Anything to anyone

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, aka Gaius, aka Caligula:

Suetonius, from The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (1957).

As with this post about Caligula, you may draw your own parallels.

Caligula is no. 17 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Tom Lehrer at YouTube

The website Tom Lehrer Songs remains online, with all the songs (words and music) and commercial recordings available to download, free. Here are some items available at YouTube:

Interviews
Tom Lehrer on Desert Island Discs (1980)
An interview with Bob Claster (1983)

From The Electric Company
“L-Y,” animated
“O-U,” animated
“Silent E,” animated
“Silent E” (two versions, the second not for kids), “O-U (The Hound Song)”
“N Apostrophe T”
“S-N (Snore, Sniff, and Sneeze),” animated

In performance
Copenhagen (1967)
In an academic setting (1997, judging from a reference to 1943 as fifty-four years ago)
From a TV special (1998)

A related post
Tom Lehrer (1928–2025)

HCR’s latest

“When Kevin Roberts [of the Heritage Foundation] announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then”: Today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is necessary reading.

“And not necessarily for major offences”

Suetonius, from The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (1957).

Draw your own parallels.

Caligula is no. 17 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

A night out

Elaine and I were on vacation, carpooling to an Indian restaurant with another couple. Their car, an old Volvo station wagon, came up a side street and turned onto an avenue to pick us up. An oncoming car stopped to let us cross the street.

I was puzzled. We could all have fit in one car, but Elaine and I had to split up, and she rode in a second car behind the Volvo. The Volvo had three rows of seats. I got into the rear row and said something about looking forward to the meal. Had they ever been to this restaurant before? No.

Sitting next to me was a woman who looked a little like a young Fran Drescher. “Calverta,” she said. “Michael,” said I. Her husband was driving. “What’s your name?” I shouted to him. “Philip,” he said, “but not if you’re going to call me that all night. Phil.” He looked like he might have been Indian.

All the car windows were open, and Calverta kept talking, mumbling and swallowing her words, which were only occasionally audible above the sound of traffic. But it didn’t seem that she was expecting any response from me. “Now you ask me a question,” she said. “How old are your kids?” I asked. There were two girls sitting side by side in the middle row of seats. “Which one?” Calverta asked. “The one with the puffy face?” “Both,” I said.

Then we were in the restaurant, which turned out to be in a Trump hotel. An enormous poster on a bathroom door said that delivery people could stay for very low rates, starting at $3.98 a night. On our table was a huge platter of plain spaghetti — an appetizer, served family-style — along with a container of Kraft Parmesan cheese. I put some spaghetti on my plate, shook out some cheese, and woke up.

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).]

Rorty makes The Late Show

Jamie Lee Curtis just gave Stephen Colbert a copy of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.

Two related posts
“A disaster for the country and the world” : Rorty on the value of literature

Mental acuity

Sunday, in a clip posted by Aaron Rupar. My transcription:

“When you were in the Middle East you talked about the images coming out of Gaza and the starving kids. Those images are still going. Many of them are much worse. Thinner children, starving. What do you see or feel when you look at those images today?”

“Well, it’s terrible. You know, when I see the children, and when I see especially over the last couple of weeks, and people are stealing the food, they’re stealing the money, they’re stealing the money for the food, they’re stealing weapons, they’re stealing everything. It’s a mess. That whole place is a mess. The Gaza Strip, you know, was given many years ago so that they could have peace. That didn’t work out too well. When Israel gave that up, whoever was the Prime Minister at the time, who I know who it was, but it was not exactly a very clever thing to do. Because that was given so that they finally have peace, and it’s actually made the situation worse. But we’ll see what happens. Uh, I think Iran is acting up. I think that we have a lot of people acting up. We have Venezuela acting up in a different way. They’re sending — they continue to send people that we rebuff to our border. They continue to send drugs into our country, Venezuela. They’ve been very nasty, and we can’t let that happen. But, and we have other countries too. We do have, and this is just getting a little off subject, but we have now the safest border we’ve ever had. And I think in many respects we probably have the most successful. And I say it all the time. Every leader, when I went to NATO the other day, every leader said, ‘You have the hottest country in the world.’ We have the hottest country in the world now. We’re taking in hundreds of billions of dollars. We have the highest stock market we’ve ever had. We have the best numbers we’ve ever had. But we have hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our country. And I think it’s the hottest. And by the way, one year ago our country was dead.”

I find that reading, not listening, does more to bring home the sheer madness of the discourse.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Nonsense and Sen-Sen

[“Stuff and ....” Zippy, July 29, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

Sen-Sen is a Zippy thing, as are Vaseline and Wheat Thins. How many readers will notice the bus signage in today’s strip? Ah, I see that you already have.

Sen-Sen has been gone for some years now. But not from Dingburg.

Related reading
Censor Breath : Sen-Sen movie dialogue : Sen-Sen and Zippy

Tom Lehrer (1928–2025)

Mathematician and singer-songwriter, or singer-songwriter and mathematician. The New York Times has an obituary.

Tom Lehrer’s That Was the Week That Was (1965), borrowed again and again from the library, was formative listening for me in my youth. A few years back I snagged a copy of the LP in a thrift store. From the back cover:

Yes, Tom Lehrer is here again, with more of the tasteless japes and tired wheezes which only a few years ago elicited from critics comments ranging from “competent” (Variety) to “occasionally amusing” (New York Times). Once again, leaden rapier in hand, he strides out fearlessly in search of adversaries to skewer, first making sure that they are already down.

Tom Lehrer’s website has all his songs, with lyrics and sheet music and recordings, all made freely available.

DEI and their opposites

It’s one thing for politicians and their supporters to rant about “political correctness run amok” and “transgender” and “wokeness.” It’d be another if they were asked to own the values that underwrite their own discourse.

I would like, just once, or repeatedly, really, to hear a reporter say something like the following to the current occupant of the White House or one of his acolytes:

The opposite of diversity is uniformity. The opposite of equity is inequity. The opposite of inclusion is exclusion. Doesn’t the course of American history, from emancipation to women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement to the women’s rights movement to the gay rights movement, show a greater and greater, though far from perfect, movement toward increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion? Why do you support uniformity, inequity, and exclusion, and not their opposites?

Has any reporter ever asked such questions? Is any reporter likely to? These last two are only rhetorical questions.

Suburban Keats

I was startled to see the word suburb in John Keats’s “Lamia” (1819):

When from the slope side of a suburb hill,
Deafening the swallow’s twitter, came a thrill
Of trumpets

Quick, call the HOA!

But suburb long predates the ’burbs and their homeowner associations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word thusly:

The area immediately outside a town or city; the area belonging to a town or city that lies immediately outside its walls or boundaries. Now: the outlying parts of a city (either beyond or just within the city boundaries), typically residential in nature; the parts of a city outside the commercial and civic centre.

The dictionary traces the word to Latin and French, with a first citation from c. 1350, as given in The Earliest Complete English Prose Psalter (1892): “Her uines is of þe uine of Sode-mens & of þe suburbes of Gomorre.” That’s from Deuteronomy 32:32: “For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah” (KJV).

[Word found in The Eve of St Agnes, no. 13 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).]

NYT substitutions

Carlos Greaves offers “New York Times ’ Style Guide Substitutions for ‘The President Violated the Constitution’” (McSweeney’s ). For instance: “The president’s solutions-focused approach to legal roadblocks necessitated thinking outside the constitutional box.”

But there’s no need for newsroom substitutions in referring to the president’s you-know-what. The one Times article referencing the season premiere of South Park makes no mention of the you-know-what or the PSA that ends the episode.

[“You-know-what” comes from the opinion side of the Times. In a column about CBS and satire, Maureen Dowd refers to the president’s you-know-what.]

The three B s

[2885 Harway Avenue, Gravesend, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Yes, the three B s: Bumpers, Bumperettes, and Brackets. Neither Merriam-Webster nor the OED has an entry for bumperette, but Wordnik comes through: “a small secondary bumper to protect a car’s main bumpers in the event of a collision.”

Here, have some, or more than some, bumperettes.

This spot, close to the intersection of Harway and Stillwell Avenues, appears to have been recently occupied by Harway Milk Farm, a deli and grocery. Stillwell Avenue has been the focus of several recent Sundays’ worth of tax photographs. Bonus points to this photograph for its dog.

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

Orange Krate art

[Click for a way cooler view.]

Sez Schwinn,

Grab your shades and turn up that transistor radio — the Schwinn Krate is back! With an aesthetic descended from drag racers and rocket ships, the Schwinn Krate oozes more vintage flair than your favorite retro binge watch.

And it’s only (?) $755.99.

I had a copper-colored Sting-Ray as a boy — so cool, even if it had nothing more than a single gear and a pedal brake. It did have a banana seat and high-rise handlebars and a SLIK rear tire (no tread). That spelling still appears on the tire, though the Schwinn website drops the all-caps and adds a c to the tire’s name. Heresy!

Thanks, Seth.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Winston Emmons, started so well for me, and in the northwest corner no less. I began with 17-A, six letters, “Descartes start.” A “Large number” (19-Across, five letters) of the answers seemed “Self-evident, these days” (7-A, four letters). But I ran into difficulty elsewhere and had to look up 59-A, six letters, “Sister of Helios,” which I should have known. And then I ended up looking up answers I was certain were correct (they were) because they seemed so utterly improbable.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

7-D, fifteen letters, “Slots.” I kept thinking of schedules and appointments.

29-D, six letters, “Joint holder.” I so wanted STONER here.

33-A, eight letters, “American benchmark.” Thoughtfully clued.

54-A, eight letters, “Pushback against parents.” Been there, done that.

Clue-and-answer pairs that bugged me:

10-D, four letters, “‘Flat-out fun’ hardware.” Search for “flat-out fun” and all you find are crossword references. I think that’s a sign of a dubious clue. I had the answer but looked it up to check find out what it was about. My answer was wrong. Blame it on 7-A. Explanation in the comments.

11-D, three letters, “Line 11 of IRS Form 1040.” Ah, yes, good old line 11. As with 10-D, the answer is gettable from crosses, but this clue is pretty ridic. Here too I looked up the answer to find out what it was about.

35-D, five letters, “Garnishing gadget.” True, but its name signifies its primary use, which is not to make garnishes.

45-D, five letters, “Last word of Antony and Cleopatra.” It kinda depends. But whatever the answer, it’s pretty arbitrary, not specific to this play.

My favorite in this puzzle: 37-A, fifteen letters, “Aloha, for instance.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Priorities

Last night NBC Nightly News gave 3:35 to its lead story, the life and death of Hulk Hogan. Later in the broadcast, NBC devoted 1:37 to the threat of starvation in Gaza. (Threat of? Let’s just say starvation.)

And last night the PBS NewsHour devoted 7:55 to its lead story, “Hunger in Gaza.” (But again, let’s just say starvation.) And later in the broadcast, PBS devoted 1:12 to the life and death of Hulk Hogan.

Granted, NBC has a commercial-filled half-hour for its nightly news. But that might suggest that less time be devoted to the life and death of a professional wrestler.

Neither broadcast noted that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general now interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell, was the current president’s attorney in his 2024 hush-money trial.

But The Late Show did.

“Everybody loves knock-knock jokes”

[Mutts, July 25, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Mutts made me think of my favorite knock-knock joke of all time, the work of a then-four-year-old comedian.

A college president speaks

Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, on the PBS NewsHour last night, commenting on Columbia University’s payment of $221 million to the federal government. From the NewsHour transcript:

“There’s no findings of facts there. It’s just, you give us $221 million, and then we allow you to compete for grants. I mean, it’s a very old-fashioned game. You pay the powerful figure so that you can go along and continue to operate.

“Now, you operate in a way, of course, that you don’t want to annoy that powerful figure or that powerful organization. And it sends a chilling message across America that, if you have a late-night comedy show, if you have a law firm, if you are working in an educational institution or a library, or, as we read today, in a museum like the Smithsonian, if you don’t please the president, you are at risk.

“And, again, I don’t blame them for trying to make the best of that situation, but, as Americans, I’m not worried about Columbia. I’m not worried about Wesleyan. I’m worried about the country, where we are being subject to a White House that thinks it could tell us what to do at every turn.”

Decimal Equivalents

[As seen on the second floor of the Main Laboratory at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey. Photograph by me. Click for a much larger view.]

Impossible to know if that chart is an original from Edison days, but it does have a 1908 copyright. The sign in the background is attached to a precarious-looking elevator. There too, it’s impossible to know if the sign from Edison days. The elevator, however, is no reproduction.

[Having longed for Aaron Draplin’s “Handheld Decimal Equivalent Chart,” an item for which, I admit, I have no earthly need, I had to photograph this sign.]

Junior Ranger patches

[Photograph by me. Click for a much larger view.]

As seen at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey. The people and programs of the National Park Service are, of course, targets of the current administration. Last night the PBS NewsHour looked at what’s happening: “How the National Parks Service is struggling with drastic funding and staffing cuts.”

I think this photograph must be the largest I’ve posted. Click through: it’s worth it.

[Yes, that’s Edison as man and boy in the bottom corners.]

Jerry Miller, rejected

[“The Far Side Cast.” The Far Side, 1988.]

From today’s samples of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, now in reruns, five strips a day on weekdays, two a day on weekends. I’d say that each strip’s casting director made the right call.

Related reading
All OCA comics posts : Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Books into people

Baltasar Gracián, How to Use Your Enemies, trans. Jeremy Robbins, a short collection of excerpts from The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence (1647).

Alas, Gracián describes reading as a element only in “the first part” of life. Then we see the world and, finally, philosophize by ourselves. But I like this sentence removed from its context. I think of becoming a person as a lifelong effort — never done.

This volume is no. 12 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

John David Moore, i.m.

Elaine and I learned over the weekend that our friend John David Moore has died. John David and I shared an office in our early years on the tenure track: two desks, and a massive file-cabinet/bookcase unit dividing the room in two. We would trade observations about local inanities across an imaginary transom. At that time we both smoked cigarettes, and I once joked that I might have been hired only because they needed another smoker to go in that office.

John David’s thing was Ruskin, but he was hired to teach children’s literature, which education majors tended to regard as a course in kiddie lit, easy reading. With John David it became a course in which all manner of cultural and psychological analysis was brought to bear on the literature of childhood, past and present. He did get to teach Shakespeare and the Victorians too — thank goodness.

John David was an unbelievably erudite man. In later years, when we each had our own office (his with a rug, floor lamp, wing chair, and ancient bookcases), I might drop in, say hello, and mention something I was reading. And he might begin “Oddly enough,” and it would turn out, say, that he had a complete set of whatever it was on his shelves. I’m making up that example because I cannot recall a real one. But they would begin “Oddly enough.” I should mention that his erudition extended well beyond literature: he was a brilliant pianist and an expert mycologist.

When I retired from teaching, John David agreed to talk about me at the end-of-year department party, which he did, in ways both funny and kind. He gave me a watch with broken hands (no more deadlines) and a Webb Young tie (“Hand woven by the mountain people of New Mexico”) that I’m going to wear when we see friends for dinner this weekend. When John David retired a year after me, I agreed to do the talking about him. Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, he missed that year’s party, but I did right by him. I later gave him a large number of vintage pencils that I had bought for him at Phil’s Stationery in Manhattan. He later gave me a C. & E.I. Railroad pencil.

Elaine, who played countless violin/viola and piano recitals with John David over the past twenty years, was very close to him. She has written about him here: Saying goodbye to John David Moore.

A small win for our side

We took a walking route this morning past a house that since last fall has had a big sign in the front yard. You can guess the names on it. If someone was working on the flowerbeds as we walked by, I’d make a point of saying to Elaine “He’s still a convicted felon,” or ”He’s still an adjudicated rapist.”

This morning the sign was gone. Perhaps it was eaten by deer, who appear to run our neighborhood. But I’d prefer to think that the homeowner has come to her senses. I hope to find out.

A related story of signage
Beautiful afternoon, ugly moment

Freudian trucking

Seen on the highway: Super Ego Trucking.

A possible motto: “We obey the rules of the road — because we wrote them!”

Not seen: Id Trucking.

A possible motto: “Outta my way!”

A model for us all

I was waiting on new brake pads and new tires and thus had to — had to, no choice — eat lunch at a great burger joint. It’s always a treat, a rare one, to go there. As I ate, I noticed a man, obviously grandfather-age, with three young kids in a booth. Everyone had a ice cream cone — cake, not sugar. At one point this man held his cone sideways — the ice cream that had been on top was all gone — and said “Flashlight.” The kids were delighted.

On my way out I stopped at their table and mentioned the flashlight trick. “Sir, you are a model for us all,” I said. I had taken him by surprise and had to repeat what I had said. He thanked me.

Dictionaries vs. AI

In The New York Times, Alessandro Tersigni suggests that we rely on dictionaries and not digital assitants when we think about our words. In so doing, he invokes George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” From “Don’t Throw Your Dictionary Away”:

Writers consulting a dictionary make a choice — writers guided by an app like Grammarly have their choices made for them.

Where Grammarly says, “Stay on-brand with consistent communication,” Orwell warns that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Grammarly urges users to “generate text with A.I. prompts,” while Orwell cautions that “ready-made phrases” inevitably “construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you.” Grammarly brags that its users can “rewrite full sentences with a click,” while Orwell notes that “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.”

It’s a fight between robotic consistency and human creativity.

I’ll borrow a line from Ted Berrigan’s poem “Mi Casa, Su Casa”: “‘I want human to begin with’” — and also thereafter.

Related reading
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Moleskine, sheesh

Ward Simmons, the new president of Moleskine America, in an “as told to” piece, talking about his career:

I had four idols growing up: Mohammed Ali, basketball legend Julius Irving, business magnate Howard Hughes, and my grandfather.

Also: Business Insider, sheesh.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts : “sheesh” posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Elaine recognized her at once. I didn’t. How about you?

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

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

A five-year-old’s observation

After a quick stop at a Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin’ for iced coffee (grown-ups) and sherbet (kids):

“Now we’re back in business.”

The New York Times goes to Wal-Mart

It’s an essay with photographs, “Finding Beauty — At Maximum Discount.” A sample:

One of the reasons neither I nor anyone else around these big-box stores can stay away from them is their particular variety of beauty. The beauty of Walmart, we might say, is baroque, like a huge Rubens canvas that fills a wall with an incredibly rich stack of colors and forms.

The writer is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought. I think he’s serious. But I think he should ask some Wal-Mart regulars why they can’t stay away.

[I choose to retain the old-school hyphen in Wal-Mart.]

An Active reflection

[2715 Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Active is a lively presence in the 1940 New York City telephone directories. In addition to Active Auto Wrecking (ESplanade 2-9605), the Brooklyn directory lists Active Awning & Window Shade Manufacturing, Drugs, Electric Service, Heating & Air Conditioning, Iron Works, Lumber, Mason Supply, Pharmacy, Provision Company, Renovating Service, Service Station, Sign Hangers, Spray Painting & Water Proofing, Studio Upholstering Service, and Vans Moving & Storage. Of the five boroughs, Staten Island alone lacks a business with Active as its first name.

A keen-eyed reader noticed a reflection in the window of last week’s delicatessen, and that prompted me to post this tax photograph from across the street. Here are the reflection and its original:


[Click either image for a larger view.]

If you knew how much time I spent resizing these closeups so that together they align with the larger photograph above, you’d likely worry about me and look away. But not to worry — an inclination to tinker with image sizes is a fairly harmless manifestation of the perfectionist gene. (Thanks, Dad.)

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

I often find a Newsday  Saturday Stumper by “Lester Ruff” (Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor) at least as difficult as any other Stumper. Today’s Stumper was no 40-A, seven letters, “Walk in the park.” But I kept at it, even when I thought I was going to have to give up.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Pound sound.” I thought I knew what to fill in for 1-A, four letters, “Sorcerers of old,” but 1-D had me flummoxed. Sneaky clue.

5-A, five letters, “Ignores their companion in favor of their phone.” We see this happen too often in restaurants. But not at our table.

6-D, nine letters, “Botanical challenge.” I thought it might be related to grafting.

11-D, eleven letters, “Jimmy Carter’s naval study.” Somehow I knew this answer, and it helped a lot.

12-D, eleven letters, “Ebert called it among ‘the best Star Trek films ever made.’” Oh, so that’s a Star Trek film? I had no idea. Oh, wait, no, it isn’t.

20-A, seven letters, “What Word owners take for granted.” I haven’t seen or thought of the answer in years.

22-A, seven letters, “Oral >:{.” I thought this clue might signify halitosis or something. Remember halitosis?

31-D, four letters, “The Land of Painted Caves author.” This name is always showing up in crosswords. I’m glad it showed up here, where it was very helpful.

53-D, four letters, “She's transfixed by teen idols.” Didn’t fool me, Lester.

65-A, four letters, “Water “far under the wide-pathed earth.’” My starting point, after scanning the puzzle with increasing fear and trembling.

My favorite in this puzzle, because the answer was both surprising and helpful: 28-A, thirteen letters, “Spotty nature.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Shatteringly crispy

[Dustin, July 19, 2025.]

Does Ed Kudlick like his bacon crispy, or very crispy? His answer is clear. There are few things worse than soggy bacon for breakfast.

I might order bacon once or twice a year, but when I do, it’s always “very crisp” or “extra crisp.” My dad used to ask that they “really burn the bacon.” But restaurant people seem to prefer that we say “crispy.” Today’s Dustin hits home.

Covering her eyes

“I painted her covering her eyes because the weight of the world has become too heavy to witness. What was once a shining symbol of liberty now carries the sorrow of lost meaning”: in Roubaix, France, Judith de Leeuw, a Dutch artist, has painted a mural that reimagines the Statue of Liberty (NBC News).

Rümeysa Öztürk writes

“I want to preserve this story in a time capsule and send it adrift in the vast ocean of essays. This narrative of human suffering, set in 2025, is filled with tears and resilience.” Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts doctoral student arrested by DHS agents for co-authoring an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper, has written an account of her time in ICE detention: “‘Even God Cannot Hear Us Here’: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison” (Vanity Fair).

Remember the debate in 2019 about whether “immigrant detention centers” were concentration camps? They were. They are. And their existence is utterly antithetical to any notion of human rights.

In 2019 I wrote a post about what it means to call something a concentration camp: Three mistakes.

Not a good night

Elaine and I went to a Good Trouble Lives On event at a local park last night. This event did not appear on the national map, and I’m not sure how well it was publicized. Perhaps eighty people showed up, and we were directed to form small groups (at tables in a pavilion) and talk about the issues that were important to us. And then each group appointed a spokesperson to share. The consensus was that we want to work on preserving democracy.

As David Allen would ask, What’s the next action? But no one asked that question.

I suggested two things everyone might do: call our congressional representative’s office every day, which might at least give the person answering the phone something to think about, and give some money to our local PBS affiliate. Another person suggested a variation on Moral Mondays. Where? The public library is closed at night. “No one” goes to the university library.

Someone got the news on their phone that The Late Show was being canceled.

Suggestions borrowed from a less local group included canvassing and phone banking. But where does one get the addresses and telephone numbers? And who answers calls from unknown callers in 2025?

The sky darkened as a storm neared. The rain began. The meeting ended early.

A minor Mac mystery solved

I was baffled not long ago by the behavior of The Washington Post crossword puzzle in Safari: 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.” I was able to reproduce this odd event any number of times.

Doing the Gisnep puzzle last night in Safari, I typed the word DONT and watched it disappear. Over and over.

When I woke up this morning, I figured out what was happening: I have text snippets that replace cant, dont, and so on with can’t, don’t, and so on. Something goes kerflooey when the letters of a snippet enter puzzle boxes. So I unchecked my apostrophe-centric snippets, and now all’s well.

But I’m still wondering why the screen reader kicked in on the WP crossword page — and nowhere else.

Cue theremin.

Up late

On a long drive back from a happy fambly weekend, we stopped for the night in ___________ and went to a friendly neighborhood multinational retailer to get some supplies before checking into a hotel: water, Guinness, herbal tea. It was Sunday, 10:30, and the store was packed with Latino families: men, women, and children.

Maybe people were just taking care of business before the week started. But Elaine suspected — and I suspect she was right — that people were shopping late on a Sunday night to avoid ICE agents, or at least to be together in case of an encounter with ICE.

What a country we’ve made for ourselves.

A Frontline to watch

Anyone concerned about the shape of things should watch the latest episode of the PBS series Frontline: “Trump’s Power & the Rule of Law.”

And as it happens, the Senate voted earlier today to remove funding for public broadcasting (The New York Times). My House idiot: “No more taxpayer-funded Leftist propaganda. DEFUND PBS & NPR!!” Not us: we’re sending our PBS affiliate more money.

Something to think about, from the Times:

NPR and PBS would survive — only a small percentage of their funding comes from the federal government. But the cuts would force many local stations to sharply reduce their programming and operations as early as this fall. Many public broadcasters receive more than 50 percent of their budgets from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

That means the package could be a death sentence for some stations, which have survived several attempts to choke off funding over the decades. For other broadcasters, it would mean cutting back on local programming.

That’s why this time we’re sending more money to our local affiliate, not to NPR and PBS.

No one looking out

Charles Dickens, “Wapping Workhouse” (1860), in Night Walks (Penguin, 2010).

Some background: here, here, and here.

Also from this volume
“Peaches and maccaroni”

From HCR

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

As the Supreme Court strengthens the office of the presidency without explaining the constitutional basis for its decisions, who is actually running the government is a very real question.

It’s a particularly dire letter, with the Department of Education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting under fire and emergency food provisions being burned.

Who is running things now? My take, in a post from June 17: “I think it’s a pretty good bet that Stephen Miller is running the country now.”

Zippy’s phone

[“Data-Driven.” Zippy, July 15, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy reminded me that yesterday, when a machine was “crafting” my coffee, I made a mental note to look up the word craft. How come it’s a noun and a verb? Must investigate.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

“Divinely prophetic”

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, trans. Meredith McKinney.

This small volume of excerpts from Essays in Idleness (c. 1329–1331), the work of a Japanese Buddhist monk, is no. 11 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Also from this volume
“Jotting down at random” : “Beneath a lamp” : “The boorishness and insensitive” : One arrow

Black Sparrow and Charles Reznikoff

How did John Martin, the founder of Black Sparrow Press, come to publish Charles Reznikoff’s poetry? Here’s a possible answer, from Ron Padgett’s Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1993):

It’s possible Ted read By the Waters of Manhattan simply because it was a New Directions book. He told me I had to read Reznikoff immediately. Soon we discovered Testimony, which we loved. We didn't know much about Reznikoff’s life, though, or even if he were still alive.

During a benefit reading for the McCarthy presidential campaign in 1968, a girl I had known in high school came up to say hello to me and to ask Ted if one of his lines (“BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN”) referred to Charles Reznikoff. We were both surprised — relatively few people knew of Reznikoff at that time. It turned out that Reznikoff was her uncle (or great uncle) by marriage. Would we like to meet him? She would have us all to dinner. We happily accepted.

When it came time for the dinner, though, Ted couldn’t make it, and Bill Berkson filled in. We had a lovely dinner with “Uncle Charles,” who gave us copies of his books he had printed (and hand-corrected) at his own expense. He was modest and sweet, and I was upset that such a wonderful poet would have to resort to publishing himself at the age of, what, eighty?

That’s why I put a notice in the Poetry Project Newsletter, which I was editing, urging someone to publish him. Not long after — and this may have been a coincidence — he got a letter from Black Sparrow, which eventually began reissuing his work. But this story makes it sound as if I deserve some credit. If any credit is due, it’s to Ted.

I remember seeing Charles Reznikoff’s self-published books from the Tens and Twenties in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago in 1988, well after Black Sparrow had begun to publish his work. Signed copies, on the shelves, there for the borrowing. But I didn’t dare.

[Testimony: The United States, in two volumes, is a documentary project: poetry made from court records. It’s astonishing, harrowing reading.]

Van Dyke Parks and Mike Love

Together, at the memorial service for Brian Wilson, in a photograph posted by Van Dyke.

These fellows have a history. An article from Parade gives a brief account: “Legendary Band’s Long-Running Feud Finds ‘Peace’ at Iconic Musician’s Memorial Service.”

See also this Orange Crate Art post: That (in)famous line, about one line of Van Dyke’s lyrics for the song “Cabinessence.” Mike Love was not a fan.

Ness

The phone rang at 6:38 in the morning. No problem: I’d already sent my Connections, Strands, and Alphaguess to the fambly thread, so everyone knew I was up. The call came (with assistance) from a granddaughter who wanted to know what ness means: as in kindness.

So I explained that -ness is a suffix, something that can be added to the end of a word. You can add -ness to an adjective, and it turns the adjective into to a noun: good, goodness; kind, kindness; silly, silliness. No problem with the terms adjective and noun: my granddaughter already knows them from doing Mad Libs.

Adjectives, nouns, -ness: what a kiddo!

Rogan josh

I suspect I’m not the only American-born eater who takes pains not mess up when ordering rogan josh. There is no Joe or Seth in rogan.

Rogan josh is deeply flavorful, absolutely great. The origin of its name is uncertain.

Scavenger hunt

[2700 Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Urban retail density at its finest.

Scavenger hunt: find Pepsi-Cola, Old Dutch Cleanser (“Chases Dirt”), Super Suds, God Bless America, F. Galletta, canned goods (your choice), Heinz Ketchup, God Bless America, Uneeda Biscuit, salami, Campbell’s Soup, a Coca-Cola maiden, Latticini Fresci (fresh dairy products), and cigars, cigars, cigars. And the ever important charlotte russe.

Does that streetside box hold some nice cold drinks, or just cigars?

In an earlier incarnation, 2700 Stillwell was home to Villa Joe’s, a restaurant that saw serious gunplay on at least one occasion: “You go for the ride tonight.”

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : A few charlotte russe posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. With limited time this morning, I’ll share one enjoyable clue: 9-D, three letters, “Fault finding.”

No spoiler; the answer is in the comments.

John Martin (1930–2025)

John Martin founded Black Sparrow Press, best known for publishing Charles Bukowski’s poetry, but also known (to fewer readers) for making available Charles Rezkinoff’s poems, complete. The New York Times has an obituary. (No mention of Reznikoff therein.)

One arrow

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, trans. Meredith McKinney.

This small volume of excerpts from Essays in Idleness (c. 1329–1331), the work of a Japanese Buddhist monk, is no. 11 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Also from this volume
“Jotting down at random” : “Beneath a lamp” : “The boorishness and insensitive”

Overheard

“I knew your parents drove a Corolla!”

Followed by three people’s hysterical laughter.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

“The boorish and insensitive”

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, trans. Meredith McKinney.

This small volume of excerpts from Essays in Idleness (c. 1329–1331), the work of a Japanese Buddhist monk, is no. 11 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015). This sentence seems to me a Proustian observation.

Also from this volume
“Jotting down at random” : “Beneath a lamp”

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. Here he is writing to a friend from childhood, Abel Desjardins, about a photograph Abel gave him in childhood, inscribed on the back “To my best friend except X.” Two years later, Abel asked for the photograph back and returned it with the words “except X” crossed out.

Proust moved from his apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann on October 1, 1919, after his aunt sold the building.

Since that time the mementos have seemed so dead to me that latterly, forced to leave the boulevard Haussmann, I burned precious autographs, manuscripts, no copies of which exist — even photographs which have become rare. But all of a sudden I stopped in front of a little boy with a thin nose, a bantering look, and a three-cornered hat, and I exclaimed to the person who was burning up all the things I was taking out of big valises: “No! not that!” It was the photograph in which I was Abel’s best friend except for X — then just best friend, nothing more. And that I couldn’t have burned, for it was still living.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Abel Desjardins, “well known as a surgeon and lover of the arts,” 1919. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Found by opening the book Augustine-style, as I’ve found other passages from letters to post on Proust’s birthday.]

“Crossroads” everywhere

From Missisippi and from around the world: “Crossroads” (Playing for Change).

Related reading
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[Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” was released in 1937. The guitar bit between the lines of each chorus comes from Cream’s 1968 “Crossroads.”]

“Beneath a lamp”

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, trans. Meredith McKinney.

This small volume of excerpts from Essays in Idleness (c. 1329–1331), the work of a Japanese Buddhist monk, is no. 11 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Every post I’m making right now is a step away from them — “them” being current events. They may be found elsewhere.

Also from this volume
“Jotting down at random”

“Jotting down at random”

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, trans. Meredith McKinney.

This small volume of excerpts from Essays in Idleness (c. 1329–1331), the work of a Japanese Buddhist monk, is no. 11 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015). It’s our household’s great discovery (so far) as we make our way through the series.

[Ellipsis in the original.]

Pre-Code reading

[From Vanity Street (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932).]

A member of a street-repair crew takes time out to read.

As in wrote in my handful of sentences about this movie, there are several moments that would never have made it past the censors in the post-Code world.

Happy birthday, Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr turns eighty-five today. The New York Times has an article about him. And The Atlantic had a long article about him in May, when he was eighty-four.

Twelve movies

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

The Young Stranger (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1957). Frankenheimer’s directing debut is a low-budget, emotionally muted variation on Rebel Without a Cause. After repeatedly annoying fellow moviegoers, a feisty teenager, Hal (James MacArthur, later of Hawaii 5–0), slugs the theater manager (Whit Bissell) and claims self-defense. Hal’s emotionally unavailable father (James Daly) doesn’t believe his son; Hal’s mother (Kim Hunter), who looks almost young enough to be her son’s older sister, has long been torn about remaining in her marriage; a police sergeant (James Gregory) is surprisingly helpful in effecting a resolution. Best moment: Dad making martinis. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Missing Juror (dir. Budd Boetticher, 1944). A man (George Macready) is wrongly convicted of murder and saved from execution, only to go mad and kill himself. And then the jurors from his case begin to turn up dead. Gosh, who’d want to kill them? Despite astonishing IMDb reviews (“one of the great over-looked film noirs,” “not noir but definitely not mediocre!!”), it’s a painfully dumb effort for all involved. ★ (YT)

*

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (dir. Joseph Sargent, 1974). That is, the hijacking of a subway train that left Pelham Bay Park station in the Bronx at 1:23 p.m. The premise is absurd, and it’s not helped by the preposterous disguises of the four hijackers and the deadpan New Yorkese of Walter Matthau and Jerry Stiller as New York City Transit Police lieutenants, but maybe this movie is really a very dark comedy disguised as a thriller. Perhaps the best reason to watch is the chance for an extended look at New York City streets and trains (the latter graffiti-free, at the insistence of the Transit Authority) in the dilapidated Manhattan of the 1970s. But for a train out of control, watch The French Connection. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950). I’m not embarrassed to say that I’d never seen Rashomon before: as I always told my students, you come to things when you come to them. Here’s a story (starring Toshiro Mifune as a roving bandit) of appalling sudden violence, told from four irreconcilable perspectives. I see the movie as pulling the viewer in two directions: toward the contemplation of an ever more fascinating indeterminacy (“Now it’s getting interesting,” a character says) and toward ethical action that puts that fascination off to the side (sorry, no spoilers). My years in lit crit lead me to think of it as the difference between theory and practice. ★★★★ (CC)

*

My Mom Jayne (dir. Mariska Hargitay, 2025). Mariska Hargitay, who was just three when Jayne Mansfield died in a horrific auto accident, looks into the life of a mother she barely remembers. Revelation after revelation follows, and a complicated network of family relationships begins to take shape (no spoilers). I know that this documentary is meant to end on a note of healing and reconciliation, but it left me with immense sadness about the life and work of a woman who made terrible choices in her private life (“problematic,” Hargitay says) and who was complicit in her public commodification. Saddest scene: Mansfield gamely playing the violin for Jack Paar, who couldn’t have cared less. ★★★★ (M)

*

Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (dir. Eva Orner, 2019 ). Bikram Choudhury is a yoga teacher who claims to have invented Bikram Yoga, a form of hot yoga, performed by hundreds of students in a sweltering studio as he walks about in a skimpy bathing suit, issuing directives and admonitions. In filmed depositions, he appears as an arrogant, manipulative, predatory creature who creates his own reality and expects others to accept it. Mark Quigley, attorney: “In his head, he thinks what he says is the truth, even though the evidence is right there — clearly what he’s saying it is not true — he’ll say it.” Our household began watching documentaries about cults and their leaders for the morbid entertainment value, but now when we watch, we’re reminded again and again of the current occupant of the White House. ★★★★ (M)

*

Terror at Midnight (dir. Franklin Adreon, 1956). A solid B-picture from Republic. The premise: the fiancée (Joan Vohs) of a newly promoted police detective (Scott Brady) hits a cyclist, drives away after getting bad advice (from Percy Helton!), and finds herself subject to the crude overtures of an auto repairman (Frank Faylen, Ernie in It’s a Wonderful Life ), while her fiancé is hit up for blackmail. Brady and Vohs, the nominal stars, offer little of interest: the real reason to watch is the marital nightmare of auto repairman Fred and his alcoholic wife Helen (Virginia Gregg, who was the voice of Norman Bates’s mother). Fred and Helen’s toxic partnership recalls that of Al and Vera (Tom Neal and Ann Savage) in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour — i.e., yow! ★★★ (YT)

*

Crumb (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 1994). Though I once wrote that I could watch this documentary again and again, this one additional viewing, inspired by the news of a R. Crumb biography, will be enough for me. “It’s grim,” Crumb says at one point, and the documentary explores a story of immense sadness, in which Crumb himself appears as the one relatively well-adjusted member of a family beset by parental brutality, mental illness, and emotional torment. Note: relatively well-adjusted: Crumb is, for me, a brilliant artist, but he also presents as a man who never moved past the resentment and self-styled superiority of a high-school outcast (is that how curmudgeons get started?). Lots of art and many scenes of Crumb at work. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Illicit (dir. Archie Mayo, 1931). Ann (Barbara Stanwyck) is a woman with what her wealthy beau Dick (James Rennie) calls “theories,” the main one being that marriage is the death of love. She’d prefer to continue “overnighting”: it’s a pre-Code world, so who cares people say? Tune in to learn what happens when these two do finally wed. With Joan Blondell, Charles Butterworth, Ricardo Cortez, and Natalie Moorhead as additional incarnations of the very idle rich. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Millie (dir. John Francis Dillon, 1931). Helen Twelvetrees is Millie, a woman who marries young, is betrayed by her lout of a husband, gives her daughter over to her now-ex-husband and mother-in-law, and resolves to live independently, starting out at a cigar counter and rising to better things. And she enters into a freewheeling nightlife with two friends (Joan Blondell and Lilyan Tashman, who share a bed, apparently because they can’t afford better lodgings). When a fancy banker whom Millie rejected takes an interest in her now-seventeen-year-old daughter (Anita Louise), Millie isn’t having it. A remarkable pre-Code picture of fierce female independence. ★★★ (YT)

*

Vanity Street (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). A hungry unhoused urbanite, Jeanie Gregg (Helen Chandler, Mina to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula), throws a brick through a drugstore window so that she’ll be arrested and get a decent meal in jail. Instead, police detective Brian Murphy (Charles Bickford) takes pity on her, and Miss Gregg (somehow) becomes a successful showgirl, until Mr. Murphy (it’s all very formal) has to arrest her for a murder of which she’s wrongly accused. Fun pre-Code stuff, with several moments that would never have made it past the censors a couple of years later. Bonus: Mayo Methot, later to be Humphrey Bogart’s partner in (mutual) domestic violence, as a faded star of the stage. ★★★ (YT)

*

Hot Summer Night (dir. David Friedkin, 1957). Leslie Nielsen plays Bill Partain, an out-of-work journalist (newspaper merger) on his honeymoon who hopes to get his job back by scoring an interview with a legendary Ozarks crime boss who’s hiding out after a bank robbery and murder. Bill’s wife Irene (Colleen Miller) appears to have much more common sense, and it’s she who takes action when Bill is held for ransom by the boss and his gang. Horribly overwrought dialogue makes much of the movie feel like a bad play. But there’s a score by André Previn, and some genuine excitement once Irene takes charge. ★★★ (TCM)

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

Found objects

Found: a Coleman lantern, a digital alarm clock, and a board-book copy of Goodnight Moon, the boards showing sharp indentations here and there.

Yes, the deer slept in our back yard.

Related reading
All OCA deer posts (Pinboard)

[The only traces they really leave are flat spots in the grass and, sometimes, skat. The grass bounces back quickly. The deer this time were three: “some deer.”]

Grace Court

[2850 Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Still on Stillwell Avenue this week, welcoming you to Grace Court. The window treatments and parapet are now gone, and the building looks much smaller with a behemoth on each side. But if you look closely, you can see the words “Grace Court” still above the building’s entrance, obscured by an ugly railing but caught by Google Maps 2024 and (more clearly) in 2022.

Bonus points for the baby carriage and the man with a broom.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Recently updated

Hi and Lois and tyranny What was the artist trying to say?

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is another “Lester Ruff” (Stan Newman) puzzle that struck me as rather difficult. I hadda look up words. The southeast corner — grr.

I’ve chosen nine-letter answers to suggest this puzzle’s delights and non-delights:

2-A, “Quirky grocery guy.” I thought the answer had to be the name of a advertising or cartoon or sitcom character. MRWHIPPLE?

6-A, “Work hard” antonym. Nicely contemporary.

18-A, “Apricot or peach potations.” BRANDIES is a letter short. I’ve always thought of a different ingredient, so I didn’t expect this answer.

32-D, “Throws off.” I kept thinking of someone creating a false trail, then of someone (else) removing a heavy garment. But I finally got on track.

33-D, “Well-suited for vacationers.” I’m surprised to see that it’s a real word, and it rivals in popularity a similar word that I would have thought is much more common.

34-D, “City north of Berkeley on I-80.” I hadda look it up. It’s a city of 25,000+: is there any reason someone solving should be expected to know its name? Maybe there is.

35-D, “About 21 pints.” I hadda look it up.

60-A, “‘Show me!’” Nicely colloquial. IWANTPROOF is one letter over.

My favorite in this puzzle: 37-A, three letters, “The Meaning of Everything subject.” Thanks for that.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Hi and Lois and tyranny

[Hi and Lois, July 4, 2025.]

Today’s Hi and Lois : wow. The expressions on the three older faces say it all.

*

July 5: After looking at the artist’s Instagram, which includes a watercolor portrait of the word elegance (i.e., the occupant’s current wife in her Hamburglar/Zorro hat), I must admit that I don’t know what his intention was with this strip. But I know that people of various political persuasions have read it as I raed it.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Robert Reich: “This is fascism”

Robert Reich:

Other presidents in my lifetime have been able to summon majorities of lawmakers for unpopular causes — I think of Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — but none with the retributive threats, social media fury, and potentially violent base of supporters that Trump is now wielding.

Needless to say, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts made America more inclusive. Trump’s Big Ugly Bill makes America crueler.

The best analogy isn’t to Lyndon Johnson. It’s to the “strongmen” of the 1930s — Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco.

That such a regressive, dangerous, gargantuan, and unpopular piece of legislation could get through Congress shows how far Trump has dragged America into modern fascism.

Fascism, always homegrown

Sarah Churchwell, cultural historian, in the PBS documentary Nazi Town, USA (dir. Peter Yost, 2024), which tells the story of the German American Bund:

“Fascism is ultra-nationalist. In other words, there’s no such thing as foreign fascism. Fascism is always homegrown.”

The documentary is streaming at PBS. An appropriate supplement: A Night at The Garden, Marshall Curry’s seven-minute assemblage of archival footage of a 1939 Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. The 20,000-strong event was advertised as a “Pro-American Rally.” Draw your own parallels and conclusions.

Freedom and tyranny

When the tyrannical reign of King George III became destructive of the ends of government by law under which all persons are equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, the American Colonists declared their independence from the British King, chronicling 27 grievances of self-evident truths about tyranny as reasons for their declaration of independence.

J. Michael Luttig catalogues “The Self-Evident Truths of Freedom — and of Tyranny” (Telos.news).

“Peaches and maccaroni”

Insomniac wanderings.

Charles Dickens, “Night Walks” (1860), in Night Walks (Penguin, 2010).

I’ve long wanted a copy of this little book (from Penguin’s Great Ideas series). After collecting the texts of the various essays therein from archive.org and Google Books, I decided to just buy the book. I found one at a reasonable price, like new, via Grand Eagle Retail.

[Bethlehem Royal Hospital: also known as Bedlam. “The death of each day’s life”: Macbeth 2.2.]

A sardine sandwich

[Nancy, October 12, 1972. From Nancy & Sluggo’s Guide to Life: Comics about Money, Food, and Other Essentials (New York Review Comics, 2024. Click for a larger sandwich.]

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and sardine posts : sardine posts (Pinboard)

AI and college writing

“The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education”: in The New Yorker, Hua Hsu asks “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”

Many anecdotes, but I don’t see much reexamination of purpose here. Hsu contrasts professors who have returned to requiring handwritten work with professors who are intent on “getting students to see the value of process.” (But have writing by hand and attention to process ever been mutually exclusive?) And Hsu wonders about the virtues of efficiency:

In my conversations, just as college students invariably thought of ChatGPT as merely another tool, people older than forty focussed on its effects, drawing a comparison to G.P.S. and the erosion of our relationship to space. The London cabdrivers rigorously trained in “the knowledge” famously developed abnormally large posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial for long-term memory and spatial awareness. And yet, in the end, most people would probably rather have swifter travel than sharper memories. What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?

What if we take seriously the idea that A.I. assistance can accelerate learning — that students today are arriving at their destinations faster?

But using AI to generate an outline or essay isn’t accelerating learning — it’s accelerating the creation of a product to turn in for a grade. And if you’re using AI to do your thinking for you, your destination may not be one you anticipated or, perhaps, even recognize upon arrival. Witness the student Hsu quotes who used Claude to “write” two papers: “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” And he received grades of A- and B+.

I will once again cite the words of 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.”

Related reading
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[Leave it to The New Yorker to punctuäte AI. And thanks to the reader who alerted me to a missing word. Generate was what I had, and I don’t know how it went missing.]

Mother and children

[Click for a larger view.]

We now know that there are three fawns in our ’hood. Yesterday morning we saw all three with two does when we were out for a walk. Elaine said they were having a play date. And then in the mid-afternoon we saw these three localites in our back yard. I think the fawn on the right was nursing or about to nurse.

I like the tangle of torsos here — I didn’t post the wrong photograph.

Undermining democracy

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

It was exactly a year ago today, on July 1, 2024, that the United States Supreme Court decided Donald J. Trump v. United States. The court’s majority overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law....

It was at a press conference in Ochopee, Florida, today that Trump showed just how profoundly the immunity conferred on him a year ago is undermining democracy.

One of the more surreal and terrifying days of 2025, with alligators, cages, and cologne. And Richardson transcribed the demonstration of mental acuity that I transcribed yesterday.

Mental acuity

Via Aaron Rupar. My transcription:

“Mr. President, is there an expected time frame that detainees will spend here — days, weeks, months? And does that have anything to do with the immigration judges you just spoke about being trained and staffed here?”

“When you say, eh, what was the first part of your question?”

“Is there a specific time frame you expect the detainees to spend here — days, weeks, months?”

“In Florida?”

“Yes, here in Alligator Alcatraz.”

“I’m going to spend a lot — look, this is my home state. I love it, I love your government, I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine, they know ’em very well. I mean, I’m not surprised that they do so well. They’re great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I’ll spend a lot of time here. Eh, I want, eh, you know, for four years, I’ve got to be in Washington and I’m okay with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office. I make it, it’s like a diamond, it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful. It wasn’t maintained properly, I will tell you that, but even when it wasn’t, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot. But I’ll spend as much time as I can here. You know, my vacation is generally here ’cause it’s convenient, I live in Palm Beach, it’s my home. And I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun, and I’m a big contributor to Florida, you know, pay a lot of tax, and a lot of people move from New York, and I don’t know what New York is going to do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York, and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they’re leaving. I don’t know what New York is gonna to do about that because some of the biggest, wealthiest people and some of the people that pay the most taxes of any people anywhere in the world for that matter, they’re moving to Florida, and other places. So we’re going to have to help some of these states out, I think. But thank you very much. I’ll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”

Related reading
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Mystery actor

[Click for an even larger face.]

*

His likeness appears as the credits roll, and that makes him immediately recognizable. I’m not sure how recognizable his likeness is on its own. Sort of recognizable, kinda. Somewhat recognizable-ish.

Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

A hint: This actor is best known for a role in a long-running cop show.

*

Oh well. I’ve put the answer in the comments.

Related reading
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“What other people think”

In The Atlantic, Betsy Levy Paluck writes about “The Most Overlooked Value of Political Protest” (gift link):

Politics is a challenge for human coordination. People want to participate in political action only if others do as well. Those who believe in self-governance must signal to other people that they wish to participate, that they believe in one form of politics or another. We must watch one another — not just through social media or a news channel — to learn what we believe. And we must be willing to speak up ourselves. This is the way to form common knowledge about what other Americans truly think and want. And this is the under-
appreciated value of protests. To paraphrase the political scientist Diana Mutz: they don’t tell us what to think, but they tell us what other people think.

I’m reminded of how cheered I was to see a number of unexpected faces at our No Kings Day gathering. As Dante said to Brunetto Latini, “Are you here?”