A line from Connie Converse

That’s a line from the song “House,” which Converse wrote and home-recorded for a friend’s short film. I came across this line while browsing Howard Fishman’s biography To Anyone Who Ever Asks : The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse (2023). There’s no trace of the song at Bandcamp, where Converse’s home recordings are available for, well, a song.

There’s wit in that seemingly sentimental line: “Hearts and Flowers” is the title of an 1893 song, music by Theodore Moses-Tobani, words by Mary D. Brine, with a melody adapted from Alphons Czibulka. That song is available: you can hear any number of lugubrious renditions at the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox. Or a reimagining for double-tracked guitars by Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. Or download the sheet music and try it yourself.

Forty-one

[Drawing by me. Click for a larger view.]

Elaine and I were married forty-one years ago today. I posted this same drawing last year, having removed the glasses I wore the year before that.

Happy anniversary, Elaine, in all years.

*

Elaine has shared another piece of fambly art today.

Atlantic oops

The Atlantic now has a trivia game (gift link). The first installment gave me pause. Its third question:

Dealing as much with loss and grief as with physical monstrosity, what Victorian epistolary novel was referred to by its young author as her “hideous progeny”?

No. No. It’s not a Victorian novel.

Spoiler approaching:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818. A revised version appeared in 1831. Queen Victoria’s long reign began in 1837.

Med beds and the Middle Ages

Wallace Shawn, in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981):

“In the Middle Ages, before the arrival of scientific thinking as we know it today, well, people could believe anything. Anything could be true. The statue of the Virgin Mary could speak or bleed or whatever it was. But the wonderful thing that happened was that then in the development of science in the western world, certain things did come slowly to be known and understood.”

The current occupant’s social-media post touting the arrival of med beds, magical beds that cure disease and regrow missing body parts, made me think of this passage. Our culture is in many ways back the Middle Ages. (Flash: A med bed is keeping JFK alive.)

The current occupant’s post has been removed. But you can still view its AI-generated faux-news story here. It features AI versions of Lara Trump and the current occupant himself, which raises the bizarre possibility that the real-world occupant can’t tell the difference between himself and a digital clone — and that he doesn’t know what he’s said or not said. It wouldn’t be surprising though if he were unable to distinguish an AI-Lara Trump from the real thing. Also not surprising that he spends time looking at looney-tunes AI slop.

So far there’s no mention of the med-bed post in The Guardian, The New York Times, or The Washington Post. In a different climate, the story of this deleted post would be everywhere: “New questions today about mental acuity after,” &c.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Chick-fil-A vs. fall

A Chick-fil-A claim, as heard in a commercial: “It gets you nice and excited for fall.”

Chick-fil-A, you’re ful-A it.

What gets me excited for fall? Fall itself, due to arrive, or having arrived, or preparing to depart. The season itself is its own prime mover.

I’ll quote something I wrote in a 2013 post: “Fall is the most beautiful and most poignant of seasons. The beauty of fall is the beauty of things fading away.”

Related reading
All OCA fall posts (Pinboard) : Mutts and fall : Nancy and fall : Peanuts and fall

More Mel Taub puzzles

The New York Times has republished three more Puns and Anagrams crosswords by the late Mel Taub (gift link).

The Times obituary for Taub has a puzzle too (gift link, still working).

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 29, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

Look at today’s Hi and Lois and you might do a doubletake.

[Hi and Lois, September 29, 2025, revised by me. Click for a larger view.]

In the second (and last) panel of today’s strip, Hi passes the question to Lois, whose facial expression suggests that she’s ill-equipped to answer.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

They may not look like ballet dancers

[555 Hudson Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and any one place is always replete with new improvisations”: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).

Having hit the halfway point (no. 40) in the Penguin Little Black Classics box set, Elaine and I are taking a break to read Jane Jacobs. And so I thought to look up her Greenwich Village address. Jacobs and her husband Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr. bought this 1842 building in 1947 and lived there from 1947 to 1968. Jacobs wrote elsewhere. But she lived above a candy store. I like knowing that, and I like seeing that this tax photograph has people on the sidewalk.

Further reading
555 Hudson Street (City Lore)
Virtual Plaque Unveiling: The Home of Jane Jacobs, 555 Hudson Street (Village Preservation)

You can see a photograph of Jacobs (and her husband and a son) at the second link. There’s still a Hoffman sign on the candy store in that photograph, dated “about 1950.”

Thanks to the anonymous reader who pointed out two typos — or is it dictos? Someday I’m going to learn to stop trusting dictation.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : Jacobs on cities destroyed by their success : Jacobs on credentialing vs. educating : Jacobs on cultural xenophobia

Two pages

Jonathan Capehart, on the PBS NewsHour last night, commenting on the indictment of James Comey:

“It’s only two pages. And it’s only — it’s two pages because it’s double-spaced.”

I wrote down Jonathan Capehart’s sentences on an index card last night and remembered to post them only when I watched the NewsHour tonight. And now I’m typing as the current occupant is directing that American military forces be sent to “War ravaged Portland.”

WWDFWD in this moment? Reality has outstripped satire, though not, the gods willing, for keeps.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by David P. Williams. XWord Info has him as the creator of seven previous puzzles between 2023 and 2025, none of them Stumpers. This one is terrific, full of punny touches and misdirection. I’m tempted to say that it “Was merciless” (24-A, thirteen letters), but there were handholds here and there.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-A, seven letters, “Italian penicillin.” I’ve never heard it called this, but the name fits.

6-A, four letters, “Half a decorator duo.” I was stuck for some time thinking of sills and sashes.

6-D, eleven letters, “Expression of doubt.” Pretty novel.

12-D, five letters, “Isn’t it ironic?” I was flummoxed for some time, not understanding the now-obvious meaning of what had to be the answer.

20-A, six letters, “Lit from liquor.” Tricky.

23-A, seven letters, “Comics canine’s collegian.” Not tricky if you read the comics.

23-D, eleven letters, “Improv activity.” One of several clue-and-answer pairs that misdirect by mixing singular and plural words.

26-D, ten letters, “Line outside a post nightclub.” Getting this answer early on helped a lot.

34-D, eight letters, “Leverage privilege.” My one quibble with this puzzle: the answer should be a noun or noun phrase to match the clue. A possible clue: “What those with leverage might do.” See the comments for an explanation from Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor.

38-D, seven letters, “First class offerings.” Carefully worded.

46-D, four letters, “Abridged mystery writer.” My first thought was EAP, but there’s more to the clue.

50-A, ten letters, “Markups.” PRICEHIKES?

57-A, four letters, “They were first sold (1961) in red trunks.” Cleverly clued.

58-A, five letters, “Knot-tying by-product.” Not BADGE, because there is no Merit Badge specifically for knot-tying.

My favorite in this puzzle: 9-D, eight letters, “Rule broken by geishas.” Stumpers gonna stump.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Guitar heroines

Charles Dickens, “The Steam Excursion” (1839). As found in The Great Winglebury Duel, no. 37 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting

[From Bright Victory (dir. Mark Robson, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

Mental acuity

Today, a question from a journalist and an answer from the current occupant. My transcription. You can watch and listen via Aaron Rupar’s Bluesky account:

“Secretary Hegseth is inviting military leaders from all around the country on Tuesday. Will you also be there?”

“From all around the country to what?”

Marco Rubio (I think) explains: “He’s inviting the generals and admirals to Virginia for a big meeting.”

“Well, I know, I love it. I mean, I think it’s great. Let ’em be friendly. Let ’em be friendly with the generals and admirals from all over the world. Why, is there some, no, but is there something wrong with it?”

“What is it about? Will you be there personally? What is it about?”

“Well, I’ll be there if they want me, but why is that such a big deal? I mean, he’s, the fact that we’re getting along with the generals and admirals from all, I’m, remember, I’m the president of peace. It’s good, it’s good to get along. It’s good, you act like this is a bad thing. Isn’t it nice that people are coming from all over the world to be with us?”

And J.D. Vance then jumps in to provide cover by ever so casually noting that the generals and admirals are the ones who report to Hegseth and the current occupant, and that such a get-together is “not unusual.” (It is.)

It doesn’t take very careful close reading to understand that the current occupant has no idea what he’s being asked about. The reporter’s “all around the country” morphs into his “all over the world,” and he thinks that he’s being asked about a meeting between Pete Hegseth and military leaders from other nations. Why else would be speak of our “getting along” with them and their coming “to be with us”? Nor does he seem to consider that a meeting of generals and admirals from “all over the world” might be something he should already know about, especially if he’s supposed to show up for it. “I’ll be there if they want me”: really?

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Somebody’s mind done gone off the goddam track.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard) : “Clickety-clack”

[“Isn’t it nice that people are coming from all over the world to be with us?” I hear Norma Desmond, ready for her closeup.]

“And so news rushes”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

From Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings, trans. Elisabeth Stopp (Penguin, 2015).

This volume of excerpts from Maxims and Reflections (1998) is no. 36 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series.

Also from this volume
Writing a chronicle : Consorting

If Emily Dickinson lived here

By me (when?), saved as a note on my Mac.

Related reading
All OCA Dickinson posts (Pinboard)

Mel Taub, or mutable

Mel Taub, creator of the New York Times Puns and Anagrams crossword, has died at the age of ninety-seven. The Times has an obituary (gift link).

The obituary includes a Puns and Anagrams crossword from 2017. To my surprise, I got the whole thing.

[I’m not that given to anagrams. But I’m not vetoing them either. The obituary mentions mutable.]

No homework

[Strands. The New York Times, September 23, 2025.]

Yesterday’s Strands has one word that, to my mind, doesn’t fit the theme. Exam, lecture, paper, quiz, reading ? Of course. Homework ? No.

I spent four years in college without doing “homework.” In a 2013 post, I explained my (still standing) objection to the use of the word in a college setting.

“Stark, raving mad”

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about the current occupant’s day at the UN:

The speech was a dark fantasy of narcissism and Christian nationalism that struck at the heart of the very concept of the United Nations. In its wake, some journalists demolished Trump’s wild claims, while others bemoaned his destruction of diplomacy by berating our friends and allies while they were guests in our country. But it was foreign affairs journalist Ishaan Tharoor who captured the larger story of Trump’s speech.

“A senior foreign diplomat posted at the U.N. texts me,” Tharoor wrote, “‘This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?’”

Yes, some.

[I’d like to remove the comma after stark, but I’m respecting the source.]

Consorting

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

From Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings, trans. Elisabeth Stopp (Penguin, 2015).

This volume of excerpts from Maxims and Reflections (1998) is no. 36 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series.

Also from this volume
Writing a chronicle

Benjamin Button reviews macOS, beginning with Tahoe

“Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews”: “Benjamin Button Reviews macOS” (Rakhim Davletkali’s blog).

[Found via 512 Pixels. Some people like Tahoe; some don’t. I don’t, but I do like the conceit of going in reverse.]

Chris Ware stamps

“The pane of 20 interconnected stamps shows a bird’s-eye view of a mail carrier’s route through a bustling town. Laid out in 4 rows of 5, the stamps depict the story through the 4 seasons from top-left to bottom-right”: from the USPS, Chris Ware’s “250 Years of Delivering Stamps.”

You can click on the image above for a larger view. But to appreciate the full sheet, you’ll probably need a magnifying glass.

Thanks to Oddments of High Unimportance for sharing the news of these stamps.

Twelve movies

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

Psyche 59 (dir. Alexander Singer, 1964). Something is rotten in England, in the city and out in the country. The story is about an affluent couple, Alison and Eric (Patricia Neal, Curd Jürgens), Alison’s sister Robin (Samantha Eggar), and family friend Paul (Ian Bannen). Alison suffers from traumatic blindness, and the viewer too remains in the dark until the cause of Alison’s blindness becomes known. The disappointingly goofy ending makes this movie lose a star, but Walter Lassally’s cinematography, with its severe black-and-white compositions and startling closeups, puts the star back. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Bright Victory (dir. Mark Robson, 1951). An unusual movie about a veteran, Larry Nevis (Arthur Kennedy), who lost his sight in the war and is now in a military hospital learning how to manage his new life. Many scenes serve to educate the viewer about how someone without sight learns to navigate the world (did you know that the crook of a cane served to protect the knuckles from sharp edges and hot pipes?). There’s also a love triangle in the works, with one woman back home (Julie Adams) and a far more appealing one on the scene (Peggy Dow). More interestingly, and, alas, more briefly, there’s the incipient friendship between Nevis and another blind vet (James Edwards), a friendship that’s threatened when Nevis tosses off a racial slur, not knowing that his new friend is Black. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Killer’s Kiss (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1955). If Kubrick had never made another film, I think he’d still be remembered for Killer’s Kiss, an extraordinarily atmospheric noir, shot on location in New York City with a budget of $75,000. It’s a story for three players: Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a boxer who’s come to the end of his ring career; Gloria Price (Irene Kane), a dance-hall girl; and Vinnie Rapallo (Frank Silvera), Gloria’s violent boss and lover. The plot isn’t much, but the atmospherics are everything: shabby one-room apartments, a dimly lit dance hall, a balletic flashback, Times Square at night, empty cobblestone streets, a warehouse full of mannequins. I could watch this movie again and again, and there — I just did. ★★★★ (TCM)

[Davey Gordon will soon be fighting for his life.]

*

Champion (dir. Mark Robson, 1949). Midge Kelly (Kirk Douglas) knocks about with his limping brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy), gets in a ring to make a few dollars, gets walloped but shows promise, reluctantly marries a waitress, Emma (Ruth Roman), and enters the fight game for real, with a legit manager, Haley (Paul Stewart). Aside from Connie, Emma, and Haley, duplicity abounds: crooked promoters, a manipulative blonde, a new manager with ties to the underworld, and Midge himself, who’s willing to betray anyone in his climb to a championship fight (Haley will call him a golem). The fight scenes are brutal, and as Elaine points out, Douglas was quite an athlete. Most remarkable scene: Midge dancing with amateur sculptor Palmer Harris (Lola Albright), who finds him sculpture-worthy. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Cold Day in the Park (dir. Robert Altman, 1969). Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis) is a wealthy woman in middle age, living in an enormous (inherited) apartment, her human connections limited to her servants and several markedly older friends (likely also inherited from her parents). Into Frances’s life comes a young man (Michael Burns) whom she invites in when she sees him sitting on a park bench in the rain. What follows is an increasingly desperate one-sided relationship. To say this story is bizarre is an understatement; to say that it’s compelling is also an understatement. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Central Park (dir. John G. Adolfi, 1932). A day and night in the park, with homeless rodeo rider Rick (Wallace), down-and-out show-biz aspirant Dot (Joan Blondell), a kindly cop on the verge of retirement (Guy Kibbee), a lionkeeper who’s escaped from an asylum (John Wray), and a lion that’s let out of its cage. There are also gangsters. This loony picture is full of violent energy, with all of its parts somehow fitting together in the end. And it offers some great glimpses of Central Park and New York. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Pandaemonium (dir. Julien Temple, 2000). Quill pens, muddy roads, green hills, candlelight, laudanum, and fine performances by Linus Roache as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Hannah as William Wordsworth, Samantha Morton as Dorothy Wordsworth, and Emily Woof as Sara Coleridge. Many unintentionally funny lines: “We came here to write poetry to ignite a revolution of the mind, not to canoodle on a hillock.” And: “Xanadu … Xanadu … Xanadu … Xanadu.” Most interesting bit: what the movie does with the man from Porlock. ★★★ (YT)

[Canoodle: the OED has it as U.S. slang, first recorded in 1864.]

*

Smart Girls Don’t Talk (dir. Richard l. Bare, 1948). A series of unfortunate events: hitmen borrows socialite Linda Vickers’s (Virginia Mayo) car for work purposes; heedless, Linda begins an affair with the hit men’s employer, nightclub owner Marty Fain (Bruce Bennett); and Linda’s medical brother “Doc” gets knocked off by Marty’s men. So what’s Linda going to do: keep her mouth shut, or go to the cops? There’s not much here, though it’s stretched to the length of a movie. A fun meta moment: Mayo doing the grumpy just-out-of-bed bit she did as Marie Derry in The Best Years of Our Lives. ★★ (TCM)

*

They All Come Out (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1939). They are prison inmates, and the premise is that since they all come out (what about lifers and those executed?), rehabilitation is an urgent matter. The story focuses on a gang of bank robbers, the most interesting of whom are Joe (Tom Neal) and Kitty (Rita Johnson). A remarkably compassionate and hopeful film, with a panel of suited men assessing each prisoner’s abilities and health and and arranging for proper accommodations, and it’s heady viewing seeing the ill-fated Tom Neal (of Detour and a real-life manslaughter conviction) make good. This was Tourneur’s first feature-length American movie, and the first movie with scenes filmed in federal prisons. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

We Lived Alone (dir. Andrea Kannes, 2014). A short documentary about the singer-songwriter Connie Converse, who never achieved commercial success and disappeared in 1974, leaving behind a trove of home recordings. Family members, an old friend, and people who have recently discovered her music talk about her with deep affection. Converse puts me in mind of the poet David Schubert: both were both tragically ahead of their times, he as a proto-New York School poet in the age of Eliot and Pound, she as a singer-songwriter before that identity was even recognized as a possibility in American popular music. All of Converse’s surviving recordings are available at Bandcamp. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Three Little Words (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1950). Fred Astaire and Red Skelton as songwriters Bert Kalmar (words) and Harry Ruby (music), with Vera-Ellen and Arlene Dahl as their dancing and singing spouses Jessie and Eileen. If the names Kalmar and Ruby don’t register: in addition to the title tune, they wrote “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” “Show Me a Rose,” and “Who’s Sorry Now?” Lots of hokum — songwriters squabble! — and many production numbers, almost all of which are orchestrated to sound nothing like music from the 1920s and ’30s. A surprise: Debbie Reynolds, in her third movie role, as Helen Kane, the human inspiration for Betty Boop. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Cat People (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1942). Probable impossibilities FTW! Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), fashion illustrator in the big city, fears that she is a descendant of her Serbian village’s cat-people and will turn into a panther if stirred by deep passion; thus her marriage to previously happy-go-lucky naval architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) must remain unconsummated, with not even a kiss passing between them. Oliver is in Sunset Boulevard territory, torn between the darkness of Irena’s world and the daylight world of his “swell” co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), who’s in love with him. Meanwhile there’s a wholly human predator lurking in the form of a suave psychiatrist (Tom Conway). ★★★★ (TCM)

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

Writing a chronicle

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

From Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings, trans. Elisabeth Stopp (Penguin, 2015).

This volume of excerpts from Maxims and Reflections (1998) is no. 36 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series.

Deal or no deal, Tom?

[Stand-ins for whole bags, one of which contains $50,000.]

I step away from current events for a couple of days and come back to the news of Tom Homan accepting a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents. The money was in a bag from the restaurant chain Cava. The investigation was stopped by the current occupant’s Department of Justice. And there is much more news.

Deal or No Deal featured twenty-six briefcases. In the interest of symmetry, I’ve opted for twenty-five bags, or stand-ins for whole bags.

Shadows under the El

[211 Pearl Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Still in Manhattan, still on Pearl Street. After dining at Nick’s Kozy Korner Spaghetti House, you might want to cross the street and enjoy the shadows under the El.

But wait: is that a person in the doorway?

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a terrific crossword. Lots of novelty and surprise. With limited playtime this morning, I did the puzzle late last night and chose just six clue-and-answer pairs to share:

18-D, thirteen letters, “Plays outdoors.” I think of running up and down the block as a kid.

22-A, ten letters, “Fast-food prep pro, for fun.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard the word.

24-A, six letters, “Their home is very near Erie.” I found the right half of this puzzle much more difficult than the left. I was about to give up and look for an answer online, and then a possibility hit me.

26-D, ten letters, “Bit to stuff.” So good.

56-A, nine letters, “Request for noninterference.” The answer is so strangely specific that I thought it must come from life. But the Internets tell me that it’s well-known slang. Who knew?

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-A, ten letters, “Facility for big wheels.” Just wonderfully inventive.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Omit needless words

The New York Times reports that a federal judge has dismissed the current occupant’s lawsuit against The New York Times, Times reporters, and Penguin Random House:

Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, said the president’s 85-page complaint was unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. He criticized Mr. Trump’s lawyers for waiting until the 80th page to lodge a formal allegation of defamation, and for including, ahead of it, dozens of “florid and enervating” pages lavishing praise on the president and enumerating a range of grievances.

“A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” Judge Merryday wrote. “Not a protected platform to rage against an adversary.”

When drafting this complaint, the current occupant’s lawyers could have heeded Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, which cautions against “inject[ing] opinion”:

We all have opinions about almost everything, and the temptation to toss them in is great. To air one’s views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion. Opinions scattered indiscriminately about leave the mark of egotism on a work. Similarly, to air one’s views at an improper time may be in bad taste. If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats.

Or the lawyers might have heeded a recent episode of the BBC podcast Word of Mouth, in which barrister Joanna Hardy-Susskind talks about judges’ preference for concise arguments, sans hyperbole, sans bluster.

I.e., omit needless words.

The complaint is here. (I got as far as page 44.)

The judge’s response is here.

[“The mark of egotism”: how fitting. We can all guess whose advice the lawyers followed, or at least which audience they had in mind.]

The future of dictionaries

At The Atlantic, Stefan Fatsis wonders whether dictionaries have a future (gift link):

We’re in a golden age for the study and appreciation of words — a time of “meta awareness” of language, as one lexicographer put it to me. Dictionaries are more accessible than ever, available on your laptop or phone. More people use them than ever, and dictionary publishers now possess the digital wherewithal to closely track that use. Podcasts, newsletters, and Words of the Year have popularized neologisms, etymologies, and usage trends. Meanwhile, analytical software has revolutionized linguistic inquiry, enabling greater understanding of the ways language works—when, how, and why words break out; the specific contexts for expressions and idioms. And all of that was true long before the rise of AI.

But these advances are also strangling the business of the dictionary.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Another new Nancy

Olivia Jaimes, who’s written and drawn Nancy since 2018, is stepping away from the strip. Caroline Cash will take over in January. Till then it’s Ernie Bushmiller reruns — which means Nancy and the new Nancy will both be running Bushmiller strips. Comics Beat has the story.

Related reading
Whither Nancy ? : All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk

“By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy”: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s commentary on the matter, “Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause,” is detailed and trenchant (Vanity Fair ).

Not an inch

“With an autocrat you cannot give an inch”: Stephen Colbert, a minute or two ago.

Glass, badge, blërg

Behold Liquid Glass in all its whatever. Horrible, ain’t it? Or to use an outdated catchword: blërg.

[Used with permission.]

Elaine put iOS 26 on her phone and granted me permission to share this screenshot. I see so much unused space: not even a short URL will fit in the address bar. And the keyboard? Someone left it out in the rain. With the cake. Yes, iOS MacArthur Park might be a good name for the updated operating system.

Did you notice what looks like a speck of dirt in the lower-left corner of the screenshot? That’s a bit of text left unblurred. I will invoke Liz Lemon: blërg.

After Elaine took this screenshot, she reduced transparency and increased contrast and finds her phone usable with those changes. Here, from OSX Daily, are eight suggestions for improving iOS 26 on the iPhone and the iPad. You have already read about two of them here.

If you decide to stay away from Liquid Glass for now and turn off automatic updates on any Apple device, you still get an annoying red badge on the Systems Settings icon to let you know an update is waiting. On the Mac, old tricks to remove the badge no longer work, but with a little courage, you can use a tiny (free) app to make the badge go away: Software Update Red Badge Remover. Just follow the directions, which may require executing a command in the Terminal. But the fix is temporary: the badge will return. And then you can run the remover again. Blërg.

*

Adam Engst’s suggestion to create an Automator workflow application might offer a permanent solution. I’m waiting to see what happens.

*

The badge returns. The only way to remove the badge might be to remove the icon from the Dock or use an alias. Adam Engst explains at the link above.

Related posts
Apple’s see-through aesthetic : Some reactions to macOS Tahoe

[Blërg might be passé (I wouldn’t know), but our household recently made our way through 30 Rock, so it’s new to us.]

HCR on Jimmy Kimmel and the First Amendment

The latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American begins with Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and works its way back to 1789 and the creation of the First Amendment. An excerpt:

During his monologue on Monday’s show, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can see how hard the president is taking this.”

Kimmel then played a clip of Trump’s response to a reporter who asked how the president was holding up after Kirk’s death. Trump answered: “I think very good. And by the way right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about for 150 years and it’s gonna be a beauty.”

On the podcast of right-wing influencer Benny Johnson on Wednesday, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr said that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Corporate entities are doing exactly what Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) tells us all not to do:

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

But of course if you have a merger awaiting FCC approval, as Nexstar (which owns many ABC affiliates) does, you might be very obedient.

You can watch Jimmy Kimmel’s final monologue at YouTube. You can see the Kirk/Trump section at Instagram.

Mystery actor

[Two views for the price of one.]

She’s making her third appearance in film. Do you recognize her?

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

*

The answer is now in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

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

Samuel Taylor Caleridge

[Click for larger mistakes.]

I make typos. You make typos. We all make typos. However.

This volume, no. 35 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series, joins no. 30 in misspelling a writer’s name on a cover. Penguin attributes no. 30, Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions, to Thomas Nasha. I’ve checked the remaining volumes in the box set, and all names are spelled correctly on the covers.

I’ve written to Penguin Random House requesting two Coleridges to replace our Caleridges. No reply, of course, about either Caleridge or Nasha. But I will report back if I hear back.

“etc etc.”

After “conquering every Heart at Bath,” Lucy receives an offer of marriage from the Duke of ⸺. She writes to Lady Williams seeking her advice:

Jane Austen, “Jack and Alice,” The Beautifull Cassandara (Penguin, 2015).

The Beautifull Cassandra, a selection from Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings, ed. Christine Alexander, is no. 33 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series. All spelling and punctuation as in the original.

Also from this volume
Introducing Charles Adams

Clickety-clack

The current occupant speaks:

“We have noticed that there are no ships in the ocean anymore. We’re seeing that there’s like no ships, no, you know, when the first one we went, there were hundreds of boats. Now there are no boats. I wonder why? Meaning no drugs are coming across. Probably stopping some fishermen too. I mean, to be honest, if I were a fisherman I wouldn’t want to go fishing in, just a nice, let’s take a little trip, because I’d say, man, if they, maybe they think I have drugs downstairs, I don’t want that. I think the fishing business has probably been hurt, but no, there are literally no boats. This was a boat, and we were surprised to see it.”

My transcription. Video via Aaron Rupar.

[Rahsaan Roland Kirk: “Clickety clack, clickety clack, / Somebody’s mind done gone off the goddam track.”]

“It’s a free country”

Will Creeley of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, on the PBS NewsHour tonight:

”There’s no official party line, as an American, about what we think of Charlie Kirk or anybody else in this country. That’s the beauty of American pluralism. Like we used to say as kids on the playground, it’s a free country.”

[My transcription. Will Creeley is the son of Robert and Penelope Creeley. “Like they say” is a well-known Robert Creeleyism. I wonder if it lies behind “like we used to say.”]

Jim Edgar (1946–2025)

Jim Edgar was the thirty-eighth governor of Illinois, from 1991 to 1999. The Chicago Tribune has an obituary. (The New York Times ? Not yet.)

JB Pritzker has been the best Illinois governor in my forty years in the state. But Jim Edgar comes in second.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 15, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

I have no idea what’s going in today’s Hi and Lois :

~ They’re at home, of course. There’d be no element of surprise if they were in a restaurant. But where did that little table for two come from? Not to mention the picture window and heavy orange drapes, which look like something out of a restaurant.

~ Do Hi’s whiskers, along with his loosened tie, suggest the end of a hard day’s work? Or is Hi growing a beard? And is Lois going to ask that he shave it off?

~ Has Hi come home late? Did Lois know he’d be home late? Is that why he’s the only one eating? Or about to eat? And will he be able to manage that steak without a knife?

~ That changing wall color? No worries: readers of Hi and Lois know that anything can happen in the interstice. But still.

And if the wall can change color in the interstice, I think it’d be nice if Hi were to go take a shave there. After all, Lois has made him that cliché of high-class dining, the steak dinner (because — another cliché — she wants something from him). Maybe Lois could get a knife for Hi in the interstice. A napkin might help too.

[Hi and Lois revised, September 15, 2025. Click for a larger view. A knife and napkin are beyond my editing skills.]

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Glenmorangie 10

Orange Crate Art will toast its twenty-first birthday tonight with two ounces of Glenmorangie 10. Given this blog’s name, no Scotch could be more appropriate. Glenmorangie, it’s orangey!

When talk of tariffs began, I had no idea how the price of this affordable whisky might change. So I bought a dozen of the Glenmorangie Discovery Set: a 750ml bottle of ten-year-old Scotch and 50ml miniatures of twelve-year-old La Santa and fourteen-year-old Quinta Ruban (all with the old, less flashy labels). And now it turns out that production of ten-year-old Glenmorangie has ended. The line now begins with a new Glenmorangie 12 (not La Santa). But Orange Crate Art, ever orangey, goes on. And I have enough Glenmorangie 10 to last for several years.

Related posts
Glenmorangie redesign : Spelling Glenmorangie with Slide to Type

Happy birthday, OCA

Orange Crate Art turns twenty-one today. Here’s what I wrote in a first nervous post after dinner on September 15, 2004:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Good advice.

This is my new blog. Thanks to Rachel and Ben for getting me started (and to Rachel for telling me what to say).

“Orange Crate Art,” by the way, is the title song of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. The song was my introduction to each man’s music and is, to my mind, one of the great American songs.

It still is.

Writing here gives me great pleasure, and it’s led to all sorts of unforeseen goodness in my life. Thanks to everyone who reads.

Malaphors

[Dustin, September 14, 2025. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Dustin, Kevin Fitch confuses his idioms, and Dustin Kudlick offers a gloss on malaphor, which he defines as “a combination of a metaphor and a malapropism.”

And now I have a word for the manglings of idiom and metaphor that I post when I notice them: going back to the well and getting the rug pulled out, the fabric of civilization at a precipice, a supply-chain bottleneck, toeing a mantra, eating humble crow, and cutting loose a hot potato, and the many flubs of Ford.

Here, from ThoughtCo., is a small collection of malaphors.

Nick’s Kozy Korner Spaghetti House

[208 Pearl Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

So many oddities in this photograph: the fire escape — or is it a staircase? — that looks like an invitation to burglars, the second-story door (or is it a window?), the curtained windows below it (which match the curtains in the restaurant windows), the lonely advertising placards, the small sign for A.B. Tipler Press, 10 Beekman Street, an address half a mile away. I like the idea of Nick’s Kozy Korner Spaghetti House standing on a literal corner. If you squint, at least two menu items become readable: liver and bacon, and a western omelet, 25¢ each.

If you squint again, you can see the words “Bigger Better” on the Pepsi-Cola signage. The twelve-ounce bottle was a selling point in the brand’s rivalry with Coca-Cola. The advertising jingle (1939) ran like so:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot,
Twice as much for a nickel too,
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

Followed by a crazed chant: “Nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, trickle, trickle,” and so on.

Pete Seeger quoted the melody’s nineteenth-century source and sang a kids’ parody of the jingle:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Ties your belly in a knot,
Tastes like vinegar, looks like ink,
Pepsi-Cola is a stinky drink.

The name Pepsi-Cola disappeared in 1961, replaced by Pepsi. The Third Avenue El disappeared in the 1950s. So too this building. A 1906 publication, Historical Guide to the City of New York, directs its reader to “go east on Platt Street to see an old house at 208 Pearl Street.” How old? William Durrell, a printer and bookseller occupied no. 208 in the late eighteenth century. He was out of business by 1802. Whatever structure stood there in 1906, a reader might not have had much time to see it: in 1907 a five-story building stood at nos. 208 and 206. That must be this one. Later development included a “one-story store structure” that made way for an office building. Suffice it to say that this corner in the financial district is unrecognizable today.

Nos. 206 and 208 appear to have taken up a city block. And across the street, its fraternal twin, no. 212. Notice the Kozy Korner sign to get oriented.

[Click for a larger view.]

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