In life and in the theatre

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

Also from this novella
Suspicion

“It's hard to know what to do with all this”

Daniele Del Guidice, A Fictional Inquiry, trans. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (New York: New Vessel Press, 2025).

This novel, first published as Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983) recounts an unnamed narrator’s travels in Trieste and London to puzzle out the life of an Italian writer who chose not to publish a word in his lifetime. The novel reminds me of both Leonardo Sciascia and W.G. Sebald, especially Sebald. If you are attuned to either of those writers, you might like A Fictional Narrative .

Credit this reading choice to the folks who display the books at the Seminary Co-op. I saw a copy on one of the banded ledges that adjoin the bookshelves. I bought a copy, started looking at it more closely, told Elaine about it, and bought a second copy the shelves. And so it became an official pick of the Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine and me, reading).

[Banded ledges? Think of a shallow version of a supermarket endcap, with bands holding the merchandise on little ledges.]

Selling a goldbrick

From The Man I Married (dir. Irving Pichel, 1941). Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett), an American vacationer in Berlin, asks a question. Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), an American foreign correspondent, answers:

“What I can’t get through my head is why these people listen to Hitler, when they know in the end it’ll only mean bloodshed and chaos.”

“Well, Schickie sold them a goldbrick, probably the greatest goldbrick that’s ever been sold any peoples in the whole history of time. He’s actually made them believe that the only culture in the world is the Nazi culture, that the only form of life worth living is the Nazi form. He’s a mathemagician. Fanatical egomaniac with the greatest appetite ever since on this earth since the days of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. He won't be satisfied until he makes an effort to wipe the democracies right off the map, and I don’t mean just England and France either. Yeah, I know, I know. A lot of us Americans laugh it off when they hear things like this, but not me. I’ve seen too much. I’ve seen the war machine he’s constructed. Nobody can tell me he has the slightest intention of letting that machine go to rust. In the long run, of course, he won’t win. But before he’s through, Schickie’s gonna spill an awful lot of blood.”

Eerie viewing in 2026.

[Schickie: Schicklgruber, the original family name of Hitler’s father Alois. Goldbrick : “a confidence game in which the victim buys a ’gold’ (actually gold-painted lead) brick.” Mathemagician : a portmanteau that suggests a mastermind and trickster.]

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Netflix, a theater, TCM, YouTube.]

A Month in the Country (dir. Pat O’Connor, 1987). From J.L. Carr’s 1980 novella. A veteran of the Great War (Colin Firth), suffering from what was then called shell shock, travels to a Yorkshire village to take on the work of uncovering a mural in a rural church. In the same village, another veteran (Kenneth Branagh) is undertaking a small-scale archaeological dig. A cranky vicar (Patrick Malahide) and his unhappy wife (Natasha Richardson) add emotional complications. An understated movie of uneasy friendship, unfulfilled desire, and the solace of solitary work. ★★★★ (A)

[I watched twice over two nights, and even now I’m not sure that anyone’s first name is ever spoken.]

*

The Blue Dahlia (dir. George Marshall, 1946). It’s quintessential post-war noir: fighter pilot Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) and crew members Buzz and George (William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont) come back from the war, and after Johnny finds his wife Helen (Doris Dowling) in a bungalow full of day-drinking types, he finds himself the prime suspect in his wife’s murder. The plot is little more than an episode of any TV mystery: one victim, several suspects, whodunit. What makes this movie worth watching again and again is characterization: the ever-resourceful Johnny; wicked Helen; Buzz, going out of his mind when he hears loud music; the sleazy nightclub owner Eddie (Howard Da Silva); and Joyce (Veronica Lake), Eddie’s estranged wife and Lauren Bacall wannabe. Screenplay by Raymond Chandler, so there’s ample snappy dialogue: “It’s funny, but practically all the people I know were strangers when I met them.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Strange Woman (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1946). “She’s so rotten; you’ve got to believe me”: it’s another melodrama that might be better understood as a study in the dark triad — Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. In early-nineteenth century Maine, Jenny Hager (Hedy Lamarr) marries a wealthy timberman (Gene Lockhart) before making a play for another man (Louis Hayward), and then another (George Sanders). (Saying anything more would ruin the movie.) Lamarr, Lockhart, and Hayward are terrific, but the most terrifying moment in the movie belongs to Moroni Olsen as a traveling evangelist. ★★★★ (A)

[The movie’s title in from Proverbs 5:3–4: “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword” (KJV).

*

Not as a Stranger (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1955). “There was something left out of you, Luke: it isn’t enough to have a brain; you have to have a heart”: so says the father (Lon Chaney Jr.) of medical student Lucas “Luke” Marsh (Robert Mitchum), an arrogant, aggressive presence in classrooms and operating theaters. Short on funds, Luke marries Kristina Hedvigson (Olivia de Haviland), a Swedish-American nurse with savings, convinced that he can manage a relationship with a partner he doesn’t love — and then things get complicated. De Haviland is okay (long in the dark about the reason for her husband’s iciness); Mitchum is just inert. The stronger presences here are supporting players: Frank Sinatra as a good-guy med-school pal of the principals, Broderick Crawford as a professor (admitted as a med student under a quota system for Jews), Charles Bickford as a country doctor (and perhaps the first person to utter the word prostate in the movies), and, especially, Gloria Grahame as lonely Harriet Lang, who smolders, and smolders, and then smolders some more. ★★★ (A)

[Gloria Grahame. Click for a larger view.]

*

Hotel Reserve (dir. Lance Comfort, Mutz Greenbaum, Victor Hanbury, 1944). From an Eric Ambler novel. Hotels, like trains, are good settings for mysteries, as they bring together and keep together motley groups of strangers, all of whom might fall under suspicion. The mystery in this movie, set in pre-WWII France, is straightforward: which hotel guest has switched cameras with an Austrian refugee and medical student (James Mason) who is now accused of photographing French military installations. Alas, the suspicious characters here are few, and many of the hotel guests are little more than decor. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Man I Married (dir. Irving Pichel, 1940). It’s August 1938, as Germany prepares to invade Czechoslovakia, and American magazine writer Carol Hoffman (Joan Bennett) and her German-born businessman husband Eric (Francis Lederer) undertake an extended vacation in Berlin. Surely, Carol thinks, things can’t be awful in Germany as are rumored, can they? — though she and Eric are bringing a pile of money to get a famed philosopher out of Dachau. The story charts Carol’s gradual enlightenment about her husband and Nazi Germany, an enlightenment aided by the truth-talking of American correspondent Kenneth Delane (Lloyd Nolan), with a major twist at the end. One of the earlier anti-Nazi Hollywood films. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1946). This movie used to air endlessly on a local public-television station (it’s in the public domain), and I watched it often, but I was surprised, after many years away, how little of it stuck in my head. I’d forgotten, for instance, that it’s a film noir that begins in childhood. I did remember that it’s a twisted story of guilt and recrimination, with Barbara Stanwyck as the wealthy plutocrat of Iverstown, Kirk Douglas (in his first screen role) as her alcoholic husband, Van Johnson as a man from the past who has happened back into town, and Elizabeth Scott as a parolee who misses her bus. And then there’s a scary Judith Anderson. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Ever in My Heart (dir. Archie Mayo, 1933). Love at first sight, in 1909, between all-American Mary Archer (Barbara Stanwyck) and Hugo Wilbrandt (Otto Kruger), a German professor of chemistry who’s come to teach at the university in town. The Great War, anti-German sentiment, and personal losses upend the couple’s marriage, and Hugo returns to Germany, convinced that he will never be accepted as an American. And Mary ends up assisting American forces in France. And that’s when the story becomes still more painful, in a way that could never happen post-Code. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Maternal Instinct (dir. Jessica Dimmock, 2026). I hesitate to invoke the dark triad again, but it’s the only way to name what’s at work in this movie, a documentary with short, silent dramatizations. In 2020, Taylor Parker, a Texas woman, was pulled over by a highway patrol trooper for erratic driving. She claimed to have just given birth. The crimes that led up to that traffic stop stagger the imagination — that’s all I can say. ★★★★ (N)

*

Pray Away (dir. Kristine Stolakis, 2021). A documentary about the “ex-gay” religious movement, some of its former leaders, and some of those still committed. The title seems to move in two directions: it’s an exhortation (to “pray away the gay”) but also a suggestion, I think, that prayer cannot change a person’s core identity (go ahead, pray away, have at it). It’s sad to see people who believe that they cannot be who they are, and joyful to see people finally able to accept themselves (it’s not a spoiler to note that there’s a wedding). The one large flaw: there’s nothing to explain what goes on, aside from prayer, when groups such as (the now-defunct) Exodus International and (still active) Living Hope attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation. ★★ (N)

*

In the Hand of Dante (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2025). Parallel stories, with Oscar Isaac as both Dante and a dissolute twenty-first-century writer pulled into a scheme to steal a hidden manuscript of the Divine Comedy. The movie is audacious, bizarre, grandiose, gratuitously violent, and at many points baffling — it felt to me like an Orson Welles project gone very wrong. The extraordinary scenery, by which I mean libraries, kept me watching. But the absurdities and corpses keep piling up, and Martin Scorcese’s turn as Dante’s fictional mentor Isaiah (wut?!) adds unintentional comedy to what’s already ridiculous. ★ (N)

*

Toy Story 5 (dir. McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton, 2026). An intergenerational story of childhood, toys, and the dangers of screens. Younger and older viewers will be watching different movies: a granddaughter’s favorite moment was Buzz Lightyear on a pink-and-blue-maned horse; mine (tears!) was seeing the inscription on the back of the picture of Jessie. The moral of the story: toys and screens can work together (thus making all sectors of corporate enterprise happy). One telling element that might be overlooked: the cluelessness of at least some parent characters, and the utter absence of others. ★★★★ (T)

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

Gloria Steinem (1934–2026)

“‘When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment,’ Ms. Steinem often said. ‘It was just called life’”: from the New York Times obituary (gift link).

Cassandra Wilson (1955–2026)

From the New York Times obituary:

“We live very segmented lives,” she told Time magazine in 1996. “There’s Black music and there’s white music. There’s R&B and funk and whatever. This has always bothered me. People don’t see things in streams, they don’t see what tends to connect us all together. That’s what I see. That’s what I try to get at.”

Here’s “The Way You Look Tonight” (Jerome Kern–Dorothy Fields), from the 2015 Billie Holiday homage Coming Forth by Day . The strings are by Van Dyke Parks. You can see the two of them in this short video about the making of the album.

Calling for a straitjacket

In a post about renaming oceans, I imagined a straight-faced reporter asking the current occupant why he hasn’t yet renamed the Strait of Hormuz.

And now the occupant has wondered aloud if that name should be changed to Trump Strait. But Trump Straitjacket would be more fitting. A nice snug fit.

[I refer to him as “the current occupant” whenever I can. Here it seems appropriate to use his name. But I won’t link to his TЯuth Social post.]

Tell Apple Maps it’s Lake Ontario

Did you know that Apple Maps permits the user to Report an Issue about a location? I reported an issue this morning about Lake America. Wrong name! “Sanity requires that it remain Lake Ontario,” I wrote.

It’s sad to see that on his first day as Apple CEO, John Ternus permitted this change. Perhaps he can visit the Oval Office and present the current occupant with a gold replica of a bended knee.

“As if we suddenly remembered it!”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

The first Oxford English Dictionary citation for déjà vu  in English comes from a 1903 publication. But the term first appeared in 1876, in the work of the French philosopher Émile Boirac.

A passage from Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846) is another example of déjà vu before its time.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[Why is the first déjà vu in this post italicized? Because it’s words as words, as in the sentence before this one.]

Eww, influencers

In an e-mail:

New England has long been home to L.L.Bean, and now it’s home for Drake and Ann Michael Maye. As they continue this next chapter, we’re excited to partner with them and share stories that celebrate time outside, everyday traditions, and the moments that make a place feel like home.

He: a New England Patriots quarterback (though L.L. makes no mention of his team affiliation). She: “content creator and media personality known for her popular baking and lifestyle content.” It all seems like a deeply un-Beanie marketing strategy.

Something I realized only after copying and pasting the above text: the company name has no space before Bean. How long has that been going on? At least nineteen years: there’s a discussion at Wikipedia.

Goodbye, Guitar Works

Sad news: I learned today that Guitar Works in Evanston, Illinois (estd. 1979) is closing. My Guitar Works story:

In 1994 Elaine and I were bopping around Evanston with our kids. Our daughter Rachel, a tyke of seven, pointed to a store window. “Look, Daddy,” she said, “that’s the kind of guitar you like.” It was a modern-day National, a resonator guitar. She must have seen a National on a videotape of Son House or Bukka White (yes, she was brought up right). We went in, and I thought I’d just try the instrument and walk out wistfully. Instead, I sat and played for an hour and half while Elaine took Rachel and Ben for ice cream. I tried two Triolians too — not as good. And then, before I knew about it, Elaine was putting the National on our credit card. I still have my National, play it, and love it. Its only problem: after thirty-two years, the maker’s label inside (held in place with Fun-Tak) has detached. (I got it and the Fun-Tak out, carefully.)

It was so comfortable to try out guitars and to just be able to play — no pressure. Thanks, Guitar Works. Now guitarists will have one less place for that to happen.

[An hour and a half: Elaine’s estimate. I lost track of time, as one does when playing an instrument.]

Zippy ink

[“It Came from India.” Zippy, September 1, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

If there’s another comic strip that regularly mentions stationery supplies, I’d like to know about it. Today’s Zippy also mentions Wite-Out pens and correction tape. Supplies are everywhere in the strip’s history. F’rinstance.

For anyone who needs to know: you should never fill a fountain pen with India ink, which is for use with brushes and dip pens. I’m partial to Pelikan pens, and I long used Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Black (not an India ink). At some point I switched to Aurora Black. Not cheap, but it’s one of the blackest black inks. And a bottle can last for years, just like a box of Ko-Rec-Type, Part No. 3.

Venn reading
All OCA ink posts : ink and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[How to get that speckled look? My dad did it with ink, a piece of screening, and a toothbrush.]

Defragmenting

Do you remember defragmenting the hard drive? The Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator is oddly soothing.

[When I think back on all the time in spent in Windows, &c.]

Faces

If you follow Aaron Rupar on Bluesky, you may already have seen the current occupant nodding in and out of consciousness this afternoon.

What really caught my eye though was his facial expression as he prepared to answer a question (at the eight-second mark). It may be normal to fall asleep as Howard Lutnick goes on and on. But that kind of facial expression? Not normal. It was there a few days ago as well. I think that’s the face of dementia.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? I don’t think so. What’s really irresponsible is journalists’ refusal to ask obvious questions. “Mr. President, you sometimes appear to be asleep while members of your cabinet are speaking. Could you comment on what Secretary Lutnick said earlier?”

Signage

[By me.]

I thought of it yesterday while walking and drew it when we got home.

The last subway pay phone?

From Ephemeral New York: “Is this the last public pay phone in a New York City subway station?”

A handful of pay phones
A Blue Dahlia pay phone : A Henry pay phone : A Naked Alibi pay phone : A Naked City pay phone : A Nancy pay phone : A Two O’Clock Courage pay phone : The Lonely Phone Booth : A subway pay phone, 1932 : Chicago pay phones : “If your coin was not returned” : The last pay phones in NYC?

Pure Food

On Flatbush Avenue, there was a Yankee Diner. South on Flatbush, a pizzeria and spaghetti house with a not especially interesting tax photograph. But go north, turn the corner onto Avenue U, and there’s still more food. And it’s pure. Pure Food: that really was the restaurant’s name, as the 1940 telephone directory makes clear.

[4212 Avenue U, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Also in the 1940 Brooklyn directory: Pure Carbonic Inc., Pure Coal Co., Pure Dairy Products, Pure Food Cafeteria, Pure Food Coffee Shoppe, Pure Food Store, Pure Food Stores, Pure Hand Laundry, Pure Home Made Products Co., M.M. Pure, Pure Oil Co., Pure White Laundry, Pure White Laundry Service, and Pure Wine Co.

The two men in uniform must have had some connection to Floyd Bennett Field, a now-defunct airfield then used by the United States Coast Guard and Navy. It’s not the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but still, I feel a song coming on.


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

“Not American Enough”

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

On Thursday, August 27, Tolouse Olorunnipa reported on the attempts of Republican lawmakers to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office. In several states, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to cut those Americans out of candidacy for elected positions, while in Congress, at least five Republicans have called for prohibiting them from federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, ambassadorships, and congressional seats.

The push has come in the wake of the rise of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and other naturalized U.S. citizens whose policy positions those like South Carolina representative Nancy Mace consider un-American. These policies are, of course, the ones voters elected people like Mamdani to put into place. In her comments to Olorunnipa, Mace said: “This isn’t personal. It’s about what standard we want for the people entrusted with enormous power over the American people.”

Her word choice was revealing. Our elected officials are entrusted with the enormous power of the American people, not over them.

Here’s a gift link to Toluse Olorunnipa’s Atlantic article: “Not American Enough.”

Arts & Letters Daily?

Has Arts & Letters Daily taken any notice of the death of Dolly Parton? No, of course not.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, had me baffled at many points. I’m just going to honest here. I’m not that informed on 1-A, eight letters, “South Carolina symbol.” I ended up switching from a printed puzzle to an online version and figuring out a handful of tough spots with autocorrect flagging my mistakes.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, letters, “Old-fashioned, technically.” Nicely worded.

11-D, three letters, “Animal in a garnish etymology.” I see it there, but I can’t claim to understand why it’s there.

21-D, three letters, “Dishware arrived there in 2026.” I knew it had to be that there.

22-A, three letters, “JFK predecessor.” Kinda perverse. My first thought was DDE. My second was “What was the code for Idlewild?” I think this clue plays a bit unfairly with the meaning of predecessor.

32-D, three letters, “Thousands of Athenians.” I know what the answer means, but I have no idea what this answer means. Now I do.

33-A, six letters, “Hardly a family man.” Aw, come on.

40-A, three letters, “Yellow belly.” Isn’t it spelled with four letters — wuss ?

48-A, four letters, “Arian intro.” Fun if you know about Arianism, but I doubt that was the intent here.

60-A, eight letters, “Lack of ice?” Clever.

My favorites in this puzzle are the two answers that cross at the center: 8-D, fifteen letters, “It’s unreal” and 34-A, thirteen letters, “False response from AI.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Arranged by Elaine Fine

Tonight on PBS’s Great Performances , a Vienna Philharmonic Sommernachtskonzert [Summer Night Concert] that includes Elaine’s orchestral arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration.”

Wie cool ist das denn?

A previous post
The Vienna Philharmonic to play Florence Price’s “Adoration” (arr. Elaine Fine) (With links that tell the “Adoration” story)

Stenography

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Here’s an article about Dickens and stenography, complete with charts of arbitrary characters from Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy (1825), the manual Dickens would have used: Hugo Bowles’s “Stenography and Orality in Dickens: Rethinking the Phonographic Myth” (Dickens Studies Annual ). Alas, no arbitrary characters for expectation and disadvantageous , which may be Dickens’s inventions.

You can see the 1778 edition of Brachygraphy (with the first chapter of Genesis and other texts in shorthand) via HathiTrust.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

MarkText

[Click for a larger view.]

“A true WYSIWYG editor — your Markdown transforms in place the moment you type. No split view, no toggling”: MarkText is a free Markdown editor for macOS, Windows, and Linux. With many themes. That’s Everforest Dark above.

I’m loyal to iA Writer and Byword, but I’m always happy to find a stylish Markdown app.

[Markdown is several thousand times easier to learn than stenography.]

SHAME

A new mnemonic: Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, Erie. SHAME.

*

I see now that other people thought of this mnemonic before I did. I hereby charge them with anticipatory plagiarism.

Oceans 47

The current occupant, just now:

“So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change ’em both.”

The only question in response: why do things like this to an ally? Because, he said, Canadians are “nasty people.”

I wish someone had pressed: but why oceans? Surely they matter to many other nations too. When you will be making these decisions? And how will you choose the names? They can’t both be the American Ocean. And why haven’t you renamed the Strait of Hormuz?

I think journalists would do well to ask straight-faced questions about these absurdities. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, “Don’t hide the madness.”

[Context: the occupant has renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America.]

Car bars

Elaine and I were headed toward Staples when we noticed two women parked in front of the store, struggling to fit a swiveling task chair into the back of a BMW. “Do you need a hand?” I asked, having had some experience fitting similar chairs into similar spaces.

They did need a hand, but not in the way I had assumed. They had the rear seats folded down and were trying to figure out how to remove the bar behind those seats so that they could slide the chair all the way in. One was looking at the BMW owner’s manual, which offered the tersest guidance: “Press the release button.” Which would be where, exactly? Four of us looked at the bar, both ends, and none of us could figure it out.

A fifth person was on her way into Staples. I figured I'd ask if she knew how to remove the bar. She had no idea. A man was on his way into Staples. He too had no idea. We all stood around.

It was sheer luck that one of BMW women did something — what? — and the bar popped out, and two of us pushed the chair in.

This afternoon Elaine and I looked at our new vehicle, a hybrid Toyota RAV4, to see if we could figure out its bar. And we did, but it’s a much less intuitive bar than the bar in our now-gone 2010 Prius. The RAV4 bar is called a luggage cover, though I think that name should more properly apply to the cover that pulls out from the bar to hide worldly possessions.

I like our RAV4 — a lot, really a lot — but everything about it is less intuitive. I’ve yet to look up the Hold button in the thick manual, even thicker, I think, than the BMW’s.

[RAV4 ? It means “Recreational Active Vehicle with 4-wheel drive.” Apple Dictation and Slide to Type both rendered the name correctly the first time out. God knows what a RAV4 will cost with higher tariffs.]

HCR on Dolly Parton

“‘Find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose,’ Parton was famous for saying”: the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is all about Dolly Parton.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library

Dolly Parton’s family requests, instead of flowers, donations to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a literacy initiative that provides a registered child with a book a month, from birth to the age of five.

Parton started the Imagination Library to honor her father, Robert Lee Parton Sr., who could neither read nor write. The program has given away more than 332 million books.

A related post
Dolly Parton on writing materials

[Yes, our household has donated.]

Dolly Parton visits Captain Kangaroo

Elaine remembered this appearance, from October 27, 1976.

I had forgotten what a strange show Captain Kangaroo was. If you don’t have the patience for the marching band bit, Dolly arrives at 2:54 and prepares to sing “Cracker Jack” at 10:18.

Dolly Parton (1946–2026)

“She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton”: from the Times obituary (gift links).

Dolly Parton was a force for good in the world. I wish that I weren’t sharing this news.

Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking back at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once, sometimes not. “Who are we as a country?”: Jonathan Capehart, on PBS, November 5, 2024. “Yes”: my mom’s last word to me. “Trying to work off some ‘writing’ on you”? I had to look it up.

“Pineapples don’t have sleeves”
“Puzzled over”
“Off the streets and out of trouble”
“Minus glases”
https://vote.gov/register
“Do not obey in advance”
“Forward”
“It is never too late to change the future”
“You just open it up and you go”
“Could be screens”
“Constantly but quietly in motion”
“Who’s shining you?”
“No kings”
“WWDFWD?”
“I think starting an essay with a quote is a bit clichéd”
“No last-sale date”
“A bag with different things in it”
“Orange door hinge”
“On hiatus”
“Yes”
“Bananas”
“Love and mercy”
“Trying”
“Looking out”
“Across an imaginary transom”
“It doesn’t bend on its own”
“Two words”
“Like we used to say as kids on the playground, it’s a
     free country”
“Blërg”
“Writes a chronicle”
“The beauty of fall is the beauty of things fading away”
“Too”
“Later, who knows?”
“Oh yeah?” “Yeah!”
“M’onderstanding”
“Overthinking”
“Early blogger energy”
“Trying to work off some ‘writing’ on you”
“Oh, I know that one”
“Look at this”
“Squirrels do bark”
“Take me to your simulacrum”
“Yes, Virginia”
“Tonight we bake”
“Not to be confused with fictional characters”
“Such as”
“Part-beagle”
“Wade through weeks”
“Is this the same morning, or a different morning?”

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not : Still more items in a series : And still more

Stefan Zweig’s Salzburg mansion for sale

From The New York Times:

The Paschinger Schlössl, the former home of Stefan Zweig, the Jewish Austrian writer, unexpectedly appeared for sale with the French luxury real estate company Le Figaro Properties in June. The mansion has long been meaningful to Salzburg, Austria, which is also home to the namesake six-week festival celebrating classical music, opera and theater now in its 106th year.

Hidden within two acres of wooded parkland on the Kapuzinerberg, a city mountain in Salzburg, this stately home has belonged to Wolfgang Porsche since 2020. The 83-year-old German car magnate purchased it from the same local merchant family, the Gollhofers, to whom Zweig’s first wife Friderike sold it, for 63,000 shillings, in 1937.

The castle, which cost Porsche €8.4 million ($9.59 million), is now priced at $14,540,900. It has been beautifully restored. Exactly what prompted the sale remains unclear. In 2025, the city controversially granted Porsche planning permission for a private access road and parking space tunneled into the mountain. The current listing highlights this permission, should its future owner act on it, as “an unparalleled feature within historic Salzburg.”

A longstanding campaign for the city or the University of Salzburg to secure the property for public use has been revived. A petition underscoring Zweig’s legacy in promoting “cosmopolitanism, understanding between nations, and peace in Europe” has garnered more than 6,000 signatures from actors, playwrights, musicians and others. When asked if the university stands a chance to purchase the property, Bernhard Fügenschuh, the school’s rector, said in a phone interview that it depends on the seller, but he hoped so.

Zweig fled Austria for England in 1934. In 1940 he left England with his second wife for the United States. He left the United States for Brazil in 1941, where he committed suicide in 1942. The dramatic film Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (dir. Maria Schrader, 2016) is a brilliant portrait of a writer lost in exile. Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (1943) is eerie reading in these times.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zwieg posts (Pinboard)

Adam Kinzinger’s Substack

Like Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, This Is Adam Kinzinger is a useful daily digest of news. I keep both in my RSS reader, where they don’t get lost among e-mails.

Profs, busted

From The Chronicle of Higher Education : “Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They’re Defending Themselves.” An excerpt:

Two professors recently admitted to using generative AI to assist them in writing opinion articles for major publications, igniting a debate over the standards faculty should be held to in their public writing.

The Financial Times added an addendum to a guest essay published August 13, disclosing that its author, Ricardo Hausmann, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab, had used AI to “condense” his piece condemning President Trump’s tariffs, in violation of the outlet’s policy. The Financial Times is conducting an “editorial review process” to evaluate the piece in more detail, a spokesperson said in a statement. Hausmann said in an email that he hadn’t been aware of the policy when writing the article, adding that he believes AI is becoming too common for policies like that to exist.

On Tuesday, The Daily Californian reported that Zvezdelina Stankova, a teaching professor in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley, had used AI to edit an August 15 San Francisco Standard opinion article. The piece argued that the UC system was admitting underqualified students because it doesn’t consider standardized testing, and cited the fact that some students use AI to write admissions essays as a reason to bring back such requirements. A spokesperson for The Standard said in a statement that it allows AI use to assist with writing, but expects that “humans are behind every article.” The piece reflects Stankova and her colleagues’ “original analysis, research, and expertise,” the spokesperson added.

Hausmann violated the outlet’s guidelines; Stankova didn’t. But beyond a newspaper’s code of conduct, what ethical responsibility — if any — do professors have when it comes to AI in their public-facing work, given that students are generally expected to refrain from using it to write?

The justifications from Hausmann and Stankova that the article goes on to detail are, well, something. What’s the harm? And everybody’s going to be doing it anyway.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[I’m not interested in focusing OCA on AI in academia. But I couldn’t pass up this item in the news.]

Misheard

Honest. On NPR: “Your donation supports the muse and information we rely on.”

Related reading
All OCA misheard posts (Pinboard)

“That’s very perspicacious of you”

Today’s Dustin : Kevin reads a thesaurus. See also these two — 1, 2 — Zippy strips.

Related posts
Beware of the saurus : Rewording : Rogeting

Mutts vibrations

[Mutts, August 23, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Mutts takes up a great American song. I’m glad I didn’t miss the title (aka “throwaway”) panel.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts and Mutts posts (Pinboard)

[I know: “Good Vibrations” did not appear on the Pet Sounds album. For anyone who needs it: the album cover.]

Writing and AI at Harvard

At The Atlantic (gift link), Tyler Austin Harper writes about “Why the Closing of Harvard’s Writing Center Matters.” He suspects that Harvard’s decision will give other schools permission to close their writing centers:

The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit — after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one?

I see it differently: I think that emphasizing the presence of a writing center might offer a lower-tier school a smart and snarky way to present itself to prospective students. On a campus tour, for instance: “This building also houses our writing center. As you may know, Harvard University recently got rid of its writing center. Unlike Harvard, we still have a writing center, because we believe that students benefit from working on their writing with another human being, not with a chatbot.”

As Harper points out, Harvard is all in on AI. A development that just made the news, postdating his essay: Harvard is now selling a course on entrepreneurship “taught” by AI replicas of business faculty (The New York Times , gift link). Only $699!

The prose of Harvard’s unrelated Teach with Generative AI page (AI-generated prose?) does not inspire confidence. For instance:

Harvard has consistently tried to embrace new technology across our classrooms, residential and virtual. GenAI has been no different.

It’d be Harvard that’s been no different, not AI.

Behold, a fused sentence:

Faculty and students have access to a range of tools. Some of these tools are free and open to all faculty, students and staff behind Harvard Key (Harvard Sandbox) other tools require a license or approval.

My favorite:

Out of this there have been several learnings worth considering.

And I’m sure there’ll be many more.

Another Yankee Diner

[2494 Flatbush Avenue, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Did you know that there’s a Brooklyn neighborhood called Marine Park? I didn’t. Did you know that at one time there were at least Yankee Diners in Brooklyn, this one, the one above, and a third whose tax photograph seems to be unavailable? I did.

The nameless dining room to the left looks (emphasis looks) as if it was part of the Yankee enterprise. And notice the bakery/restaurant to the right. And those cars. There’s more food on this block, coming soon.

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Tell me you’ve never read my blog without telling me that you’ve never read my blog

In today’s mail:

We recently came across Orange Crate Art — a quietly artful personal blog.

That's exactly the kind of artful personal blog we built [redacted] for — an AI content team that keeps creating for you. Tell it what to make — newsletters, videos, podcasts, or articles — and how often; it researches fresh sources, picks what matters, and produces editable content on schedule, so morning musings draft with the coffee.

And so on.

I replied with a link to my Pinboard list of OCA posts tagged AI (three of those posts are on the front page right now) and three more words: “No, no, no.”

[“Morning musings”? And they “draft with the coffee”? Seriously?]

Recently updated

Things I learned on my summer vacation: Today’s Zippy prompted me to seek out a photograph of a Guggenheim Museum bathroom that I linked to in 2010. That photograph has disappeared from the Internets, but I found another.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Ben Zimmer, wildly difficult. Daily puzzles — Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the syndicated New York Times — seem to me increasingly easy. I can often do an entire puzzle, or nearly an entire puzzle, from Across clues alone. But the Saturday Stumper seems to get more and more difficult and unfun. Humph.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, five letters, “Little-used.” This clue starts the puzzle off with a bang: three or four different letters could plausibly fill the answer’s first square.

1-D, eight letters, “Social media ‘Spare me your replies.’” Never heard of the answer. I must need to partake of more social media. Oh, wait — I don’t.

2-D, fifteen letters, “Signals profound change.” Surprisingly easy to see.

4-D, four letters, “Barcelona bros.” Yes, but. Pretty arcane, imho. 1-D!

8-D, fifteen letters, “Unforgettable, in a way.” I liked this one.

10-A, six letters, “Papers’ attention-getter.” I thought it had to be a slang term for a giant headline.

19-A, nine letters, “Weird Al parodied it with ‘Bologna’ (1979).” Good grief.

25-A, six letters, “What the first jeans were, per its etymology.” I was sure the answer had to do with Nîmes and denim , but nothing would fit, not even after I took a seamripper to the grid.

26-D, letters, “Wellington museum models.” Can you tell that I found this puzzle exasperating?

40-A, seven letters, “Slide-show subjects.” Cute. The clue, not the subjects.

42-A, six letters, “Legendary rock singers.” Rock on.

44-A, four letters, “Name on a Scotch bottle above a clipper ship.” I know it, but there is no reason anyone in 2026 should be expected to know it.

My favorite in this puzzle:

30-A, eight letters, “Seller of Tova cosmetics to QVC (2002).” Because it’s utterly bizarre and patently ridiculous — and because it was my starting point in the puzzle.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Paving the swamp

Michelle Price of the Associated Press, on Washington Week in Review tonight: “This is a president who for a long time campaigned on draining the swamp, and it seems he’s paving it and making it glitzier.” Well put.

Origin of an idiom: “My foot!”

From Saul Maydup, Idioms and How They Got That Way (2019):

We know the expression “My foot!” as a way to signify indignant disbelief or shock: “Safe? My foot! He was out by a mile!” But it may surprise you to learn that the expression has its origin in the world of feet — in the world, that is, of poetry.

The expression was born in 1727, during one of Jonathan Swift's many visits to the Twickenham villa of his friend and fellow poet Alexander Pope. Almost two and a half centuries before the collaborative shenanigans of the poets of the New York School — writing poems or even an entire novel by taking turns with lines or sentences — Pope and Swift tried their hands at a poem in heroic couplets, with each poet taking not a line at a time but a single foot of iambic pentameter at a time (the da DUM of da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). The two friends decided on a title, “An Immodest Proposal,” and set to writing.

Though the text of the unfinished poem is lost, the story of its creation has been preserved, each poet having written a letter to John Gay detailing events. As the two men sat side by side at a writing table, Swift, in a poetic frenzy, began to write more than one foot on each of his turns. A large man (over six feet tall), he crowded the table, leaving Pope (well under five feet tall) as something of a marginalized bystander in his own home. “My foot!” Pope shouted, as Swift's quill raced across the page. “My foot!” And Pope seized the manuscript and cast it into a fireplace.

Surprisingly, the poets’ letters are in agreement on every detail. But when the poets told their stories to their fellow writers at the Scriblerus Club, Swift exulted in his takeover of the writing project, while Pope solicited sympathy as a poet who had been subjected to from a highly unusual form of writer's block. The letters to Gay reached a larger audience upon their publication (1753), and thus "My foot!" has come down to us as the one thing salvaged from the failed effort to create “An Immodest Proposal.”

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

More origins
“At loose ends” : “A low bar” : “Don’t cry over spilled milk” : “Let the cat out of the bag” : “Lightning in a bottle” : “That takes the cake” : “The wind at our backs” : All OCA AI posts and idiom posts (Pinboard)

[Maydup is not quite accurate: John Ashbery and James Schuyler began their collaborative novel A Nest of Ninnies (1968) by trading sentences. But as they continued, they loosened the rules: each could write “whole paragraphs even.”]

Apropos of “the news”

[“Dream Job.” Zippy, August 21, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Context: Allen Ginsberg.]

AI scans the curriculum at Texas Tech

From The New York Times (gift link): “A Texas University Becomes a Petri Dish for a Conservative Overhaul”:

Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.

The chancellor at this five-school system says that this effort “‘will produce the best curriculum in America’” and become a national model.

The Times ill-considered subhead refers to “left-leaning content” and “forbidden topics,” a glaring distortion of what’s at stake. For instance:

Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.

“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said.

And one could ask: forbidden since when, and by whom?

The article notes that “A faculty senate survey from May found that about 50 percent of respondents changed their course content without being asked to comply with the new directives.” See Tyler Austin Harper’s observation: “The cowardice of tenured faculty is a root cause of a lot of problems.” At Texas Tech, some faculty might better have heeded Timothy Snyder’s advice: “Do not obey in advance.”

Fortnite, Harry Potter, &c.

Natalie Wexler, co-author with Judith Hochman of The Writing Revolution, writes about how Alpha School, a private-school network that relies on AI instruction, teaches writing. Long story short: Alpha School borrowed (or co-opted?) the model of The Writing Revolution, known as the Hochman Method, and called it AlphaWrite:

It’s possible that AlphaWrite could do a good job of teaching writing. But the app’s creators have overlooked a crucial component of the Hochman Method: it’s designed to be embedded in curriculum content. AlphaWrite, in contrast, is ... “embedded in content that matters to students.” And the model assumes that the content that “matters to students” is anything but the content of the curriculum.

Instead, AlphaWrite encourages students to write about their personal interests.

AlphaWrite’s suggestions, for students who need them: Fortnite, Harry Potter, Social Media, Video Games, Basketball.

Imagine being the lucky teacher who gets to read those essays. Oh, wait — there is no teacher. It’s all AI.

Peg Tyre’s 2012 Atlantic article “The Writing Revolution” is still necessary reading for anyone who cares about the teaching of writing.

A related post
AI school

Student writing and AI

From The New York Times (gift link), “What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?” An excerpt:

Cognitive research confirms that writing is a powerful aid in helping us to retain information we read. The work of writing forces us to stress-test our ideas, allowing the writer to respond to counterarguments and cite sources. Revision is a practice of self-critique and self-improvement, and can be social, as well, if feedback is elicited. Writing can also be empowering, allowing us to share our experiences and express our views. It can even be healing, which is why therapists sometimes suggest keeping a journal.

It is not clear if these benefits can be fully realized when writing alongside artificial intelligence. There are reasons to be wary.

It is not clear? Oh, I’d say it’s clear.

Related reading
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Nick and nook and cranny

I skip a lot of commercials, so I am late to the game, having seen the Swiffer Duster Kit commercial “No Jump Needed” (from December 2025) for the first time last night. After some successful cleaning, there’s this exchange:

“It looks like you got into everything.”

“Every nick and cranny.”

Uh, no. As any eater of Thomas’ English Muffins knows, they’re called nooks and crannies.

I can think of several possible explanations for this mistake:

~ It’s a meta element, recalling a February 2019 Swiffer Heavy Duty commercial, “Nick’s Cleaning Confession.” I like meta , but I think this explanation is unlikely.

~ It’s deliberate, a ploy to get people who are second-screening to pay attention and then talk about the commercial and the product. See? It worked. This explanation’s somewhat likely.

~ It’s just a mistake. Likeliest of all, say I.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the origin of nook (c. 1300) is unknown. The word has a wide variety of meanings. Here, of course, it means “any small corner or recess” (c. 1400 or 1450). It’s been paired with corner since about 1593. From Christopher Marlowe, Edward II :

Make seuerall kingdomes of this monarchie,
And share it equally amongst you all,
So I may haue some nooke or corner left,
To frolike with my deerest Gaueston

Nook has been paired with cranny since 1873: “He explored the whole neighbourhood, looking into every nook and cranny of it” (P. G. Hamerton, Intellectual Life ).

As for cranny (c. 1440), “a small narrow opening or hole; a chink, crevice, crack, fissure,” the origin is uncertain:

Apparently related to French cran (in Cotgrave cren ) “a notch, cleft, niche, or jag,” a crack in metal, a transverse fissure in strata, etc.; but the etymology and form-history present many difficulties.

Nook and cranny and nooks and crannies are instances of what’s called an irreversible binomial. That’s all I’m going to say: I’m keeping it short and sweet.

And I’m going to leave nick in the commercial, where it does and doesn’t belong.

[Randall Cotgrave: an English lexicographer.]

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Dillinger (dir. Max Nosseck, 1945). Click for a larger view.]

Two feds, one pocket notebook, one pencil. Perhaps a Dixon Ticonderoga? Also one wallet. Out of the picture: John Dillinger.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

Jacques Pépin pays tribute to Julia Child

As part of Heather Cox Richardson’s 250 to 250 series.

I always like seeing Julia Child or Jacques Pépin cook. Watching M. Pépin in my grownuphood gave me confidence to try a few more things in cooking.

Did you know that Julia Child once visited the Martin family of TV fame: Ruth, Paul, Timmy, and Lassie? She did — at least in my imagination she did. The story is here: “Bon Appétit!”

[It’s a good story.]

Recently updated

Is this a cigar which I see before me? Now with an explanation of sorts.

“He doesn’t want to do the job”

Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia), yesterday in Atlanta:

“And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs, and trades stocks. You see, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

[My punctuation.]

Robert Caro, interviewed on C-SPAN

It’s a great ninety minutes: Peter Slen interviews Robert Caro about his Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson biographies.

When will the final volume of the Johnson biography be out? “Bad question.”

A fun moment: the bookcases.

A chilling revelation, in a discussion of Johnson’s and Robert Kennedy’s hatred of each another: when Robert Kennedy was shot, Johnson was up all night, asking his aides, “Is he dead yet?”

Related reading
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Tyler Austin Harper, ex-prof

Three samples.

From “Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The Insufferable Hypocrisy of Elite Academia” (The Atlantic , gift link):

I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates [College, in Lewiston, Maine], I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.

From “The Confessions of Tyler Austin Harper,” an interview (The Chronicle of Higher Education :

It really was being at Bates and slowly realizing that what we might call an intersectional version of progressivism was just a grand charade to mask real political and economic problems at both Bates specifically and higher education writ large. I did the work. I read a lot of alternative pedagogy. I quit using grades in my classes. I agreed with some of these critiques, and I still agree with some of them. But it became apparent that it was quite convenient to latch on to these things rather than confront the simmering class warfare on campus.

From “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday” (The Atlantic , gift link):

To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.

I look forward to reading much more from Tyler Austin Harper.

A shoe shine boy

[Outside 5117 4th Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

He appears in yesterday’s post. I didn’t want him to be overlooked.

An outtake shows a shoe-repair shop at no. 5117, offering “Ladies and Gents Shoe Shine Inside.” An earlier photograph, I’d assume, before a radio-repair shop took over the premises. Sitting across from what was once shoes , perhaps this kid was looking to capitalize on people’s remembrance of shines past. Or perhaps he was just counting on foot traffic from the subway entrance and exit.

I can’t write this post without pointing to Duke Ellington’s beautiful rendition of Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn’s “Shoe Shine Boy.” With Lawrence Brown (trombone), Barney Bigard (clarinet), and a vocal by Ivie Anderson. Is it really ninety years old? It is.

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

Word of the day: pothook

It appears in a metaphor atop a metaphor, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield . The narrator describes the houses on Tommy Traddles’s street:

They were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick and mortar pothooks.

The Oxford English Dictionary to the rescue. A pothook is

a hook suspended over a fireplace on which a pot or kettle may be hung.

But also

a curved or hooked stroke made with the pen, esp. as a component of an unfamiliar or unintelligible script or when learning to write; (also) a crooked character, a scrawl.

So the buildings resemble in their monotony the marks made by a boy learning the rudiments of handwriting, practicing the same stroke over and over. And those marks resemble the hooks suspended over a fireplace. The houses resemble the marks that resemble the hooks.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

What’s under there?

Aaron Rupar posted some strange footage and asked “Seriously, what is going on with Trump’s rear end here? It looks like he has some sort of contraption back there.”

Whatever is back there, there also appears to be some sort of contraption on his legs as well. Watch as he walks toward the crowd: you can see his pants legs riding up at about eight inches above his shoes. And watch as he ascends the stairs: his pants legs bulge in an odd way below the knee. There’s something in there, I suspect, likely an exoskeletal device to help with walking. I found this one at Amazon. And who knows what else is under those pants?

I don’t believe in making a joke of anyone’s effort to retain their mobility. But there’s something to be said when the White House (or what’s left of it) insists that the current occupant is astonishingly fit for the office.

*

The bulge has attracted international attention.

Diners face off

Count ’em. One diner:

[5117 4th Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

And right across the street, a second:

[5116 4th Avenue, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Look closely to see the Y and D design next to the Yankee Diner’s entrance, “Colored Revue,” “Scandinavian Home Cooking,” and many other details. Both diners are long gone. But the ghost of the Yankee Diner can be seen in no. 5117’s 1980s tax photograph.

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

Who was?

I caught by chance a minute of Jeopardy! yesterday. New episode? Old? No idea. Here’s what got my attention:

The category: American Poetry. The answer, for $800:

Poems by him include “Crowing Hen Blues,” "Po’ Boy Blues,” & “The Weary Blues”

No one buzzed.

See also Black Jeopardy Misses, a YouTube compendium of similar fails. For instance:

The category: That Is the Question. The answer, for $800:

In 1851 in Akron, Sojourner Truth delivered a speech called this 4-word rhetorical question

No one buzzed.

And I’m reminded of a moment in the documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine (dir. Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982), in which Hoyt Fuller tells James Baldwin about a moment from the classroom, when he asked a student to read a quiz question aloud:

“And she says, ‘I have no idea who Malcolm Ten was.’”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is “Extremely” (18-A, six letters) difficult. I left 1-A, eight letters, “Top drawer” alone and began with 60-A, eight letters, “Siege that named an SUV.” How do I know that?

A source of unhappiness in this puzzle: 24-A, six letters, “Cesky apoštol.” Printing the puzzle to fill a letter-sized page left apoštol looking more like apositol. So I looked online and found Český apoštol and figured it out. And then I discovered that the free online versions of the puzzle — 1, 2 — render the clue minus the mark.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-A, eight letters, “Greek who wrote Theory of the Passions.” Odysseus?

9-D, eleven letters, “Cups of tea.” Not sure about this one. Something can have be your 9-D without being your cup of tea.

12-D, six letters, “Luke’s unfortunate news.” I had to drop my certainty that this clue was a cryptic.

17-A, eight letters, “Spoils.” Just a cool word.

22-A, three letters, “Key duplication.” Now that I understand it, I still think it’s ridiculous.

24-D, eleven letters, “Overly optimistic.” Reviving an old-timey phrase.

32-A, seven letters, “Guess who?” Fun.

35-D, eight letters, “Posters, postcards, pamphlets, etc.” One of my cups of tea.

39-D, seven letters, “Talk over?” Clever.

48-A, four letters, “Word from the French for ‘small and detailed.’” Who knew?

My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, eleven letters, “Show-off.” For a moment, I’m in The Honeymooners 

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

But sometimes it’s a pencil

[A Zits cigar, modified.]

I decided to make the cigar in today’s Zits look more cigar-like. But my son Ben went me one better. Well done, son.

As Ben reminds me, Walt Duncan has sometimes been seen with a cigar, as in this 1999 strip.

A related post
Is this a cigar that I see before me? (Today’s Zits )

[Post title with apologies to Sigmund Freud.]

Catchphrases and all

Elaine and I have been made honorary characters, at least on paper, in the world of Animal Crossing.

Elaine’s clothing: green sweater and dress. Her catchphrase: “Isn't that cool.” Her personality: sweet.

My clothing: polo shirt. My catchphrase: “You always need a pencil.” My personality: smug.

These attributes were chosen for us, with the exception of smug, which I chose when presented with a small list of options. (Jock didn’t fit.)

Is this a cigar which I see before me?

[Zits, August 14, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

It looks a bit like a vaping device, but the puffs and the red suggest a cartoon cigar. At least Walt is setting his bad example outside the house.

Notice the shirt: Bucyrus is a town in Ohio, the Zits home state. There is no Hard Rock Cafe there. Jeremy Duncan has (or recently had) a summer job at Pipkin’s, a Cincinnati grocer. There is an HRC in Cincinnati.

Grandpa’s Cheesebarn, which appeared in a 2020 Zits, is also in Ohio.

*

My son Ben and I have each improved that cigar.

*

August 18: The cigar showed up again today. It turns out that these strips are reruns from August 2015. Were cigars more acceptable then? I don’t think so. But at least Walt is smoking his outside the house.

Simon Willison’s advice for bloggers

Via Daring Fireball: tech developer Simon Willison offers observations and advice about blogging.

Willison’s advice for someone getting started:

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog.

Excellent advice. It reminds me of what my daughter Rachel suggested when I started out:

“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.’”

Willison also suggests not worrying about readership:

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers.

Here too I agree. Thinking of a blog post as a message in a bottle can be a useful mental trick when putting something on the Internets. One sends off the bottle in the hope that somebody somewhere will find it. And that can happen. Bottle after bottle.

A piece of advice with which I can’t agree:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

I’m always tinkering with posts new and old, even when they may appear to be fine as they are. As I wrote in a 2013 post, I think about writing

as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

I’m with Aaron Draplin (quoted in that same post):

“I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

Besides, what example would I have been setting for my students if I believed in lowering my own standards? Gah!

And besides, not all flaws are invisible. I know, because I get comments: “No need to post this, but shouldn’t the third sentence read,” &c. And I’m always grateful for those comments.

Related reading
All OCA blogging posts (Pinboard)

Bean soup theory

From Merriam-Webster, an introduction to bean soup theory.

(Wait — should that be bean-soup theory? Nah, don’t overthink it, Michael.)

Here, from TikTok, is the recipe that prompted the theory. My favorite joke complaint: “What if you can’t eat solid food yet because you’re a newborn.”

And from Delish, some further context.

“Bob swore!”

Miss Mowcher bids goodbye to David Copperfield and James Steerforth:

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Poor billionaire

From NPR:

In California, tech billionaires are ramping up spending to defeat a wealth tax in the state.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent more than $100 million to blanket the state in ads and commercials condemning the ballot measure. The measure, known as Proposition 40, would impose a one-time 5% tax on California residents worth more than $1 billion. If passed, the tax would fund healthcare programs in the state.

Brin has compared the tax to the Soviet-style socialism his family fled in the late-1970s, and has moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe to avoid the tax.

Brin is also supporting two competing ballot measures in November that would effectively void the billionaires' tax.

When I heard this story on the radio, I tried to do some calculating in my head. If one had, say, an even billion, a 5% tax would take only $50 million. Brin has already spent twice as much fighting this tax. His estimated wealth when I typed this sentence: $260.1 billion. A 5% tax (which he will avoid anyway) would leave him with about $247 billion.

“The Moronic Bullshit of the ‘Third Way’”

That’s Robert Reich’s phrasing. An excerpt from his essay:

I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of The New York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.

If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.

Odd that The New York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.

And then Reich names names. His conclusion:

So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”

And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”

Instead, focus on what’s really happening.

Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.

This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.