely based on Weegee, wants to capture a mob hit as it happens. To do so, he must figure out which Italian restaurant is hosting the private party where the hit is to take place. So he starts calling around for a reservation to find out who’ll be closed to the public tonight. From The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin, 1992). Click any image for a larger view.


The EXchange names and street names are real. I looked up enough of the restaurant names in the 1940 Manhattan directory to feel pretty sure that they’re all fictional. And the pages are, of course, fictional. Look closely and you can see the paste-up.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)

Typo alerts

From the podcast Mac Power Users, episode 760. Stephen Hackett is talking with David Sparks about readers calling attention to typos:

“Nine times out of ten that comes with an apology attached, like ‘Oh, hey, I’m sorry, I found this.‘ Thank you for sending them in. We didn’t catch it, we want to be accurate and correct, and there’s nothing worse — I’m sure you’ve had this experience too — where you come across a blog post from eight years ago and there’s a typo in it. That’s been on the Internet for almost a decade, and no one told you. It’s the worst feeling, so thank you for sending those in.”

That’s my attitude too.

James Earl Jones (1931–2024)

James Earl Jones has died at the age of ninety-three. The Guardian has an obituary.

Darth Vader? Mufasa? Sure. But I always think of him as Lear.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

One of those moments: Wait, is that ________? Yes, that’s ________.

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll be on and off the computer this morning and will drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

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9:04 a.m.: The answer is now in the comments.

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

Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking back at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once. “Puissance without hauteur”? Bob and Ray. “Fifty years late?” I had to look it up. I didn’t catch the repetition of “Traffic and weather.”

“Traffic and weather on the eights”
“Eccentric adventures”
“It’s just . . . it’s notes.”
“That ain't hay”
“As well-lit as a good film noir”
“Write a blog instead of posting to Twitter or Facebook”
“In so-called adult life”
“Perimeter oscillations”
“E.g, i.e., etc.”
“One fluke visible”
“Puissance without hauteur”
“Shortened studies”
“Created from a combination of many small precise
    decisions”
“Fifty years late”
“Mostly groovy”
“Great typos”
“Things keep accumulating”
“I wanna be where the people are”
“In the pencil what?”
“Office fritters”
“Books, always books”
“Scholarly voracity”
“:~:”
“Against the terrible odds of syntax”
“One more way to look like an outlier”
“Thick with virtual dust”
“ Are we really doing this?”
“I don’t feel human uptown”
“Tired of hitting”
“F♯min Emaj7 F♯min Emaj7 G♯min D E C B”
“Typing and typing”
“Is it raining on the phone, or outside?”
“Rattle OK”
“Viva música, bendita música”
“However fleeting, however partial”
“In the new old-fashioned way”
“Writer-y”
“It’s not as if we have only a finite supply of commas
    available”
“Subjects and verbs”
“You sure we’ve come to the right place?”
“To please not call me ‘Doctor’”
“‘Meticulous,’ ‘commendable,’ ‘intricate’”
“Knock, knock, who’s there?”
“Inventory”
“Got hyphens?”
“Get up, dress up, and show up”
“It goes idea by idea”
“I've run my random character generator”
“Traffic and weather”
“Please change your hold music”

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not : Still more items in a series

“Red flags for scholars of fascism”

Heather Cox Richardson usually takes a break from writing Letters from an American and posts a photograph as the week ends. But this weekend she was writing, about an increasingly aberrant presidential candidate. From the September 7 installment of Letters from an American :

Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

This installment of Letters from an American, like every other installment of Letters from an American, deserves a wide audience.

Neon in semi-daylight

[4920 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure”: Frank O’Hara, in “A Step Away from Them,” imagining what his friend and fellow poet Edwin Denby would write.

I chose this photograph for its neon in semi-daylight, vivid in the shadow of the El. The band of light between the El and the buildings looks itself a bit like neon, or at least like fluorescence.

A quick check of online sources shows that in 1909 the 4920 address housed a saloon. A neighborhood miscreant passed a bad check there. The construction of the El in 1914 led to lawsuits from the owner of 4920 and other property owners on the block over noise, darkness, and decreased rental value, with damages paid out in 1922. In 1933 4920 may have housed a delicatessen.

The property may have been undergoing an identity crisis when its tax photograph was taken. Was it a bar & grill? (Look closely.) A delicatessen? (Look closely.) A liquor store? (Look closely.) The 1940 telephone directory has it as a restaurant:

[Click for a larger view.]

Two brands of beer are advertised in the window, Breldt’s and Ox Head. The Peter Breldt Brewing Company was based in Elizabeth, New Jersey. During Prohibition, the Peter Breldt Company, minus the Brewing, brewed near beer that was too near. Ox Head was a product of the Wehle Brewing Company, West Haven, Connecticut.

In 1949, just days after a liquor license was issued to the Utrecht Restaurant (to a new owner?), this advertisement appeared in The Brooklyn Eagle:

[The Brooklyn Eagle, March 20, 1949.]

Someone was cleaning house.

The Utrecht Restaurant, still operating under that name, received another liquor license (for yet another owner?) in 1963. In 1964 the liquor license for this address went to the Boro Lounge. Today the first floor of 1420 is split between Emil’s Shoes and Zion Car Service.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : C. O. Bigelow : https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2010/09/minetta-tavern.html : Saratoga Bar and Cafe

Sanewashing

Margaret Sullivan, former public editor at The New York Times writes about “the power of a single word about media malfeasance.” The word is sanewashing. The immediate context: reporting about Trump’s bizarre non-answer to a question about the cost of childcare:

Why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.

And it’s also, I believe, because of the restrained language of traditional objective journalism. That’s often a good thing; it’s part of being careful and cautious. But when it fails to present a truthful picture, that practice distorts reality.

[From the Times: “The crisis for middle-class families struggling with child care? The economic growth he said would be spurred by things like tariffs.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

1-A, four letters, “Field of operations”: AREA? ZONE? It doesn’t take long to figure out that today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, will be something of a doozy.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, six letters, “Puzzled over.” Misdirection.

4-D, ten letters, “Produces with silk, perhaps.” I thought it must have to do with worms.

11-D, eight letters, “Nintendo persona battling Baron Brrr.” I guessed, correctly.

16-A, ten letters, “Genre for Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson.” I thought it was usually called something else.

18-A, four letters, “Not deep or high.” A book that we were just talking about made the answer pop into my head.

29-D, ten letters, “LED-covered dancer with wedding guests.” I must lead a sheltered life.

34-A, fifteen letters, “Subtly shady compliment.” So much novelty in this puzzle.

53-D, three letters, “Q & A in DC.” I always like seeing such effort put into making a Stumper-y clue for a mere three-letter answer. Value added!

My favorite in this puzzle: 12-D, eight letters, “It could have wings.” I thought my answer must have been wrong, and then I saw a way in which it could make sense, and then I didn’t, and then I did. An insanely great clue-and-answer pairing.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Trump splatter, transcribed

Yesterday at the Economic Club on New York, Donald Trump gave a lengthy non-response to a question about the cost of childcare. The non-response is incoherent enough when you watch and listen. But I wanted to see it, and I think the incoherence deepens with print, or with pixels. The questioner was Reshma Saujani, the CEO of Girls Who Code. My transcription, and I’m even giving Trump the benefit of paragraphs:

“If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make childcare affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue.

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, childcare is childcare, it couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it, in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they'll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with childcare, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

“We're gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It's about make America great again. We have to do it. Because right now we are a failing nation. [Applause.] So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”

By the way, in case you missed it, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of Head Start (page 482) and for an emphasis on funding home-based childcare, not daycare (page 486).

Fading technology

Scene: a restaurant, last night. A daughter of the family — maybe ten? — was helping out at the counter.

“Are you old enough to run the cash register?”

“What’s a cash register?”

The register was, of course, a tablet.

A related post
“What’s a BVD?”

ChatGPT and a forklift

From Ted Chiang’s essay “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” (The New Yorker ). If I were teaching, I’d share this passage with my students:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Related posts
“Human interaction might be preferred” : “Inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators” : ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

Word of the day: frisket

[“Dots All, Folks!” Zippy, September 5, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In the third panel of today’s strip, Zippy explains: “Th’ space outside th’ panels is un-specked because a frisket is being used to confine th’ spattered areas!”

Frisket comes from the French frisquette, origin unknown. The OED has one definition: “a thin iron frame hinged to the tympan, having tapes or paper strips stretched across it, for keeping the sheet in position while printing.” First citation: 1683.

Merriam-Webster has a definition that fits today’s strip: “a masking device or material used especially in printing or graphic arts.” First use: c. 1898.

Wikipedia offers further explanation.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Georgia, 46th of 50

From The Washington Post:

Gun-control advocates consistently report that Georgia’s gun laws are among the nation’s weakest. The nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety ranks Georgia 46th in the country for gun law strength, in a tier of states referred to as “national failures.” The Giffords Law Center, another organization that advocates for stricter gun measures, gives Georgia an F rating on its annual scorecard, faulting the state for lacking rules such as universal background checks and red-flag laws.

During his term as governor, Kemp has expanded gun rights, including signing a 2022 bill that allows residents to carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit.

When Giffords delivered Georgia its failing grade, Kemp replied: “I’ll wear this ‘F’ as a badge of honor.”

A related post
“We have created this hellscape for our children”

“We have created this hellscape for our children”

Dr. Annie Andrews, pediatrician and senior advisor to Everytown for Gun Safety, on MSNBC a few minutes ago:

“My heart is broken for this community, for every child that was in that building today, for the children whose lives were stolen by this public health crisis of gun violence. And I have a pit in my stomach, as I do every time I see these headlines.

“This is a public health crisis, and what is so infuriating about it is we have created this hellscape for our children. Every child in this country goes to school and sits in a classroom where they should be learning how to read and write, and they're also learning how to hide from a bad man with the gun. And for far too many children in this country, that reality grows even darker when an active shooter incident happens.

“This is a public health crisis, and we know the solutions. The solutions include commonsense gun laws, like expanded background checks, secure-storage laws so that adult gun owners cannot allow access to children to their firearms, and red-flag laws. What we lack in this country is elected leaders with the moral courage to pass the laws that the majority of Americans know that we need and that the children in this country so desperately need and deserve.

“We have robbed every child in this country of a sense of physical and psychological safety in their classrooms, and as a mother, it breaks my heart.”

Related reading
Everytown for Gun Safety

[Context: yet another school shooting, this one at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. My transcription and paragraphing.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll be on and off the computer this morning and will drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

*

8:46 a.m.: That was fast. The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all)
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Departure Mono

[Click for a larger view.]

Departure Mono is a font by Helena Zhang. The font’s website is by Tobias Fried. If you go that website, make sure to scroll all the way down.

I’m using Departure Mono for short-term fun, or sort-of fun. I made more mistakes in typing those green words than I’m willing to recount.

[Found via Daring Fireball.]

Phi Better Whatchamacallit

From Chicago Syndicate (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1955). Some hoods are giving undercover agent Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe) a hard time:

“A philosopher.”

“College man.”

“Must be Phi Better Whatchamacallit.”

“Kappa.”

“Kappa — or copper.”

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Fandango, PBS, YouTube.]

Chicago Syndicate (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1955). Another movie with a highly improbable premise: an accountant with a military background (Dennis O’Keefe) is persuaded to go undercover to expose the racketeer who has just ordered the murder of his accountant. What makes this movie worth watching: Paul Stewart as a misogynist racketeer, Abbe Lane as a nightclub singer and racketeer’s moll, Xavier Cugat as a bandleader on the edges of the criminal world, and Allison Hayes as a wrench in the mob’s works. A bonus: lots of Chicago streets, and a visit to the Field Museum. An extra bonus: the Chicago freight tunnels. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Cash on Demand (dir. Quentin Lawrence, 1961). A duet, with Peter Cushing as priggish bank manager Harry Fordyce, and André Morell as “Colonel Gore Hepburn,” a bank thief posing as an insurance investigator. The colonel’s fiendish scheme has elements that compel Fordyce to become an accomplice in crime. Suspense abounds as the two open a safe and load suitcases with money. I won’t say how the movie ends, but I will point out that Fordyce more than slightly resembles Scrooge and that the events of the movie take place right before Christmas. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Dark Tower (dir. John Harlow, 1943). Three nominal stars, but the movie belongs to the fourth-billed Herbert Lom as Torg, a swarthy fellow who materializes at a traveling circus and talks the manager (Ben Lyon) into a job hypnotizing star aerialist Mary (Anne Crawford) into performing sans a balancing prop. And yes, Torg has designs on Mary, which doesn’t please her partner Tom (David Farrar). Considerable circus atmosphere, with real performers. The story seems to me to take place in the weird imaginary Europe of, say, The Lady Vanishes. ★★★ (YT)

*

A little Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti festival

Sideways (2004). From a fambly discussion, 2010:

“Wait till you’re older. Then you might like it.”

“I am older.”

I wrote in a 2010 post that you have to be at least forty to like Sideways, but now I think that thirty-five is right. ★★★★ (DVD)

The Holdovers (2023). I wrote four sentences about this movie earlier this year. All I want to add here is that the movie’s sentimentality, even corniness (as in the candlepin bowling scene), merits appreciation. The sadness and snow might make The Holdovers my favorite Christmas movie. And as I noticed once again, there’s even an homage to A Charlie Brown Christmas (no kidding). ★★★★ (F)

*

Among the Living (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1941). We watched because it’s a movie with Frances Farmer, who made only sixteen film appearances. But she’s hardly on screen here. The real interest comes from Albert Dekker in a double role (mad twin, sane twin), Harry Carey as a doctor with dubious ethics and a hilarious accent, and Susan Hayward as a boarding-house owner’s daughter who doesn’t realize it’s the mad twin who’s buying her gifts and stealing her heart. Dekker is disturbingly (insanely?) convincing: it’s sometimes difficult to believe the same actor is playing both his roles. ★★★ (YT)

*

Jack Goes Boating (dir. Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010). Hoffman’s only directing effort, from a play by Robert Glaudini. It’s the story of two couples: Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) are in a relationship whose foundation has sustained considerable damage; Jack (Hoffman) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are naifs barely getting started. Their tentative beginning looks back to Delbert Mann’s Marty and perhaps served to influence Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. Alas, the movie jumps a big shark in the dinner scene and never quite recovers. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Price of the Ticket (dir. Karen Thorsen, 1989). A documentary about James Baldwin, with archival footage in abundance, and Baldwin speaking truth with a fierce hope about human possibility: “the bottom line,” he says, is that all men are brothers. Considerable commentary from Maya Angelou, Baldwin’s bother David, and others. The most unexpected moments: David and Bobby Short singing spirituals, as they once did with James. This documentary aired as an episode of the PBS series American Masters. ★★★★ (PBS)

*

The Last of Sheila (dir. Herbert Ross, 1973). A mystery of bewildering complexity: one year after his wife Sheila was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a wealthy man (James Coburn) devises a game for six of his friends (Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, James Mason, Ian McShane, Raquel Welch) to play as they travel the French Riviera on his yacht (named Sheila). Each friend is given a card with a secret, and the object of the game is to figure out whose secret is whose. Harmless enough, right? The screenplay, by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, is filled with delights and meta jokes about storytelling and moviemaking, but damn if I understand the plot. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin, 1992). Joe Pesci stars as Leon Bernstein, The Great Bernzini, a photographer of New York City crime scenes and street life, loosely based on Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Barbara Hershey stars as Kay Levitz, a nightclub owner in difficulty with the mob who looks to Bernzini for help. The plot seems beside the point, everything here being a matter of atmosphere, with an extraordinary degree of attention to sets and furnishings. The only character who’s not merely a type is Bernzini himself, though he is of course a type of Weegee. ★★★ (CC)

*

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (dir. Carl Reiner, 1982). It’s a simple, deftly managed premise: scenes from black-and-white noirs mixed into the (also black-and-white) story of a private eye (Steve Martin) and his client (Rachel Ward). Thus we get what might be called cameo appearances by (in order) Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Edward Arnold, Kirk Douglas, Fred MacMurray, and James Cagney. It’s fun, but the novelty wears off, and the juxtapositions aren’t especially funny. I would like to have seen the intertextuality extend to the older movies themselves, with, say, Ray Milland talking to Lana Turner. ★★★ (F)

*

Female on the Beach (dir. Jodrph Pevney, 1955). A wildly melodramatic, campy delight. Joan Crawford plays Lynn Markham, a recently widowed woman who moves into her late husband’s beach house. She just wants to be alone (that’s how she likes her coffee: alone!), but odd neighbors Osbert and Queenie Sorenson (Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schafer) and their protégé of sorts, Drummond Hall (Jeff Chandler) make that difficult. The relationship that develops between Lynn and Drummy is, at every turn, bizarre, and why Drummy is the way he is, why he cannot “change,” and how Osbert and Queenie so quickly find another protégé are questions left unexplored — and maybe I’m reading too much into the movie. ★★★★ (CC)

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

NPR, sheesh

From a Consider This story. The subject is Kamala Harris’s effort to align herself with popular Biden administration policies while establishing her own candidacy:

“How is she walking that needle, and how are you going to look for that, particularly in the debate coming up?”

Maybe just listen for the screams?

You can walk a line. You can thread a needle. You can walk the line if you’re Johnny Cash. But you cannot walk a needle. Ouch.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[Know your clichés!]

Moleskine: seventy-five words

From Roland Allen’s “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era” (The Walrus ), a brief commentary on the the prose in the little leaflet that comes with every Moleskine — which apparently ran to seventy-five words in the original Italian. The leaflet’s prose, in translation:

The Moleskine is an exact reproduction of the legendary notebook of Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse. Anonymous custodian of an extraordinary tradition, the Moleskine is a distillation of function and an accumulator of emotions that releases its charge over time. From the original notebook a family of essential and trusted pocket books was born. Hard cover covered in moleskine, elastic closure, thread binding. Internal bellowed pocket in cardboard and canvas. Removable leaflet with the history of Moleskine. Format 9 x 14 cm.

Allen’s commentary:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities — usefulness and emotion — to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. [Maria] Sebregondi and [Francesco] Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

This piece is an excerpt from a new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . I’m looking forward to reading it.

As I have confessed in these pages, I am a prisoner of Moleskine.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts : notebook posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“Commuters, who have just come off the train, waiting for the bus to go home, Lowell, Mass.” Photograph by Jack Delano. January 1941. From the Library of Congress Flickr pages. Click for a larger view.]

They also work who only stand and wait.

That’s Union Station, “Lowell’s main railroad station from 1894 to the 1950s.”

[“They also serve who only stand and wait”: John Milton, sonnet 19.]

“False balance” in the NYT

Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of The New York Times, writes about “an ugly case of ‘false balance’” in that newspaper. It’s in a story about Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s plans to increase afforable housing:

The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.

Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme....

Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.

But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump.

When crosswords try to do jazz

I saw the answer coming Caleb Madison’s Atlantic crossword, but I couldn’t believe it: 8-D, eleven letters, “Basie handle.” Answer: KINGOFSWING.

Count Basie was was known as the Kid from Red Bank. But it was Benny Goodman who was known as the King of Swing.

See also the Los Angeles Times crossword and Duke Ellington, the New Yorker crossword and Jelly Roll Morton, and the New York Times crossword and Mel Tormé.

Empire of signs

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

Can you spot the wingback chair?

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

[Post title borrowed from Roland Barthes’s book about Japan. La Marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir) was released in 1938. I don’t know when it arrived in the States. Swanee River (dir. Sidney Lanfield) was released on December 30, 1939.]