New Year’s Eve 1924

[“Many Extra Police for New Year's Eve: 300 Detailed To Handle Crowds.” The New York Times, December 31, 1924.]

It was that final sentence that made me choose this article excerpt. The Oxford English Dictionary has but one definition that seems to fit here: ”a feather brush used to tickle the face of passers, as a diversion at fairs and carnivals.” First citation: 1680. What a strange place the past is.

Happy New Year to all.

TextGrabber

A free menu-bar app for macOS: TextGrabber. Open an image in Preview, and the Mac can scan its text. But TextGrabber lets you scan text anywhere. If you’re looking, say, at old Life advertisements for Quaker Oats, hit ⇧⌘2, and you can scan text from right in the browser:

You know breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Especially a good hot breakfast on those cold winter mornings.

Warm up the entire family with Quaker Oats. It’s the next warmest thing to staying in bed.

[Found via MacMenuBar.]

The “Harlem section”

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The areas of the maps on which the dots were sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes.

Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930’s. He built one playground in Harlem.

Robert Moses built seventeen playgrounds as part of the West Side Improvement. He built one playground in the Harlem section of the Improvement. He built five football fields as part of the Improvement. He built one in the Harlem section. He built eighteen horseshoe courts, twenty-two tennis courts, half a mile of roller-skating paths and a mile of bicycle paths in the rest of the Improvement. He did not build a single horseshoe or tennis court or a foot of roller-skating or bicycle path in the Harlem portion.

When the Improvement first opened, in fact, there was not a single recreational facility of any type in the entire “Harlem section” — not so much as a stanchion with a basketball hoop attached.

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them tie in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves. The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

There are other matters: Moses’s varied efforts to prevent Black people (and carless New Yorkers generally) from availing themselves of Jones Beach; his use of water temperature in city pools to enforce de facto segregation (he believed that Black people did not like cold water). In 2014, Robert Caro wrote that Robert Moses’s racism was “unashamed, unapologetic.” The Power Broker makes that clear. (Spoiler alert: that article gives away the story behind the final sentence of The Power Broker.)

The monkeys were removed in 2023.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

Playground design

In the Moses universe, playground design allowed for little variation. From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

These designs were banal, containing for the most part nothing but benches for mothers and standard “active play” equipment — swings, seesaws, jungle gyms, wading pools, slides — for children. The equipment was surrounded by fences that only a mother could love: either dreary chain-link or high, black bars that made the playgrounds look like animal cages. And they were set in a surface that even a mother had to hate — a surface cheap to lay down and easy to maintain (that was why Moses’ engineers had selected it) but hard on the knees and elbows of little boys and girls who fell on it. Comfort stations, squat and unadorned, looked like nothing so much as concrete or brick pillboxes. A neighborhood committee might request some particularly desired facility — a bocci court, for example, for an Italian neighborhood — but few substitutions were permitted.

And one choice detail:

Some playgrounds were situated atop hills and their entrances were set with flights of steps despite the fact that the most frequent users of these parks were mothers with baby carriages, which were difficult to maneuver up steps, and entrance to these playgrounds could have been made easier for them by simply making the entrances ramps instead of steps.

But Moses no longer had much time for detail.

Here, from an episode of Naked City, are some glimpses of Moses’s dystopian playground equipment. Bonus, not from Naked City: a photograph of me, not yet one, in a Moses baby swing.

In my Brooklyn neighborhood, bocci (or bocce) was a game played on (largely) disused railroad tracks.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

A wood phone booth

From Ephemeral New York, a wood phone booth, complete with phone, in a bar on St. Marks Place.

Two related posts
The Lonely Phone Booth : Five phone booths, 1961

Wordle, oh my

Wordle 1,290 1/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
[Unretouched.]

As I always use the same starting word, this result will almost certainly never happen again.

Jimmy Carter (1924–2024)

The Guardian has an obituary. Nothing in The New York Times yet.

Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for (and the second). He lived a good life, a life of uncommon decency, and there’s probably some grace in its ending before our next national nightmare officially begins.

“It is never too late to change the future”

In today’s installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reflects on the Wounded Knee Massacre:

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

But it is never too late to change the future.

Just some guys hanging out?

[285 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the older fellows did their hanging out leaning against or sitting on cars. Maybe these guys are just hanging out. Maybe not. They might be waiting for someone to unlock the garage door so that they can get to work. Notice that the guy on the far right has a newspaper. Is it opened to the sports pages? To Nancy ? Maybe the guy who’s out in front is demonstrating a new dance step. Maybe he’s goofing off for the camera. Is he really that tall? Or is he just out in front?

[Click for a larger view.]

It’s hard to tell what’s at this address today.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, teems with obliquity. I thought it’d be fun to say that. It’s a very difficult Stumper — an hour’s worth for me. It teems with obliquity.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Hoe foe.” There’s an obvious answer to guess here, and it would seem to fit with 1-A, four letters, “Significantly lessen,” but it would be wrong.

10-D, thirteen letters, “Royal news source since 1665.” Whoa.

14-D, four letters, “Virtual reality purveyor.” Interesting to see clues that blur digital and analog categories.

15-D, six letters, “Quick charge.” Really clever.

17-A, fifteen letters, “They say it ain't so, formally.” Great clue and answer.

18-D, thirteen letters, “Seat of power.” Robert Moses’s swivel chair at the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority? Uh, no.

20-A, eight letters, “Hand axes?” Obliquity, teeming.

23-D, five letters, “Smart devices.” See 14-D.

28-A, five letters, “Primary course.” I can’t believe I got this one, no crosses.

37-A, three letters, “Galaxy part.” Which kind?

41-D, six letters, “Beatles ‘Be thankful I don't take it all’ tune.” Maybe the only giveaway in the puzzle.

50-D, four letters “Forest* A *___ (online woods management tool).” I’ve seen this strange clue before, with slightly different wording, in a Brad Wilber Stumper. I never thought I’d see it again.

51-A, fifteen letters, “Iconic song on AFI’s 100 list (recorded 1500+ times) named for a ’55 film you've likely never heard of.” You’re right about that. It’s quite a song.

54-A, three “Letter letters more often seen with one S.” Slightly awkward.

55-A, six letters, “Standing trial.” See 14-D.

My favorite in this puzzle: 4-D, eight letters, “Special feature.” My first thought: the goodies the Criterion Collection adds to a DVD.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

End of a garbage era

The invoice that came in yesterday’s mail marks the end of one era and the beginning of another: our garbage service has, finally, abandoned its dot-matrix printer and tractor-feed perforated forms for a laser printer and shiny multi-color forms.

[What do you take out: the garbage, or the trash?]

What It’s Like to Be ...

A newish podcast: What It’s Like to Be ... , hosted by Dan Heath. Short interviews with people from varied lines of work. I’ve listened to “A Forensic Accountant,” and “A Long-Haul Trucker,” “A Stadium Beer Vendor,” and “A TV Meteorologist.” Smart, respectful, not a moment wasted. It’s one of the best podcasts I’ve heard.

[I think I’ve been listening long enough to suspect that there will be not be a George Costanza joke in the episode with a marine biologist.]

Drag and drop, broken in Sequoia

What was I doing wrong? I couldn’t drag a file to a folder. I couldn’t drag an image into an app.

I tried restarting — no soap, and looked around online. The problem is in macOS 15, and I find it almost unbelievable that Apple could release new system software with such a glaring problem. Hardly an intelligent move. (Ahem.)

A temporary fix, from the developer of Yoink and other apps: open the Activity Monitor, choose CPU or Memory, and quit the process ScopedBookmarkAgent. I’m not sure how long that fix will work, but it’s working for me now.

*

And still working, even though ScopedBookmarkAgent is up and running again.

“A goddamned Greek chorus”

As time went on, Robert Caro writes, Robert Moses “had no respect for anyone’s opinion but his own.” From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Once Moses had at least listened to his own aides, allowed them to argue with him, tested his opinions against theirs. But now that had changed, too. In the In the first days of his power, he had hired aides whose opinions were worth listening to. He had selected men for ability, engineering ability, legal ability. The aides he was hiring now had also to possess an additional ability: the ability to say, “Yes, sir.”

“Lunches at Moses’ office were really starting to get pretty sickening,” recalls one top La Guardia official. “Even if he only had one guest, he would always have six or eight of his ‘Moses Men’ — ‘my muchachos,’ he used to call them — at the table and it was all ‘Yes, sir, RM,’ ‘No, sir, RM,’ ‘Right as usual, RM!’ When he laughed, they laughed, only louder — you know what I mean. Christ, when he made a statement, you could look around the table and see eight heads nodding practically in unison. It was like a goddamned Greek chorus.”

Reuben Lazarus, invited by Moses to become chief counsel for the Triborough Bridge Authority, refused — “I didn’t want to be a doormat for any man” — and when Moses asked him to recommend one of his assistants, Lazarus selected the one who, he had noticed, “doesn’t answer back,” and in the taxi taking William Lebwohl to lunch with Moses, told him what was going to be expected of him: “You’re going to have to be able to bend over and take a kick in the ass and say ‘Thank you, sir,’ with a smile. ” At the luncheon, Lazarus recalls, “Lebwohl did not answer back.” Moses hired him — and kept him on as Triborough counsel for more than thirty years.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

[It’s not that the chorus necessarily agrees with someone in authority; it’s that the chorus speaks as one, at least usually.]

Deco elevator

[From Shopworn (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). Click any image for a larger view.]

Yes, the display takes up the screen as the elevator rises.

Shopworn (starring Barbara Stanwyck) is streaming in the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Columbia collection.

William Labov (1927–2024)

He was a giant of linguistics. The New York Times has an obituary.

I had the chance to hear William Labov give a talk in 2007, “The Growing Divergence of English Dialects in North America.” I took that chance, and wrote something about the talk.

A Labov comment about communication and truthfulness that has stuck with me: “A parrot can say ‘I will meet you downtown at 8:00’ — but he won’t be there.”

Two related posts
The long e : A vowel shift in the wild

A Christmas song

I’ve come to think of it as the greatest Christmas song of all time (sorry, Mel Tormé). From 1929, it’s the Cotton Top Sanctified Singers, with “Christ Was Born on Christmas Morn.”

Christmas 1924

[“Yule Joy for Poor, Aged, Young And Ill.” The New York Times, December 26, 1924.]

In 2024, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate it. Happy Kwanzaa to all who celebrate it. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote yesterday, “Happy holidays to you all, however you celebrate ... or don’t.”

A Christmas Eve joke in the traditional manner

Found on a whiteboard and shared by my friend Stefan Hagemann:

What did Santa pay for his sleigh?

The answer is in the comments.

One series, eleven movies

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

A Man on the Inside (created by Michael Schur, 2024). An eight-episode series with a silly premise: Charles, a retired professor of engineering (an ultra-natty Ted Danson), answers a newspaper ad and goes undercover to investigate a theft in a retirement community. Anyone who’s been around the world of assisted living and memory care is likely to find this series’s representations true to life (and death). There are funny complications: the private investigator employing Charles poses as his daughter, which means that his daughter has to pose as his niece; a cranky resident sees Charles as his sexual rival. The best moments: Charles’s conversations with fellow residents Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Gladys (Susan Ruttan), and his recitation of the “seven ages” speech from As You Like It. ★★★★ (N)

*

Strange Way of Life (dir. Pedro Amodóvar, 2023). A short, in which a sheriff, Jake (Ethan Hawke), and a rancher, Silva (Pedro Pascal), once lovers, reunite after twenty-five years apart. But it’s Jake’s hunt for Silva’s son (a suspected murderer) that brings about the reunion. A witty queer western, with all the proper tropes, even a three-way standoff. Best line, spoken by Silva: “Years ago, you asked me what two men could do living together on a ranch.” ★★★★ (N)

*

The Whale (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2022). From a play by Samuel D. Hunter, in which Charlie, a morbidly obese teacher of online English composition classes, hides from his students (claiming a faulty webcam) and from the world. An estranged daughter (Sadie Sink), a friend and caregiver (Hong Chau), and a missionary from an end-times sect (Ty Simpkins) become frequent visitors, and Charlie’s hard-drinking estranged wife (Samantha Morton) drops in just once. Present in memory is the now-dead male partner for whom Charlie left his wife and daughter. A credible performance from Fraser, but the other principals are unconvincing, the dialogue stilted, the production stagey, the storyline improbable in so many ways (call 911, dammit), the ending absurd, and the talk about honest and amazing writing so patently ridiculous that I remembered what I heard a person in the row in front of me whisper to a companion during a (Broadway!) performance of ’night, Mother : “I can’t believe people are taking this seriously.” ★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Columbia feature

Ladies of Leisure (dir. Frank Capra, 1930). Barbara Stanwyck is Kay Arnold, a “party girl” (we might say “escort”); Ralph Graves is Jerry Strong, an aspiring painter from a wealthy family. Chance brings the two together, and the differences in their stations in life threaten to pull them apart. Marie Prevost as Kay’s roommate and Lowell Sherman as a client bring some comedy to the slow-moving proceedings. Best scenes: the painter’s studio, seen through a rainy window, and Kay’s impassioned speech to Jerry’s mother. ★★★

Forbidden (dir. Frank Capra, 1932). Stanwyck again, as Lulu, “old lady four-eyes,” a small-town librarian who uses all her savings for a cruise to Havana and finds herself in a cabin across the hall from Bob (Adolphe Menjou), a charming older man. Their romance continues ashore in Havana and back in the States, but Bob is married (of course) and has political ambitions. Menjou is no “Bob” (such a strange name for such a glamorous man), but Stanwyck is great as a woman torn between preserving a relationship and preserving her dignity. Ralph Bellamy appears as a cruel newspaperman and Bob’s rival. ★★★

Shopworn (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). “A waitress — oh, my heart!” Barbara Stanwyck can’t catch a break: here she plays Kitty Lane, waitressing in a college-town café, where a romance develops with medical student David Livingston (Regis Toomey). His mother (Clara Blandick) doesn’t approve, but not to worry: everything gets worked out, and surprisingly so, in a mere seventy-two minutes. Best moment: the mother and her lawyer walking to Kitty’s humble house. ★★★★

*

Best. Christmas. Ever! (dir. Mary Lambert, 2023). Heather Graham and Brandy Norwood play one-time best friends whose families spend Christmas together because of faulty driving directions. Weird inappropriateness, abundant stupidity, and snow that seems to appear and disappear. An incoherent mess. And I’ll never think of the words “moving furniture” without thinking of this movie. ★ (N)

*

Meet Me Next Christmas (dir. Rusty Cundieff, 2024). The premise: strangers Layla (Christina Milian) and James (Kofi Siriboe) met in an airport lounge and promised to meet next Christmas for a Pentatonix concert if they’re unattached. But tickets are scarce, which means that Layla must hire a personal concierge, scruffy Teddy (Devale Ellis), to find a ticket so she can meet tall, handsome James. And you can already guess that it will be Teddy who carries the day — but you could not have guessed that the quest for the ticket will require Layla and Teddy to compete in a drag-heavy lip-sync contest. As Elaine observed, the members of the Pentatonix serve as the gods in this story, watching over the mortals as they lip-sync their way to happiness. ★★ (N)

*

The Only Girl in the Orchestra (dir. Molly O’Brien, 2023). A short documentary portrait of Orin O’Brien, double bassist, the first woman to join the New York Philharmonic (in 1966), about to retire after fifty-five years as her frankly adoring niece was making this film. O’Brien must be one of the coolest octogenarians in the world: she’s smart, funny, ultra-energetic, still devoted to her students and her instrument. Fun fact: O’Brien, who never sought stardom, is the daughter of early movie stars George O’Brien (who starred in Sunrise ) and Marguerite Churchill. I’m always interested in films that show people doing their work — Crumb, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and ‌Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb come immediately to mind — and this movie does that, beautifully. ★★★★ (N)

*

Internes Can’t Take Money (dir. Alfred Santell, 1937). Barbara Stanwyck is Janet Haley, gangster’s widow, ex-con, factory worker, searching for the little daughter her late husband took away. Joel McCrea is Dr. Jimmie Kildaire — the screen’s first Dr. Kildaire — and once again a relationship develops across class boundaries. Plenty of barroom talk and gangsterism, and some lewd talk using popcorn as a metaphor (at least they weren’t talking about moving the furniture). Along with McCrea and Stanwyck, the Art Deco hospital is a star in this movie. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Night Walker (dir. William Castle, 1964). Barbara Stanwyck’s final big-screen role, as Irene Trent, the wife of a spooky blind inventor. Irene dreams of a lover; her husband dies in an explosion (or does he?); and the imaginary lover appears to Irene in what might be called waking dreams. Only a kind lawyer (Robert Taylor, Stanwyck’s one-time husband) is there to stand by Irene through this strange ordeal. Sheer craziness, lots of screams, several real scares, and a screenplay by Robert Bloch, writer of the novel Psycho. ★★★ (YT)

*

Karen Kingsbury’s Maggie’s Christmas Miracle (dir. Michael Robison, 2017). I subject myself to a random Hallmark movie every “holiday season,” but alas, this one was not as bad as I’d hoped, with its predictable elements (sad backstories, an endearing waif, the Black friend, moments of awkwardness) offset by some genuinely grown-up moments between the two (straight, white) principals. There is also an ample helping of weirdness: a diner that becomes a pop-up Christmas shop in winter, a tradition called the Christmas Stroll for which the stores on Main Street close (?!) and the storekeepers hand out cider and cocoa, the insane number of Christmas decorations in the male lead’s apartment (count the trees), and the miracle that ties the elements of the story together. ★★ (H)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Raindrop.io)

Marisa Paredes (1946–2024)

“Best known to international audiences for her work with directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Guillermo del Toro and Roberto Benigni.” Best known to me from her work with Almodóvar. The Guardian has an obituary.

Mary Miller and Fabrice Ambrosini

In Mother Jones, David Axelrod writes about Donald, Leon, and the German far-right:

“So where’s my German friends?” Donald Trump asked a fawning Mar-a-Lago crowd on Election Day, before flashing a grin and a thumbs up for a photo with a group of young men. The German friends in question: Fabrice Ambrosini, a former politician forced to resign after a video surfaced of him doing a Hitler salute; Leonard Jäger, a far-right influencer who has promoted the Reichsbürger movement, an extremist group behind a failed coup attempt in 2022; and Phillipp-Anders Rau, a candidate for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party.

And here’s a Guardian article with more photographs and more background on the visitors.

Mary Miller, our representative in Congress (IL-15), was there too. Here she poses with Fabrice Ambrosini:

[Mary Miller (R, IL-15) and Fabrice Ambrosini. Click for a larger view.]

This photograph, credited only to “Instagram,” appeared at MeidasNews, where Miller is misidentified as “Carol.” No, that’s our Mary, the one who said that “Hitler was right on one thing.”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Raindrop.io)

[I sent MeidasNews a correction in November, but the mistaken caption remains unchanged.]

Valves, Valvoline, and singing circuits

I borrowed Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk from the library. “I want to learn more about our next president,” I told the librarian. She laughed. Once home, I opened at random and read these paragraphs:

One unfortunate trend in the 1980s was that cars and computers became tightly sealed appliances. It was possible to open up and fiddle with the innards of the Apple II that Steve Wozniak designed in the late 1970s, but you couldn’t do that with the Macintosh, which Steve Jobs in 1984 made almost impossible to open. Similarly, kids in the 1970s and earlier grew up rummaging under the hoods of cars, tinkering with the carburetors, changing spark plugs, and souping up the engines. They had a fingertip-feel for valves and Valvoline. This hands-on imperative and Heathkit mindset even applied to radios and television sets; if you wanted, you could change the tubes and later the transistors and have a feel for how a circuit board worked.

This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. They never knew the sweet smell of a soldering iron, but they could code in ways that made circuits sing. Musk was different. He liked hardware as well as software. He could code, but he also had a feel for physical components, such as battery cells and capacitors, valves and combustion chambers, fuel pumps and fan belts.

In particular, Musk loved fiddling with cars. At the time, he owned a twenty-year-old BMW 300i, and he spent Saturdays rummaging around junkyards in Philadelphia to score the parts he needed to soup it up. It had a four-speed transmission, but he decided to upgrade it when BMW started making a five-speed. Borrowing the lift at a local repair shop, he was able, with a couple of shims and a litte bit of grinding, to jam a five-speed transmission into what had been a four-speed car. “It was really able to haul ass,” he recalls.

Clichés, cheap alliteration, corny phrasing, wild generalizations — all lurching toward utter inanity in that final sentence. “He recalls” — aaugh.

This book has many other pages. But I am hauling ass back to the library.

“What’s a magazine?”

In today’s Dustin : “What’s a magazine?”

See also “What’s a BVD?” and “What’s a cash register?”

Life and print in New Jersey

[Zippy, December 22, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is on the edge, the edge of a ledge, having decided that life is not worth living if it’s in New Jersey. Why? Because print is dying.

In Februrary 2025, The Star-Ledger will go digital and The Jersey Journal will shutt down.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Raindrop.io)

Nothing orange can stay

New York City subway cars will be losing their orange and yellow seats in 2025. Replacing them: blue and yellow seats.

[I’m not happy about linking to the New York Post, but its article has the best photographs of the old and new seats.]

Another disappearing pharmacy

[5027 3rd Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday I posted the tax photograph for a Sunset Park pharmacy, one of countless commercial and residential properties torn down to make way for Robert Moses’s Gowanus Parkway (later Expressway). Robert Caro tells the story in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, pages 520–525. Here’s a second Third Avenue pharmacy that was torn down, five blocks away, the Koblentz Pharmacy.

It’s not possible to know the date of this photograph, or any tax photograph (“1939–1941” is all we’ve got), but this one looks as if it was taken after work on the parkway had begun. Other tax photographs from this part of Third Avenue show the El tracks already gone. The pharmacy and the adjacent storefronts in this photograph look empty. And many of the windows of the apartments above the pharmacy have been boarded up.

The Moses project took out the pharmacy and the one-story storefronts on 51st Street. The rowhouses stayed. You can see them in Google Maps. And once again, a building that is now on a corner still bears scars from the removal of a neighboring building.

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor Stan Newman, composing as “Lester Ruff.” As usual, I didn’t find this puzzle significantly easier than a regular Stumper. Indeed, I stumbled around to find a couple of starting points that led nowhere: 60-A, three letters, “TV planet where humor is forbidden” and 22-D, three letters, “Easter precursor.”

And then I saw 1-D, four letters, “Romney’s former firm ___ Capital.” Elaine was working as a word processor there when we met, until she became horrified by what she was typing — pages about downsizing and outsourcing — and quit. All of which is to say that I knew 1-D, and I-D opened up the rest of the puzzle, each answer leading to others with nary a hitch.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

17-A, eight letters, “Glut.” Noun? Verb?

21-A, seven letters, “Polish place.” City? Furniture item?

15-D, three letters, “Tributary lines.” I was really thinking that there might be a very short word having to do rivers.

31-A, eleven letters, “Charles III greeter, 7/5/24.” Okay, whatever.

32-A, three letters, “2010s head of State initials.” Read carefully.

36-A, eleven letters, “Sportscast's replay ‘pen.’” A pretty macho name for what is, after all, a writing instrument.

36-D, seven letters, “First to commercialize laptops (1985).” How long ago that seems.

54-D, three letters, “____ Brum (auto accessory).” Brum? I thought this must be some foreign-car item.

55-D, three letters, “Continuously reduced.” Clever.

My favorite in this puzzle: 7-D, seven letters, “Needle holder.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

David Gergen on the country’s future

“On a recent afternoon as we were sitting together watching the migrating birds and capturing the last of the autumnal sunshine, my father awoke to more words of clarity.” Katherine Gergen Barnett, David Gergen’s daughter, wrote down her father’s fleetingly lucid thoughts: “My father, David Gergen, has dementia. Here are his reflections on the path forward for our country” (The Boston Globe ).

Fiorello La Guardia, a balanced ticket

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). Fiorello La Guardia was running for mayor:

La Guardia possessed qualifications for making the run beyond the fact that, half Jewish and half Italian, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran of German descent, himself a Mason and an Episcopalian, he was practically a balanced ticket all by himself.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

Jimmy Walker’s Versailles

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). The Central Park Casino was “a quiet little night club,” built for Mayor Jimmy Walker and friends in what had once been a “Ladies Refreshment Salon” in Central Park:

But the Casino was more than a restaurant or a night club. The Casino was Jimmy Walker’s Versailles. Friends joked that the Mayor spent more time there than he did at City Hall. When his limousine pulled into view, the doorman would scurry inside and signal the orchestra, so that when Beau James and Betty entered, it would be to strains of “Will You Love Me in December?” Holding hands with Betty, sipping champagne while she sipped beer, the Mayor would receive the parade of visitors to his table with careless ease, and sometimes, when Betty asked him to dance, he would even arise, pinch-waisted and slim in the tuxedo with the shiny lapels that people were beginning to copy, and glide with her around the floor.

Caro adds: “Mrs. Walker’s place was apparently Florida, the state to which she had been packed off for an extended vacation.” One person in Manhattan, one in Florida: shades of a contemporary couple.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

[Betty: Walker’s mistress, Betty “Monk” Compton.]

Things into other things

Today, in Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, a speech balloon thought cloud becomes a real cloud. See also street arithmetic.

All OCA Nancy posts (Raindrop.io)

“Just the one?”

I went to pick up a prescription. Name: last, first. Date of birth. Picking up one prescription. And the question: “Just the one?”

Just the one? Meaning merely the one? Or the one alone, the one being the one thing absolutely needful?

James Brown can explain.

Moses and Dressler

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Now Robert Moses’ eyes were turning again to the city around which, as a youth, he had wandered “burning up” with ideas for its improvement.

I never thought to think about it before, but I would wager that Steven Millhauser read The Power Broker in doing the research that went into his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996). Martin Dressler walking around the city and imagining its possibilities is a nineteenth-century version of Robert Moses walking around his New York. The difference is that Dressler imagines the vertical possibilities; Moses, the horizontal ones.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Raindrop.io)

Moses Mongol

[Click for a larger view.]

Robert Moses with a Mongol pencil, as seen in “City of Tomorrow,” the sixth episode of Ken Burns’s New York: A Documentary Film (2001).

From childhood’s hour, the Mongol has been my favorite pencil — and remains so, even if Robert Moses used one.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol pencil posts (Raindrop.io)

16h 57m

[No. Just no.]

Here’s what the Screen Time widget on my iPhone was showing last night. A quick search for ios screen time wrong showed that a wildly wrong time is a common problem. Turning the phone off and back on didn’t help. Nor did deleting the widget, turning Screen Time off and back on, and re-adding the widget. After trying that fix, my phone showed a never-changing 30s in the widget and 14h in the app.

What finally worked: turning Content & Privacy Restrictions on and back off.

Through it all, the bar graph kept looking realistic.

A 2025 calendar, last call

Free: a 2025 calendar, in large legible Gill Sans, licorice and cayenne and tangerine (as Apple would have it), three months per page. Minimal holiday markings: New Year’s Day, MLK Day, Juneteenth, Halloween (rhymes with tangerine) , Thanksgiving, Christmas. Readable from the other side of the room, depending on the room.

As the print-center person said last year, “It looks like an old-fashioned calendar.” Because it is one, made in the new old-fashioned way, with the Mac app Pages and tables.

You can download here (via Google Drive): a 2025 calendar.

[Vignette effect not included.]

Censor Breath

[Yours for the Asking (dir. Alexander Hall, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

The joke fills the screen — perhaps a joke on the Code, but certainly a joke on Sen-Sen, which masked all sorts of stuff on one’s breath. (Ida Lupino’s Gert Malloy is three sheets to the wind.)

Here’s more than anyone needs to know about Sen-Sen.

Related posts
Sen-Sen movie dialogue : Sen-Sen and Zippy

Dr. Max Korowitz

[“Druggist Is Mayor, Judge, Boss and Prof at Times.” The Brooklyn Eagle, November 4, 1936. Click for a larger view.]

An indefatigable reader tracked down the pharmacist whose pharmacy was destroyed to make way for the Gowanus Parkway: Dr. Max Korowitz, who bought the pharmacy at 4523 3rd Avenue in 1916.

Thanks, Brian.

There is no there there

[4523 3rd Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“When Commissioner Moses finds the surface of the earth too congested for one of his parkways, he lifts the road into the air and continues it on its way”: thus gushed The New York Times in 1941 on the creation of the Gowanus Parkway (later Expressway), a six-lane highway that wreaked havoc in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. Robert Caro tells the story in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, pages 520–525.

This building, at the southeast corner of 46th Street and 3rd Avenue, was one of many that were destroyed to make room for the parkway. The first rowhouse that followed this corner building was also destroyed: the block now begins with the rowhouse with the bow window. Look at this corner in Google Maps and you can see that it’s as if buildings have been sheared away.

I think of the kid in knickers as a silent witness to a neighborhood’s destruction.

*

A reader tracked down the pharmacist: Dr. Max Korowitz, who had been at this address since 1916. In 1936, he was the subject of an article in The Brooklyn Eagle.

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives posts (Raindrop.io)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, started out so easily: 1-A, letters, four letters “Personal magnetism, these days.” I know that word, if only from my reading. With 1-A in, the top-left corner came together in no time. And then I spent nearly an hour finding an answer here, an answer there, followed by a visit to our favorite restaurant. Back at the puzzle after eggplant with beef and pad ped with chicken, I began to see answers right away, and the whole puzzle fell into place. What had been so difficult about it anyway? Nothing that “spicy number three” couldn’t overcome.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-A, five letters, “Light measures.” Evidence of this puzzle’s trickiness.

5-D, five letters, “Less likely to pack it in.” See 5-A. The first letter of these answers was the last letter I wrote in.

9-D, nine letters, “Inexpensive lockout insurance.” I thought at first that it might have to do with management and labor.

10-D, ten letters, “Salsa ingredients.” This one fooled me for a while.

11-D, nine letters, “Patronizing instruction.” Cleverly clued.

24-A, six letters, “Doctor without borders.” Really cleverly clued.

26-D, ten letters, “Offer homage.” I think the pad ped helped with this one.

31-D, nine letters, “Without compunctions.” I don’t know why this clue uses a plural.

32-A, three letters, “Tee-vee connection.” I was wrong before I was right.

34-A, fifteen letters, “Without restriction.” A lively answer.

34-D, four letters, “Galaxy cluster.” Maybe the best clue I’ve seen for this answer.

36-D, five letters, “‘The Father of ____’ (Edmond Hoyle).” CARDS? GAMES? What?

41-A, five letters, “Alien power plants.” Please, Leon, go to Mars to look. And don’t come back. (Leon: sic .)

46-A, five letters, “Divine water.” I was a bit awed when I saw the answer.

49-A, four letters, “Tree hugger.” Long time ago, I’d say.

54-A, ten letters, “Fanfare orchestra participant.” Pretty arbitrary if you don’t know what a fanfare orchestra is, and I didn’t. The clue I’d prefer: “Miles alternative.”

My favorite in this puzzle: 30-D, nine letters, “What some desks and dungarees are made with.” Like, crazy, man!

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Discouragement

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road’s proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently “dirty,” there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses’ beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using “white” beach areas — the best beaches — by a system Shapiro calls “flagging”; the handful of Negro lifeguards (there were only a handful of Negro employees among the thousands employed by the Long Island State Park Commission) were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that “Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks. ” Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently — and the Governor never raised the matter again.

In 2014, Robert Caro wrote that Robert Moses’s racism was “unashamed, unapologetic.” The Power Broker makes that clear. If you plan to read The Power Broker, you may want to wait to click on that link. It gives away the book’s final sentence.

Related reading
All OCA RobertCaro posts (Raindrop.io)

[Sidney M. Shapiro: one of Moses’s engineers. Roosevelt: Franklin Delano, then governor of New York.]

Hands and AI

I realized last night while watching The Late Show that when I see ordinary human hands on a screen, they’ve begun to look like the work of AI.

[The hands in the screenshot are real and belong to Timothée Chalamet.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[From Anything Goes (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

The notebook belongs to Sir Evelyn Oakleigh (Arthur Treacher, later of the Fish & Chips), who is collecting American slang — gangster slang, really. Why is his pencil positioned in the middle of a word? Because he’s correcting snitch to snatch. Know your slang!

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings posts (Raindrop.io)

At the dentist, or barber

I went to see my old dentist, who was now working as a barber. He was in a large shop with one barber chair (red and white) and many chairs along the walls for waiting customers. I took a seat and a former student (not a favorite student) came in and sat down next to me. She said that it looked like I lost weight, and I thanked her for the compliment. She was there for a cavity: “Too much gin and tonic,” she explained.

My dentist, now barber, stepped out for a break. It seemed that everyone in the complex where he worked took a break at the same time. When he came back in, he was carrying a can of air freshener that he had won in a trivia contest by knowing and singing the song “Keep the Home-Fires Burning.” And everyone in the shop sang the song along with him.

The sources I can think of here: getting crowned last week (thanks, Grape-Nuts), reading a friend’s post with a campfire in it, and buying candles yesterday to, yes, keep the home fires burning. To the best of my knowledge, I have never heard “Keep the Home-Fires Burning,” though I’ve heard an adaptation, “Keep the Campfires Burning,” in an episode of Lassie. And yes, that’s Ken Osmond (better known as Eddie Haskell) near the Scout campsite, ever the saboteur.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Raindrop.io)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]

Interstate freakout

Driving home in our Prius post-Thanksgiving I saw the Tire Pressure Monitoring System light come on. We were on an interstate — yikes! — and had just passed the aftermath of a minor collision, with two cars on the shoulder and debris scattered on the road. I had dodged the debris, but now I wondered if I had run over a shard of something and sprung a leak.

We took the next exit and checked the tires — no obvious problem. We’ve had the TPMS light go on before, after getting the tires rotated, so we tried the TPMS reset trick, restarted the car, hoped, and drove on. But the light stayed on. Crap. We got some air closer to home, where we found that all four tires were slightly under pressure, no doubt because of a sudden drop in temperature (about thirty degrees) in the four days since we had last inflated the tires. And the light stayed on.

Rather than pay to have the tires’ sensors checked (an expensive proposition), we figured we should just get new tires (we’re about halfway there). So we called our dealer, who ordered tires but said that we could cancel if the problem went away. It didn’t: the light stayed on, and on. But yesterday, Elaine got gas, and the light went off, and it was only then that we remembered that we had gotten gas shortly before the light went on. It turns out that uncapping and recapping the Prius gas tank can create the problem, and that uncapping and recapping the gas tank can make the problem go away. To quote a redditor: “Last time I check[ed] it was the gas cap.”

And it’s been the gas cap for us before, setting off not the TPMS light but the Check Engine light. O brave new world, that has such gas caps in’t.

One more commentary on the election

It’s by Rebecca Solnit: “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do” (The Guardian ).

Twelve movies

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

Our Betters (dir. George Cukor, 1933). From a play by Somerset Maugham, with a screenplay by Jane Murfin and Harry Wagstaff Gribble, and it would have been a nice addition to the Criterion Channel’s recent Rebels at the Typewriter feature. “There’s something about these people that makes me feel terribly uncomfortable”: yes, and it took our household some time to realize that we were watching a Wildean comedy, and that these idle rich folk in a great country house were not to be taken seriously. Constance Bennett stars as Pearl, Lady Grayston, an American heiress who takes a lover after discovering that her British lord of a husband has a mistress and married only for money. At the great house (where that husband is never to be seen), we find Lady G, her lover, her sister (with old-fashioned ideas about — ha! — monogamy), a duchess, the duchess’s kept man, various hangers-on, and Ernest (Tyrell Davis), a tango dancer who puts a considerable amount of pre into pre-Code. ★★★ (TCM)

[Tyrell Davis and Constance Bennett.]

*

Living (dir. Oliver Hermanus, 2022). An adaptation of Ikiru (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1952), which I haven’t seen. In 1950s London, Bill Nighy is Mr. Williams, a widower, a government bureaucrat, an icy enigma to his underlings, a figure of no interest to his grown son and daughter-in-law. Mr. Williams suddenly disappears from the office, and when he’s spotted by a neighbor, he appears to have taken up with the much-younger Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), a former co-worker. A poignant (though never merely sentimental) movie about leaving the world a little better than you found it. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel features Noirvember Essentials, Columbia Noir, and Queer Noir

Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945). It’s Noirvember at the Criterion Channel, so I had to watch. It’s a brilliant movie, a story of fate (or contingency), made on the cheap, imaginatively filmed to make up for the absence of elaborate sets, with a great performance from Ann Savage, who speaks some of the grimmest dialogue in noir: “We all know we’re gonna kick off someday. It’s only a question of when.” ★★★★ (CC)

Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944). The idea of queer noir might make a viewer rethink the relationship between Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), neither of whom has ever married, with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) as MacMurray’s amour on the side. I’ve watched this movie so many times, and this time I noticed the many pictures of fighters in Neff’s apartment, the way the pouring-drinks-in-the-kitchen scene looks unmistakably like a post-coital moment, Neff’s “I love you too” (to Keyes), and the funny moment when “Tangerine” plays in the background, and — surprise — it’s diegetic music. One incredible line: “There’s a very good osteopath in town I’d like to see before I leave.” ★★★★

Pickup Alley (dir. John Gilling, 1957). The alleys are figurative, the places where narcotics are handed off from one transporter to another: in London, Lisbon, Rome, Naples, and Athens. Victor Mature gets top billing as an FBI agent, but he has little to do; the real stars here are Trevor Howard as a thoroughly convincing sadistic criminal kingpin (that’s why it’s called acting) and Anita Ekberg as his “doll.” Sudden violence, flashy music (Richard Rodney Bennett), and some French Connection flavor. A surprising asset: Bonar Colleano, as a shady American in Rome, selling souvenirs and information. ★★★

Brighton Rock (dir. John Boulting, 1948). From a Graham Greene novel, with Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown, a psychopathic teenaged hoodlum, Carol Marsh as his devoted girlfriend Rose, and Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold, an indefatigible music-hall type who turns amateur investigator to expose Pinkie’s wrongdoing. “I’m like those sticks of rock,” she says. Caution: if you don’t pause for the newspaper article at the beginning and then switch on subtitles before the dialogue begins, you’ll likely be lost. ★★★★

Cry of the Hunted (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1953). In the Queer Noir feature, and it’s not difficult to see why: Police lieutenant Tunner (Barry Sullivan) pursues escaped convict Jory (Vittorio Gassman) from Los Angeles to the swamps of Louisiana, where they end up in a shared struggle to survive. The homophile element in their relationship is clear from the start: after the two men fight it out in a prison cell, they sit side by side in front of a cot, panting, with Tunner offering Jory a post-fightal cigarette. With a great chase scene along the Angels Flight funicular. Best line: “I’m not going to walk out on him!” ★★★★ (CC)

[Feet vs. train: a bit like The French Connection chase.]

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Starring Ida Lupino

Anything Goes (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1936). It’s fun to see Ida Lupino playing an English heiress, and it’s fun to see the young Ethel Merman (a force of nature), but there’s not much more for me to like in this adaptation. Only four of Cole Porter’s songs remain (with lyrics substantially rewritten for the censors), with songs by other hands added. Bing Crosby is Merman’s co-star, and he’s just weird, as he often is, doing an odd whistling bit as he rises from or sinks into a chair. I thought I’d try it ’cause it’s Porter but now think I hadn’t oughter, ’cause heaven knows, this movie blows. ★★

Yours for the Asking (dir. Alexander Hall, 1936). When casino owner Johnny Lamb (George Raft) takes pity on impoverished socialite Lucille Sutton (Dolores Costello), his pals hire con artists Gert Malloy (Ida Lupino) and Dictionary McKinney (Reginald Owen) to pull him out of Lucille’s clutches, and complications follow. Fun to see Lupino playing a lowlife pretending to be one of the smart set: her shifts in diction are entertaining in themselves. James Gleason, Edgar Kennedy, and Lynne Overman add considerable comedy to the proceedings. I wish this movie had been made before the Code kicked in. ★★★

*

Breath of Fire (dir. Hayley Pappas and Smiley Stevens, 2024). I seem to find out about cults only when they become the stuff of Hulu and Max documentaries. So it is here, with the story of Katie Griggs, aka Kundalini Katie, aka Guru Jagat, a teacher of Kundalini yoga with a Venice, California studio and celebrity clients. Griggs’s story brings in the stories of two other teachers, Yogi Bhajan, aka Harbhajan Singh Puri, a one-time customs inspector, and Hari Jiwan Singh Khalsa, aka Stephen Oxenhandler, aka Toner Bandit. Unpaid labor, sexual abuse, conspiracy theories, telemarketing fraud (that’s where the printer toner comes in), Yogi Tea, an awful lot of gullible people, and an awful lot of money. ★★★★ (M)

*

Raising Arizona (dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1987). Lunacy abounding: ex-con H.I.(Nicolas Cage) and ex-policewoman Ed (Holly Hunter) marry, and when they cannot conceive, they kidnap a quintuplet, Nathan Arizona Jr., whose parents, they figure, already have enough kids on their hands. And the search for the missing infant begins. The comedy here is broad, feral, silly, smart, and unending. What made me laugh the hardest: a hand rising through mud, followed by a leg rising through mud — or is that mud? ★★★★ (CC)

*

Surveilled (dir. Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz, 2024). Ronan Farrow looks at cyber-surveillance by authoritarian regimes, western democracies, and private entities, all spying on their enemies and objects of suspicion. This documentary is a dud, never offering a clear or even a bewildering explanation of how devices are hacked or of what can be done to prevent hacking. What we get instead is Farrow, always impeccably dressed, always with a different pen in hand, saying that it’s nice to finally meet a person, and then reading off questions deadpan, as if reenacting a genuine interview. Low point: Farrow being interviewed by David Remnick in posh New Yorker surroundings. ★ (M)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Raindrop.io)

YAS (Yet Another Scam)

I got this message last night as Elaine and I were strolling to a restaurant:

Your group order has been picked up from Chili's Grill & Bar and your Dasher is on the way! :-) - Msg&Data rates may apply. Reply STOP to cancel.

And soon after:

Your Dasher Abduvali is approaching with your group order from Chili's Grill & Bar. Enjoy your meal!

The message came from a number with a 201 area code — northern New Jersey. I was in New Jersey in October. Did someone get hold of my info? I immediately had visions of forgetting about dinner and being stuck on the phone with my bank sorting out the problem. So:

I checked the account. No charge for Chili’s.

I searched for the number that texted me and found it at 800notes, where other recipients of texts from this number had reported it: “Thanks for your order from Han Dynasty,” “Thank you for your order from Gus’s World Famous Chicken.”

Of course — a scam.

Scam efforts increase as we near the end-of-year holidays. Keep calm and carry on.

Recently updated

Gibson sues One cease-and-desist order later, Trump’s knock-off Les Pauls are off the market.

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with polarization.

Survey says sloppy

I received an e-mail more than three weeks ago asking me to complete a survey about my university and community. I stopped after the second question.

The first question asked if I’m a member of the campus or of the community. As a retired prof, what do I answer? I don’t get emergency text-alerts, because they’re not available to retired faculty, which makes me think that I’m not considered a member of the campus. Retired faculty who live at some distance would seem to be members of neither the campus nor the community. But since I’m a seven-minute walk from campus and have library privileges and free parking for life, I decided to say that I’m a member of the campus.

It was the second question that brought my survey to a stop:

Which picture best represents how closely aligned with [the university] and the community are CURRENTLY in terms of shared goals and concerns?

As written, this question makes no sense: the word with makes it gibberish. For a moment I thought that the question was asking whether I was aligned with the shared goals and concerns of the university and the community. I know of course that the question is supposed to be asking how closely the university and community are aligned. But it doesn’t ask that.

As I suspected, this question did not originate with an administrator in my university. It’s taken from a survey instrument called the Optimal College Town Assessment, a source credited, if obliquely, on my university’s survey form. But someone at my school screwed up the OCTA’s question, which should read

Which picture best represents how closely aligned your campus and community are CURRENTLY in terms of shared goals and concerns?

And I now see that someone also screwed up the survey question that follows:

Which picture best represents how closely aligned with [the university] and the community would be IDEALLY at some future point in terms of shared goals and concerns?

That question should read

Which picture best represents how closely aligned your campus and community would be IDEALLY at some future point in terms of shared goals and concerns?

After stopping at the second question, I wrote a polite e-mail to explain why I thought that the survey needed tweaking. IDEALLY, there would have been a correction. A follow-up e-mail to clarify retiree status and note the troublesome with would have done the trick. CURRENTLY, I’ve had no reply.

Yes, we all make mistakes. But we can correct them too.

Harvard student to her peers: read

Claire V. Miller is a first-year student at Harvard College. In an opinion piece for the The Harvard Crimson, she writes that her fellow students should read books:

Harvard students complain about readings constantly. They lament any assignments requiring they conquer more than twenty-five pages as tedious or overwhelming (if they aren’t passing the work off to ChatGPT). It’s far too rare that we’re assigned a full book to read and rarer still that we actually finish them.

Literature is worryingly absent from many Harvard students’ course of study. My proposal? The College should instate a new requirement: an English course.

By which she means a course in literature. And yes, she’s an English major.

See also Natalie Wexler’s recent commentary “Becoming a Nation of Non-Readers.” Wexler points out that the National Council of Teachers of English says that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Got memes? (Read the NCTE statement, and you’ll see that I’m not joking.)

See also Nathan Heller’s “The End of the English Major,” in which Stephen Greenblatt wonders whether literature departments should spend more time on television.

I recall on more than one occasion a student writing on an evaluation form that the upper-level gen-ed course I was teaching was the first in which they’d read a book in college — in other words, a whole book, from start to finish. Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Invisible Man, whatever. They were grateful.

Related posts
“AWOL from Academics” : “The End of the English Major”

“NO FOOD FINER”

[234 East 41st Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Not just a diner: the diner. I can imagine that the song “Dinah” — is there anyone finer? — might have had something to do with the jaunty slogan on this establishment’s sign.

[Click for a larger view.]

Today, there’s an entrance to a parking garage.

[From the 1940 Manhattan directory.]

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

On Willa Cather’s birthday

Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873.

From a letter to William Lyon Phelps, critic and professor, May 29, 1943. Phelps has sent along a comment from J.M. Barrie about A Lost Lady. In her reply, Cather recalls that, through a friend, Barrie had used “gentle pressure” to secure an autographed copy of My Ántonia :

I did not take it seriously, for I don’t think writers often care about autographed copies. (After all, isn’t the one real and only autograph in the book itself, on every page of it?)

But Cather sent a signed copy.

Heber Taylor has also taken note of Cather’s birthday.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Raindrop.io) : All OCA posts from Cather’s letters

[A Lost Lady was published in 1923, and Barrie died in 1937. The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is, I believe, Kate Chin Park’s third Stumper. Her first prompted me to write “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” Her second prompted me to say, once again, “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” And I’ll say it now again, “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” Today’s puzzle is a terrific challenge, filled with surprising, tricky stuff. I bounced around looking for a place to start and found one at 32-D, letters, “Obstetric eponym.” Ah, memories.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Asset from the Greek for ‘favor.’” Good to know.

4-D, nine letters, “Insurance for fair play.” Something to do with poker and antes? No.

9-A, six letters, “Descriptor for some couples.” This one had me fooled at first.

9-D, eleven letters, “Reflection of a skeptic.” Fun to see.

14-D, four letters, “Base pay?” It’s a wonderful thing when a constructor can render the most familiar words strange.

18-A, six letters, “Back up.” A nice example of this puzzle’s trickiness.

23-D, eleven letters, “Documentary procedure.” Parse every word of the clue.

37-D, nine letters, “Beat it.” I wrote in an answer, no crosses, but sure it was right. It was.

38-A, fifteen letters, “Solving skill.” Especially apt in a crossword.

42-A, three letters, “Digest, say.” See 18-A.

57-D, four letters, “New Looney Tune ____ Go Bugs.” A fun (loony) way to clue a familiar crossword answer.

61-A, eight letters, “Much-anticipated global decline?” Yes, but so what? I’ve never understood the fascination.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, four letters, “Folkie from Charlotte.” Because I only understood the answer several hours after finishing the puzzle. Oh! — that’s what it means.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Raindrop.io

I’m trying out Raindrop.io, a bookmarking service that looks very promising.

Here’s a public page for Orange Crate Art. And here, for demonstration purposes, is a page with all posts tagged squirrels. Not as compact as a Pinboard page, but it’s a page, right there, available to anyone, no subscription needed.

Lead Belly and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”

From Dust-to-Digital, a post about Lead Belly on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death. With the songs that were the origin of “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” Not new news, but news to me.

A related post
Lead Belly at the MLA

I just adore a penthouse view

[Click for a larger view.]

I don’t know what’s up (sorry) with that tree, but it’s been like that for years, though not always with a penthouse atop.

See also yesterday’s tree.

[Post title with apologies to Green Acres.]

Pinboard tags again

The behavior of Pinboard tags has puzzled me. I use a Pinboard account to create public tags for Orange Crate Art posts. The tags are supposed to work for everyone, taking an OCA reader to a Pinboard page with an index — okay, a list — of all posts with that tag.

In July 2021 I found that tags were working that way only if the reader was logged into a Pinboard account. As I’m always logged in, I thought that I must have dumbly missed something obvious — that tags always only worked for someone logged into a Pinboard account. (Two e-mails about that to Maciej Cegłowski, Pinboard’s developer, went unanswered.) In September 2021 tags were once again working for everyone, Pinboard account or no. Now tags are again working only for someone logged into Pinboard. I found a workaround:

pinboard.in/search/u:M.Leddy/?query=

And now the workaround no longer works for anyone not logged into a Pinboard account.

I found — finally — an explanation from Maciej Cegłowski in a Google Group, pinboard-dev:

The intent is for all public Pinboard pages to be visible without a login. However, user+tag pages in particular are somewhat expensive to generate on the fly, so a crawler that iterates through them can quickly bog down the site.

In the past, it was fairly easy to block or throttle this kind of crawling. But in recent months, I've seen a rise in distributed crawling from China+Singapore IP addresses, with no patterns that would make the traffic easy to block. So I’m forced to either put pages behind a login, or have the site become unusably slow for everyone.

If I have to I’ll block the entire PRC address range, though I’m looking for alternate solutions that are less drastic. But I just want people to know the reason for the back-and-forth behavior on public pages.

Ugh. I hope there’s a fix. Incidentally, there’s never been an acknowledgement on the Pinboard website of the problem with public tags. The website now announces a “big code cleanup underway.”

[And as you may have noticed, I’ve removed the widget with links to the top twenty OCA tags from the OCA sidebar.]

Towne Branch subdivision

[Click for a larger tree.]

I photographed this tree — I call it the Towne Branch subdivision — in fall 2020 and 2022 and again in fall 2023. In 2024 Towne Branch continues to be popular with established families and first-time homebuyers. Close to schools, shopping, and public transportation (power lines). This fall I counted six squirrel nests, five visible from this angle.

Initialism

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The Twenties was an age for heroes, of course, and if 1927 was Lindbergh’s year in the New York press, 1928 was Moses’. Albert Einstein, who announced his theory of relativity in that year, was all but ignored in the city’s thirteen daily newspapers, but New York’s reporters strove for new adjectives to describe the park builder, one writer concentrating on his physical attributes (“tall, dark, muscular and zealous”), another on the mental (“a powerful and nervous mind”), a third on the moral (“fearless,” “courageous”) to describe “Rhodes Scholar” Robert A. Moses, Robert B. Moses, most frequently Robert H. Moses (reporters could not seem to reconcile themselves to his lack of a middle initial).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

I did not draw the glasses.

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

*

9:17 a.m.: That was fast. The answer is in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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