Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, and it’s a tough one. Fifty-two minutes for me, and I was prepared to give up and get a hint when I hit upon another possibility for 1-A, eight letters, “Where locks are picked.” And the rest of the northwest corner fell into place.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

8-D, three letters, “Cal Poly U. city.” Now I get it.

10-D, four letters, “He’s into financial analysis.” I wasn’t fooled.

25-A, four letters, “Coffee cup holder.” I learned something.

26-A, nine letters, “Upped the pressure on.” Oof.

27-D, five letters, “MyFamily Rainbow Bone, e.g.” I thought this must be something like a My Little Pony cutie mark. Because granddaughters.

30-A, six letters, “Spat’s close relative.” Nicely misdirective.

31-A, thirteen letters, “BBC’s home, as often announced.” Getting this answer felt strangely reassuring.

35-A, seven letters, “Compound in supermarket soups and sauces.” Ick.

38-A, nine letters, “Ergs, dynes, etc.” Well, they’re units, right? But oof again.

39-D, six letters, “First in episodic drama creation.” Now I understand first.

45-A, four letters, “‘Terrible swift sword’ user.”

My favorite in this puzzle: 51-A, eight letters, “Maltese cross candidate.” Far out.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

WSL

On the local news:

“This isn’t even the apex of the warm weather machine.”

Translation: It’s gonna get hotter.

[WSL: Weather as a Second Language. See also Crazy weather.]

Narrative economy

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue, trans. Katrina C. Atwood (Penguin, 2015).

Here are three unrelated passages that show a remarkable respect for narrative economy. After I collected them, I thought they might make an odd little story.

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue is the third volume in Penguin’s Little Black Classics series. It’s a saga of travel, poetic performance, and the deadly battle between two poets to win the hand of Helga the Fair.

I am now out of this post.

Etymonopoly

“Buy up every language on the board so you can reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language and thereby win”: that’s the objective in Etymonopoly: A Free Print-and-Play Game for Language Lovers.

As the game pages print, you might like listening to Michael Rosen and Laura Spinney discuss Proto-Indo-European on the BBC Radio 4 program Word of Mouth : “The language that changed the world.” But first you might need to buy some A4 paper for printing.

Ghost-standard science

Curiouser and curiouser:

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.

Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.

Read it all: ““The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist” (NOTUS ). AI at work? Or at play? See also Real newspaper, fake books.

[I’ve omitted one link from the passage I’ve quoted, as it went back to the article itself.]

Cage match, anyone?

Yona T. Sperling-Milner, a Harvard undergrad, offers a brilliant, funny, immodest proposal:

I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success. Secretary, I hope you brought your mouth guard.

Read it all: “Come at Me, Bro” (The Harvard Crimson ).

Mr. Varsity Blues speaks

From The Chronicle of Higher Education podcast College Matters, Jack Stripling interviews Rick Singer, the college-admissions consultant at the center of an admissions scandal: “Mr. Varsity Blues Claps Back.” It’s a remarkable performance of whataboutism and self-justification.

The questions that don’t get asked: What about the student who wasn’t accepted to a school because someone whose family had the means to hire you was accepted instead? And what about the student who missed out on a scholarship because someone whose family had the means to hire you got it instead?

Cheating the system is not a victimless crime.

Intimations of mortality

I was teaching something pre-Gilgamesh, all about mortality. We were sitting at desks, loosely arranged in the classroom. A student in the far corner of the room began to freak out: she said that she was realizing that she was going to die.

“We’re all dying,” I said. “Every day brings us closer to death, and I’m further down the road than you are. But at the same time, we’re living. All of us, we’re all living.”

I looked at the clock, and it was ten past the hour. We had run twenty minutes over. And there was no class waiting to get in the room, and nobody in my class had made a move to leave.

A possible influence on this dream: mortality, duh. But also a moment when a student told me she had been unable to sleep all night after reading Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.” My words in the dream jibe with the poem.

I remember finding “Aubade” in the Times Literary Supplement and xeroxing copies for Jim Doyle and myself. The publication of this poem was something of an event — Larkin had more or less stopped writing, or at least publishing — and I remember walking into a class Jim was teaching to give him a copy, hot off the copy machine.

*

An influence that I overlooked: watching Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), with a tubercular yakuza, living while dying.

This is the thirtieth teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. It’s only the second such dream in which nothing has gone wrong. The other: teaching a novel with a cover price of $69.95. I don’t consider it wrong if a student has a strong response to a work of literature. Nor do I consider it wrong to run twenty minutes over with an attentive and willing group of students, so long as there’s no one waiting to get into the room.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

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

Angst repellent

A tip that circulates widely but is new to our household: when you’re about to go on vacation, take a photograph of the knobs on your stovetop.

If you’re wondering why anyone would want to do that, you’re not a good audience for this tip.

Pen and pencil sighting

[From Intruder in the Dust (dir. Clarence Brown, 1949). Click for a larger view.]

That’s Will Geer as Sheriff Hampton. And in his pocket — no question — an Eversharp Skyliner, a pen designed by Henry Dreyfuss. The distinctive cap is a giveaway. But what about the pencil?

[Juano Hernadez (Lucas Beauchamp), Geer, Claude Jarman Jr. (Chick Mallison), David Brian (John Gavin Stevens). Click for a larger view.]

It’s a Dixon Ticonderoga. The ferrule is the giveaway. Notice that the pencil has been accessorized with a clip. You wouldn’t want your pen or pencil falling out of your pocket.

With three dark green bands on its ferrule, the Ticonderoga must be the recognizable pencil in film. I’d put the Eberhard Faber Mongol in second place — it’s sometimes a tough call in black and white. The Eberhard Faber Blackwing? Distinctive, of course, but only if you get to see its ferrule from the proper angle. When we watch movies: “Is that a Blackwing?” “Go back.” And it’s often impossible to decide.

Related reading
All OCA pen and pencil posts (Pinboard)

Sardine girl summer

“Everything in the past month has become all things sardines!” USA Today explains: “What is ‘sardine girl’ summer”? And The Everygirl offers tips: “It’s a Sardine Summer: Here’s How to Embrace the Cheeky Trend.”

I amused myself by inventorying the instances of elegant, or inelegant, variation in these reports:

~ petite fish
~ salty snack
~ tiny fish
~ healthy, cheap snacks
~ inexpensive snack

Since 2017, “small oily fish” has been my own deliberately dumb inelegant variation on “sardine” — like “slender yellow fruit” for “banana.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Scott Pelley’s commencement address

Every member of the reality-based community would do well to read Scott Pelley’s commencement address to graduates of Wake Forest University.

Eleanor Roosevelt (in the OCA sidebar) wrote that “Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.”

Scott Pelley’s address offers impetus to hope and try.

Twelve movies

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

Wanted for Murder (dir. Lawrence Huntington, 1946). Eric Portman stars as Victor James Colebrooke, aka Tom Maren. There’s good reason for him to want to renounce the name Colebrooke, a name that helps to explain his compulsion to kill women. A superior thriller with Hitchcock overtones and London locations. Creepiest scene: the diary. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Noir and the Blacklist

Intruder in the Dust (dir. Clarence Brown, 1949). From William Faulkner’s novel, a detective story of sorts, in which the murder of a white man is pinned on a Black man, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez). A handful of courageous people — the lawyer John Gavin Stevens (David Brian), his nephew Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr.), the son of the Mallison family’s maid, Alexander (Elzie Emanuel), and an eccentric spinster named Miss Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson) — join forces to stave off a lynching and solve the crime. As in To Kill a Mockingbird, the point seems to be that white people can do the right thing, but Intruder in the Dust is great filmmaking nonetheless. Filmed on location in Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi, with brilliant cinematography by Robert Surtees. ★★★★

The Lawless (dir. Joseph Losey, 1950). “This is the story of a town and of some of its people, who, in the grip of blind anger forgot their American heritage of tolerance and decency, and became lawless.” In a California agricultural town, a fight between breaks out at a dance and just like that — the fight is cast as a riot, and a young Latino migrant worker, Paul Rodriguez (Lalo Rois), is arrested, branded a “fruit tramp,” and paraded before TV cameras in a theater of cruelty. When a newspaper editor (Macdonald Carey) stands up for Rodriguez, greater trouble follows, and good grief, is this movie made for these times. The relationship that develops between the editors (Carey, Gail Russell) of the town’s two newspapers, The Union and La Luz, suggests a healthily multicultural America that, seventy-five years later, seems still out of reach. ★★★★

*

Passing (dir. Rebecca Hall, 2021). From Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga star as Irene and Clare, affluent Black women, old school friends, now suddenly reunited. Clare, married to an unabashed racist, has chosen to live her life passing as white, which makes her renewed friendship with Irene and subsequent frequenting of what might be called Black spaces a dangerous matter. All the while, Clare must continue to perform as white, and the toll her double life takes — on her and on others — is the story the movie tells. Brilliant performances from the two principals, luminous cinematography by Eduard Grau. ★★★★ (N)

*

Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (dir. Questlove, 2025). It’s an immensely joyous and immensely sad story: joyous when it’s about the music of Sylvester Stewart and the Family Stone, sad when it charts the downfall of a musician losing himself to drugs and becoming pathetic in an effort to maintain his appeal to the public. As André 3000 observes, “The same thing that made you great becomes the thing that kills you.” An abundance of archival performance clips and interviews with band members and other musicians — with everyone but Sly himself, who wasn’t capable of an interview — make this documentary necessary viewing for anyone who cares about American music and culture. The great revelation of this documentary for me: Sly Stone was a musical prodigy and played keyboards for and produced countless musicians and groups before forming the Family Stone. ★★★★ (N)

*

Riffraff (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1947). It begins with a celebrated scene, silent and unnerving, but the movie doesn’t live up to its start. In Panama, private detective Dan Hammer (Pat O’Brien) is hired to find a missing map, in a routine story with overtones of Casablanca (exotica) and The Maltese Falcon (love and betrayal). Walter Slezak, in a Sydney Greenstreet white suit, is a passable bit of riffraff; Anne Jeffreys as a Brigid O’Shaughnessy stand-in is another; O’Brien alas is the weak link, not convincing as a private eye or love interest. But George E. Diskant’s inventive camera makes the movie worth watching. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Joe Smith, American (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1942). An everyman (Robert Young) is taken off a defense-plant assembly line to work on a secret project, and before he knows it, he’s kidnapped by spies who want to know what he knows. Blindfolded and beaten, he remains remarkably attentive to his surroundings, and after a lucky escape he’s able to lead friends and police to the house where he was held captive. Marsha Hunt is Joe’s wife Mary (an everywoman); Darryl Hickman is their son Johnny (an everykid who adds an interesting subplot about American history and keeping secrets). We can now count ourselves among the small number of people who realize that Joe’s story was the model for the 1959 movie The Big Operator. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Shadowed (dir. John Sturges, 1946). I sometimes wonder what it was like to watch television in the 1950s or early 1960s and see actors whom you vaguely remembered from the movies. Let’s say you were watching a Christmas episode of Lassie and recognized the mysterious Claus-like toy repairman Mr. Nicholson: “Say, isn’t that” — why, yes, It’s Lloyd Corrigan, who stars in this B-movie as an agricultural implement salesman and amateur golfer whose discovery of a corpse on a course puts him and his daughters (Anita Louise, Terry Moore) in peril. A perfectly okay B-movie. And a helpful demonstration of why it’s a good idea to keep agricultural implements around the office. ★★ (YT)

*

Rachel and the Stranger (dir. Norman Foster, 1948). Big Davey (William Holden), a widowed farmer still in mourning, travels to a nearby stockade to get himself a — “wife” isn’t quite the right word; “partner,” certainly not. Rachel (Loretta Young) is an indentured servant, whose contract Big Davey buys, and they marry only for the sake of propriety, so that Rachel can keep house and teach Davey’s son. The icy relationship between husband and wife begins to change when Davey’s old friend Jim (Robert Mitchum) comes to visit. A disturbing, albeit ultimately sentimental, portrait of a woman regarded as a domestic commodity. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Nonnas (dir. Stephen Chbosky, 2025). Based on the true story of Jody Scaravella, or Joe (Vince Vaughn), as the movie calls him, a transit worker who opens a restaurant on Staten Island, Enoteca Maria, to honor his dead mother. What makes the restaurant different: Joe hires older Italian-American women, nonnas, or grandmas, to do the cooking. I liked the chance to see Lorraine Bracco, Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, and Brenda Vaccaro, all women of, as they say, a certain age, front and center in funny and poignant performances. But this movie makes the average Hallmark movie feel like film noir — there’s way too much sugar in the sauce. ★★★ (N)

*

The Strip (dir. László Kardos, 1951). We didn’t realize that we had seen it before until a few minutes in. It’s a noir with music, with Mickey Rooney as a drummer accused of murder, telling his story in a movie-long flashback with many glimpses of real-world Los Angeles nightspots. The music is the reason to watch: it’s mostly by Louis Armstrong and three of his All-Stars: Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, and Earl Hines, with Rooney stepping in to serve as their loud, tasteless drummer. William Demarest plays a kindly nightclub owner and sometime-pianist; Sally Forrest, a cigarette girl/dancer; and James Craig, a mustachioed mob boss who looks like he stepped out of Jack Elrod’s Mark Trail. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Deadline — U.S.A. (dir. Richard Brooks, 1952). As the days to its sale run down, a great daily paper, The Day, doggedly investigates a mobster (Martin Gabel) and his likely involvement in the death of a young woman. It’s a terrific newspaper movie, with a premise that recalls The Naked City and a picture of a newsroom that looks forward to Lou Grant (Nancy Marchand, who played the owner of the TV show’s newspaper, seems to be the reincarnation of The Day’s owner, Margaret Garrison (Ethel Barrymore). As The Day’s editor, Humphrey Bogart seems stagey, and he has little chemistry with the ex-wife he’s still pursuing (Kim Hunter) or his reporters, who include Jim Backus, Ed Begley, and Paul Stewart, all of whom wear fedoras indoors. Best scene: the walkway above the printing presses. ★★★ (TCM)

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

One sanewashes, the other doesn’t

Headline and subhead from The New York Times :

Trump Praises Military, and His Return to Office, in Memorial Day Remarks

In a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, President Trump highlighted the sacrifices of soldiers and their families but also his own achievements.

Headline and subhead from The Guardian :

Trump peppers Memorial Day speech with personal boasting and partisan attacks

President paid tribute to fallen soldiers at Arlington cemetery, and also veered off into rally-style remarks

[Comma, not semicolon, in the post title to respect the source.]

A tale of two headlines

And subheads. George Conway called attention to the contrast in a Bluesky post. From The New York Times :

Trump Gives Commencement Address at West Point, Stressing a New Era

The president said the graduating cadets would enter a service no longer subject to “absurd ideological experiments” or “nation-building crusades.”

And from The Independent :

Trump gives rambling speech about trophy wives, golf and the ’great late’ Al Capone in politically-charged West Point address

President praised his administration’s efforts to end DEI programs and crack down on immigration while addressing West Point’s Class of 2025

One paper sanewashes; the other doesn’t.

[The Times devotes a single sentence to the stranger things: “Mr. Trump also rambled at times as he took shots at his opponents and told stories about his famous golf buddy Gary Player and how the real-estate developer William Levitt came to have a ‘trophy wife.’” His rambling story about Levitt, builder of segregated housing developments, took almost five minutes to tell. C-SPAN has the entire speech. There is, of course, no transcript at the White House website. In 2017 Trump told his Levitt story, with crude embellishments, at the National Boy Scout Jamboree.]

Memorial Day 1925

[“Women Pacifists Barred at Church Door While Officer Within Asks Preparedness.” The New York Times, June 1, 1925.]

Or in the words of a twelve-year old Bosnian girl that serve as one of two epigraphs for the final chapter of Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994): “I want that this is the last war in my life.”

The Times goes on to report that Captain Crawford threw the folder away and that “several lads, among them a number that have signed up for this year's citizens’ military training camp at Plattsburg, stood across the street and jeered the women.”

Candy stores of The Naked City

We are in The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948). Detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) is down on the Lower East Side, searching for a killer. It’s a hot day. But look — there’s a candy store.

[Click any image for a larger view.]

And here’s the crowd outside the candy store before or after the scene was filmed.

In New York City language, candy store didn’t signify a shiny mall outlet with enormous tubes of artifically colored treats. My attempt at a definition of a term that has eluded Merriam-Webster, from a 2021 post:

can·dy store \ˈkan-dē-ˈstȯr\ n : an urban retail establishment usu. selling candy, chewing gum, lottery tickets, magazines, newspapers, novelties, tobacco products, and stationery, often with a soda fountain attached

In the twenty-first century, the bodega has replaced the candy store as the center of small-scale urban commerce.

Halloran has come into this candy store on business, but he’s also looking for some refreshment: “Got any cold root beer?” he asks. And Molly Picon replies: “Like ice!” She recognizes the man in a photograph Halloran has been asking about all over the Lower East Side, so right away, Halloran is on the phone to Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald). And so we get to see a second candy store, right across the street.


These two establishments are ready for their tax photographs.

[129 Rivington Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections.]

[130 Rivington Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections.]

And now they’re ready for their close-ups.

[129 Rivington Street. I know — the number reads 123.]

[130 Rivington Street. Click for a larger view.]

If you’re wondering about Deities: Egyptian Deities were a brand of hand-rolled cigarettes, produced by the New York tobacconist Soterios Anargyros.

These buildings still stand. The storefront at no. 129 may still be for rent, as it was in 2023 (Google Maps). The storefront at no. 130 houses a nail salon, Hello Nails.

This post is a mere drop in the urban bucket. Scouting NY has a three-part series on filming locations for The Naked City: 1, 2, 3. And the Criterion Channel has as an exclusive Bruce Goldstein’s astonishingly well-researched documentary Uncovering “The Naked City.” (But contra Goldstein, that is Molly Picon in the candystore, not Celia Adler.)

And as Mark Hellinger never said: There were elevenyteen candy stores in the Naked City. These have been two of them.

Related posts
All OCA candy store posts (Pinboard) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

HCR on American anti-intellectualism

Heather Cox Richardson:

While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university famous for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States.

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Richardson offers a short course in American anti-intellectualism.

[One hundred years ago today, John T. Scopes was indicted for teaching evolution.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is another solid sender by Kate Chin Park. As I wrote when I solved what I think was her first Stumper, “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” This one was fairly easy going until the northeast corner, which took me a good long time to figure out.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

9-A, six letters, “Mix’s opposite.” From the northeast corner. Tough to see this answer.

9-D, letters, “Making possible.” See 9-A.

10-D, ten letters, “Reached back for.” Another struggle in the northeast.

11-A, four letters, “Hurried home horizontally.” Clever.

19-A, seven letters, “Most remote region.” An unusual answer.

21-A, seven letters, “Expert’s 10-second-or-so sprint.” I went to the dictionary to understand the answer.

38-D, eight letters, “Traditional plastic now sold in paper.” Huh. Something one might know without knowing that one knows it.

42-A, six letters, “Awl cousin.” I think I learned this word from a poem. Which poem?

46-A, five letters, “Digital contents displays.” That’s my kind of digital content.

48-D, five letters, “Ice plane?” I suppose the clue must carry a question mark, but I’d like it better without one.

58-A, eight letters, “State that’s above suspicion.” Yikes!

58-D, three letters, “Setting for the ’25 Oscars.” Heh.

61-A, six letters, “What pros have.” Can someone explain this answer? (Answer: yes, in the comments.)

My favorite in this puzzle: 14-D, five letters, “Check out in a small space.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

How then?

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Old Church Bell.” In The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard (1983).

For me, a good reason to keep reading these stories despite their morbidity, piety, and sentimentality is that every two or three hundred pages, Andersen comes out with something that knocks me flat.

See also this meditation on a herbarium.

Whither the full stop, aka the period?

From the BBC Radio 4 show Word of Mouth, Michael Rosen and Christian Ilbury discuss the fate of a punctuation mark: “The End of the Full Stop?”

Cue the English Beat.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

No tie

I just told Elaine about a Bluesky post by Ron Filipkowski, commenting on a screenshot of Jake Tapper and his co-author hawking their book:

All day, every day. The 24 hour CNN host book sale network. Got to take the tie off when you switch seats from host to guest.

And then I switched on BBC News and who do I see? Jake Tapper, no tie, hawking his book.

*

And now it’s the PBS NewsHour. Different shirt, no tie.

Recently updated

Words about my mom Now with “Do good.”

Whither the semicolon?

From The Guardian: “Marked decline in semicolons in English books, study suggests.” With a quiz.

Related reading
All OCA semicolon posts (Pinboard)

[Sometimes the news of the day is so awful that all I can do here is something else.]

Made-up word of the day: reat

Elaine made it up, but she’s left it to me to write up:

reat \ˈrēt\ verb
reat \ˈret\ ; reating \ˈrē-tiŋ\

intransitive verb
1 : to read while eating
2 : to eat while reading
     | We like to reat at the breakfast table.

More made-up words
Alecry : Alread : Fequid : Humormeter : Lane duck : Lane-locked : Misinflame and misinflammation : Oveness : Power-sit : Plutonic : ’Sation : Skeptiphobia

Real newspaper, fake books

From 404 Media: the Chicago Sun-Times Heat Index, a guide to summer in the city, printed a reading list that includes non-existent AI-generated books, complete with brief descriptions.

And: “Other articles in the Heat Index insert have what appear to be AI-generated sections as well.”

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Kristi Noem is indeed ignorant

An Atlantic headline: “Kristi Noem Should Probably Know What Habeas Corpus Is.” But in the browser tab: “Kristi Noem Is Dangerously Ignorant.” I’ll go with that one.

If Noem were a regular reader of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, she would know what habeas corpus means. Richardson wrote about the term last Thursday:

The Magna Carta established the writ of habeas corpus—a prohibition on unlawful imprisonment — and the concept of the right to trial by jury.

Famously, it put into writing that: “No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.” It also provided that “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”

Contra NBC News, Noem didn’t “struggle” to define the term or “mangle” her response. Struggling is what you see kids do during a spelling bee. Mangling is what you see when someone mixes up their words. Noem’s answer was prompt, fluent, and utterly, dangerously ignorant.

Mental acuity

In action:

“We got the Olympics and then we got through Gianni, he’s the boss, we got, he’s a friend of mine, and we got the World Cup, I got them both, and I said, ‘Man, I won’t be president. I won’t be pre — I got the Olympics and the World Cup and I won’t be president and they’re gonna forget that I got them, nobody’s gonna mention it,’ because you know, a little bit, that’s the way life is. And then they rigged the election, and then I said, ‘You know what I’ll do? I’ll run again and I’ll shove it up their ass.’”

[Applause.]

“And that’s what I did, and all of a sudden, and then, realized, I said, ‘You know what? I got the Olympics, I got the World Cup, and I got the 250th.’” Look at the way this works out. So if they would’ve left us alone, and wouldn’t have cheated on the election, and wouldn’t have rigged it, I would’ve been retired right now. I would’ve been happily doing something else, and instead they have me for four more years, can you believe that?”

[Applause.]

My transcription, from this video clip. It’s excerpted from a meeting of the Kennedy Center board, with the full video posted on the White House website. Yes, this madness is on the White House website.

You can see a much longer demonstration of acuity if you begin at the 25:00 mark. He brags that he got the Olympics and the World Cup (but refuses to take credit for “the 250th”), moves to dissing Barack Obama, stumbles over the pronunciation of Los Angeles, comments on the Los Angeles fires and the goodness of water, goes back to dissing Obama, and recounts a telephone conversation with a Scandinavian Olympics official who was “starved for love.” And then picks up with “We got the Olympics,” &c.

“There is for me—there was”

Fernando Pessoa, from a prose fragment, in The Selected Prose, ed. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove, 2022).

See also William Carlos Williams and Wallace Shawn.

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

[Pessoa wrote in English, French, and Portuguese. He wrote this fragment in English.]

Tom Waits on homelessness

Tom Waits appears in an episode of the Italian documentary series Il fattore umano [The human fate]: “Ultima fermata,” a report on homelessness in the American south. He talks, sings “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” a bit of “The Fall of Troy,” a bit of “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” (Brecht-Weill), and reads from his poem Seeds on Hard Ground, published as a chapbook in 2011 and reprinted in 2025, with all proceedings going to organizations providing services to homeless people.

You can watch the episode (it’s all in English) at YouTube. (At the series website it has Italian subtitles.) You can read Seeds on Hard Ground at Flickr. (That’s apparently with Waits’s approval, because his website has a link.)

Related reading
All OCA Tom Waits posts (Pinboard)

[Waits’s website gives the episode title as “The Last Ride,” but I think the title is properly translated as “Last Stop.” Waits is an advocate for the homeless; there’s no reason to think he has ever been homeless himself.]

Another Apple Dictation failure

I texted my paper-centric daughter: “By the way I just ordered a 2026 muleskinner.”

No, not that.

Molina. Ball skin. Bull skin. Molina.

I thought it might be better if I pronounced it just as two syllables, but no luck. Malkin. Malkin. Mole skin. Close.

I tried four again. Mosquito.

Anyhoo (as my son would say), 2026 Moleskine planners are now available. And though I vowed in 2024 that I’d never buy another year’s /mōl-uh-SKEEN-uh/, I have.

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

[To its credit, Apple Dictation now gets most of these right. Glenmorangie is still Glenn Margie. Oedipus (edifice ) is now purpose, and rathskellar is now wrath scalar. Derrida briefly appeared as itself before resolving to da da.]

Gateway books

“It has to start somewhere, this business of being an intellectual. Chances are, it doesn’t start well”: Timothy Aubry writes about gateway books.

Mine: Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Other Inquisitions; Albert Camus, The Plague; Franz Kafka, Selected Short Stories; Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (yes, really). All of them independent reading in high school. I had access to a good bookstore. But I have no idea how I found my way to these writers.

Morrell Meats (and true weirdness)

[73-75 Kent Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I chose a Brooklyn street at random, started looking for some human interest, and found this photograph. I got a kick out of the guys standing on the corner, who know they’re being photographed. You can click on the photograph for a larger, jollier view.

As for no. 77 Kent Avenue, that large building in the background, I looked up Morrell Meats and found that in 1940, they had three locations in Brooklyn:

[Click for a larger, meatier view.]

And then I found that John Morrell has been a brand since 1827. The brand is now owned by Smithfield Foods, with a plant in Iowa. Here’s some detailed history.

And now for some true weirdness: I was jonesing for liverwurst earlier this week. I give in to my cravings and buy liverwurst twice a year, max — I think of it as a seasonal item. The name Morrell in this photograph seemed vaguely familiar, and then it came to me: that’s the brand of liverwurst, or Braunschweiger, now sitting in our refrigerator.

Bonus weirdness: John Morrell Meats advertised in Life magazine and for at least four years ran contests with a top prize of “His and Her” airplanes. You can’t make this stuff up. Or you could, but there’s no need to, because it’s already real.

Related reading
All OCA liverwurst posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing as Lester Ruff. And this puzzle is indeed les ruff. I started with 11-D, eight letters, “Ovid’s swift maid” and never looked back.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

13-D, eight letters, “Tortuous travels.” Nice.

14-A, nine letters, “The first Harley-Davidson carburetor.” A fun fact, if indeed it’s true.

18-A, five letters, “Chestnutlike.” A bit tricky.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Emulates orcas or beach bums.” Heh.

35-D, eight letters, “Extremely hardy.” And applicable to various life forms.

38-D, four letters, “‘Jeet ___?’ (Aussie’s ‘Had dinner?’).” I’ll take Lester’s word for it.

43-D, three letters, “‘Ausiness’ adder in 2024.” But this one was in my wheelhouse.

44-A, three letters, “Orwellian dictator.” This took me back to sixth grade.

63-A, nine letters, “Clean and green.” And concisely clued.

65-A, four letters, “Elucidation intro.” Maybe the most oblique answer in the puzzle.

My favorite: 66-A, four letters, “A buck or two or twenty.” Just because.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

86

The Guardian looks at the nonsensical claim that a former director of the FBI is calling for the assassination of a president: “What does ‘86’ really mean?”

Or more precisely, what can it mean? The Guardian presents a number of meanings and a number of origin stories, though the origin that Merriam-Webster considers most likely is missing: “a rhyming slang word for nix, which means ‘to veto’ or ‘to reject.’” I think it’s an awake, aware person who suggests that we veto or reject the number 47 before we slide into autocracy for keeps.

I always associate the other number, as a numeral or spelled out, with Tom Waits. It appears in his song “Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)”:

I’ve been eighty-sixed from your scheme
Now I’m in a melodramatic nocturnal scene

It’s almost fifty years since I bought Nighthawks at the Dinner, and I still don’t know who Susan Michelson was. Tom? Anyone?

Oh, now I know: a girlfriend.

Related reading
All OCA Tom Waits posts (Pinboard)

Beneficiaries

A tip for the living: it’s wise to add beneficiaries to bank accounts and such. Doing so will make things much easier for the people of the future. If someone isn’t capable of adding beneficiaries, a person with power of attorney can do it for them.

The reason for this post: a bank employee mentioned to us that so many people don’t think to add beneficiaries for their accounts. And having power of attorney is no help after someone dies: that’s when power of attorney ends.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for adding beneficiaries to your accounts.

[I’m not a lawyer, but lawyers say that beneficiaries trump wills — at least in many cases — and thus avoid the complications of probate.]

Today’s HCR

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about the Magna Carta and Bruce Springsteen. Yes, really.

Letters from an American is required reading in our household.

“Long live the weeds”

I like these lines:

Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Inversnaid” (1881).

Here’s an accurate text of the poem.

[Inversnaid: “a small rural community on the east bank of Loch Lomond in Scotland, near the north end of the loch.”]

Sold a Story returns

The podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong has returned, with five new episodes so far.

Related reading
More OCA Sold a Story posts

Not for; not for; not for

A killer paragraph by J. Michael Luttig, writing in The Atlantic:

For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims. Not for the crippling global tariffs he ordered unilaterally; not for his unlawful deportations of hundreds of immigrants to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), El Salvador’s squalid maximum-security prison; not for his deportation of U.S. citizens to Honduras; not for his defiantly corrupt order from the Great Hall of the Department of Justice to weaponize the department against his political enemies; not for his evil executive orders against the nation’s law firms for their representation of his political enemies and clients of whom he personally disapproves; not for his corrupt executive orders against honorable American citizens and former officials of his own administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security chief of staff who dared to criticize Trump anonymously during his first term; not for his unlawful bludgeoning of the nation’s colleges and universities with unconstitutional demands that they surrender their governance and curricula to his wholly owned federal government; not for his threatened revocation of Harvard University’s tax-exempt status; not for his impoundment of billions of dollars of congressionally approved funds or his politically motivated threats to revoke tax exemptions; not for his attempt to alter the rules for federal elections; not for his direct assault on the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship guarantee; not for his mass firings of federal employees; not for his empowerment of Musk and DOGE to ravage the federal government; not for his threats to fire Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell; not for his unconstitutional attacks on press freedoms; and finally, not for his appalling arrest of Judge Dugan.

Read it all: “The End of Rule Of Law in America” (gift link).

Recently updated

Avoiding good dental hygiene Another look at a troublesome sentence.

Origin of an idiom: “the wind at our backs”

From A.I. Phail’s Everyday Idioms and How They Got That Way (2023):

“The wind at our backs” is an expression that takes us back to the early 1950s.

In that mid-century modern era, fashion designer Hendrik der Vinde (1916–1987) was at the height of his fame. His B-line skirt and chapeau immatériel (“So light, you’ll forget you’re wearing it”) took sophisticated New York by storm. His most sought-after designs, those of his Mountain Greenery collection, with fabric textures meant to resemble topographical maps, were available from only one outlet, Ohrbach’s department store, known through the 1950s and 1960s as the trendsetter in women’s clothes.

Ohrbach’s full-page newspaper advertisements featured der Vinde’s designs with the catchphrase “der Vinde at Ohrbach’s.” And that catchphrase became a watchword among chic urbanites, even making an appearance in Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where it is spoken by Holly Golightly:

“There’s only one designer who can really make me happy, darling: der Vinde at Ohrbach’s.”

By extension, “der Vinde at Ohrbach’s” came to signify any highly desirable consumer good. Through mishearing and mispronouncing, the words were turned into ”the wind at our backs” — or at anyone’s back.

It is likely impossible to pin down a first appearance of this idiom in print. But here is a fine example of its use, though one that might have made der Vinde wince. From ”Around My Kitchen, Around My Town,” Gainsville Bugle-Courier, November 9, 1998:

Thanksgiving will be complete this year. I finally found the Gobbles Beanie Baby I’ve been searching for. I have the wind at my back!

Note: “Gone with the wind” is an unrelated idiom that has been traced to Martha Mitchell’s 1939 novel Gone with the Wind. Mitchell was later known as the fourth wife of Richard Nixon’s surgeon general John Mitchell.

More origins
“Don’t cry over spilled milk” : “At loose ends” : “Lightning in a bottle” : All OCA AI posts and idiom posts (Pinboard)

[If AI is going to be scraping us all, I’d like to contribute to its wealth of knowledge.]

Professorial AI

From The New York Times: “The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It.” An excerpt:

Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings.

Ms. Stapleton asked for a tuition refund.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Avoiding good dental hygiene

My friend Luanne noticed this sentence from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:

The best way to prevent cavities in children is by avoiding excessive sugar intake and good dental hygiene, not by altering a child’s microbiome.

Maybe we can rewrite the sentence:

The best way to prevent cavities in children is by avoiding excessive sugar intake and practicing good dental hygiene, not by altering a child’s microbiome.

But there’s still a problem, because practicing good dental hygiene itself alters a child’s microbiome.

“Alters a child’s microbiome”: such a sinister sound to those words, no? But eating and drinking themselves alter one’s micobiome. Pass the ketchup, please.

*

If you read the comments, you’ll see why I’ve come back to this post. Readers have pointed out two more problems with the sentence:

Does it bother you at all that the person or persons who are being addressed, the ones who would seek to prevent cavities, are being advised to avoid excess sugar intake? Surely it’s sugar intake by the children that should be reduced.

And:

How about “altering a child’s microbiome for the worse” or “degrading a child’s microbiome” or “unbalancing a child’s microbiome”?

Yes, and yes.

And nowI see yet another problem with the original sentence: avoiding sugar and practicing good hygiene are things one can do to avoid cavities, but altering (or degrading or unbalancing) the biome is an effect of something that can be done, if indeed it is an effect of adding fluoride to drinking water.

And it occurs to me now that “cavities in children” sounds strange. Here’s another try:

Avoiding excessive sugar and practicing good dental hygiene are the best ways to prevent cavities. Unbalancing a child’s microbiome is not.

[My attention in this post was to a mess of a sentence. But it’s important to know that according to a 2023 paper, “There is no conclusive evidence that community water fluoridation (CWF) at WHO recommended concentrations for caries prevention has any harmful effects.” And according to that same paper, “fluoride[-]containing oral hygiene products may have beneficial effects on the oral microbiome regarding caries prevention.”]

Goodnight Mutts

[Mutts, May 13, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

Mooch reads to Bip and Bop in today’s Mutts. Which reminds me: Goodnight Moon stamps are now available from the USPS.

Related posts
In the great green room : Goodnight commas : Vocative comma, no comma

A Proust-related plot

From The Times of London: “Proust fans fight to restore his muse’s grave.” The Society of the Friends of Marcel Proust is raising money to restore the burial plot of Alfred Agostinelli, the chauffeur whom Proust metamorphosed into Albertine Simonet in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Related reading
Une campagne de souscription pour la restauration de la tombe d'Alfred Agostinelli (The Society of the Friends of Marcel Proust)

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its tenth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:

Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairytales and Stories

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays

Giovanni Boccaccio, Mrs. Rosie and the Priest (four stories from the Decameron)

Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Anton Chekhov, “Peasants” and Other Stories

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters

Maureen Duffy, That’s How It Was

Gerard Manley Hopkins, As kingfishers catch fire (selected poems and journal excerpts)

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts

Alice Munro, Dear Life

Vladimir Nabokov, The Complete Stories

Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger, The Wine-Dark Sea

John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down

Boccaccio and Hopkins are the first two volumes in the Penguin Little Black Classics set. We are taking breaks from Andersen’s stories and fairy tales with these little books.

Thanks to the translators who brought several of these works to us: Avril Bardoni, Adrienne Foulke,Constance Garnett, Peter Hainsworth, Erik Christian Haugaard, Richard Howard, Tess Lewis, Dmitri Nabokov, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Many books. Really many!

A lion in the yard

I saw a lion wandering our backyard, so I called 911. A cheery female voice answered.

“Hi, this is 911. Thank you for calling. What can I do for you today?”

“I thought people should know that there’s a lion loose in our area.”

“Okay, thanks for calling.”

And before I could give an address, she ended the call.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

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

Grifting on a jet plane

From The Guardian: “Trump reportedly prepared to accept ‘palace in the sky’ as gift from Qatar.” Gosh, is that permitted?

According to ABC’s sources, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, and his top White House lawyer, David Warrington, have pre-emptively concluded that it is “legally permissible” for Trump to accept the luxury gift and then transfer it over to his presidential library.

Both reportedly arrived at that conclusion after lawyers for the White House counsel’s office as well as the justice department said the gifted plane was not conditioned on any official act and therefore was not bribery.

Those lawyers drafted an analysis for defense secretary Pete Hegseth, which reiterated that nothing about the plane violated federal laws prohibiting US government officials accepting gifts from foreign states or their royals. In fact, ABC’s sources said, Bondi’s reading of the situation was that the plane was being given to the US air force and then Trump’s presidential library foundation rather than her boss himself.

<irony>Well, that’s a relief.</irony>

The grifting never stops, not even on Mother’s Day. Why would it?

Happy Mother’s Day

I’ve added some sentences to the post I wrote last month in memory of my mom: Words about my mom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all.

David Souter on the danger of a strongman

David Souter, talking to Margaret Warner in 2012, as heard on the PBS NewsHour last night. My transcription:

“I don’t worry about our losing republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough, as they might do, for example, with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown, some one person will come forward and say ‘Give me total power, and I will solve this problem.’”

AI yi yi

In New York magazine, James D. Walsh writes about AI and higher education. One detail that made my spirit sag:

A philosophy professor ... at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Read it all: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.”

If I were still teaching, I’d cite Ted Chiang:

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

And I’d do the things I describe in this post.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, must one of the most difficult Stumpers ever. I thought about giving up, kept going, and after an hour and eighteen minutes, I had it all. All of the puzzle, that is.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, three letters, “What many are served on their dishes.” And we’re off.

4-A, four letters, “Pot filler.” I thought of the common crossword answer ANTE. One of many instances of misdirection in the puzzle.

8-D, nine letters, “Cut out to be put on.” BESPOKE? TAILORED? Neither fits.

17-D, six letters, “Avoid sounding like a 25-Across.” And 25-A, six letters, is “Sudden expiration.”

26-D, four letters, “Letter followed by two rhymes.” I don’t understand. Just got it.

30-D, nine letters, “Impatient irritation.” Filled it in (correctly) without hesitation.

33-D, nine letters, “Small circle stuff.” The answer reminds me of a blogger, no longer blogging, many of whose interests jibed with mine.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Line outside a bar.” Is it some exclusive joint with a gatekeeper? This clue had me baffled.

47-A, thirteen letters, “Sweet nothings?” I’m sure they’ll appreciate this clue.

48-D, five letters, “ATM output.” See 4-A.

62-A, three letters, “Windows entry point designation.” The horror!

My favorite in this puzzle: 22-A, thirteen letters, “Address book contents.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Purport

Again and again, Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day sends me looking back at my prose. And yes, I sometimes end up making small changes to a number of posts as a result. Today’s tip made me wonder about how I’ve been using purport :

purport, vb., = to be intended to seem <the bill purported to be a $100 bill>. Because the sense is already passive, this verb shouldn’t be put into the passive voice.

And examples follow.

To my surprise, I’ve been using purport correctly, as in a sentence about a hilarious-in-retrospect episode of Murder, She Wrote:

In addition to extended glimpses of Jessica Fletcher wearing what purports to be a virtual-reality headset, there are repeated references to “source codes” (plural).

Garner’s tips are not archived online, but you can subscribe here. Read! Learn! Revise! Or don’t!

Choices of four

I asked Elaine which TV husband she would choose if she had to: Ralph Kramden, Fred Mertz, Ed Norton, or Ricky Ricardo. She chose Norton. I’d say she chose wisely.

But turnabout is fair play. Elaine gave me a choice of four TV wives: Roseanne Conner, Estelle Costanza, Endora, or Phyllis Lindstrom. Cruel, eh?

I chose Phyllis, because, I said, at least I could have an affair, as Phyllis’s husband Lars did. But I forgot that Lars’s affair was with Sue Ann Nivens, WJM-TV’s Happy Homemaker.

Game, set, match to Elaine.

Can and may

Can he? May he? In Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, Sluggo faces off with a librarian in a battle of usage.

Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that it’s often advisable to distinguish between can and may, but that

only an insufferable precisian would insist on observing the distinction in informal speech or writing (especially in questions such as “Can I wait until August?”).

Or in questions such as “Can I get some help finding a book?”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Mary Miller makes Public Notice

Mary Miller (R, IL-15) has made Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice:

Republican Rep. Mary Miller from Illinois, an agricultural state that does a lot of business with China, spun some outrageous propaganda this week during an interview on Real America’s Voice.

"Even people that are feeling a little pain from the tariffs are completely supportive of what President Trump is doing,” she said. “It takes time. The left are liars and the legacy media, they lie."

Miller’s response is a typical example of MAGA projection, since she’s the one lying when she claims that Americans support Trump’s actions on trade. According to a Navigator Research report, 56 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s tariffs, a 15 percent increase since just before his inauguration. A Washington Post poll from late last month showed that 70 percent of independents disapprove of the way Trump is handling tariffs, and it’s worth remembering that Americans haven’t yet really experienced tariff-related inflation or shortages.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve omitted the link that went with Real America News, as it goes to something from CBS News.]

Sleepy

[Screenshots from the April 30 Cabinet meeting. Click either image for a sleepier view.]

If you watch a stretch of footage from this meeting, you can see him zoning out, snapping to, zoning out, snapping to. I trust that sooner or later he’s going to snore.

Got art?

The Met Gala. The Met Gala. The Met Gala. Rinse and repeat.

Is it reasonable to wonder how many of the celebrities who appear at the Met Gala have gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as ordinary civilians to look at the art? Is it reasonable to wonder how many have a small collection of admission buttons from days gone by?

Noem watch

JB Pritzker hammers out a warning: “We would urge all pet owners in the region to make sure all of your beloved animals are under watchful protection while the secretary is in the region.”

“Why that?”

A herbarium book, to be buried with its owner:

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Silent Album.” In The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard (1983).

Robert Caro’s abandoned novel

Chris Heath at Smithsonian magazine found something: “We Rediscovered Robert Caro’s Abandoned Novel About an Intrepid Journalist Buried in His Archives.”

Yikes — it sounds like an Edgar Allan Poe story. That headline needs rewriting. Maybe like so:

In Robert Caro’s Archives, an Abandoned Novel About an Intrepid Journalist

And there’s more fiction.

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

[This post is no. 128 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose. I know that the headline of a magazine and newspaper article is not typically the work of the article’s writer. I included Chris Heath’s name to credit him as the writer who dug out the abandoned novel.]

Pedro Almodóvar on the U.S. president

From The Guardian : Pedro Almodóvar spoke at Lincoln Center as the recipient of this year’s Chaplin Award. I listened to the speech and have made some silent additions and corrections to the Guardian transcription:

“I doubted if it was appropriate to come to a country ruled by a narcissistic authoritian lunatic, who doesn’t respect human rights” he said. “Trump and his friends, millionaires and oligarchs, cannot convince us that the reality we are seeing with our own eyes is the opposite of what we are living, however much he may twist the words, claiming that they mean the opposite of what they do. Immigrants are not criminals. However, they are created as such. Zelenskyy is not a dictator. Putin is. And however much Trump denies it, it was Russia that invaded Ukraine.”

Almodóvar continued: “Mr Trump, I’m talking to you, and I hope that you hear what I’m going to say to you. You will not go down in history as the great peacemaker of our time. Your naïveté is only comparable to your violence. You will go down in history as one of the greatest damages to humanity in this beginning of the century. You will go down in history as a catastrophe.”

You can watch and listen to it all at YouTube. Even better: use the free app FreeTube.

Mary Miller in the news

From The Guardian : “Jewish faculty decry Republican panel members ahead of antisemitism hearing.” The subheadline: “Lawmakers on key committee have quoted Hitler and are associated with calls for Jews to convert to Christianity.” Sure enough, there’s Illinois’s own Mary Miller:

A number of Republican legislators set to grill university presidents in a congressional hearing on antisemitism this week are associated with calls for Jews to convert to Christianity, have quoted Adolf Hitler, or have reportedly threatened to burn a synagogue to the ground.

A group of Haverford [College, Haverford, Pennsylvania] professors, most of them Jewish, has raised concerns about the legislators, pointing to statements they have made in the past and antisemitic incidents in their districts that the professors say they have not forcefully condemned....

In a memo shared exclusively with the Guardian, the faculty at Haverford have questioned the credibility of several members of the committee.

The faculty have requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. In the memo, they write that the committee’s chair, Republican representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, is associated with the Moody Bible Institute, which, according to the memo, “trains students to convert Jewish people to Christianity.” Representative Mark Harris of North Carolina, it notes, once said that until Jews and Muslims accept Jesus Christ “there’ll never be peace in their soul or peace in their city.”

The faculty also condemned committee member Mary Miller of Illinois, who in a speech outside the US Capitol the day before the January 6 attack, quoted Hitler and said he was “right on one thing” when he said that whoever “has the youth has the future.” (Miller later apologized.)

Well, she sort of apologized. She also said that her words had been twisted. And one of her daughters praised her on Facebook:

Mom is getting roasted on national news media platforms. The funny thing is: she and Dad don’t care!! She said it. She’s owning it. Go mom!

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

A cafeteria, a window, coleslaw

Elaine and I were sitting in a school cafeteria. It was packed with students. In one corner, a student, white, male, was playing the alto sax. At the table next to us, a student, Black, male, was singing. And in the distance, next to a wall, a third student, white, male, was playing the drums. They made a mighty sound together.

And then I was in my paternal grandparents’ fifth-floor apartment. I was helping a little blond boy climb out the window and down the side of the building. When he disappeared, I went downstairs to look for him but couldn’t find him. His mother appeared. “Oh, he does that all the time,” she said. And then the boy was standing before us.

Back in the building I saw that there were many dishes not washed from the day before, and a large bowl of coleslaw that needed to be refrigerated.

A possible source, at least for the cafeteria scene and the window: the film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (dir. Rebecca Hall, 2021). I don’t know where the coleslaw came from.

I dreamed this dream Sunday night after watching Passing. For anyone who believes, as Vladimir Nabokov did, in precognitive dreaming, I watched Questlove’s 2025 documentary Sly Lives! last night. An impulse purchase, so to speak. The Family Stone’s two white members: saxophonist Jerry Martini and drummer Greg Errico. And this morning, I read this passage, from Digital Ink’d’s exploration of the ruins of the InterRoyal Corporation, once a manufacturer of office furniture:

Even in its decay, InterRoyal draws people in. And on that summer day, it wasn’t just us. As we circled the remnants, searching for a safe descent into a shallow basement area, we heard voices rolling up behind us. Two kids, barely middle schoolers, emerged from the side rail over a dirt mound like they owned the place.

One of them, a boy no older than 11, offered casual advice on how to climb down. He’d been here before. Knew every foothold and hidden drop like the back of his hand. His nonchalance was jarring. This was no playground; this was a derelict structure riddled with chemicals, rusted beams, and collapse-ready floors. And yet, these local kids treated it like a secret clubhouse, indifferent to the very real dangers it posed.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). I believe in coincidence, not precognition.]

Montclair Book Center on screen

[From The Room Next Door (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2024). Click either image for a larger view.]

Here we see Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) in a bookstore. The wraparound balcony, visible in the screenshot, was the instant giveaway: the scene is the Montclair Book Center in Montclair, New Jersey (with its name edited out of the awning for the movie). I bought Robert Caro’s The Power Broker there last summer.

We spotted Julianne Moore in 2017 when we had lunch with our friend Luanne Koper at the Cafe Cluny in Greenwich Village. And last summer we went to the Montclair Book Center with Luanne’s husband Jim Koper. Somehow that all seems kinda cool — or is it strangely portentous, and if so, of what? Cue the theremin.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Hulu, Netflix, TCM, YouTube, the final film’s website.]

Pursued (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1947). It’s more Greek tragedy than Western: little Jeb Rand (as a grown-up, he’s played by Robert Mitchum) hides beneath the floorboards as his parents and siblings are murdered, after which he is taken in by a widow, Mrs. Callum (Judith Anderson) to be raised with her two children. Jeb soon finds himself hated by Mrs. Callum’s son Adam (John Rodney), hunted by her brother Grant (Dean Jagger), and smitten with her daughter Thor (Teresa Wright). It all comes in the form of flashbacks that precede a powerful ending. Mitchum and Wright are an unlikely but compelling pairing: the one unflappable; the other, full of flaps. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Man Inside (dir. John Gilling, 1958). “You see, Mr. Marsh, every man is actually two men: the one, the world sees; the other, the man inside.” The movie begins in Manhattan, and like the director’s Pickup Alley (1957), it moves across Europe — here it’s Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, and London — with detective Milo Marsh (Jack Palance) on the trail of the stolen Tyrahna Blue diamond. Palance is a poor man’s James Bond; Anita Ekberg (who appears in Pickup Alley) is a two-dimensional mystery woman; the real star is Nigel Patrick, as a tidy little merchant who can’t resist a good diamond. Some unexpected developments on a train bring the story to a satisfying end. ★★★ (YT)

*

X Marks the Spot (dir. George Sherman, 1942). With just an hour to burn, there’s always time for Republic Pictures: cops with Irish accents, a private eye who shows no emotion when his cop father is shot to death, a plot that makes little sense. One reason to watch: Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon in TV’s Batman) has a prominent role (his ghastly toupee is even more prominent). Another: the bizarre technology of “Number, Please,” which allows a customer in a nightspot to drop a nickel into a machine and speak to a smiling operator, who then puts the 78 record of the customer’s choice on a phonograph, with the sound (somehow) transferred to the nightspot. In the world of this movie, there are thirty-seven such nightspots being served, which makes me wonder what happens when more than phonograph is playing at once. ★ (YT)

*

My Gun Is Quick (dir. George White and Phil Victor, 1957). Mike Hammer (Robert Bray) presents as the brute of all time, barking orders (“Coffee, black!”) at a counterman and his secretary Velda (Pamela Duncan). But his moral compass often points to true north: moved by the plight of a “sick” prostitute (an STD?), he throttles her pimp, gives her money to go home to Montana, and asks her to write so that he knows she’s made it back. Her death sets off a chain of events that points to missing jewels, several more deaths, and an ending straight from The Maltese Falcon. Surprises: Whitney Blake (Missy Baxter of Hazel ) as an alluring woman of scandal and means, Terence de Marney as a nightclub employee made mute by the Nazis, Peter Mamakos as a hook-handed thief. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Kill Her Gently (dir. Charles Saunders, 1957). A posh Brit (Griffith Jones) picks up two hitchhikers (Marc Lawrence, George Mikell) — knowing that they’re prison escapees — and enlists them to kill his wife (Maureen Connell). Through much of the movie we have a husband and wife seemingly held captive in their house by two cons, except that the husband is waiting to head to his bank in the morning, so that the cons can kill his wife while he withdraws the money he’s going to pay them. As per usual, nothing goes according to plan, and there’s a twist that no viewer is likely to see coming. You may recognize Marc Lawrence as Cobby from The Asphalt Jungle: this movie is likely his finest hour. ★★★ (YT)

*

What Would Sophia Loren Do? (dir. Ross Kauffman, 2021). When you give up on finding a feature-length movie at Netflix, all kinds of unexpected shorter films become noticeable. This short documentary is a double portrait, of Sophia Loren and Nancy Kulik, an eighty-two-year-old Italian-American New Jerseyan for whom Loren and her movies are a lifelong fascination. Mrs. Kulik shows herself to be a wise, self-possessed, a great talker and a hugely resourceful woman who carries deep sorrow with her, but, as she says, “You go forward.” Try to watch her meeting with Loren without smiling or tearing up or both. ★★★★ (N)

*

A Special Day (dir. Ettore Scola, 1977). The special day is May 4, 1938, when Benito Mussolini welcomed Adolf Hitler to Rome, a political reality that runs through the film, first in documentary footage, then in a radio broadcast that plays in the background, always present. An apartment complex empties out to witness the proceedings, and left behind are a burdened wife and mother of six, Antonietta (Sophia Loren), and a radio broadcaster, Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni). A chance meeting across a courtyard brings them together, and what appears to be a tentative attraction develops — but what in fact develops is far more complicated. An extraordinary movie about fascism, gender, and sexuality, with great performances from Loren and Mastroianni. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Trader (dir. Tamta Gabrichidze, 2018). Another unexpected documentary, following the travels of Gela Kolochovi, who operates something like a thrift store on wheels in the Republic of Georgia, with all sorts of merchandise for sale: lamps, pots, shoes, toys. Each item has a price in potatoes, which Kolochovi brings to market and sells for cash. This short movie is a picture of grim poverty, poverty of means and poverty of imagination: a boy who’s asked what he’d like to be when he grows up stares blankly in the face of a meaningless question. The most affecting moment, for me: the same boy picks up an item, asks what it is, and is told, “A sponge.” ★★★★ (N)

[Notice the randomness of the goods for sale. And notice (top right) Gela’s bubble-blowing equipment, meant to draw children who will then bring their parents.]

*

The Moon Is Down (dir. Irving Pichel, 1943). Nazi occupation and civilian resistance in a Norwegian town. Sir Cedric Hardwicke is an arrogant Nazi colonel; Henry Travers, the town’s acerbic mayor; Dorris Bowdon, a young widow who takes justice into her own hands. An adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1942 novel, and for at least once, a movie is better than its book. The best scene happens off-screen: the scissors. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Room Next Door (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2024). Ingrid (Julianne Moore), who’s written what appears to be a best-selling book, On Sudden Death, to help herself “better understand and accept death,” is pressed into the service of a friend from many years back, Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent with cervical cancer, who plans to take a “euthanasia pill” and wants someone to be in the room next door when she does so. The story, such as it is, is relatively dramaless: there’s never any doubt that Martha will end her life, and Ingrid is not asked to assist, which leaves her as a friendly bystander who must feign ignorance of her friend’s intentions after the end comes (and who seems unchanged by her friend’s death). The vibrant color schemes that go with the passions typically on display in an Almodóvar movie seem weirdly out of place here; the subplots (Martha’s husband and daughter, the lover she and Ingrid have had in common; climate change; some Vertigo overtones) are left underdeveloped; the portentous recitations from James Joyce’s “The Dead” feel merely pretentious; and the declamatory dialogue (it’s Almodóvar’s screenplay) sounds like stilted subtitles (I could imagine the dialogue sounding plausible in Spanish: was it translated into English?). I’ve seen nineteen other Almodóvar movies — I’m a fan, okay? — so I was surprised that this one proved relatively disappointing. ★★★ (N)

*

No Other Land (dir. Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szoris, 2024). “I started filming when we started to end”: this documentary records the Israeli military’s gradual, unremitting destruction of Masafer Yatta, an area in the occupied West Bank that is a long-standing home to Palestinian families. It also records the friendship that develops between Palestinian videographer Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. Again and again, Palestinian men and women argue with and try to shame soldiers, and again and again, we see the elements of everyday life destroyed as tanks and trucks move into a settlement, knocking down houses and a school, filling a well with concrete. And again and again, those who have been forcibly evicted take refuge in caves and begin to rebuild. ★★★★ (W)

*

Small Things Like These (dir. Tim Mielants, 2024). From Claire Keegan’s novella, a Magadelene laundry story. “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future,” young Billy Furlong (Louis Kirwan) reads in A Christmas Carol, and as a husband and father, he does so, as fragments from his childhood mix with his unflinching recognition of cruelty in the present and a decision to make things different in the future, in at least a small way. Cillian Murphy gives a brilliant, understated performance as the adult Bill: his painful history shows in every word he speaks or doesn’t speak. This is a movie that benefits greatly from a second viewing — some subtle touches probably won’t be apparent the first time through. ★★★★ (H)

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