Fancy groceries, anyone?

A second curious term in the signage at Sam’s Dairy: fancy groceries . Like table luxuries , the term is missing from the OED and from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third. My casual browsing suggests that the term was typically paired with staple groceries . Here’s an explanation of the fancy from Proceedings of The Second Pan American Scientific Congress (1917):

The fancy grocery. — To solve the problem of the downtown store two means have been tried — one, to secure larger margins; the other, to seek greater volume. The former has given rise to the fancy store. In nearly every community there are some exceptional people who will pay an extra price for the best, and there are many people who will buy extra-priced articles for exceptional occasions. This trade, like the shopping trade of the textile lines, tends to concentrate, but unlike the shopping lines, the goods are bought without comparison of value, hence there is nothing to prevent a single store securing a monopoly and frequently a single grocer does secure a marked leadership if not a positive monopoly of fancy lines. The chief difficulty with these stores is to secure sufficient volume and to supplement the rather limited trade in fancy groceries. In many large cities the fancy grocers have added wines and liquors.

Though the term has long since fallen out of use, specialty shops, with high-end items in tins and jars and bottles, carry on in the spirit of the fancy grocery.

Here’s a sampling of fancy groceries, in an extraordinary Macy’s advertisement from 1927:

[The New York Times, February 10, 1927. Click for a larger view.]

Do click for a larger view: the oh so precious text is worth reading. Then reach for the bicarb.

A related post
Table luxuries, anyone?

Zippy and Proust

[“Quote Slam, Cont’d.” Zippy , October 15, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Zippy is spending a second day visiting the Père Lachaise. Yesterday he was trading remarks with Edith Piaf.

The words from Proust appear in Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way ] (1920). Dr. du Boulbon is speaking to the narrator’s grandmother:

«Supportez d’être appelée une nerveuse. Vous appartenez à cette famille magnifique et lamentable qui est le sel de la terre. Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d’autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d’oeuvre.»

In Mark Treharne’s translation (Penguin, 2002):

“Feel comfortable to be called a neurotic. You belong to the splendid, pitiable family that is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art.”

Strange: when I opened my copy of The Guermantes Way and began to thumb pages, I landed almost immediately on page 299 and this passage.

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

One more MacGuffin

I missed this one. From Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that’s raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, “What does he do?”

The counterintelligence man replies, “Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter.”

“But what does he sell?”

“Oh, just government secrets!” is the answer.

Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!

I must note: Phillip Vandamm, James Mason’s character, was not an importer or exporter of table luxuries.

Related reading
Egg MacGuffin : All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Mike Love on stage

My daughter Rachel warned me that it’s painful to watch. It is.

Musicians, like boxers, need to know when to stop.

Related reading
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Recently updated

Table luxuries, anyone? Now with a familial connection, albeit a tenuous one.

Egg MacGuffin

From a movie review:

[Graham] Moore throws in a Hitchcock-style McMuffin in the shape of a secret tape recording which will reveal just who has been betraying the gangsters. The problem is that no-one has a machine on which to play it.

The writer has egg on his face, or ought to: the Hitchcock device was called the MacGuffin. He explained it to François Truffaut in one of the conversations preserved in Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

Well, it’s the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after. I’ll tell you about it. Most of Kipling’s stories, as you know, were set in India, and they dealt with the fighting between the natives and the British forces on the Afghanistan border. Many of them were spy stories, and they were concerned with the efforts to steal the secret plans out of a fortress. The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So the “MacGuffin” is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever.

You may be wondering where the term originated. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”

And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”

The first one asks, ”What’s a MacGuffin?“

”Well,“ the other man says, ”it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”

The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!” So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

Hitchcock and Truffaut mention the formula for the construction of an airplane engine in The 39 Steps (1935), the little tune in The Lady Vanishes (1938), and the secret clause in a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940). Each a device to propel a narrative, each egg-free.

Thanks, Seth!

Related reading
All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing

Good Lord, it’s painful. Don’t miss the journalists turning to one another with smiles at the end.

But if you can’t take it, Aaron Rupar has selected moments.

“Total degradation”

AI is in the air at the university where I taught for thirty years. The news that a faculty member had ChatGPT design two senior-level courses and create reading material for those courses (in the form of authorless handouts) has led students to petition university administrators to create a university-wide policy governing faculty use of AI in courses.

The administrative response to the petition has emphasized the problems AI presents for branding (e.g., inaccurate depictions of university buildings and sloppy typography) and skirted the possibility of a university-wide policy about the use of AI in teaching, stating that such a policy would threaten academic freedom. Each department should establish its own policy: that’s the mantra, though a department policy could be said to pose the same threat to academic freedom.

To my mind, saying that faculty must not generate course design and reading material via AI should be no more controversial than saying that math classes must use Arabic not Roman numerals. (An alligator rule.) But I can’t imagine any department coming up with a policy that does more than leave decisions about AI use to the discretion of the individual faculty member.

At least some students already recognize that branding is not what’s most important. A student-government leader points out that the larger issue is the “total degradation” of academic integrity at the institution. Hitting the nail on its head.

Table luxuries, anyone?

The signage at Sam’s Dairy has a couple of curious terms. One of them: table luxuries .

The term is missing from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third, and it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary only in a 1903 citation for laver , an edible seaweed. From P. W. Joyce, A Social History of Ancient Ireland (1903):

The marine-plant called Porphyra vulgaris, a species of laver, found growing on rocks round the coast, was esteemed a table luxury: it is now often sold in fish-shops and eaten with pepper, vinegar, &c.

It’s fair to say though that seaweed is not what people typically had in mind when speaking of table luxuries. What they did seem to have in mind: anything beyond main staples such as coffee, flour, sugar.

That might even include fruits and vegetables. Here’s a photograph (c. 1890–1915) by Jenny Young Chandler of a wagon belonging to Fehrenbach Table Luxuries. Look closely: fruits and vegetables on the sign, vegetables on the wagon. Carrots, cauliflower: table luxuries. Or perhaps they were just to get customers to visit a store.

A swanker version of table luxuries appears in Eva A. Alvey Richards account of her Milwaukee family’s situation in 1893:

Father at that time was importing luxuries — table luxuries, such as truffles and pâté de foie gras, caviar, olives, wines, and cordials — a business he had followed for many years.

That sentence seems just made for an OED citation, no?

And from New York, 1894 (A.F. Parsons, 1894), a helpful list:

The importation of table luxuries constitutes a most important feature of New York’s commerce. Among the most recently established of those engaged in the trade is Mr. Geo. K. Etienne, who began operations in September, 1894. He is sole agent for the United States for the Paris house of Mr. Joseph Ramell, dealer in sardines, peas, mushrooms, beans, macedoine, olive oil, truffles, macaroni, candied and preserved fruits, etc. These products are guaranteed to be the the finest of the kind the market affords.

I’m amused to think that sardines are once again a table luxury: a couple of weeks ago I saw a Portuguese brand selling for $12 a tin.

From The New York Times , October 23, 1916 (gift link), an article with an urgent headline: “Rush Heavy Imports of Table Luxuries; Dainties Worth $2,000,000 Brought In for Holiday Dinners”:

Among the things now coming in from abroad for the holiday dinner table are currants, dates, figs, grapes, lemons, olives, raisins, preserved fruits, nuts of many kinds, together with cured and canned fish of the higher grades. The countries furnishing these delicacies were Greece, England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Japan, China, and the West Indies.

In 1925 tomatoes and cucumbers were table luxuries in New York. From The New York Times , January 11, 1925 (gift link), “Vegetables in Liberal Supply”:

Cucumbers and tomatoes now head the list of table luxuries, according to the weekly review of local food markets made public yesterday by Dr. Arthur E. Albrecht, Director of the New York office of the State Department of Farms and Markets. The review among other things says:

“Cucumbers and tomatoes at this season are generally to be classed with the luxuries, the price for cucumbers in the stores lately being mostiy 10 and 15 cents each and tomatoes 25 and 30 cents a pound.”

No indication of where those cucumbers and tomatoes were coming from, but the article also mentions “fancy hothouse grapes” coming from Belgium. (Belgium!)

Okay, that’s enough investigating for me. Now I want to drive to St. Louis and visit DiGregorio’s Italian Market.

For sentimental reasons, here’s the final Times appearance of “table luxuries” — meaning food, not china and cutlery — in an October 29, 1980 advertisement for a now-defunct delicatessen:

[Click for a larger view.]

*

October 13: Elaine recalled that her grandfather the accountant worked for an importer of foods in Chicago. That was almost certainly an importer of table luxuries.

Origin of an idiom: “full of beans”

From Why Do We Say That? The Suprising Origins of Everyday Idioms (2012), by May Dopp:

You’ve no doubt heard the expression “full of beans.” In the United States and the United Kingdom, it means “full of energy and life.” In the United States it also means “full of nonsense.” But did you know that this expression began its life with a capital B ? That’s just one more surprising fact about our weird and wonderful language.

The story begins with Charles Foster Bean (1930–2017), actor, raconteur, and game-show habitué. Bean did most of his acting on the stage or in television, but in 1966 he had his first and last starring role in film as Charlie Gallagher, a put-upon father of seven in The Refrigerator’s Running, and I Can’t … Keep … Up! (dir. Michael Gordon), the first film to feature two ellipses in its name. The seven child actors who played the rambunctious Gallagher children, all Beans themselves, were billed as “The Bean Team.” (I omit their names here to spare them embarrassment.) Their characters were called Andy, Candy, Dandy, Mandy, Randy, Sandy, and Tandy — which alone should give a suggestion of the film’s comic content: names shouted and misheard (“No, I said MANDY!”), water balloons hitting the mailman, prank calls to the drugstore about Prince Albert, a sheepdog tearing through the house and managing to yank out the telephone line, all while Mrs. Gallagher (Doris Day) is away at work as a “lady executive.”

Some reviewers were amused; some, not. Whether awarding one star or four, any number of reviewers described the movie as “full of Beans.” “It’s full of Beans and a laugh a minute, a riotous, colourful celebration of childhood energy and of life itself,” wrote Barry Norman (Daily Mail, November 29, 1966). “Yes, the movie is full of Beans, which is to say full of nonsense. But I prefer my nonsense neat, untainted by sugary drool,” wrote John Simon (New York, December 3, 1966).

Love it or hate it, a long-forgotten movie gave rise to a phrase we still use today, with two different meanings.

And if you have Prince Albert in a can, let him out.

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” : “My foot!” : “That takes the cake” : “The wind at our backs” : All OCA AI posts and idiom posts (Pinboard)

[If AI is going to be scraping us all, I’d like to contribute to its wealth of knowledge. And I’m happy to report that my post about the idiom “Don’t cry over spilled milk” is receiving a significant number of visits via Google.]

Domestic comedy

[Surveying the books and writing materials ranged across the sofa .]

“I think we need to get another sofa.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Empire of signs

[4116 Avenue U, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

One more trip back to Avenue U.

I count twenty bits of signage at Sam’s Dairy, not including the Kool penguin (look closely) and the Beech-Nut Coffee advertisement that must appear on the hidden plate-glass window. The penguin’s name was Willie.

And I count at least six more Brooklyn stores in 1940 calling themselves Sam’s Dairy, three listed in full-page Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum advertisements, three more listed in the telephone directory. Nothing consistent about their signage, which makes me doubt that Sam ran an empire of stores.

In 1926 this address housed the Erasmus Realty Co. By 1928 it housed a fruit and vegetable market. At some point, Sam moved in (ESplanade 7-9284). The space is now ceded to the parking lot of a strip mall that includes a CVS.

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

[Post title, wrenched out of context, from Roland Barthes.]

Russia, Russia, Russia

So now, after more than a decade of pretending that he is not associated with Russia and that he would honor the U.S. national security position of support for Ukraine and our European allies, Trump is openly backing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

In the most recent installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson provides a helpful recap.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Let t equal time and p equal pleasure: sometimes, only sometimes, the t and p of a Newsday Saturday Stumper will begin to move in opposite directions. The longer the puzzle takes, the less pleasure it will offer. So it was, at least for me, with today’s puzzle, by Frank Longo.

Too much obscurity: 7-D, three letters, “How a ...Silence title starts.” I looked up silence , title , and the answer, and I think I understand, though this bit will not be going into long-term storage.

Too much obscurity: 11-D, seven letters, “Company with a $25 billion IPO (2014).” Ah yes, a wonderful year for IPOs.

Too much obscurity: 29-A, five letters, “Sports great who wrote the novel The Academy: Love Match .” We are speaking of a young-adult novel published in 2014. (Ah yes, a wonderful year for YA novels.) There is no reason anyone should be expected to know this answer.

Too much obscurity: 57-A, four letters, “Head of the services, for short.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen the answer in print.

11-D and 29-A seem like a matter of taking unobjectionable answers and finding out-of-the-way factoids with which to clue them. The clue for 57-A might be a matter of making an awkward string of letters fit. As for 7-D, who knows? Granted, these answers can all be had via crosses, but there’s little pleasure in that. What’s the point?

And one clue-and-answer that even for a nonbeliever might be jarring: 50-A, six letters, “Party with the Host.” I thought the context might be some reality show with a host named the Host. I did not think the Stumper would go where it went.

I did appreciate the four spanners in this puzzle, one of which was a giveaway (thank you), and one of which I really enjoyed:

17-A, fifteen letters, “Didn’t save face.”

36-A, fifteen letters, “Their last windows are opened on Christmas Eve.”

53-A, fifteen letters, “How humanity exists, per Kant.”

And my favorite, 31-A, fifteen letters, “I may stand for it.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

Morning becomes Ernie Bushmiller: Now with a link to a New York Times article.

Nobel wit

“If you clap a little more, I may share this award with Trump”: Navi Pillay, on learning that she will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Hours after the announcement, the current occupant’s administration announced sanctions on the International Criminal Court. As The New York Times reports (gift link), Pillay served for nine years as an ICC judge. The sanctions have been in the works for a while, but the timing of the announcement is curious, to say the least.]

VDP and Eva Marie Saint

Van Dyke Parks mentioned to me that he and Eva Marie Saint were both on a television show when he was a child. Sure enough: Saint appeared in the pilot episode of the single-season situation comedy Bonino . Van Dyke came on board in the fourth episode, playing Andrew Bonino, the youngest Bonino child. The series starred Ezio Pinza as a widowed singer raising his eight children. You can see them all in this photograph. Van Dyke is front and center, with glasses.

As Van Dyke’s IMDb page shows, he had quite a career as a child actor. Of special interest to me: he appeared as Tommy Borden in “The Hero,” a “lost” (kinescope) episode of The Honeymooners. And it wasn’t a bit part: his character has long stretches of dialogue with Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason), just the two of them. You can find the lost episodes at Amazon and Tubi.

Related reading
All OCA VDP posts (Pinboard)

“One autumn night”

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Christ of Nanjing.” 1920. In The Essential Akutagawa: Twenty-Two Short Stories by Japan's Master Storyteller, trans. Richard Medhurst (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2025).

This story’s opening paragraphs made me think right away of James Joyce’s “Eveline.” So I was excited to learn that in 1919 Akutagawa purchased copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and one other book by Joyce. Was it the slim poetry volume Chamber Music , the Ibsen-like play Exiles , or Dubliners ? My guess is that it was Dubliners . Akutagawa later translated excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist into Japanese.

I caught on to Akutagawa by reading The Life of a Stupid Man , no. 56 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Also from Akutagawa
Cut ear, long pipe

Recently updated

Lowlights, a children’s magazine: Now with a refund.

Arthur turns thirty

Daughter Number Three reminds us that today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the premiere of the PBS kids’ show Arthur.

When our son Ben worked at GBH, he did a series of YouTube videos with items from the station’s archives. So of course he did an (unembeddable) episode about Arthur, featuring an archival interview with Arthur’s creator Marc Brown. If you watch, you’ll get to see a yearbook photograph of the teacher who inspired Mr. Ratburn.

My favorite Arthur episode: the one in which Miss Sweetwater subs for Mr. Ratburn and the kids get sick of being babied.

[N.B.: Ben has since lost the beard.]

Twelve movies

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

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (dir. Charles Waters, 1960). From Jean Kerr’s bestseller. David Niven plays a retired professor who now works as a New York theater critic; Doris Day is his wife, who insists on moving to “the country” (seventy miles from New York) with their four boys and one dog. She fixes up their sprawling house while he resists the metropolitan allure of an actor (Janie Paige) whom he panned. A couple of meta moments — Day singing a bit of “Que Será, Será” and referencing Rock Hudson — made me more alert. But the comedy here is on the level of, say, The Brady Bunch. ★★ (TCM)

*

Crow Hollow (dir. Michael McCarthy, 1952). A variation on Rebecca : a whirlwind romance, followed by married life in a strange, great house with three aged aunts and a surly servant girl. Also on the premises: strychnine, a tarantula, and poisonous mushrooms. Newlywed Anne (Natasha Parry) is at a loss for what to do when someone tries to murder her while her dimbulb husband Robert (Donald Houston) goes about his country doctoring. A thoroughly satisfying B movie. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Frightened Man (dir. John Gilling, 1952). Not much here for anyone to be frightened about. It’s a story of jewel thievery, with a young man sent down from Oxford who turns to a life of crime. Both he and his antiques-dealer father will be in for a surprise. Some tension in the breaking-through-the-wall safe-cracking effort, but nothing of real interest here. ★★ (YT)

*

The Snorkel (dir. Guy Green, 1958). That last one was a dud, but there are so many superior movies waiting in obscurity at YouTube. This one is a variation on Shadow of a Doubt, with a teenager (Mandy Miller) who saw her stepfather (Peter van Eyck) murder her father and is now convinced that her mother’s locked-room suicide is another murder. But how did the stepfather do it, and how can his stepdaughter prove it? Van Eyck, Miller, and Betta St. John (as the teen’s nurse/chaperone and perhaps the stepfather’s new love interest) are all terrific, and the ending is sure to throw the viewer off balance. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Whole Truth (dir. John Guillermin, 1958). We’re in Nice, or a recreation thereof, in a story that begins with a chase through twisty narrow streets, winds back the clock, and moves forward to pick up the chase. The plot: a volatile actress (Gianna Maria Canale) is found dead, and the film producer (Stewart Granger) with whom she was having an affair is accused of murder. An inspector from Scotland Yard (George Sanders) steps in to investigate, as the producer’s wife (Donna Reed) looks on with dismay. The plot is tricky — too tricky, really, but still fun. ★★★ (YT)

*

A Tale of Two Cities (dir. Jack Conway, 1935). Watching the crowd scenes, I wondered, as I do when watching The Grapes of Wrath : where did they find people who looked like that? I know; they’re actors — but still. Ronald Colman shines as gentle, dissolute Sydney Carton; Blanche Yurka is a terrifying Madame De Farge; as the Marquis St. Evrémonde, Basil Rathbone looks eerily like Stephen Miller. The storming of the Bastille, worked out by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, is a crowd scene to end all crowd scenes. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

I Want You (dir. Mark Robson, 1951). A family and their associates on the eve of the Korean War, as men are called up for service. It’ll be over in two weeks, says one man in a bar — in a movie released a year and a half after American involvement began. There are moments of frank desperation about the reality of war — a father’s plea that his son be classified as an indispensable worker, the dread with which another son reads his draft notice — but the movie wraps up on a weirdly happy note. With Dana Andrews, Peggy Dow, Farley Granger, Dorothy McGuire, and a surprising moment from bit player Walter Baldwin. ★★★ (A)

*

Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal (dir. Jenny Carchman, 2024). I had a vague recollection of “the eBay scandal,” the effort by high-ranking employees to terrify and silence a husband and wife team who blog about e-commerce. Their sin: they dared to criticize eBay. But the details of what these eBay employees did (authorized, it appears, at a high level) were new to me. A well-made and angry-making documentary about the corporate will to power. ★★★★ (A)

*

Sister Carrie (dir. Daniel Nearing, 2022). That this black-and-white, nearly silent movie has no ratings or reviews at IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes might make it an object of curiosity, but our curiosity turned to boredom to exasperation. Though the title is Sister Carrie, the end credits state that the movie also draws upon fiction by Sherwood Anderson, Alexandre Dumas Fils, and Antonie Francois Prévost — which must explain why the foreman at the Chicago shoe factory where Carrie works murders his wife and ends up in jail. Text, including lines from Philip Larkin’s “High Windows” and a postscript from Jonathan Safran Foer, appears on the screen in a highly unreadable font. It’s all a pretentious mess, though I did like seeing the Bean. (A)

[That’s right, no stars.]

*

Carrie (dir. William Wyler, 1952). It’s a big picture, beautifully made, and true to the urban poverty and glamour of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. But I have misgivings. This adaptation deprives Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) of self-direction: she is instead present only as a victim or victimizer of men. As George Hurstwood, Laurence Olivier emotes all over everything; the movie, unlike the novel, even ends with him (whose life is it anyway?). But Eddie Albert is delightful as peppy, blithely libidinous Charles Drouet. ★★★ (A)

*

The Big Shakedown (dir. John Francis Dillon, 1934). Husband-to-be Jimmy Morrell (Charles Farrell) is a pharmacist; his wife-to-be Norma Nelson (Bette Davis) runs the register and the soda fountain, providing stamps, ice cream, and nickels for the telephone. Their drugstore, they admit, is more a community service than a flourishing business. All that changes when a gangster (Ricardo Cortez) stops in for a headache powder and persuades Jimmy to manufacture sham brandname products. Cortez is the real star here, brutish yet suave; with Davis in second place and Farrell a distant third. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Hamnet (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2025). Better late than never. It’s a curiously modern story, with a husband and father, Will (Paul Mescal), away at work or away in his own head, and a mother, Agnes, or Anne (Jessie Buckley), left to manage a house and children largely on her own. The glaring anachronisms (“Hello,” “OK”) are thus less jarring than a viewer might expect. I think the movie too often substitutes over-the-top emoting for genuine feeling, and in the final scene at the Globe, things really go off the rails. ★★★ (N)

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

VDP on BW and “Heroes and Villains”

In an interview with Dutch television, Van Dyke Parks talks about “Heroes and Villains” and the loss of Brian Wilson: “What I’ve lost with the death of Brian is a witness, a person who was there. Brian took an era with him.”

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

Lowlights, a children’s magazine

A certain children’s magazine appears to be notorious for renewing subscriptions without a customer’s approval. Ask me how I know this.

Okay, I’ll tell you.

Last year I ordered a one-year subscription for a kiddo. (More than a year doesn’t make sense: kids outgrow this stuff pretty quickly). Last night I noticed an unauthorized renewal charge in my bank statement. Very sneaky: the subscription doesn’t expire until January, and the charge was made one day before my then-current card expired. I filed a fraud report with my bank, and I’m watching now for the refund that the magazine’s customer rep promised (though not before trying to get me to renew anyway).

Nasty company. Friends of children, beware.

*

October 9: Subscription canceled, money returned, no fraud investigation required. But still, it’s unconscionable for a company to push through a renewal without the customer’s consent, and to do so months in advance so as to catch a card before it expired. Think of the automation that must go into making that happen.

Eva Marie Saint (1924–2026)

[Eva Marie Saint at the Academy Awards, 1955. Photograph by Michael Rougier. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

From The New York Times obituary:

Nine months pregnant with her first child when she picked up her Oscar at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood, she told the audience, ‘I’m so excited I may have the baby right here.’ Her son was born two days later.

The Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was for her role as Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront .

A treat of my life as an English prof was getting to introduce students to that film (deeply Iliad-like) and North by Northwest (deeply Odyssey-like, with Saint’s Eve Kendall as Athena, Circe, and Penelope.)

[Movies: Never during class time, always in a reserved classroom at a time or times that accommodated most students. Students who couldn’t make it watched a DVD on reserve in the library. Remember DVDs?]

An NYRB cover

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

The cover is a detail of a William Wegman photograph, Beach Scene (1996). I think it’s the greatest New York Review Books cover of them all. But you have to read Asleep in the Sun to know why. And you shouldn’t take this cover literally.

Related reading
A handful of Bioy Casares posts

Dianas

Lucio Bordenave has agreed to have his wife Diana, aka the missus, taken off to Dr. Reger Samaniego’s Psychiatric Institute. In her absence, her lookalike sister Adriana María has moved in. The aged relative doña Ceferina is still on the scene. And in Diana’s absence, Lucio has taken in a dog whom he names Diana.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

It’s impossible to describe what goes on in this novel without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that it combines domestic comedy and mad science into a surreal allegory of national and sexual politics.

Related reading
A handful of Bioy Casares posts

Recently updated

Morning becomes Ernie Bushmiller: Now with a link to a New Yorker piece about A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller.

Recently updated

“You can do either” Now with a suggestion that Iran could destroy Los Angeles or San Diego. And other mishaps.

“You can do either”

Via Aaron Rupar:

Q: Why are you telling your supporters to vote by mail if you think it’s fraud?

A: They’ll vote by mail or vote in person. I’d rather have them vote in person, but they can vote by mail if they want, because we seem to have no choice, because, ahh, a lot of people wanna vote by mail but a lot of very good people also wanna vote in person. You can do either. What we’re concerned about is there seems to be a lot of cheat — not seems to be, there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail.

Q: Where? Where’s the evidence?

A: I’ll tell you what: start off by taking a look at California. Take a look at —

Q: There’s no evidence in California.

A: Take a look at — no evidence, with millions and millions of ballots? You are fake news.

Watch this clip and the others that Aaron Rupar collected this afternoon and you’ll see a man who cannot respond to questions coherently and who falls back on empty stock phrasing: “We’re looking at it very strongly.” “It will all work out very well.” It’s gonna work out very well.” His response to a question about pneumonic plague shows him pretending to scientific expertise. When asked a question about María Corina Machado returning to Venezuela, he doesn’t even attempt to answer.

Help.

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October 6: This post now looks a bit nitpicky in light of his suggestion last night that Iran could destroy Los Angeles or San Diego (NYT gift link). And there were many other problem spots in his discourse. I am creating a new Pinboard tag: OOHFM. (Out of his, &c.)

The New York Times offered a curiously delimited headline: “Fury in California After Trump Suggests Iran ‘Take Out’ L.A. or San Diego.” Fury everywhere there are clear-thinking people, even in downstate Illinois.

Writing and thinking

I wish I had missed this one. In The New York Times (gift link), Joe Cruz, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science, opines: “I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.” See? He’s a professor. So he must know stuff.

And he begins by fabricating straw people, with the assertion that “Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing.” Only by writing? I don’t think so. I don‘t know anyone who thinks so. Why discount the value of writing by leading with a false premise? As you might suspect, AI soon enters the argument.

Natalie Wexler offers a carefully reasoned response: ”Yes, Writing Does Advance Thinking.” As someone who has again and again not figured something out before sitting down to write, I must agree.

I like the Leuchtturm motto Denken mit der Hand: think with the hand. Or in a formulation that Wittgenstein approved, “I think with my pen.” The pencil is also a means to advancement.

Jeff Tweedy annotates Woody Guthrie

In The New York Times (gift link), Jeff Tweedy annotates Woody Guthrie’s “America Singing,” a prose piece published in the Times on April 4, 1943. An excerpt:

I think we need to get better at defining the stakes we face today. Because, while the people who are systematically dismantling our institutions and violating Americans’ rights don’t wear the uniforms of the Fascist Party, the consequences of their actions are similar to the ones Guthrie feared.

Guthrie’s piece, which I can see in its original form in ProQuest but not via the Times itself, appeared on a page titled “Music of the Times,” otherwise devoted to classical music. That might explain Guthrie’s seemingly out of the blue reference to “real honest classical music.”

The condescending subhead the Times added to Guthrie’s piece: “Author of ‘Bound for Glory’ Recalls What The Plain People Sing.”

Related reading
A handful of OCA Woody Guthrie posts (Pinboard)

Morning becomes Ernie Bushmiller

A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller, a play about the celebrated cartoonist, soon begins a six-performance run in Brooklyn. More information at BroadwayWorld.

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The New Yorker has a much longer piece about the play: “Ernie Bushmiller’s Sunday Morning, Live.” I didn’t know that Bushmiller was the butt of a joke on Saturday Night Live.

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The New York Times (gift link) has an article: “He Wrote for Seinfeld . Now He Wants You to See the Genius of Nancy .”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

”Dine at the Ritz”

[27 Union Square West, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like the cheeky sign: “Dine at the Ritz.” Yes, let us dine at the Ritz, after which we can have our press conference at the Four Seasons. Just don’t bring along any gangsters.

Here’s another view of this Ritz, with the candy store and a shoeshine parlor to the side. A five-story building owns this corner today. A later Ritz Diner at 1133 1st Avenue appears to have recently closed. That restaurant’s website gives the address as 1079 1st Avenue, which is the address of another diner under the same ownership, the Tramway. Mixing up those two establishments would be considerably less embarrassing than mixing up one Ritz or Four Seasons with another.

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

”Are we having beer yet?“

[Zippy , October 4, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

On Friday, Zippy became Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon . Yesterday he turned into Lee Marvin, and he continues in that role today (in Point Blank ?).

When I read the dozen comics I read daily, I close read. So I embiggened to see what’s on Zippy Lee’s bottle: Google Zippy Lemon Ale . Yes, it was real, 7.2 ABV (strong), available in Idaho and Washington. What did Bill Griffith ask for as compensation for the use of Zippy’s likeness? Two six-packs. The story is behind the link just above.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[The post title is part of the beer’s logo.]

Belated birthday

I missed the date: Orange Crate Art turned twenty-two on September 15. Twenty-two!

Elaine says that it’s okay to have missed the date. After twenty-one, she says, it’s all just adulthood.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Joel Fagliano of NYT Games. It’s the first time I’ve seen his name on a Stumper, and it’s a terrific one — tricky, amusing, with enough toeholds to get started and keep going. For instance, 29-A, four letters, “‘He was       , take him for all in all’: Hamlet.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, nine letters, “Tangentially.” I’m given to tangentiality.

2-D, nine letters, “What children make a stand for.” I was a little uncertain about filling in what seemed like the obvious answer. How could it be nine letters?

6-D, eight letters, “Leaves home.” Lovely.

12-D, five letters, “Friday the 3rd?” Groan.

20-D, eight letters, “Deal with your in-box.” See 2-D: how could the answer be eight letters? Perhaps (to my mind) the extra letters are to make the puzzle a bit trickier.

23-A, ten letters, “Short-term lab job.” Cute.

27-A, six letters, “Subject to slamming.” NOGOOD? A nice bit of trickery.

36-A, four letters, “Soul’s foregoer.” I tried to think of other Kia models.

39-A, five letters, “Edges of some calendar line lists.” I think I get it.

46-A, ten letters, “City near Manhattan not related to a sand bag brand.” I love it.

46-D, five letters, “Half a bubble gum brand.” Remarkable the way such stuff just sticks in my head.

57-A, six letters, “Loud buzzer.” I have lived it.

49-D, five letters, “Informal term of endearment.” I use this word often and typed it just yesterday.

My favorite in this puzzle: 61-A, six letters, “Layers of floors.” Just because.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

The folk process

Three wonderful granddaughters have each altered the venerable “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” substituting the fifth note of the scale (sol) for the second (re) in the song’s final line: “How I wonder what YOU are.”

One kiddo explained: “I like a little burst of excitement at the end.”

Yodeling

A great episode of 99% Invisible : “Tootle of a Devilish Song,” all about yodeling.

Two musicians missing from the episode who deserve mentioning: Emmett Miller, the minstrel show (blackface) performer whose “Lovesick Blues” (with yodeling) was taken up by Hank Williams, and Tommy Johnson, the Mississippi blues singer and guitarist with a signature understated yodel. As on, for instance, “Canned Heat Blues.”

[“Canned heat”: Sterno, an extremely dangerous subsitute for alcohol beverages. Johnson’s song is the source for the name of the blues-rock band Canned Heat.]

“Lightly edited,” but still wildly incoherent

Have you read the transcript of the current occupant’s September 28 interview with Time ? The transcript has been “lightly edited,” Time says, but it’s still wildly incoherent. With lots of lies. I wonder what it was like before editing. A sample:

Do you trust Sam Altman?

I like him. Do I trust him? Who do I trust? I like Sam Altman. Smart. Dario’s smart. They’re all smart. We’re dealing with a very high level of IQ. Very very high level. That’s a good thing. I like that. I like it. Did you see the story about my uncle?

The one who taught at MIT?

I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a — I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.

What I’ve done is I’ve created, for instance, these massive plants have no — We have no electricity in our grid. These massive plants now are allowed to make their own electric —

Are you worried you can’t bring the American people along with you on that?

I might not be able to. I don’t know.

The child-like appraisal of a person (“I like Sam Altman”), the obsession with IQ, the uncle story, the bragging, the weird JFK touch (“the new frontiers”), the preposterous claim to have created “massive plants,” the struggle to say something clearly (“We have no electricity in our grid”), the surprising moment of self-doubt. What a long strange trip.

For me, the biggest tell comes in two words: “I’m fine.” No, he’s not.

Sherry Turkle on the world she’d like

From a Here and Now interview with Sherry Turkle about her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines :

I'm not looking to a world where we evolve with AI into a posthuman thing. I'm not looking to a world where we leave to go to different planets and it doesn't matter what we did to the earth. I'm not looking for a world where robots raise our children. I'm really looking to a world where human beings, our species, maximizes what we are best at, which is caring for each other, loving each other, making communities, making culture, not leaving that all behind because computers can’t do it.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Big Jim

“Big Jim is a nearly 32-foot-tall aluminum statue of a fisherman, clad in old-style yellow oilskins, holding a giant can of Maine sardines”: you can see him in this report about the Penobscot Marine Museum’s SardineFest.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Sad: the newscasters make no mention of the sardine’s new status as a fad food.]

Educational malpractice

The most recent episode of This American Life , “An Argument,” is devoted to one story: the decision two affluent, Black Brooklyn parents made to send their daughter to a low-income, mostly Black public school, and the years of education (or miseducation) that followed. A 2016 New York Times article (gift link) told the beginning of the story. A Times article (gift link) published earlier this month brings the story up to date. The TAL episode adds details.

Reading the Times articles and listening to the podcast reminded me of what I used to tell my students: whatever form educational malpractice takes, it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. I think of the daughter in this story, Najya Hannah-Jones, crushed when she fails a statewide eighth-grade algebra exam. It turned out that despite her great grades and the confidence they inspired, she knew very little algebra. What’s more, she had great deficits in her knowledge of fractions and long division.

And I think back to the last freshman composition class I taught, many of whose students had taken AP English in high school. Granted, they hadn’t received test scores that would have exempted them from a college course, but still — I thought it’d be a great class. I began to think differently when I assigned some reading — Betty S. Flowers’s “Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process” and an excerpt from William Zinsser’s “Writing English as a Second Language” — and some short writing.¹ So many of these students were lost. During conferences (that inflated word), I asked, Did you do much reading last year? Did you do much writing last year? No, and no. So many students disappeared from that class. The work, at least at that time, was beyond them.

Whatever form malpractice takes — and I assign far greater blame to teachers and principals and the shitstem in which they’re embedded, not to the Hannah-Joneses, who thought that they were doing the right thing and worked mightily to improve education for everyone in their daughter’s school — it’s always the student who’s left holding the bag. And who, sometimes, is able to trudge their way to real improvement and set the bag down.
_____

¹ The class was not for second-language learners. I omitted Zinsser’s opening paragraphs about languages and began with “So what is good English — the language we’re here today to wrestle with?” Written English is in many ways a second language for anyone.

Forty-two

Elaine and I were married forty-two years ago today. It hardly seems possible. Happy anniversary, Elaine, in all the seasons and all the years.

Q: Who knows where the time goes? Anyone?

I went down St. James rabbit holes

Robert W. Harwood’s I Went Down to St. James Infirmary (Genius Music Books) explores the origins and history of a song. The book is now in a fourth (2024) edition. I have the third (2022) via interlibrary loan. It’s one rabbit hole after another. (I like rabbit holes.) Here are some items I collected from my reading:

Wax cylinders:

Unlike the discs that achieved popularity early in the twentieth century, these cylinders could not be mass-produced. However, as many as five records could be made at a time by pointing the recording horn of each machine toward the singer’s mouth.

Bessie Smith and industry practices:

If a musician did not have the education or savvy to know better, record executives would pay them twenty-five or a hundred dollars to record a song. Even if the song became a hit, the artist received no further money.

Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” for example, never saw a penny beyond her cash-per-recording deal with Columbia, despite having authored many of the songs she recorded. Frank Walker, who signed Bessie to Columbia Records, struck out the royalty clause in her contract.

I knew that many early recording artists were paid by the side, with no royalties to follow. I didn’t know that even Bessie Smith recorded under those terms. In 1979, the son of Smith’s estranged husband took the matter to court.

Syphilis and mercury:

Mercury is known as quicksilver — or, in German, Quacksalber. Doctors who over-treated their patients with mercury came to be referred to as quacks.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has quack derived from the early modern Dutch quacksalver. The etymology is uncertain, but zalver denotes a “person who cures by using ointments,” salves.

Radio:

Chicago’s first radio station began broadcasting in 1921, but in its initial season it aired only opera. The first American radio advertisement reputedly took place in 1922 — it cost the advertiser hundred dollars and lasted ten minutes: “Visit our new apartment homes in Hawthorne Courts, Jackson Heights, where you may enjoy community life in a friendly environment.”

That Queens apartment complex still stands.

Novelties:

“Piccolo Pete,” recorded by Ted Weems and his orchestra in 1929, was possibly the first novelty record to sell a million copies.

Here it is. Years later, Elaine’s flute teacher Julius Baker played it on a children’s television show. Elaine has a story about that.

Buell Kazee’s first banjo:

The neck of the instrument was a whittled piece of walnut, the hoop was made from split white oak, and a home-tanned cat skin hide was stretched over the hoop and fashioned with carpet tacks.

Kazee makes three appearances in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music : “The Butcher’s Boy” “The Wagoner’s Lad” (both 1928) and “East Virginia” (1929). He became a minister and returned to musical performance in the 1960s.

Irving Mills (Duke Ellington’s manager from 1926 to 1939):

At nineteen, while demonstrating songs in a store in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Irving met his future wife and proposed after one-week courtship. He and Bessie remained together for the next sixty years and had seven children.

Sophie Tucker:

She was born Sophia Kalish in 1884 to Jewish parents who were fleeing Russia. As a young girl she learned to sing and perform vaudeville songs from patrons in her parents’ Connecticut restaurant. She was married at sixteen to Louis Tuck, who left a year later following the birth of her son. Changing her name to Tucker, Sophie broke into vaudeville in 1906, where she performed in blackface. She stopped using the burnt cork when, prior to a 1908 concert, her makeup case was stolen. She appeared on stage without makeup and was startled to discover that she was a bigger hit with the audience that she had been when in blackface.

Here’s her last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show .

Irving Mills again:

He managed as many as thirty-six bands concurrently.

Cab Calloway:

Before “Minnie, [the Moocher],” Cab Calloway’s signature tune had been “St. James Infirmary.” He first recorded it on December 23, 1930, about a month before signing a contract with Irving Mills. The song remained in his repertoire throughout his long career, and Calloway recorded at least three times. Millions watched him perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 23, 1964 — the date of the Beatles’ third appearance on the show.

Here’s that performance. And here, from the same show, the Beatles.

It’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters:

We shall never know the original author of “St. James Infirmary.” There was none. We are unlikely to discover when it was first performed, or how it sounded at the time. Regardless of where a musician first heard the song, we can be recently certain it came to that place from elsewhere, assembled from fragments of other songs, from snippets of other people’s experiences. It was a song written by Everybody (E.V. Body), and until 1929 it was owned by nobody.

In the second decade of the 21st century “St. James Infirmary ”is once again on my nobody. The present bracket Irving bracket Mills copyright refers only to a specific arrangement of traditional song, not in the original song itself. It seems that sometime, probably fairly recently, music publishers seated ownership of the song back to E. V. Body, where it has always belonged.

Related reading
I Went Down to St. James Infirmary (Harwood’s blog, with further exploration)

Dream app pun

It came to me: ’Just the Pages, a third-party app to adjust settings in the Mac app Pages. But why, I wondered, would Apple permit a third-party app to tinker with Pages?

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). A possible source for this slight dream: seeing Harry Morgan and Jack “Just the facts, ma’am” Webb as bad guys in Appointment with Danger (dir. Lewis Allen, 1950).]

“Hopelessly analog”

[“Four Panels in Search of an Algorithm.” Zippy , September 28, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s strip insists on the analog life.

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

[As a youth, my dad set pins in a bowling alley. You can see how the work went, or still goes, at YouTube.]

Western Electric 500

From the 99% Invisible podcast series A History of the United States in 100 Objects, an episode about the Western Electric 500, the telephone that was once ubiquitous in United States households.

I still have a thrift-store 500, a gift from my kids, which I used in my office, where its loud ring would sometimes startle students. I sometimes invited curious students to call when they came in to talk, just so they could hear the ring if they’d never heard it. I had it turned up to eleven. Several years before I retired, we lost our office phones — a cost-cutting measure. Now the 500 sits in a closet, sometimes taken out to entertain grandkids.

Given the discussion in this episode of telephony past, with room-length extension cords and young people talking away for hours at a time, I would have liked to have heard something about Tin Can, the faux-landline telephone for kids that helps foster the skills of person-to-person communication across a distance. It’s a nifty device. As durable as the Western Electric 500? We’ll have to wait and see.

Related reading
All OCA telephone posts (Pinboard)

Paper sizes

JetPens explains paper sizes.

Related reading
All OCA paper posts (Pinboard)

Elaine Dress Shop

[40 John Street, Financial District, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

There are a number of Elaine enterprises in the 1940 Manhattan directory:

[As seen via stevemorse.org.]

But only one has a tax photograph with a legible sign: Elaine Dress Shop.

Elaine Dress Shop appears to have been a fairly swank operation. Notice how few items of apparel appear in its windows. The New York Times shows a shop with the same name — the same shop? — taking a lease at 3½ Church Street in 1931. New York Times classified ads show the John Street shop looking for a slswoman [sic ] and an alteration hand in 1946. The shop later appears in a frankly insane advertising spread encouraging charge-account use.

[The New York Times, November 7, 1962. The listings for Lower Manhattan take up roughly half a column of a two-page six-column spread. Click for a larger view if you dare — the shop is in there, honest.]

At no. 42, Farrish’s Chop House. A short New Yorker item tells something of its history. At no. 44, not seen in this photograph, John Street United Methodist Church, the oldest United Methodist church in the United States.

And that’s all I’ve got.

This post is a slightly early anniversary present for my Elaine, though I think she’d rather have gotten the frock company.

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September 28: I just realized that I posted a John Street tax photograph with a Chock full o’Nuts last year: Chock full o’Signs.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, constructing as Lester Ruff. Sometimes I find Lester Ruff puzzles less rough; sometimes I find them as difficult as the average Stumper, as I did today. I sometimes have issues with what Stan calls “tough factual clues,” or what I would call arcane trivia. I started with 35-D, eight letters, “Bard’s ‘I love your Majesty’ speaker,” not arcane, and most helpful.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, six letters, “King, birthwise.” Which one?

5-D, three letters, “Dieter’s complaint.” I was not fooled.

7-D, letters, “Hunt’s dad on Mad About You.” Here’s what I mean by arcane trivia. He appeared in this role in four of the original show’s 164 episodes, in 1996, 1997, and 1999. The name can be had by way of crosses, but still. There must be a better way to clue this name. I’ll suggest one in the comments.

9-D, three letters, “Senate salutation.” See 5-D.

14-A, five letters, “One-author first name on books in nine Dewey Decimal categories (1950-1992).” Less arcane than 7-D, if you think of someone known for cranking out books.

27-A, ten letters, “Cellphone part.” How about “one-time cellphone part”?

37-A, three letters, “Short-notice flight.”

42-A, four letters, “I think, therefore       ” (’90s hardware slogan).” Predates my awareness of such hardware.

43-A, ten letters, “Daily's text + images + graphics.” Ugly word.

44-D, six letters, “‘The supreme master,’ per Christie.” If you say so.

55-A, five letters, “Canaries’ keeper.” I wondered if AVIAN is a word for a birdlover.

My favorite in this puzzle: 11-D, eight letters, “Toon with a niece Deezil.” Another tough factual clue, but it’s about a cartoon, and I learned something that I liked learning.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Zippy in the sun

[“Rabbit Hole.” Zippy, September 26, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s strip channels Edward Hopper — Zippy and Bugs have found their way into Hopper’s painting People in the Sun . The strip’s first oanel also echoes this panting, and the middle panel has a strong Hopper vibe.

Hopper’s work appears a number of times in Zippy. You can do a strip search to see them all.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Crossplay

Playing Crossplay (The New York Times ) with our son Ben has turned Elaine and me into hardened criminals of this Scrabble-like board.

The beauty (?) of Crossplay is that you can try improbable combinations of letters, and if they don’t spell a real word, the app lets you know, and you can try something else. So you might as well try.

We will not be STOPT. Even if Ben is TALAR than we are.

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I realized after writing the sentences above that playing this game is like walking down a street testing car doors to find one that’s unlocked.

Word Matters is back

The Merriam-Webster podcast Word Matters disappeared in 2022 after 100 episodes. I just discovered that it’s back, or sort of back, with four episodes in 2025 and 2026. I’ve listened to just one, “The Making of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , Twelfth Edition.” Highly recommended. And, yes, I have the twelfth on a nearby shelf.

Related reading
Word Matters on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (They’re wrong) : A handful of other OCA Word Matters posts

Owner’s manuals, free

A great website, though it makes no claim to be complete: Car Owner’s Manuals.

No surprise to see the 2026 Toyota RAV4 manual among the most popular — the vehicle is like an operating system with a car attached. And besides, the manual is missing from the Toyota website. Having a searchable PDF as an alternative to the poorly indexed print manual is hugely helpful.

See also ManualsLib.

[Should that be owners’ manuals ? You’re welcome to overthink it for me.]

The Heidi Overton window

I’m losing a good ninety minutes this morning watching what I put on for a minute before reading: a Senate confirmation hearing on C-SPAN 3 for Dr. Heidi Overton, the nominee to head the Food and Drug administration. She dodges question after question: Was the current occupant wrong when he said that acetaminophen causes autism? Was he wrong when he said that the MMR vaccine is lethal? Can he ever be wrong about something? (All real questions.)

She dodges and dodges, and dodges some more, and follows up every dodge with a thin smile.

I vote no.

A grudge against clocks

When Lucio Bordenave was fired from his job at a bank, his wife Diana, aka the missus, wanted him to work at a used-car showroom. He refused, and as it turned out, the place was being run by “a famous gang.” Lucio now supports his household, which includes doña Ceferina, an aged relative on his mother’s side, by repairing clocks and watches. But Diana isn’t crazy about that work.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

Lucio is a very patient man.

Related posts
Two passages from The Invention of Morel

EXchange name sighting

[Sheila Cabot (Lana Turner) takes a cab. From Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). Click for a larger view.]

TUxedo 5-1234 was indeed the number for San Francisco’s Yellow Cab Company. See also this post, with a 1951 movie appearance.

Related reading
All OCA Exchange name posts (Pinboard)

Le code, c’est lui

”I am the code,“ he said.

We are all living inside the theater of a madman’s mind.

Deciding that things are too hard

Michael Gorra, a recently retired Smith English professor. From The Chronicle of Higher Education :

I was teaching a Victorian novel class when “The End of the English Major,” that infamous article Nathan Heller wrote for The New Yorker, came out a few years ago. And I put the question to my students, “Is it too much to ask you to read Middlemarch ? Is it too hard?” I was really encouraged by their response, because they said, Yes, it’s hard, but we’re proud to be able to do it. They had a real sense of achievement, of having done something they hadn’t been certain they could do before they got to college.

Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do, in order to get the benefit and to be able to do it easily later. You do get better, and it does get easier, but you have to set yourself an ambitious task. Deciding that things are too hard for students, I think, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I once told students that when a job interviewer asked about a challenge they took on in college, they could say, “I once had this professor, and he assigned this huge novel, and it was over a thousand pages,” &c.

See also Natalie Wexler: “Lower Academic Standards Can Perpetuate Unfairness,” especially the section “Fish Can’t Climb Trees.”

Two related posts
On “meeting them where they are” : Parts and wholes (On reading entire books) : Teaching Bleak House

[The thousand-plus novel would have been Infinite Jest. It took a long time.]

School pictures

AI in the news: “Stanford Used A.I. to Swap Black Student for Hispanic Student in a Photo” (The New York Times, gift link).

What a typo can reveal

Women scientist is the wicker furniture of typos.

A related post
x is the y of z s (Fetterman edition)

Falling into a piano

[From Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941). Click for a larger view.]

Kay Grant (Betty Field), who’s been struggling to become a decent singer, falls through the keys of a dream piano. From one of several striking montage sequences in this movie.

Portrait in Black Blackwing

[From Portrait in Black (dir. Michael Gordon, 1960). Click for a much larger view.]

Shipping magnate Matthew S. Cabot (Lloyd Nolan) and his secretary, Miss Lee (Virgina Grey), in an opening scene. I expected Miss Lee to reappear later in the movie — she didn’t. And she took her Blackwing with her.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing pencil posts (Pinboard)

Ten best TV shows?

The New York Times (gift links) is counting down what television people consider the 100 best shows of the twenty-first century. And readers are invited to pick their own ten best. My list would have to include Route 66 , Naked City , and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, but the Times is asking about shows released after January 1, 2000. Which of course wasn’t really the start of the twenty-first century. But anyway.

If you vote, the Times puts your picks in a tidy list. These are mine, in no particular order. But if I had to put them in order, Breaking Bad would be first, as it is here.

They also serve who hang around and wait

Brad (Wallace Ford), in Blues in the Night (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1941):

“Wonder if you’d do me a favor. Would you mind playing for me? Funny, a guy like me, how I go for music, yet I can’t play well. But then I never could do anything very well except hang around and wait.”

[See John Milton.]

Domestic comedy

“I hear thunder.”

“It was thundering downstairs too.”

“Thunder is general all over the house.”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[See James Joyce.]

Got grapes?

[528 Sheepshead Bay Road, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just a short walk in from the beach, and you could get all the grapes you want. My first guess was that A. Cafiero supplied grapes to grocery stores. But then why have a sign touting low prices, and boxes of grapes on the sidewalk? Maybe these grapes went to home vintners. (My Brooklyn grandfather made his own wine during Prohibition.)

I found one trace of the grapes in Google Books, which holds a volume of a trade journal listing seven shipments of grapes to an A. Cafiero, all from Buenos Aires. For example:

[Fruit Trade Journal and Produce Record (1927). Why was a bank getting a shipment of grapes?]

I wish they all could be California grapes.

Bonus points for the laundry, the possible lurker at the second-floor window, the hatted pedestrians, and whatever is in the WPA man’s hand. Paperwork related to the work of photography, or a receipt for grapes? It must be paperwork, with a printed form similar to those used by census takers. I suspect that the WPA men are filling in address numbers and block and lot codes as they go.

And (I forgot to add it) the sign: ROOMS.

Today the Grapes address is part of a parking lot.

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)