Leo Wright, unexpectedly

I was surprised to see the alto saxophonist and flutist Leo Wright (1933–1991) in a photograph that accompanies the New York Times obituary for the pianist and composer Lalo Schifrin.

Leo was a dear friend to Elaine when she lived in Vienna, even, she says, something of a surrogate father. She has written about him on her blog.

“Very antique”

The setting: a Scottish castle. A bit of droll dialogue from The Ghost Goes West (dir. René Clair, 1935):

“This place seems very antique.”

“It’s six hundred years old, Mother.”

“I knew I could feel a sense of the past here.”

The movie is streaming at the Criterion Channel.

A choral “God Only Knows”

In Toronto, a project called Choir! Choir! Choir! brought more than five hundred people together to sing “God Only Knows.”

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

“It’s fine”

The most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American reports on four news items that demand attention. Richardson credits this one to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

At a press conference in the Netherlands last Wednesday, Trump said he had given Iran permission to bomb a U.S. air base in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program sites. “They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”

Marshall expressed astonishment that this admission has attracted very little attention. He suggested that, if it is true, it represents “the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief,” and he wondered how Republicans would have reacted if a Democratic president had said he had let “a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation.”

You can watch a clip from the press conference here, at the 6:37 mark.

I haven’t seen “I said it’s fine” reported anywhere. How about you?

[A correction: Sarah Posner, not Josh Marshall, wrote the article at TPM.]

Brooklyn biker gang

Back on Stillwell Avenue.

[2812 Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]



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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, started so well for me: 10-D, five letters, “_____ eterno (passionate pledge)” and 11-D, five letters, “‘Low’ language” got me the whole northeast. The southeast followed. Smooth sailing, thought I. But no. The temperature is already rising, and we want to walk before it rises too much, and thus I ended up looking up four words to finish, the most I’ve ever looked up in a Stumper. It’s funny how looking up just a single word makes it easier to look up another.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, nine letters, “Legalese for ‘all the more.’” I had to look it up, hereinafter referred to as “IHTLIU.”

14-A, six letters, “Checked out.” A decidely sneaky clue.

21-A, eleven letters, “Legendary flier.” Neither Dedalus nor Icarus helps out here.

25-D, four letters, “Carb source.” I didn’t think about the informality of carb soon enough. IHTLIU.

29-A, six letters, “Metaphorical goal.” See 14-A.

32-D, nine letters, “Where Elvis was before G.I. Blues.” Heh.

39-A, eight letters, “Group with celebrity bloggers.” In 2025, this notion feels dated.

44-D, six letters, “Bit of Thanksgiving decor.” Really? Well, no, not really, not on its own.

46-A, five letters, “Biscuit close kin.” Wanting the answer to be SCONE made the southwest corner of the puzzle difficult to work out. IHTLIU.

50-D, five letters, “Protection and support.” I tend to think of the answer too specifically, but I’m sure that’s okay with her. (Her? Who? She’s in the comments.)

56-A, ten letters, “Citrus sinensis.” Thank you for that.

61-A, three letters, “Umbrella for Outlook.” Outlook, gah! My university now makes us use it — no forwarding from an .edu account to another service. Outlook is the worst e-mail interface I know.

My favorite in this puzzle: 14-D, eleven letters, “Grandma Moses, for instance.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

The Civil War and paper clips

The current occupant of the White House places the end of the Civil War in “1869, or whatever.” No.

And he places the invention of the paper clip in 1817. Also no.

From Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things (1992):

As with many new devices, especially ones of modest proportions and few pretensions, the origins of the first bent-wire paper clip are not without their uncertainties, including those induced by chauvinism. According to an oft-repeated account, a Norwegian named Johan Vaaler should be credited with the invention of the paper clip in 1899. However, as the story goes, Norway had no patent law at the time, and though Vaaler’s drawing was accepted by a special government commission, he had to seek an actual patent in Germany. Norwegians are said to have remembered proudly the humble item’s origins in their country when, during World War II, they “fastened paper clips to their jacket lapels to show patriotism and irritate the Germans.” Wearing a paper clip could result in arrest, but the function of the device, “to bind together,” took on the fiercely symbolic meaning of “people joining against the forces of occupation.

Vaaler’s fin-de-siècle notion was granted an American patent in 1901, and the document describes the “paper clip or holder”:

It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions.

But there’s more:

There were indeed other paper clips by the time Vaaler’s American patent was issued, and it appears to have been granted more for his variations on some common themes than for any seminal contribution. Matthew Schooley, a Pennsylvanian, filed a patent application in 1896 for a “paper clip or holder which, while simple in its construction, is easy of application and certain in the performance of its functions.”

And:

When all is said and done, any attempt to sort out the origins and the patent history of the paper clip may be an exercise in futility. For there appear to have been countless variations on the device, a great multiplicity of forms, and some of the earliest and most interesting versions seem not to have been patented at all, which is perhaps not so surprising for such a modest artifact.

But at least we can say that the paper clip was not invented in 1817.

I believe that the current occupant pulled both dates out of his — no, out of his head. What a scustumad.

There’s also an 1867 patent, issued to Samuel B. Fay, for a “ticket fastener,” “a loop made of wire for the purpose of holding tags or tickets to fine fabrics to supply the place of pins.” It’s often cited as the first paper clip, but notice: it’s for holding tags or tickets to fabrics, not for holding papers together. Petroski doesn’t mention it.

Related reading
On paper clips : Paper clips (A prose poem) : My dad’s paper clips

UVA president resigns

From The New York Times: James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, is resigning under pressure from the Justice Department:

The University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, has told the board overseeing the school that he will resign in the face of demands by the Trump administration that he step aside to help resolve a Justice Department inquiry into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to three people briefed on the matter.

For the leader of one of the nation’s most prominent public universities to take such an extraordinary step demonstrates President Trump’s success in harnessing the investigative powers of the federal government to accomplish his administration’s policy goals....

Mr. Ryan, the university’s ninth president, has held that post since 2018 and was unanimously approved for another contract in 2022. During his seven years in the job, Mr. Ryan developed a reputation as a champion of diversity. He encouraged community service and helped drive an increase in the number of first-generation students.

He summed up his philosophy as one aimed at making the university “both great and good,” describing his goal of striving for academic excellence in a manner that would benefit society. But that rankled conservative alumni and some Republican board members, who accused him of imposing his own ethics and values on college students.

Our household heard James Ryan speak in 2016, when he was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dean Ryan’s talk at that year’s HGSE diploma ceremony became the stuff of a book, Wait, What? And Life’s Other Essential Questions. The questions are six:

Wait, what?
I wonder why, or if?
Couldn’t we at least?
How can I help?
What really matters?

And a “bonus” question, from Raymond Carver’s poem “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?” (Slightly misquoted as “And did you get what you wanted out of life, even so?”) Listen or read, and you can tell that James Ryan is a good guy.

And now we have to ask, Wait, what? A president and his minions have taken down yet another university president?

A related post
HGSE’s speech at Open Culture

Washington Post crossword redesign

Could The Washington Post have come up with a worse way to redesign a crossword? I’ll be doing the (same) puzzle in the Los Angeles Times.

The weirdest thing about the redesign: on Wednesday, when I typed the first T of the fourteen-letter answer UCANTTOUCHTHIS, CANT disappeared, the puzzle jumped back to the second box, and a screen reader kicked in: “Second box selected.” The screen reader was functioning only on the puzzle page. Quitting the browser and restarting my Mac made no difference: I was able to replicate this weirdness any number of times.

UCANT do the puzzle here, the Post seemed to be telling me. Well, I did unsubscribe last October.

*

July 22: I solved the mystery of the disappearing letters. But I still find the redesign awful.

Word of the day: scustumad

Scustumad : Italian American slang for an idiot or an ill-mannered person. Here’s an entertaining explanation. And another.

The word comes up in “Soubise,” the second episode of the new (fourth) season of The Bear. Our household is seven episodes in. The best ones so far: three, four, five, six, and seven. Best of all: episode four, “Worms.” Give Ayo Edebiri all the Emmys.

Shari & Lamb Chop

Shari & Lamp Chop is a documentary by Lisa D’Apolito. Here’s the trailer.

Our household is pro-Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, always. How many times did our kids watch Don’t Wake Your Mom ? Really really many.

[The IMDb gives 2023 as the documentary’s date, but the trailer was just uploaded to YouTube. Perhaps getting a distributor took some time.]

Involuntaries

Walking this morning, circa 6:45, heading east into the sun: I’m back in grad school, walking from the Port Authority to the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building). I was working a summer job as a legal proofreader. My hours were 7:00 to 3:00.

Removing, or attempting to remove, a sweaty T-shirt: I’m back in high-school gym class. Ugh.

Writing a note to a granddaughter, using my very best printing: I’m back in first grade, admiring the teacher’s perfect letters written in soft chalk on a real slate blackboard.

Related reading
In a memory kitchen : Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things : Involuntary bicycle : Involuntary memory in Mayberry : “You’re gonna be late for bowling” : Roland Barthes and involuntary memory : Involuntary Brooklyn : Slot cars : Jean Stafford and involuntary memory : Vladimir Nabokov and involuntary memory

Mail by mules

An eye-opening article by Sarah Yager: “How the Most Remote Community in America Gets Its Mail” (The Atlantic, gift link). The community is a village in Arizona on the reservation of the Havasupai Tribe, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It’s the only place in the United States where the USPS delivers by mule — or, rather, mules, a train of six.

Mental acuity

Via The Bulwark. My transcription:

“Well, the intelligence was very inconclusive. The intelligence says we don’t know. It could have been very severe. That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct. But I think we can take the “we don’t know.” It was very severe. It was obliteration. Ah — and you think that a media outlet would say, “Isn’t that a great thing?” I mean, more important for the pilots, for the military. You take their guts out. You take their absolute guts out. They had a tremendous attack. There was a complete obliteration. The other team, the other, the other group, Iran, said, “Let’s stop this.” And you know what? Israel said it too. Very smart. They fought like hell and then they said, “Let’s stop.” And they’re gonna build themselves — and I really see it as [thinking?] — I mean, we may do papers on it, Marco, maybe we’re going to do papers, I don’t even know if you need them. They’re not going to be fighting each other. They’ve had it. They’ve had a big fight, like two kids in a school yard. You know, they fight like hell? You can’t stop ’em. Let ’em fight for about two, three minutes. Then it’s easier to stop ’em.”

The intelligence very inconclusive, but it was obliteration. And sometimes two and two are four, five, and three, all of them at once.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Mary Miller, environmentalist?

Mary Miller (IL-15) is one of twenty-five congressional Republicans calling for an investigation of mifepristone in the nation’s water supply.

Some context from PolitiFact at the Poynter Institute:

Environmental scientists and engineers told PolitiFact there is no evidence that mifepristone has harmed the environment or people via wastewater.

“There is absolutely no evidence that this is an environmental issue,” said Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Pharmaceutical waste can be a big issue when we’re talking about widely used drugs, but to somehow point to mifepristone as a bad actor here is completely disingenuous.”

Thanks, Rachel.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Open city

I looked up “open city,” as in the title of the 1945 Roberto Rossellini film Roma città aperta [Rome, Open City]. In war, an open city is one that has surrendered to an occupying enemy. I’d known the term only as a descriptor of U.S. hotbeds of vice. Terre Haute, Indiana, for instance, was “open.”

Last week, Google AI for terre haute open city included this remarkable sentence:

While this reputation is mostly historical, the city is still known for its vibrant culture and attractions, including the Federal Correctional Complex, which houses the federal death row.

But the AI is always learning. Today the Larry Bird Museum has replaced the prison and its death row. The museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but it’s open today.

A related post
“You know, the boys in Terre Haute, they don't set no limit”

Gramps and Uncle Petrie

[It Happened Tomorrow (dir. René Clair, 1944). Click for a larger view.]

On the left, George Cleveland, who played George Miller, Gramps, during the Miller years of Lassie (1954–1957). On the right, George Chandler, who played Petrie Martin, Uncle Petrie, through some of the Martin years (1958–1959). Two TV futures meeting up in the past.

If I wanted to keep things simple, I would not mention that George Chandler played another character, Chet Power, in two Miller-years Lassie episodes (1956, 1957).

Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

A song in the air

From the latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight [June 24] recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”

It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.

Long long long past. He’s really out of his mind.

[Some context: “Barbara-Ann,” with a hyphen, was written by Fred Fassert and recorded by the Regents in 1961. The Beach Boys covered the song, minus the hyphen, on their 1965 album Beach Boys’ Party! (considered to be the first “unplugged” album). The parody song (which I never knew existed) is from 1980, by Vince Vance and the Valiants.]

Eleven movies, one short series

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

Race Street (dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1948). George Raft is a nightclub owner whose lifelong pal (Harry Morgan) is rubbed out by gangsters extorting protection money. Complications follow, as do song-and-dance numbers that do little more than take up time. (Contrast, say, the nightclub number in Drunken Angel, which has a point: it shows us Matsunaga’s determination to perform well-being.) Best moment: Raft blindfolded and sniffing. ★★ (YT)

*

Pee-wee as Himself (dir. Matt Wolf, 2025). Watching this two-part documentary, I was reminded of Richard Zenith’s characterization of Fernando Pessoa’s project of making himself “into fictitious others whose reality threatened to overshadow his own.” So it was with Paul Reubens, whose public persona of Pee-wee Herman for many years more or less obliterated the man: “I hid behind an alter-ego,” he says here. Reubens talks to the camera at length — he’s often funny, often revealing, sometimes evasive, sometimes combative, and there’s a subject that he is willing to broach only in an audio recording made the day before he died. The many clips from live shows, movies, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse included here are pure glee (Reubens’s word for what he wanted to offer his audiences), but that glee had a great cost to its giver. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature René Clair’s Inventive Enchantments

The Ghost Goes West (1935). It’s something of a supernatural screwball comedy: a 19th-century battle of clans leaves a ghost (Robert Donat) with unfinished business stuck in a Scottish castle. When the castle is taken apart to be reconstructed in Florida, the ghost goes along, as does his descendant (also Donat). Some wonderful moments and droll dialogue, and Eugene Pallette does much to enliven the proceedings. But the comedy is often labored, and once again I find that I’m just not the audience for most screwball comedies. ★★

It Happened Tomorrow (1944). Charmant is the only word that will do to characterize this movie. In a turn-of-the-century American city, newspaper reporter Larry Stevens (Dick Powell) gets a recurring gift from a strange little man: the next day’s newspaper, and thus Larry becomes a remarkably prescient reporter, writing up the news before it happens. When he gets the next day’s paper that reports his own death, the stage is set for a wild conclusion. With Linda Darnell and Jack Oakie as partners in a phony mindreading act. ★★★★

*

Rome, Open City (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945). I have known the term “open” only in relation to American hotbeds of vice, so I looked it up: an open city is a wartime city that’s given up its defensive efforts. It’s 1944, and Rome is an open city, under Nazi occupation. We are among members of the Resistance (who haven’t given up), in a world where betrayal, torture, and death are constant dangers. It’s a brutal film (how could it not be?) with unforgettable scenes of courage and pain: witness Pina (Anna Magnani) running down the street and Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) blessing the atheist Luigi (Marcello Pagliero). ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Mask of Diijon (dir. Lew Landers, 1946). You had me at Erich von Stroheim: he stars as Diijon, a celebrated magician who’s turned to studying the mind. When his new hypnotism act goes wrong, he decides to exact revenge on those he blames. Not much here to admire aside from Stroheim, who has the uncanny gift of looking like he’s about the burst into tears even when he’s being utterly vicious. Come for the guillotine; stay for the weird cigarette lighter. ★★ (YT)

*

Good-Time Girl (dir. David MacDonald, 1948). Wayward fifteen-year-old Lyla Lawrence (Diana Dors) listens to a juvenile-court official tell the cautionary tale of wayward sixteen-year-old Gwen Rawlings (Jean Kent), who fled her dysfunctional family for the dangers of city life on her own. Trouble followed, of course: a predatory neighbor, the girls at an “approved school,” a nightclub denizen and his crowd, two AWOL American servicemen. Herbert Lom is a suave nightclub owner who knows his limit when it comes to helping others; Bonar Colleano is one of the ugly Americans. It’s no spoiler to say that Gwen’s story will have the proper effect on Lyla. ★★★ (YT)

*

Good Night, and Good Luck (dir. Micah Bickham and David Cromer, 2025). A stage adaptation of the 2005 film, written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, with Clooney as Edward R. Murrow. The drama’s relevance in 2025 cannot be overstated: whole swaths of Murrow’s commentary on events speak to our perilous times. I’m not much for live theater, but I was especially struck by the elements of media here — archival footage of Murrow and the junior Senator from Wisconsin, and a stage set reminiscent of a computer screen divided into several windows. I’m sorry to have to say that there’s an outrageous irony in a performance of this play being aired on CNN, which of course is deeply complicit in the rise of the several-times-bankrupt reality-TV star from Queens. ★★★★ (CNN)

*

Gunman in the Streets (dir. Frank Tuttle, 1950). Dane Clark stars as Eddy Roback, an American military deserter and criminal stuck in Paris, trying to make it to Belgium. Simone Signoret is his bafflingly loyal girlfriend. The premise recalls that of High Sierra, but Eddy, unlike Humphrey Bogart’s Roy Earle, has no redeeming qualities: he’s a brute. Filmed on location, giving the viewer the opportunity to see mid-century Parisian locations, including a department store. ★★★

*

Misericordia (dir. Alain Guiraudie, 2024). The baker in a French village dies, and a young baker whom he mentored (Félix Kysyl) returns to pay his respects. Complications follow, all centering on the mentee, in a tangle of grievances, longings, mushrooms, and violence. An extremely dark comedy, teeming with implications, beautifully filmed. Imagine Columbo in a French village, but minus a detective. ★★★★ (CC)

*

This Side of the Law (dir. Richard L. Bare, 1950). Any movie that opens with someone trapped at the bottom of a cistern is likely to keep me watching. This one is something of a Gothic noir, with a lawyer (Robert Douglas) who schemes to have a vagrant (Kent Smith) impersonate a look-alike missing heir. Most of the story plays out at San Souci (irony alert), an estate inhabited by the heir’s wife (Viveca Lindfors) and her sister (Janis Paige) and brother-in-law (Calder Taylor). There appears to be little to do for the residents but sit around and sometimes play the piano — at least until the long-lost impostor shows up. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Surgeon’s Cut (dir. Lucy Blakstad, Stephen Cooter, James Newton, and Sophie Robinson, 2020). An episode of the podcast What It’s Like to Be about the brain surgeon Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa put me onto the four-part series about extraordinary surgeons: the transplant specialist Nancy Ascher, the fetal medicine specialist Kypros Nicolaides, the heart surgeon Devi Shetty, and “Dr. Q,” as he’s known, himself. These surgeons present as models of compassion and clarity, reassuring patients, speaking with frankness when the news is not good, and recognizing always that they carry people’s lives in their gifted hands. Don’t be put off by the prospect of watching surgeons at work: it’s more breathtaking than horrifying. Dr. Q’s story is especially timely: he came to the United States from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant with no English and went on to UC Berkeley and Harvard Medical School. ★★★★ (N)

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

Ever fashion-forward

Elaine noticed that the hemmed sleeves of my new L.L. Bean black polo shirts are slightly different from the hemmed sleeves of my other Bean and Lands’ End black polo shirts. A whole new look, she said.

It is, or they are.

“Hope you’re doing well ...”

Texting styles in the news: “Here's Why Boomers Keep Using Ellipses in Text (And Why It Makes You Panic)” (Huffington Post ).

Garner’s Modern English Usage describes a single use for the ellipsis:

Ellipsis points — also called “period-dots” — come in threes. Each one is typographically identical to the period, but together they perform a special function: they signal that the writer has omitted something, usually from quoted matter.”

Examples and a bit of nuance (about omitting words from the end of a sentence) follow.

I find just one ellipsis in my vast archive of text messages, from me to fambly: “never mind ... ,” sent after I figured out what I had misunderstood in someone’s previous text. I can’t recall ever seeing the ellipsis as a substitute for conventional punctuation in a text message from anyone of any age, and I agree that the use of the ellipsis in a text, if it’s not signaling omitted words, would indeed seem ... ominous. An example from the Huffington Post — “Hope you’re doing well ...” — would make me suspect that a loan shark will soon drop by to discuss the repayment plan.

Thanks to Jim at 30 Squares of Ontario for pointing me to this bit of punctuation in the news. As I told him, my favorite use of the ellipsis is David Foster Wallace’s in Infinite Jest, where it signals baffled silence in conversation:

“...”

Ellipsis ... posts
A perfect ellipsis in HTML : The DFW ellipsis and other marks of punctuation : The New York Times sanitizing DFW via the ellipsis : Zippy ellipses

[Of course Orange Crate Art has ellipsis posts.]

Watching your grammar

From The Tattooed Stranger (dir. Edward Montagne, 1950). Captain Lundquist (Frank Tweddell) has chosen Detective Frank Tobin (John Miles) to work with Lieutenant Corrigan (Walter Kinsella) on a homicide. Corrigan balks:

”Aw, have a heart, Lundy, I’ve never worked with a college-boy cop before. I might use bad grammar.”

And Lundquist: “Grow up, Corrigan.” And the captain cites Tobin’s military service and accomplishments as a police offer as evidence that the college boy is no mere “bookbender.”

Anyone who teaches English knows that when you admit what you do for a living, you risk hearing someone say “I better watch my grammar.” It’s sad. I’ve used three replies to allay any fear:

“Don’t worry, my grammar ain’t very good.”

“Don’t worry, my grammar aren’t very good.”

“Don’t worry, I taught literature” (or poetry, or stories).

They all seem to work. But I think I like the second best, because it’s so patently ridiculous. All three, I’d say, are better than the plain “Don’t worry, I don’t correct people’s grammar,” which implies that the other person is likely to make mistakes and that English teachers are in the habit of correcting such mistakes. I’ll quote myself, from a review of Anne Curzan’s Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words:

Someone with a keen attention to language is first of all attentive to getting things right in their own speech and writing and to recognizing the standards appropriate to different forms of discourse.

Related reading
All OCA grammar posts (Pinboard)

Back to Queens Boulevard

[Zippy, June 22, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, little Zippy has noticed a car from 1946 hovering overheard: “If it comes down, can we take a ride in it?” Sure. But where to go? Little Zippy has an idea.

Given the date of birth, traveling back to the fall of 1945 might make things simpler. But the car is a 1946 model.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

The misfits

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

The arrow points to no. 229, N. Levin Office Furniture, but more interesting possibilities await to the north and south. To the north, The Bowery Mission, which today includes no. 229. Click for large and you’ll see a small bit of the mission’s sign. To the south, a dog going about, as W.H. Auden says in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” its “doggy life,” and nos. 231 and 233, housing a men’s clothing store. You’ll have to (again) click for large to see what first caught my eye there: “Men’s and Youngmen’s Misfit Suits.”

So what’s a misfit suit?

The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition of the noun misfit (noun) that might seem to (ahem) fit: “a garment or other article which does not fit (or occasionally suit) the person for whom it is intended.” But I doubt that a Bowery clothing store would have a considerable inventory of bespoke or altered suits that didn’t fit the men they were meant for.

I looked at Google Books, where the transcript of a 1941 trial almost gives an answer:

Q. Now, you have just told us what — tell me again about the misfit suits? A. Mismatched and misfit suits were picked up in New York City.

Q. What do you mean by mismatched suits? A. Mismatched and misfits.

A column from The Clothier & Furnisher (1884) gives a clearer picture. It begins,

[Click for a larger view.]

And a 1907 advertisement for Sincerity Clothes suggests that a misfit suit is a matter of shoddy tailoring:

You've been a Victim of the great Misfit evil, haven't you, Reader?

You've joined the procession of Slaves before the Tyrant of Tailoring Incompetence, Indifference, Ignorance and Love of Gain, haven't you —

Pretty nearly Everybody has —

Maybe you belong now?

An OED citation for the noun misfit from George Bernard Shaw (1891) gives a sense of what it might be like to go about in a misfit suit: “He was put out of countenance from the beginning by being clothed in a seedy misfit which made him look lamentably down on his luck.” No wonder Google Books has a number of comic plays whose casts include characters wearing misfit suits. And thanks to another item at Google Books I know that Shaw was reviewing a performance of Don Giovanni. See? Everything makes sense.

Today nos. 231 and 233 are gone, replaced by something new, the New Museum. And today we refer to irregular and slightly irregular garments, the stuff of outlet malls and Filene’s Basement.

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

“We are at the mercy of maniacs”

Tom Nichols, writing in The Atlantic (gift link):

President Donald Trump has done what he swore he would not do: involve the United States in a war in the Middle East.

But why should anyone be surprised?

Ellen Braaten (child psychologist, Harvard Medical School), writing on Bluesky:

We have to stop talking about him as if he is he is a man who has the ability to understand diplomacy or military tactics ... or anything else for that matter. He is a pathological narcissist with limited cognitive functioning. No one should discuss him with any other lens.

Robert Reich, writing on Substack, asks and answers ten questions. He begins:

A single person — Donald J. Trump — has released the dogs of war on one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and done it without the consent of Congress, our allies, or even a clear explanation to the American people.

Anyone who has doubted Trump’s intention to replace American democracy with a dictatorship should now be fully disabused.

I share your despair, sadness, and fear. Even if our president was a wise a judicious man, surrounded by thoughtful advisors with impeccable integrity and wisdom, this would be a highly dangerous move. But we are at the mercy of maniacs.

That final sentence appears in the e-mail text but not in the (earlier? later?) text available in a browser. I believe it holds true.

Reich’s concluding sentences: “Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.”

Turn on your hazard lights (once again)

[Now that summer is upon us, I’m repeating advice that I shared in 2011 and again in 2023 and 2024. Pass it on.]

If you’re driving on a highway and the traffic suddenly slows or stops, and the vehicles behind you are at some distance:

1. Turn on your hazard lights.

2. Leave significant space between you and the vehicle in front of you.

3. Keep checking your rear-view mirror.

4. After someone has come up behind you, turn your hazard lights off.

If someone is coming up behind you and not paying full attention, your hazard lights might catch their eye and prompt them to slow down or stop in time. If not, the free space in front of your vehicle might lessen the severity of a collision.

I called the Illinois State Police to ask what they thought about using hazard lights in this way. A desk sergeant said it was the right thing to do and added the second and third points. I do those things without thinking and wouldn’t have thought to add them. I’ve added the fourth point for clarity.

Drivers of big rigs appear to make a habit of using their hazard lights in this way. Laypeople, not so much. Thus I’m repeating myself.

“In two weeks”

I woke up in the middle of the night and thought a dreadful thought:

“Two weeks” is one of his pet phrases. But two weeks from yesterday, when this latest “two week” pronouncement was issued, is the Fourth of July. It wouldn’t be beyond him to associate the dropping of a massive bomb with that day, would it? Fireworks!

[And since he kinda knows he’s not getting a Nobel Peace Prize, then why not drop a bomb? Or as he might say, Why the hell not?]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Lester Ruff, are you really? Less rough, that is. Because today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is not especially easy, or at least it wasn’t for me. I was ready to surrender until I realized what 33-A, six letters, “100 Years of Warner Bros., e.g.” signified.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Wet-weather wear.” If this answer means what I think it means, this clue is pretty sneaky.

12-D, eight letters, “Structure in a policing metaphor.” Not seeing this answer readily made the northeast corner much more difficult than it might have been otherwise.

13-D, eight letters, “Miles Davis sax collaborator.” My difficulties with 12-D and 18-A made this one much more difficult than it should have been. I thought that the answer had to be first name–last name, and I was stumped trying to think of someone, anyone, from Miles’s later years.

14-D, eight letters, “Belle’s lidded comforter.” Aww.

18-A, six letters, “What miscreants might make.” See 12-D.

25-A, five letters, “Sitcom’s fellow-shrink.” Of course.

26-D, seven letters, “Harvest with an annual limit.” Stumper-y.

40-A, five letters, “FDR self-descriptor.” The answer works in at least two ways.

45-D, six letters, “City served by Andersen Airport.” Andersen who?

51-D, four letters, “SeatMe acquirer in 2013.” And who was SeatMe?

My favorite in this puzzle: 38-A, six letters, “Not a single heavy duty.” Way Stumper-y.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

Mystery actor The answer is now in the comments.

“Your Brain on ChatGPT”

A study from MIT Media Lab Research, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” asked fifty-four participants to write essays, with some participants using their own heads, some using a search engine, and some using a large language model (LLM). The conclusion:

While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.

Everywhere in academic life, teachers are hearing the mantra “Our students need to know this.” I’d offer great resistance. What students first need to know is how to read well and how think, speak, and write clearly and persuasively and ethically. (I swiped part of that sentence from a comment I wrote a couple of days ago.)

A detail from the abstract that I found interesting: “LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work.” That reminded me of a low-tech strategy teachers sometimes use to help figure out whether a student has plagiarized: present the student with a passage from their writing with every fifth word removed. It’s surprisingly difficult to recreate what isn’t your own.

[I know: just fifty-four participants. But the findings were consistent.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll be close to a computer all morning and will check in now and then. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

Needed or not, it drops: she’s English.

*

I’m afraid this one is a lost cause. The answer is now in the comments.

Related reading
101 mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

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

The Electric Rembrandt

[From The Tattooed Stranger (dir. Edward Montagne, 1950). Click for a much larger view.]

Like the detectives of The Tattooed Stranger, we’re traveling from Sailor Kovac’s Epidermal Louvre on the Bowery down to The Electric Rembrant on Brooklyn’s Sands Street.

If Rembrandt was in business on Sands Street between 1939 and 1941, he seems to have eluded the WPA tax photographers. An assiduous reader found a reference to the artist in The Brooklyn Eagle (October 31, 1949). From Margaret Mara’s column “Living in Brooklyn”:

As usual, Sands St. proved fascinating. I discovered Phil’s Tattoo Parlor. Phil calls himself “The Electric Rembrandt.”

Samples of designs for tat[t]ooing fill the window. They are unbelievable! They include numerous pictures of girls with hairdos of the early ’20s, serpent-entwined ladies, skull and crossbones, hearts and flowers, daggers, and even the Rock of Ages.

“Johnny Marseille” must have been the filmmakers’ temporary addition to an already crowded window. You can see the shop with Phil’s name in a photograph from the City Museum of New York. Phil may have been this fellow, Phil Duane, who worked on the Bowery (and perhaps later moved to Brooklyn). Whoever Phil was, he placed at least one advertisement for his wares:

[The Billboard, December 29, 1951.]

“What’s the use?”

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

Also from Andersen
A meditation on a herbarium : Understanding ourselves

Juneteenth

From a conversation between the Reverend Alonzo Hickman and Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting United States senator. As a boy, Sunraider was known as Bliss. Hickman raised him. The two are speaking of old times:


Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage, 2000).

I posted this passage in 2020. Notice the final sentence: “‘Even if folks sometimes try to make us believe it never happened or that it was a mistake that it ever did....’” In 2025, that sentence seems more relevant than ever. Just one timely example: Rolling Stone reports today that

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office requested “a passive approach to Juneteenth messaging” for the holiday on Thursday commemorating the end of slavery, according to an email obtained by Rolling Stone. The news was relayed by the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, which said it wasn’t planning to publish Juneteenth-related content online, per the email.

The RS article goes on to note that a 2024 article about Juneteenth has been removed from a U.S. Army website.

Recall too the assertions in recent years that Black people were better off enslaved.

*

June 20: Not a word about this Juneteenth from the White House, save for one social media post about there being “too many non-working holidays in America.” In the first term, he marked every Juneteenth, even before it was a federal holiday. Who made it a federal holiday? Joe Biden.

Related reading
More OCA Juneteenth posts (Pinboard)

Mental acuity

Via Aaron Rupar. My transcription:

“They don’t even have to get permission. They just go up to the autopen. That's a subversion. That’s a takeover of our government. And you people ought to start looking at it.That’s a takeover — not only did they cheat – I guess you saw yesterday, it came out, with China and the license plates. Tens of thousands of cards. They used those cards to vote on the second election, my second, the one 2020. ’Cause as everybody here knows I won that election by a lot. But the only good thing I can say is this is a much more historic term than I think I could have had as a second term. This is a much more historic election. And now we’re gonna put up a beautiful flagpole, and we’re gonna put a flag, and I hope you enjoy it, and let’s see how real people work. These are real people. You’re not real people, your job is too easy. Okay? Thank you.”

And the first question you can hear at the end is “Mr. President, how tall is the flagpole?” A journalist doing her job.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

New music from Pegg and Van Dyke Parks

New music:

Fans of ornate pop and America’s pastime have reason to celebrate today. Brooklyn’s Pegg, the highly collaborative project of Xander Duell, has teamed up with the legendary Van Dyke Parks for their brief but densely-packed three-song suite, Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season.”

You can hear part one, “No Dice,” and learn more via the link. The music is being released as a digital download, as a CD, and, in a limited edition, with a jigsaw puzzle.

Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

Van Dyke Parks writes about Brian Wilson

In The Guardian , Van Dyke Parks writes about Brian Wilson. An excerpt:

Brian bloomed where he was planted and his music documented an America that no longer exists. He moved mountains. He changed the language. He treated me kindly when he didn’t need to and when people say his music is astonishing, I agree.

Venn reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts : Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks posts : Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

Handwriting in college

“Five semesters after ChatGPT changed education forever, some professors are taking their classes back to the pre-internet era”: from Inside Higher Ed, an article about “The Handwriting Revolution.”

Telling words from one prof: “We’re sometimes pushed to incorporate high-tech tools in our classroom, and this can be difficult to resist, especially if a professor is not tenured or they’re an adjunct.”

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

[As always, handwriting ≠ cursive.]

“Sail On, Sailor”

From the 1987 television special The Beach Boys: 25 Years Together, a remarkable cover: Ray Charles sings “Sail On, Sailor” (Brian Wilson–Van Dyke Parks, with contributions by Tandyn Almer, Ray Kennedy, and Jack Rieley). Odyssean!

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

A mob boss

From the latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that's why. That's the ultimate protection.”

Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.

But wait: there’s more. There’s always more.

“A disaster for the country and the world”

This passage has circulated widely online, but there must be someone who hasn’t yet read it. So I want to share it here. I’ve redacted two words — you can figure them out. From Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 1998):

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “n——” and “k——” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like [Patrick] Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?

How strange to read this Guardian article not long after making this post.

Two more Rorty posts
On the value of literature : On Proust

The last great Brian Wilson song?

Many listeners would say it’s “’Til I Die” (1971). “I lost my way — hey, hey, hey”: what a frighteningly casual acceptance of despair.

A great feature of Brian Wilson’s later-year performances was a medley of the Barenaked Ladies song “Brian Wilson” and “’Til I Die.” You can hear it on Live at the Roxy Theater (2001).

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

Comics implosion

[“The Cat’s Meow.” Zippy, June 17, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

In today's Zippy, Griffy reports that an old girlfriend has proposed collaborating on a “domestic” comic strip “modeled closely on Hi & Lois.”

Venn reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts : Hi and Lois and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Avoiding exposure

From the latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

On Friday, journalist Dean Blundell reported that Washington insiders and observers from abroad had noticed how rarely Trump appears in public and how often he falls asleep when he does, prompting speculation that he is not physically able to do the work of the presidency. Blundell suggested Trump’s team would look for a way to get the president out of the G7 early to avoid exposure.

And so it came to pass, or so it would appear.

Dean Blundell’s Substack report is worth reading: “Rumors of Decline: Trump’s Health Speculation Swirls Ahead of the G7 Summit.”

[I think it’s a pretty good bet that Stephen Miller is running the country now.]

New New Grown-Ups

“Taking a modern twist on American roots music, The New Grown-Ups blend traditional folk, country, blues, Celtic, old time, originals, and bluegrass into a snafu of contemporary acoustic music”: The New Grown-Ups have a new release, available from Bandcamp.

Full disclosure: our son Ben Leddy is in the band. Also: they’re really good. Their website: The New Grown-Ups.

“This Whole World”

Another sample of Brian Wilson’s art: “This Whole World,” from the 1970 album Sunflower. The lead vocal is by Carl Wilson. In less than two minutes, this song travels through at least four key changes and never comes to a final cadence.

I’ve written the chord names line by line, without trying to align them with the lyrics. The slash chords have the chord’s bass note to the right. This post is partly for my benefit, so that I don’t have to try to work out the chords at our piano again after the index card on which I’ve already worked them out them goes missing. There have many such index cards.

C7
I’m thinkin’ ’bout this whole world

C  F  Em7  G  Am  F
Late at night I think about the love of this whole world

A  F#7  Bm7  E7  C#m
Lots of different people everywhere

C#  C#/C  F#/Bb  Ab7  Bbm  Bbm/Ab  F#maj7
And when I go anywhere I see love

Bb
When girls get made at boys and go

Ebmaj7
Many times they’re just puttin’ on a show

Bb  F  G
But when they leave you wait alone

C  F  Em7  G  Am  F
You are there like everywhere like everyone you see

A  F#7  Bm7  E7  C#m
Happy ’cause you’re livin’ and you’re free

C#  C#/C  F#/Bb  Ab7  Bbm  Bbm/Ab  F#maj7
Now, here comes another day for your love

Bb
[wordless vocals]

Ebmaj7
[wordless vocals]

Bb  F  G
[wordless vocals]

C  F  Em7  G  Am  F
Late at night I think about the love of this whole world

A  F#7  Bm7  E7  C#m
[wordless vocals]

What is there to say? Ah-oom dop didit.

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

Bloomsday 2025

From the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, thinking.

CHILBLAIN

[New York Times Spelling Bee, June 15, 2025.]

I feel horribly cheated.

A Naked City cast member comments

The boy, no longer a boy, who listens to Adam Flint recite an Emily Dickinson poem in the Naked City episode “The Multiplicity of Herbert Kornish” has left a comment on the OCA post Naked poetry City .

To say that I’m flabbergasted would be a statement, an accurate one, neither over- nor under-.

On the Bowery, twice

[217 Bowery, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections.]

Roughly a decade later, when The Tattooed Stranger was filming on the Bowery, little had changed. Click either image for a much larger view to take in the details. Do you see the bear?

[From The Tattooed Stranger (dir. Edward Montagne, 1950).]

In a recent incarnation, no. 217 housed a club called Mission — a sick choice of name for an establishment on the Bowery. In 2005 a twenty-four-year-old man was shot to death after accidentally spilling a drink on a woman therein. No. 217 was more recently home to Katra, which Google describes as a “Moroccan-themed duplex lounge offering hookahs, pillow-filled banquettes & occasional belly dancing.” Now permanently closed.

More tax photographs from the Bowery
Ace-Hy Sign Co. : Central Barber School : The Old Landmark : The Pioneer Restaurant

And: More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Father’s Day

“I am the damn paterfamilias!”: Ulysses Everett McGill, in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (dir. Joel Cohn and Ethan Coen, 2000).

Happy Father’s Day to all.

No Kings Day in east-central Illinois

I am happy about and proud of my smallish community today. At least 500 people lined one side of our largest park, the side facing the main drag through town, some of them the usual suspects, most of them people we’d never seen before. Not one appeared to have received a check from George Soros. We stood, talked, laughed, chanted, and cheered for drivers and passengers who showed their support as they went by. We got approving honks from a Vespa rider, a couple in an Audi convertible, a Walmart truckdriver, and at least a couple of hundred more drivers, many in Jeeps and trucks, many holding up little flags. We also met with a handful of middle fingers and a cardboard cutout of His Majesty stuck through a truck’s sunroof. “Curb your dog!” I shouted.

The news from Minneapolis made me feel sick when I saw it late this morning. The only violence we encountered came in the form of four behemoth pickup trucks gunning their engines and spewing exhaust to show their disapproval as they drove by. The police showed up not long after (someone must have called) and chased one down when he came back and did it again. One or more police vehicles stayed close by for the rest of the two-hour protest. The only request they made of us was to stand back on the far side of the sidewalk (and not on the boulevard or whatever else it might be called). No need to tempt an aggressive driver.

We’re a long way from February, when no one but Elaine and I showed up for a rally.

[How do trucks make all that exhaust? It’s called rolling coal.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber, whose last Stumper appeared in October 2023. (The alias is an anagram of the names Bradley and Douglas.) I expected great difficulty, and at first, that’s what I found: clue after clue to which I said, “No clue.” And then I saw 40-D, six letters, “He’s heard in Mambo Kings.” That had to be [redacted], no? And then 45-A, four letters, “Decantation sound.” And I worked my way up from the bottom of the puzzle in just nineteen minutes.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, six letters, “Book bought by Barnes & Noble.” I got it, but I don’t get it.

4-D, five letters, “Small diamond.” Kinda arbitrary.

6-D, three letters, “Band with Japanese CDs.” I learned something.

9-D, nine letters, “Attire first allowed on the Senate floor in the 1990s.” That late — I’m surprised but not surprised.

14-A, fifteen letters, “Currently deprioritized.” Yes, fifteen letters, but a couple of crosses might give it away.

17-A, fifteen letters, “Long-term irritant.” See 14-A.

26-A, five letters, “On-screen ‘Super’ man.” Cute.

29-A, five letters, “Hollywood icon whom Johnny (nearly uniquely) visited in his Tonight Show dressing room.” Some power greater than my own guided my hand, and I wrote in the correct answer, no crosses, no hesitation. Also no idea if it was correct.

49-A, fifteen letters, “‘Distinguished and de luxe’ newsstand debut of 1930.” Well, it sure ain’t POPULARMECHANIC.

52-A, fifteen letters, “Literary thriftiness.” The Stumpery spanner in this puzzle.

53-A, five letters, “Stores like Tupperware.” I just watched the movie.

My favorite in this puzzle: 30-D, eight letters, “Stock market purchase.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

No Kings Day

I’ll be wearing a No Kings T-shirt, from the Doomtree collective, and carrying a homemade sign made with black foamboard (20" x 30"), two colors of masking tape, and the help of pencil, ruler, and protractor. And the help of Elaine, who told me to plan the thing. Which I did, and I finally made a sign I’m truly happy with. And yes, I like the slightly ragged points of the crown.

[I know that No Kings is a 2011 hip-hop release by the Doomtree collective — no connection to No Kings Day. But if the shirt fits.]

Recently updated

JB Pritzker and Mary Miller With some more context.

Aldi and Anderson

At our Aldi outlet yesterday I packed one of our cold bags Wes Anderson-style. (That is, if Wes Anderson packs groceries in a cold bag.) Please imagine a two-story bag:

strawberries    cherries cherries    strawberries

yogurt               apples apples               yogurt

[File under We make our own fun — we have to.]

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” vocals only

As the post title says. Music by Brian Wilson, lyrics by Tony Asher. In the released version, Mike Love sings the bridge. Here Brian sings lead all the way through.

I once played this vocals-only version (from The Pet Sounds Sessions) for a freshman lit class. We were reading our way through a lifetime, beginning with William Blake’s “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow” and ending, probably, with John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 or David Rakoff’s monologue “The Invisible Made Visible.” Cross my heart: when the harmonies kicked in, you could feel a shiver go through the room. And a few understandable giggles at 1:33 and 1:37.

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

JB Pritzer and Mary Miller

Governor JB Pritzker said to Rep. Mary Miller: "I am not going to be lectured to by somebody who extols the virtue of Hitler." Finally, someone says it to their faces.

[image or embed]

— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) June 12, 2025 at 4:32 PM

And just so the context is here: in January 2021, as a newly elected member of Congress, Mary Miller (R, IL-15) said that “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.‘” I am cheered to see Governor Pritzker reminding her about it today.

Here’s the text of the letter I sent to Miller back then (the first of many, all unanswered). If my reference to Kant’s categorical imperative went over her head, well, she never asked for clarification.

*

June 13: A little more context from the Chicago Tribune :

Pritzker also had a sharp back-and-forth with right-wing downstate Republican U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, who isn’t on the panel [the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform] but joined for the day and accused Pritzker of backing a policy of “tying the hands of Illinois law enforcement” and of rolling out “the red carpet for illegal aliens to protect them all at the expense of working people in Illinois.”

“I’m not going to be lectured to by someone who extolls the virtues of Adolf Hitler,” the Jewish Illinois governor said of Miller, referring to comments Miller made on the day before the Jan. 6 riot when she told an audience of conservative women that “Hitler was right on one thing” for trying to indoctrinate the youth. She subsequently issued an apology.

After the hearing, Pritzker called Miller, of Hindsboro, a “terrible congresswoman” who “literally brings nothing home to the district” and “does not believe in doing things for her constituents.” Instead, he said, “All she does is attack, attack, attack.”

Notice: “who isn’t on the panel but joined for the day.” Mary Miller showed up to showboat.

And it has to be said: Miller’s apology for her “Hitler was right” was at least an atrium and two ventricles short of wholehearted. She insisted 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)

[Thanks, Sara, for not letting me miss this moment.]

The windmills of his mind

Mental acuity:

“The windmills are killin’ our country, by the way. The fields are littered with ’em. Junk. They’re littered with ’em. And they get older and they get rusty and they get bad and they get — this is other countries also. It’s the greatest scam in history. It’s the most expensive energy you can buy. They’re ugly. A friend of mine, uh, comes from Minnesota. He’s been in New York. He hit it big, he’s a very successful guy, actually. And he wanted to go back, see his mother who’s not well. And he went back to Minnesota, hasn’t been back there in twenty years. And he said, ‘It’s unbelievable what happened.’ He said, ‘I’m driving down a highway and up a certain road and the most beautiful fields. I remember ’em so well. And I was so looking forward to seeing ’em again and I looked at ’em and they had windmills all over ’em. These horrible horrible structures.’ Very smart guy, this guy. And he said, ‘These ugly build — these ugly horrible things.’ And he said, ‘It was so bad I actually drove back to see it because I couldn’t believe it, before I even got to my mother I drove back.’ I said ‘How much do you like your mother?’ But no, it hurt him to see it. He said ‘I looked at this field that was one of the most beautiful places in my own mind and imagination that I’ve ever seen, and I said it’s littered with these — this, this garbage.’”

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

[My transcription.]

Barbara Holdridge (1929–2025)

Barbara Holdridge, co-founder with Marianne Mantell of Caedmon Records, has died at the age of ninety-five. Caedmon was for many years the source for poets’ voices. The New York Times has an obituary.

Ms. Mantell died in 2023. Here’s an OCA post with a link to her Times obituary, a drawing from a Caedmon album, and an anecdote from the poet Ron Padgett about listening to The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading Their Own Poetry.

VDP on BW

Van Dyke Parks: “Here’s to Brian Wilson.”

Six “Surf’s Up”

“Surf’s Up” was the first song written for SMiLE, music by Brian Wilson, lyrics by Van Dyke Parks.

~ A partial solo performance, from the 1967 CBS documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.

~ Solo demo version (1967).

~ The Beach Boys (1971).

~ Vince Gill, Jimmy Webb, and David Crosby, with Brian Wilson’s band (2001).

~ Brian Wilson (2004).

~ Brian Wilson in concert (2004).

Brian Wilson (1942–2025)

Brian Wilson has died at the age of eighty-two. Here are four obituaries, from The Guardian , The New York Times , Rolling Stone , and The Washington Post .

I was a latecomer to Brian Wilson’s music. I found my way to it by chance — I rented, out of idle curiosity, a videotape (remember renting videotapes?) of I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (dir. Don Was, 1995). As a young musical snob (first Beatles, then pre-war blues, fusion music, and jazz), I had never thought to take the Beach Boys seriously. Jeez, was I wrong. I told the story in this post: Being wrong about beauty.

I feel fortunate to have heard Brian in concert twice, on the Pet Sounds tour in 2000 and the SMiLE tour in 2004. To hear the opening notes of “Our Prayer” sung from a stage — not so many years before, no one would have thought it possible. So much suffering in one lifetime, and so much imagination and generosity — and resilience.

“Love and Mercy” to Brian’s family and friends.

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

Sanewashing

Some industrial-strength sanewashing from Politico :

President Trump is leveraging his role as commander-in-chief in a much clearer and more urgent way than during his first term — whether that’s showing off the military in a parade or using it to quell protests.

Related reading
All OCA sanewashing posts (Pinboard)

Word of Mouth : “Lists”

☑︎ HCR post

☑︎ Tattooed Stranger post

☐ Lists post

On the BBC Radio 4 program Word of Mouth, Michael Rosen and guest Jo Nolan discuss lists.

Two of my favorite lists appear in OCA posts: a stranger’s list that I found in a 1967 paperback, and a list of supplies for an imaginary camping trip that my daughter Rachel wrote up at the age of six or seven.

There are many other OCA list posts. Look: I made a list.

[How do I check the open box?]

Sailor Kovac’s Epidermal Louvre

[From The Tattooed Stranger (dir. Edward Montagne, 1950). Click for a much larger view.]

The Internets appear to have not a single reference to Sailor Kovac’s Epidermal Louvre. Now there will be one.

The IMDb gives 4 Bowery as a filming location for The Tattooed Stranger. Alas, the tax photograph that goes with that address is a sideways view that reveals nothing of the window. But if you look closely at that photograph, you can see that the two bands on the column to the left of the eye match what we see in the movie.

Speaking of eyes, this page of tattoo history explains “BLACK EYES MADE NATURAL.”

Imagine my surprise when I realized that 4 Bowery is right around the corner from a building in a previous OCA tax-photograph post.

“Very big force”

From today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

Today President Donald J. Trump made it clear that the provocations he and his administration are escalating in Los Angeles and now elsewhere are using the issue of immigration to suppress dissent entirely.

In the Oval Office today, Trump said of the military parade scheduled for this Saturday: “If there’s any protester wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.... For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.”

Which reminds me of Simone Weil’s comment on force:

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.

Simone Weil, The “Iliad,” or the Poem of Force , trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956).

Twelve movies

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

The Soul of a Monster (dir. Will Jason, 1944). It rivals The Seventh Victim for B-movie strangeness: it’s a Faustian story with striking camerawork (Burnett Guffey), bizarre dialogue, and long silent stretches. George Macready plays a surgeon saved from certain death by a mysterious woman (Rose Hobart) who seems to have claimed his soul for Satan. The movie cheats in the end and thus loses a star. Best moments: the cellar doors opening, the boy selling newspapers by a barrel fire on a deserted street, and a starring role for Rose Hobart, whom I knew only from Joseph Cornell’s film of that name. ★★★ (YT)

*

Devil at the Crossroads: A Robert Johnson Story (dir. Brian Oakes, 2019). A handful of musicians and scholars retrace the story of Johnson’s life. Outrageous claims about Johnson’s musicianship — it’s like Bach, it’s like three guitars — do him no service. Nor does the tired story of Johnson selling his soul to the devil, already discredited by the time of this documentary. But it’s remarkable to see Johnson’s son Claud Johnson (d. 2015) and grandson Michael Johnson: reminders that Robert Johnson was a human being, not a myth. ★★ (N)

*

The Dead Don’t Die (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2019). I’m puzzled by negative responses to this movie: to my mind, it’s a delightful assemblage of tropes and meta moments. The premise: polar fracking has tilted the earth off its axis and created a zombie apocalypse in the small town of Centerville, and it seems, everywhere else. Bill Murray and Adam Driver star as small town police, exchanging deadpan commentary in their patrol car à la Joe Friday and Bill Gannon. With a bewilderingly deep cast: Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Selena Gomez, Carol Kane, Rosie Perez, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits, and many, many more. ★★★★ (N)

*

The Wonderful World of Tupperware (dir. George Yarbrough, 1965). It’s an unironic presentation of the story behind, let’s admit it, some beautifully designed products. Much emphasis on materials (our friend petroleum) and engineering, less on what happens at Tupperware parties. The strangest sequence: scenes from a “jubilee,” a four-day gathering of Tupperware executives and successful saleswomen (and, of course, their husbands). Two terrifying jubilee moments: Anita Bryant singing a Tupperware-themed version of “Blues in the Night” and Johnny Desmond singing “Hello, Dolly” while kissing Tupperware ladies. ★★★ (TMC)

*

Tread Softly Stranger (dir. Gordon Parry, 1958). Two brothers, rogueish Johnny (George Baker) and dweebish Dave (Terence Morgan), the one on the run from London gambling debts, the other a clerk at a Yorkshire steel mill. And then there’s Calico (Diana Dors), Dave’s girlfriend, whose penchant for the finer things has led Dave to cook the company books, and whose penchant for Johnny and his penchant for her make a rift between the brothers. But a scheme to steal the company payroll before the books are audited will solve all problems, right? Great performances and several surprises, and it has to be said: Diana Dors, while a looker indeed, was also an actor of considerable talent. ★★★★ (YT)

*

A Bullet Is Waiting (dir. John Farrow, 1954). It’s a noirish triangle somewhere out west: lawman Frank Munson (Stephen McNally), badman Ed Stone (Rory Calhoun), and, living in a remote cabin, Cally Canham, the educated daughter (Jean Simmons) of an ex-Oxford professor (Brian Aherne) who’s away from the cabin for most of the picture. The three principals find themselves stuck at the Canhams’ place when the only route back to civilization is flooded. Can you guess which of the two men Cally will be drawn to? Many moments of high tension, though the ending is a letdown. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948). Location, location, location: it’s filmed almost entirely on location, and it’s perhaps the greatest movie about New York City ever made. The plot is thin, and Barry Fitzgerald’s Irishisms wear on me, but the real point here is atmosphere, from Jimmy Halloran’s (Don Taylor) sunny Queens neighborhood to swank Fifth Avenue shops to a Lower East Side tenement. This time I watched with greater appreciation of two of the supporting players: David Opatoshu (Sgt. Dave Miller), always with his notebook, and Tom Pedi (Detective Perelli), who provides humor and uncovers evidence. A forever-unanswered question: why do bad guys climb upward when they’re trying to get away? (CC) ★★★★

*

Uncovering “The Naked City” (dir. Bruce Goldstein, 2020). One film lover’s exploration of the film’s locations and production. Bruce Goldstein is beyond knowledgable, about The Naked City and about Manhattan then and now. The detail that most amazed me: he tracked down the days for filming a scene from the changing titles on a theater marquee in the background. A Criterion Channel exclusive. ★★★★ [Sentences first posted in 2020.]

*

Stray Dog (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949). Dumb luck: we didn’t know when we chose this movie that Kurosawa cited The Naked City as an influence, but it’s unmistakable: a hot, sweaty metropolis (Tokyo), with two police detectives, rookie Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) and veteran Satō (Takashi Shimura), searching for the rookie’s Colt pistol, which was stolen from him on a crowded trolley. The search takes Murakami into a seedy section of the city, where he hopes to penetrate the black market in firearms. Hanging over the action is the catastrophe of the war, which figures heavily in the life of the yakuza who has been using the Colt in the commission of crimes. The ending is stunning, joining the pursuer and the pursued as children walk by singing, oblivious. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Drunken Angel (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1948). “It’s like he’s sick to the core”: illness as tuberculosis, illness as metaphor. The story charts the relationship between a gifted, brusque, sometimes violent, alcoholic man of medicine, Doctor Sanada (Takashi Shimura), and a patient in denial, a tubercular yakuza, Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune). The complications are noirish: a yakuza boss, released from prison, is looking to push Matsunaga out of the rackets, and that boss’s former girlfriend is now working as Sanada’s nurse. Like tuberculosis (notice all the garbarge-strewn pools of standing water), criminality is an illness that permeates the culture, and it leads to an ending of extraordinary tension and violence. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Tattooed Stranger (dir. Edward Montagne, 1950). More dumb luck: it’s The Naked City in B-movie form (just sixty-four minutes). Here, as there, the plot is prosaic: in Central Park, a woman is found shot to death, and the only obvious clue to her identity is a tattoo. And here, as there, the city is a star: the American Museum of Natural History, the Bowery, a Brooklyn tattoo parlor, a Bronx monument company. A bonus for our household: the score is by Alan Shulman, whom Elaine met when she was a Juilliard student. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Woman in the Hall (dir. Jack Lee, 1947). Lorna Blake (Ursula Jeans) calls on rich people, pleading various hardships, picking up funds here and there, and eventually picking up a husband (Cecil Parker, perhaps best known as the philandering husband in The Lady Vanishes). Before that husband comes into the picture, Lorna’s daughter Jay (Jean Simmons) removes herself from her mother’s house to live a different kind of life but ends up committing her own non-violent crimes. The film weakens as it goes on: there’s nothing to prepare for the revelation that Jay is being charged with anything. I even wondered if I had fallen asleep and missed something (I hadn’t), but now I wonder if a scene might have been cut from the film. ★★ (YT)

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