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.

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
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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).

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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.

Where’s the Silk?

I finally called the toll-free number to ask about Silk Soymilk, which has been missing from (as they say) my grocer’s shelf for several weeks. Yes, there's a supply-chain problem.

But what the Silk rep didn’t mention is that a plant in New Jersey has been shut down “amid broader struggles for the plant-based milk category in the US.” It’s not clear to me whether changes in European sourcing of soy are also affecting US production.

Do you see Silk on your grocer’s shelf? Quick — put some cartons in a catering truck and send them to me. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

*

A non-dairy miracle: five cartons on my grocer’s shelf this afternoon. Now there are two.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , August 12, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

I don’t go looking for trouble: it finds me .

I defy any close reader to make full sense of the background in this panel from today’s Hi and Lois . The looming black triangle is a standard Hi-Lo Amalgamated feature — I cannot object to its appearance here. The blue must be a wall; the green, the floor of a room devoid of furniture; the purple, another floor. The white must be a surprisingly large cased opening. The light-purple area must be a tile or faux-tile wall. The lined light-blue surface must be the side of a kitchen cabinet; the light-brown strip, a countertop edge. But the line that appears to mark the cabinet’s side from its front doesn’t align with the line that appears to mark the countertop’s side edge from its front edge. I’m reminded of the Escher-like hot-dog stand I noticed in my early days as a close reader of this comic strip.

A strip need not have the precise minimalism of Nancy or the intensity of detail of Zippy to be satisfying. But a comic kitchen ought to look better than this one.

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At the door

[“Be Seated.” Zippy, August 11, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy offers a catalogue of diner delights.

What do I like most about diners? Their democratic hospitality.

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

Out the door

From The Chronicle of Higher Education : “These Professors Are Retiring Early. Al Was the Last Straw.” An excerpt:

Many of the faculty members who told The Chronicle they had retired or planned to retire earlier than anticipated expressed frustration with several aspects of their jobs. All of them, though, said AI loomed large in their decisions.

They described feeling overwhelmed by the task of trying to catch students who are cheating, or the prospect of having to completely redesign their courses. They were tired of trying to persuade students it was worth the effort not to farm out their assignments to an LLM, large language model. And they found themselves questioning the value of their own work. What is the point of teaching, they asked, if students no longer seem invested in learning?

Not everyone is willing to believe that AI will turn the university into “a super marvellous place.”

This alligator rules

This alligator rules!

[Context here.]

The gold standard and AI oral exams

Venu Govindaraju, Distinguished Professor, Chief AI Officer, and Senior Vice President for Research, Innovation and Economic Development at SUNY Buffalo, calls the oral examination “the gold standard of evaluation and assessment” in academic life, as in a doctoral candidate’s dissertation defense. He envisions oral examinations at all levels in university life. And AI, he says, will be able do it. From the Inside Higher Ed podcast The Key , “AI for the Public Good with Govindaraju”:

So all those aspects can a simulated by a AI platform. We could actually have AI platforms simulate the AI committee, ... and this would this scale.... I'm sure in the future we will be able to scale individualized oral exams.... When you come and take an exam, you know, we will have our own AI platform which will engage with you just like a committee engages a Ph.D. student.

Govindaraju envisions AI as making the university “a super marvellous place which will enrich the learning process in ways that we never imagined before.”

The interviewer’s response: “Mmm.”

But it’s not clear what instructors are supposed to do until AI takes over exams. Nor is it clear whether Govindaraju envisions AI replacing a doctoral candidate’s committee — and if not, why not. But even if not, his is still a remarkable proposal: AI makes it impossible to determine what a student knows by administering, say, a written test; therefore, we should use AI to determine by other means what a student knows. And the result will enable “us” to “look at the trajectory of inquisition of the student.” But it’s not clear who will be looking, nor is it clear how that would scale.

To adapt Alex Hirsch’s response to Sam Altman: Why not just talk to your students?

See also a post I wrote during the mania for MOOCs: The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else. An excerpt:

An often-repeated claim among those who insist on educational disruption is that the efficiencies of teaching — one teacher, one room — have stayed the same for too long. But then the efficiencies of, say, cutting hair — one barber, one head — haven’t changed much either. Perhaps there are good reasons why. The great irony for me in the rhetoric of disruption: those who speak it will no doubt seek for their own children what [John] Hennessy [then-president of Standford] calls “the gold standard.” There will always be real college for the few. For everyone else, it may be another story.

Related reading
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[But also: the AI panel would have to make sure that the students are not ghosts. Maybe facial recognition would help — something Govindaraju worked on years ago.]

Ghost students

Méadhbh McIvor writes about AI and an online asychronous course: “My Students Weren’t Human. They Were Ghosts” (The Chronicle of Higher Education). An excerpt:

Whether or not they had really done the work, I took it for granted that both Jeffrey and Adam were flesh-and-blood human beings — thinking, feeling people with the kinds of busy, unpredictable lives that sometimes prevented them from completing their coursework as conscientiously as their instructors might have hoped.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

I am happy to have missed out on teaching an online asynchronous course.

Related reading
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[McIvor writes that at Arizona State University, her “relentlessly — and controversially — pro-AI university,” people like her are deemed “Luddites, contrarians, or ornery stuck-in-the-muds.” She, though, says that she’s proud to be all three. More power to her.]

Yes, Cornell is an Ivy League school

From The New York Times (gift link): “Students Skinned a Bear in a Dorm. Cornell Realized It Should Ban That.”

A perfect time to invoke the alligator rule.

Still a diner

[518 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Finally: out of East Williamsburg, and not only are there sidewalks — there’s a diner.

The Kellogg Diner opened in 1928. The photograph captures the installation of a neon sign — a momentous occasion for any concern. (Recall The Best Years of Our Lives, in which returning vet Homer Parrish notices that his uncle’s tavern, Butch’s Place, now has a neon sign: modernity strikes.) Click for the much larger view and you’ll see a wealth of other details. Find the pie. And Irene. And “Boy, it’s a honey.” And the Luckies. But remember: Smoking Is Not Permitted.

The diner, reborn as Kellogg’s Diner, continues at this corner, though the menu is a considerable step up from ordinary diner fare. And the diner now takes reservations.

Some background:

“NYC’s iconic, 95-year-old Kellogg’s Diner goes bankrupt, seeks buyer to fork over hefty $2.5 million” (New York Post ).

“A Star Is Reborn: Kellogg’s Diner Is Revamped as a Tex-Mex Triumph” (BKMAG).

“Everything You Need to Know About the New Kellogg’s Diner” (Resy).

“Kellogg’s Diner Lives On With Jackie Carnesi at the Helm” (The New York Times , gift link).

“My All-Nighter in a Vanishing World: the 24-Hour Diner” (The New York Times, gift link).

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, was for me pretty joyless — difficult in ways that sparked no delight. If you had told me I’d be able to finish it, I would have pointed to 24-A, eleven letters, “Disbeliever’s hyperbole.” But I did finish, and I didn’t say 24-A.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, three letters, “Venerable entertainment threesome.” EMI? NBC? RCA? I took a guess, and it worked.

3-D, nine letters, “Provincial accumulation.” Good grief. I thought of something like TOWNTAXES.

20-A, seven letters, “Chops, these days.” Does the clue mean that “chops” has replaced this seven-letter word? Or that this seven-letter word has replaced “chops”? I can’t decide, because I think chops have been and always will be chops. (I’m writing as a musician with fairly decent chops.)

31-D, nine letters, “Tiki bar cocktail served in a wooden container.” I have shared one tiki bar cocktail in my lifetime — a scorpion bowl, aptly named.

32-D, nine letters, “Key catalyst in America's westward expansion.” Nice misdirection. My first thought was CONESTOGA.

38-A, eight letters, “French restaurant supplier.” Bon sang!

40-A, five letters, “Give in to.” Kinda forced.

42-D, six letters, “Spade topper.” Nice.

52-A, four letters, “She’s featured in Fun in Acapulco.” Okay, but there is a movie of that name, and she’s not in it.

53-A, ten letters, “British brass band mainstays.” Uh, ELGARTUNES?

A low point: 13-D, five letters, “Who succeeded Bob as Sentate Majority Leader (2001).” There’s no reason to have this [redacted] racist’s name in a crossword. Another clue, please.

My favorite in this puzzle: 11-D, five letters, “Not much to add.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

A kiddo’s mondegreen: Now with an explanation of “Barn Sesame Seeds.”

A kiddo’s mondegreen

A song heard at camp, requested at home: “Barn Sesame Seeds.”

Can you figure out the real title? I couldn’t. But my daughter did.

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll reveal the answer later today if no one has it.

*

The song is Terry Gilkyson’s “The Bare Necessities,” from the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book. And who did the arrangement? Van Dyke Parks.

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“A striking reflection”

The New York Times (gift link) has a long article about the blue and the green: “How the Reflecting Pool Came to Mirror Trump’s Washington.” An excerpt:

Many of the details of the saga are reported in this article for the first time. They show that the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.

Domestic comedy

“Is this the same morning, or a different morning?”

“A different morning, several months later. You were asleep for a couple of months.”

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[Context: I fell asleep during one morning scene in the pleasantly dreadful movie Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and woke up during another.]

Periwinkle blues

[Zits, August 6, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

From today’s Zits. Jeremy’s “blues” (modeled on Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”) begins

I got a comfortable suburban home, baby.
Daa-daa-da-dumm!
Food in the fridge!
Daa-daa-da-dumm!
My parents are loving and reasonably supportive
    of me, honey.

And so on. Sometimes it’s better to just play.

Related reading
All OCA blues posts (Pinboard)

Poor moon, “Poor Moon”

From The New York Times (gift link):

A discarded upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket slammed into the surface of the moon around 2:35 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday at a speed of 5,400 miles per hour.

Cue Canned Heat’s “Poor Moon”:

Oh well, they might test some bomb
Oh well, and scar your skin
Oh well, I don’t think they care
So I wonder when they’re going to destroy your
    face

Related reading
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[Some background about the song.]

Take that, Sam Altman

[Click for a larger view.]

What a sad picture of a parent–child relationship. There is nothing cool about it at all.

See those numbers? The term, which I may never have occasion to use again, is ratioed .

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[Alex Hirsch is the creator of the animated series Gravity Falls.]

Dictation at work?

A New York Times correction:

An article on Page 18 this weekend about the novelist Colson Whitehead misstates the title of one of Whitehead’s novels. It is “Apex Hides the Hurt,” not “Apex Hides the Heart.”

Granted, someone could have misremembered or misheard the title. But I wonder if that mistake could be a sign of dictation at work. How does a record store become a liquor store? How does a Moleskine become a muleskinner? That’s Apple Dictation for you, or for me.

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On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

Here, from the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald recording of music from Porgy and Bess (1959), is “Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess?”, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Du Bose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, with an orchestra conducted by Russell Garcia.

From the Verve LP liner notes: “When Ira Gershwin heard Louis Armstrong’s rendition of this song, he found it most touching and poignant.”

Related reading
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[Why not embed the YouTube video? Not all videos allow it. And if they do embed, they almost always do so with ads. Use a browser extension or two to block ads in YouTube itself.]

Graffiti Moe

Brett Terpstra’s Graffiti Moe is a free service that appends a random quotation to a Mac Terminal window.

I rarely use the Mac Terminal, but I couldn’t resist contributing a couple of quotations.

One, from an informal list of rules for a college art department, found in Learning by Heart, a book by the artist Corita Kent:

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

I shared Rule 7 on syllabi for many years and wrote a post about it in 2005. (And note: the list of rules is not the work of John Cage.)

Two, a lyric that appears in the OCA sidebar:

I'm not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it one more try

Sufjan Stevens, "Jacksonville"

I’m a Sufjan fan, and I’m especially a fan of this song (another version), which our fambly performed at a local coffeehouse some years ago.

So far there are 129 contributions. If I were using the Terminal, I’d be happy to have any one of them brighten the day. You can see the most recent ones and add one or more of your own at graffiti.moe/add. (Why not?)

A Seminary Co-op postcard

[The small print: “‘Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.’ (Motto over the entrance to Epicurus’ Garden.)” Context here.]

I’ve had this postcard for many years. Notice the opening time: you could get there before a 9:00 class. Times change: these days the Seminary Co-op is open M-F 11-6, S 10-5, and closed on the other S.

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Three packs

I was preparing to drive to a southern state to buy three packs of cigarettes — they’re so much cheaper there. I was torn between Camels and Pall Malls: should I get three packs of the one, or the other? Or one pack of one and two of the other? And which of which? And yes, yes, I was going to quit, eventually, but I wanted to have some packs to keep around.

Now I’m puzzled that Lucky Strikes weren’t part of my purchasing dilemma.

The likely inspirations for this dream: watching A Private Life (dir. Rebecca Zlotowski, 2025), in which a psychoanalyst’s patient stops smoking after hypnosis but takes up the habit again, and looking at a photograph of J.D. Salinger and trying to figure out the identity of the pack on his desk. Nearly thirty-seven years after I stopped smoking (October 8, 1989), cigarettes still turn up in my dreams. But I’ve never smoked there.

This dream happened before I watched I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

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[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). ]

How to improve writing (no. 136)

A reader (and writer) passed on a headline from the Writers Guild of America:

It’s Time to Take on Free Work

The Guild meant, of course, that writers should challenge the idea of free work, not that they should work for free. So let’s have the headline say so:

It’s Time to Say No to Free Work

Thanks, reader (and writer).

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[This post is no. 136 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose. And to be a little persnickety: on is better capitalized. The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (8.160), on titles: “Lowercase prepositions of fewer than five letters, except when they are used adverbially or adjectivally (up in Look Up, down in Turn Down, on in The On Button, to in Come To, etc.) or when they compose part of a Latin expression used adjectivally or adverbially (De Facto, In Vitro, etc.).” Do I have qualms about giving my writing away here? Not at all. I’m working only for myself and whoever reads.]

Strawberries, again

A reminder: just as the current occupant insists that vandals destroyed the surface of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with sharp knives, Captain Queeg insisted that the strawberries were stolen with a duplicate key to the icebox.

But as I wrote in a 2020 post, Queeg had the self-awareness to stop himself mid-rant.

FOR SALE

[169 Lombardy Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

This is the fourth WPA tax photograph I’ve posted from East Williamsburg. Next Sunday I’m going to get back to tax photographs with genuine sidewalks. Click for the much larger view and you might be surprised to see what was for sale in industrial Brooklyn. Today the address is occupied by Rich’s Skylights & Roof Hatches.

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[“Well rotted,” the ads said.]

On James Baldwin’s birthday

Heber Taylor reminds his readers that today is James Baldwin’s birthday. It must be no coincidence that the Criterion Channel’s August offerings include James Baldwin On-Screen, five films about him. Missing: the 1965 Cambridge University debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley, readily available at YouTube.

Last night we watched I Heard It Through the Grapevine (dir. Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982), a documentary in which Baldwin revisits the American south (with a sidetrip to Newark, New Jersey) and talks with veterans of the fight for human rights. The sad conclusion: everything had changed, and nothing had changed. Baldwin: “Twenty years later, and the same old piano playing the blues.”

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The emperor’s new pool

In the most recent installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about the travesty of the botched effort to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the current occupant’s insistence, nonetheless, that vandals were to blame for the damage.

The utter absurdity of this story would make it a fitting representation of the lunacy of this regime, save that the human costs are fairly negligible. Cutting off foreign aid, promulgating medical quackery, killing protestors and boat crews, demonizing those who are not white and those who are transgender, seizing and imprisoning and deporting people without due process, beginning an ill-considered war of choice: there the human costs are much higher.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing as Anna Stiga (Stan Again). It’s a tough one. There is sports trivia: 43-A, six letters, “First State school mascot, appropriately.” There is sports trivia that I do not understand: 25-D, seven letters, “Three NFL nicknames.” There are non-sports answers I do not understand: 15-A, nine letters, “Verbal matter of fact.” There is obscurity: 2-D, eight letters, “About 27,000 gallons on the farm.” There is at least one answer that doesn’t ring true (or ring at all): 40-D, eight letters, “Fashion rebel.” But there are still moments of 44-D, six letters, “Flash.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

21-A, three letters, “Quick lunch.” Short and snappy.

27-D, seven letters, “Having bills.” In debt? Or flush with cash?

37-A, fifteen letters, “Discussion agreement.” Given the effort it took me to solve this puzzle, I’m happy to accept this plain-ish spanner.

50-A, four letters, “Gobi Desert’s day.” Nice.

59-A, five letters, “Toon swimmer saying ‘If I become human....’” It helps to have grandchildren.

65-A, letters, “Didn’t write off too quickly.” I like the weirdness of the word that is the answer.

My favorite in this puzzle: 52-D, five letters, “Irish first name.” Because even after I got it, it took me a while to get it.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Dusty Baker digs Hooker ’n Heat

From an interview: Dusty Baker digs Hooker ’n Heat .

That 1970 collaboration between John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat, is, still, one of my favorite recordings. I think it’s the best album Hooker ever made, and with the possible exception of Future Blues, the best album Canned Heat ever made. I wrote a long post about Hooker ’n Heat in 2011 to mark the double-album’s fortieth anniversary.

Dusty Baker also talks about his memories of Monterey Pop, where he would have heard Canned Heat. And there’s also stuff about baseball.

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Emily Wilson slams adaptation

In the news:

In a 4,500-word essay published in Harper’s Magazine, Emily Wilson, known for her popular translation of the Minions epic poem, blasted the latest film Thursday as a “sexless, bloodless” adaptation. “The first line of my translation is ‘Tell me about a kooky Minion,’ but the Minions in director Pierre Coffin’s film — who has said in at least one interview he was directly inspired by my work — aren’t kooky at all,” said the University of Pennsylvania classic scholar, who published a popular and highly praised translation of the 2,700-year-old Minions And Monsters poem in 2017.

[Context: Wilson’s review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, July 31, 2026.]

I would have added “Click for a larger view,” but the Flagstons appear to be living in a field that’s large enough already. Poor Chip.

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All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Notebook carousel

At Oscar’s Portrait, Geo-B (or someone suspiciously like him) buys yet another notebook. I can identify.

Which do you prefer? A? B? Neither?

In The New York Times, Karan Manjahar presents two different openings for his new novel, one from the galley, one from the novel as published, and asks readers (gift link) which they prefer. The novel begins with a telephone call from a lawyer announcing that the narrator’s father is being released from prison.

What I see in both passages: too much overwriting. A sample from the galley:

I could distinguish individual squirrels shrieking on the balconies of the gulmohar tree outside my dusty window. I could hear brisk ropes of water being let down onto the bottoms of plastic buckets, the swell and the music and the chaos of the family complex in which I lived with 20 other relatives — relatives I rarely saw but whose dramas gave shape to my dreams.

The family, in its tentacular way, must have had its own connections to Tihar Jail because the news got around quickly, and my Nokia began to jump and glow with texts.

And from the novel as published:

I ended the call with the lawyer and sat back in my scaly-walled flat, blinking against the onrush of hot green mulberry leaves outside the window.

In the tall days of summer, family members began to ring my bell.

The Times asks its readers to choose between the two. In these tall days of summer, I’d choose neither. “Individual squirrels shrieking,” “brisk ropes of water,” a family’s “tentacular way,” a phone that jumps and glows, a “scaly-walled flat,” “the onrush of hot green mulberry leaves”? No, no thanks. Another way to begin: “The lawyer said my father was getting out of prison.”

The invitation to compare began with a question from an audience member at a reading. And then: “As my book tour progressed, the dueling readings of the openings became a shtick I repurposed for other events.” And now further repurposed in The New York Times — and, lo, gaining publicity! Shtick we must.

*

My son Ben, inspired by a recent adaptation of an old poem, has a suggestion: “Dad’s coming home.” Ha!

[The paragraph breaks in the samples I’ve chosen are in the original texts. Telemachus, in Christopher Nolan’s film: “My dad is coming home.”]

Zippy and company

[“Ernie Sees All.” Zippy, July 30, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, our hero is visited by the heads of Nancy, Sluggo, Phil Fumble, and Fritzi Ritz. It’s Aunt Fritzi who finally spurs Zippy to action. There are also “some rocks.”

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

A tide of umbers

At Oscar’s Portrait, Geo-B catalogues the umbers.

[Post title with apologies to Andrew Marvell.]

After the show

At Covent Garden Theatre, David sees Julius Caesar and “the new Pantomime.” He finds that seeing “noble Romans alive,” “walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school,” is “a most novel and delightful effect.”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[“Link-lighted”: by the link-boy.]

A joke in the neo-traditional manner

A six-year-old at work:

Name a bad game.

No spoilers; the punchline is in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA jokes in the traditional or neo-traditional or non-traditional manner

[“In the neo-traditional manner”: from a later generation and à la my dad, who was making dad jokes long before they were called dad jokes.]

Bostitch Staples

[Click for larger staples.]

I bought these staples for just eighty cents at a fading office-supply store some years ago. At the time I owned neither a Bostitch T5-8 Tacker nor a Bostitch P4-8 Stapling Plier. I still don’t. I just liked (and like) the packaging — a sturdy cardboard box, a little larger than a cassette tape or a deck of cards 4 5/16″ × 3″. And I especially liked (and like) the carefully rendered thumb, complete with lunula and interphalangeal creases.

An older package, for sale at eBay, says that these staples are “for attaching ceiling tile and walk plank / installing cornerite and other light tacking jobs.” The staples are still made, and still known as STCR-5019.

This post is the twenty-fifth in a series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. The museum and its vitrines are imaginary. The supplies are real.

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
Ace Gummed Reinforcments : Bic Accountant Fine Point : C. & E.I. pencil : Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Dr. Scat : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Esterbrook erasers : Faber-Castell Type Cleaner : Fineline erasers : Harvest Refill Leads : Illinois Central Railroad Pencil : Ko-Rec-Type, Part No. 3 : A Mad Men sort of man, sort of : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Moore Metalhed Tacks : A mystery supply : National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint : Pedigree Pencil : Pentel Quicker Clicker : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule : Tele-Rest No. 300

A Seminary Co-op tour

From the University of Chicago, a clip in which Jack Cella offers a brief tour of the old Seminary Co-op Bookstore. The new (since 2012) location is bright, airy, and still home to books a reader is unlikely to find in any other bookstore. But the old Co-op: wow. Just wow. Watch and see.

Elaine and I have been Sem Co-op members since 1988, when, as newish parents, we spent a summer in Chicago for an NEH seminar. I’ve always called the bookstore the Sem Co-op.

Related reading
Best wishes to Jack Cella : Two great bookstores

[The seminar? “Verbal and Visual Representation.” Not “Toddlers.” I was the participant.]

Emily Wilson on Nolan’s The Odyssey

Emily Wilson, classicist and translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, says that despite what she sees as the film’s many faults, the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey “is still an event to celebrate.”

Notice though: Wilson is referring to the release of the film, not the film itself. Her review of the film in the London Review of Books is devastating. An excerpt:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

And Wilson cites a line of dialogue that, like “My dad is coming home,” is reason to cringe: “Let’s get off this fucking beach.” Yes, let's. And go read Homer’s poem.

Related reading
All OCA Odyssey posts (Pinboard)

“The most delightful book in the world”

Doctor Strong, headmaster, is at work on a dictionary, or the Dictionary:

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

W.H. Auden would agree. From “Prologue: Reading,” in The Dyer’s Hand (1962):

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts : dictionary posts (Pinboard)

[David Copperfield itself is not the most delightful book in the world. Micawber, Traddles, Micawber, Traddles — I lose patience.]

A Wishbone documentary

“It was kids and dogs”: and it’s a new documentary, What’s the Story, Wishbone?

The Wishbone episode “Homer Sweet Homer” is a wonderful reimagining of the Odyssey.

Related posts
A Wishbone movie? : Pitching Wishbone

A Bill Griffith memoir in the works

[Zippy , July 26, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

News of the past, present, and future in today’s Zippy .

Today’s strip might mark the first time Bill Griffith has appeared as his own white-haired self, not as Griffy.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

One Homeric cat

[Mutts , July 26, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Tales of brave Mooch in today’s Mutts. Everybody wants in on the Odyssey.

So many publications drop the title panels from comic strips. I found this one at (gulp) The Washington Post .

Related reading
All OCA Mutts and Odyssey posts (Pinboard)

[This post tips its hat to the psychedelic gibberish — I mean, poetry — of “Tales of Brave Ulysses.”]

Truckmen & Riggers

[188 Varick Avenue, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

What is a rigger? Merriam-Webster: “one that rigs.” Thanks for that. Dictionary.com is more helpful: “a person who works with hoisting tackle, cranes, scaffolding, etc.”

This building stands in the background of last Sunday’s tax photograph. Strange: the map at 1940s.nyc shows no building where this one appears to stand.

Also on Varick Street: Sand, slag, coal, crime, lunch.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is sometimes “Crystal clear” (21-D, five letters), and sometimes “Perversely not no-raid” (3-D, six letters). Huh? Wut? It’s a mix of the straightforward, the legitimately tricky, and, for me, the trying too hard to be clever.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, four letters, “Engagement with a ring.” I thought BOUT. The answer fits, to my surprise, as a noun.

18-A, six letters, “Cubed salad ingredient.” Some people cube them?

23-A, four letters, “Chinese cabbage.” NAPA! NAPA!

40-A, eight letters, “Patio fixtures.” When did I last hear someone call them that? Never.

41-D, seven letters, “Writer’s bloc.” Trying too hard to be clever.

43-A, five letters, “What Poe’s ‘eccentric fools’ do.” I’m not sure that anyone should be expected to know. I think what we have here is an answer in search of a clue, with the constructor finding a citation to go with a word. My first thought was WRITE.

45-D, six letters, “Foundation for martial arts training.” Nice.

49-D, six letters, “Place for circle shows.” Never heard of them.

65-A, eight letters, “Hang on.” My first thought was MALINGER. But I prefer the puzzle’s answer.

My favorite in this puzzle: 37-D, eight letters, “Pollack as an imitator.” Weird and wonderful.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Separated at birth

[Michel Foucault, philosopher, and Peter Swanick as the Supervisor. Click either image for a larger view.]

For context, see this post: A Foucault double?

Related reading
All OCA “separated at birth” posts (Pinboard)

A Foucault double?

[Peter Swanick as the Supervisor. From “Arrival,” the first episode of The Prisoner. First aired October 1, 1967.]

Elaine and I just started watching The Prisoner, which neither of us had watched before. (Thanks, Diane.) The series is prescient in so many ways, presenting a picture of life that anticipates the surveillance culture of our twenty-first century.

My first glimpse of Peter Swanick, who plays the Supervisor in eight episodes, made me think Foucault . The resemblance isn’t perfect: Michel Foucault typically wore white turtlenecks. The strange thing: it was not until 1975, years after The Prisoner aired, that Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison [Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ], which posits the panopticon as a model for modern surveillance culture.

So what was “Foucault” doing in this television series? Getting ideas for the book he was to write?

[As far as I can tell, the Internets have not noticed the Foucault–Swanick resemblance. The Prisoner is available at the Criterion Channel.]

Taxes and war and citizens

“I have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what the government should do for its people”: that’s the focus of the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. With excerpts from a 1953 speech by Dwight Eisenhower. One of them:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Here’s Heep

Meet Uriah Heep:

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Smokey and us

I realized only recently that Smokey the Bear meant more than I realized as a child.

“Only you can prevent forest fires”: only you, singular, the individual viewer watching a PSA on a black-and-white TV.

But also: only you humans , plural. The animals who dwell in the forest can’t prevent forest fires. Only humans can. Granted, humans can’t prevent them all. But they’re the only ones who can crush smokes dead out, &c.

YouTube has a pile of Smokey PSAs. Today’s message: “Only you can prevent wildfires.”

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

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

*

A hint: In one of his last movies, he played a version of himself.

*

I’ll try one more hint: In some of his other film appearances, he wore much more makeup.

*

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

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado: Now with a sharper, darker photograph of a long-gone Bronx bar.

[The tax photographs as they’ve been made available at Julian Boilen’s 1940s.nyc are much better than those at the NYC Municipal Archives. I can’t replace the photographs in all older posts, but I have to do so for the El D.]

Another “Adoration”

Ilya Kaler, one of Elaine’s favorite violinists, and the pianist Rasa Vitkauskaite have recorded Elaine’s arrangement of Florence Price’s “Adoration.” It’s at YouTube in advance of a CD release: The Bridgetower Project.

Related reading
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Twelve movies

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

‌Lumière, Le Cinéma! (dir. Thierry Frémaux, 2024). Originally titled ‌ Lumière, l’aventure continue, it’s a sequel to ‌Lumière!, an earlier collection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière. This anthology presents 120 short films (fifty seconds or less), with a running commentary by Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Institut Lumière, and music (brilliantly tailored to each film) by Gabriel Fauré. One might think for a moment that we’re back in a world of TikToks, but here the emphasis is mainly on the ordinary: people walking in a city, women leaving a workplace, men riding bicycles and waving their hats, boats in a port, all scenes that are beautifully composed (painterly), in footage that has been lovingly restored. I only wish that the English subtitles were less overwrought: “With Lumière, the Cinematograph will invent and reinvent itself, when it will have explored infinitely its own territories” (huh?). ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943). I’ll watch whenever TCM airs it, as it’s one of strangest movies I’ve seen. I’ll let the sentences from my first, second, and third viewings cover for me here. One detail that I didn’t register before this viewing: Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway) is the same psychiatrist who met a gruesome end in Cat People (also a Val Lewton production, released in 1942). A typescript of the screenplay is available at archive.org. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Dillinger (dir. Max Nosseck, 1945). Lawrence Tierney in his first starring role. The movie begins with the promise of a frame story, as John Dillinger’s father tells his son’s story to a theater audience. But that frame is left, uh, hanging, and what develops is a routine story of heists, murders, and speeding cars (the startling exceptions are especially brutal scenes in a tavern and a motor lodge). That this movie was a box-office sensation can only be explained by the strength — make that the brutality — of Tierney’s performance. ★★ (TCM)

*

Ed Wood (dir. Tim Burton, 1994). “Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”: that’s the question a fictional Orson Welles puts to a star-struck Ed Wood in LA‘s Musso and Frank Grill. This movie (has it been thirty-some years since we rented it on DVD?) is a deliriously funny celebration of individual vision, however idiosyncratic or commercially unsuccessful that vision might be. Johnny Depp plays the outsider auteur of Plan 9 from Outer Space with optimism and pep, cheerfully announcing to his future wife (Patricia Arquette) that he’s a cross-dresser, lovingly tending to the fading Bela Lugosi (an Oscar-winning performance by Martin Landau), and shooting everything in single takes. With Jeffrey Jones (The Amazing Criswell), Lisa Marie (Vampira), Bill Murray (Bunny Breckinridge), Sarah Jessica Parker (Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller), and George “The Animal” Steele (Tor Johnson). ★★★★ (TCM)

[Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Lisa Marie, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, George “The Animal” Steele, and Michael Satterfield. Click for a larger view.]

*

Mirage (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1965). Ben Mankiewicz remarks that Gregory Peck claimed to have very little recollection of making this movie, and no wonder, because he plays an accountant who appears to be suffering from amnesia, even as assassins sent by a man known as the Major are after him for reasons he cannot understand. Strong overtones of Spellbound, The Manchurian Candidate, and Charade, but the plot here is so murky (not a hint of what’s going on) that it becomes tedious rather than suspenseful. With Diane Baker, George Kennedy, Walter Matthau, and Kevin McCarthy, and a great soundtrack by Quincy Jones. But the real star of the movie is mid-century Manhattan, in vivid black and white. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Bedelia (dir. Lance Comfort, 1946). From a novel by Vera Caspary, best known for Laura. Margaret Lockwood is Bedelia Carrington, a wealthy woman of leisure with several secrets in her past. Her husband Charlie (Ian Hunter) adores her; the fellow painting her portrait (Barry K. Barnes), has his suspicions about her. Like so many noirs and noir-ish movies, this one is a study in psychopathy: Margaret’s consummate ability to charm and manipulate and her utter lack of empathy make for a dark, dark story, much darker than Laura. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Lady of Vengeance (dir. Burt Balaban, 1957). That was no lady, that was my ward, Melissa, who was fooling around with a lousy trombonist before jumping in front of a train and leaving a letter that asked me, her wealthy guardian (Dennis O’Keefe), to kill the man who ruined her life. Of course I agreed, and not having previous experience with murder myself, I enlisted a criminal mastermind and philatelist (Anton Diffring) to hatch a fitting scheme. And as you’ll see, I’m a tricky guy. But you have to believe me when I say that I told the director, “Burt, it’s a B-picture, and that final scene, it’s much too similar to Citizen Kane,” but he just wouldn’t listen, dammit. ★★★ (YT)

*

Of Human Bondage (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1946). Eleanor Parker is impressive as the dissolute Mildred Rogers; Paul Henreid is impressive as a hopeless lover. But are they as good as Bette Davis and Leslie Howard? Alas, no. The movie isn’t helped by Alexis Smith’s disappearance (where’d she go?), nor by Edmund Gwenn’s more than ample screentime. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Postmark for Danger (dir. Guy Green, 1955). British noir. A somewhat bewildering story, with international smugglers and several murders. There’s not much postal system here: if you were expecting a story about, say, a carrier sussing out the doings of a fiendish criminal enterprise from their mail, you’d be disappointed. But who’d really expect that, right? ★★ (TCM)

*

Eyewitness (dir. Muriel Box, 1956). Lucy (Muriel Pavlow) and Jay (Michael Craig) argue, and she walks out into the night, goes to the movies, witnesses a robbery and murder, gets struck by a bus, and spends the rest of this movie in a hospital, heavily bandaged and only sometimes conscious. Meanwhile, murderous Wade (Donald Sinden) and his more decent partner Barney (Nigel Stork) know that Lucy is the only witness to their crimes, and Wade is scheming for a chance to break into the hospital and kill her. Many odd and funny touches in this arch noir, with considerable comedy added by Ada Reeve as a feisty oldster (the nurses think she’s seeing men), and genuine menace added by Donald Sinden. Note to Jay: if you want to make a major household purchase, talk it over with Lucy first. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Social Dilemma (dir. Jeff Orlowski-Yang, 2020). Somewhere in the early aughts, I remarked in a class that attention would be the most valuable commodity of our century, but I did not imagine the ways in which attention would be coerced by forces seeking to erode individual agency at every turn. The focus in this documentary is the algorithm, whatever form it takes, enticing the user and keep that user clicking. In the age of generative AI for all, The Social Dilemma already feels dated, but its cautionary tales — all coming from people deeply embedded in the tech world — still apply. The warnings here are coming not from Luddites; they’re coming from inside the house, or from people who broke their lease and moved out. ★★★★ (A)

*

The Delinquents (dir. Robert Altman, 1957). Altman’s first full-length solo directing effort. It’s a grim story of teenaged mayhem, with a blond brute and his gang who have it in for a clean-cut fellow and his girl. Brutal fights, enforced whiskey-drinking, and a gas-station robbery, with an intro and outro voiceover to add a veneer of adult seriousness to the proceedings. The cast includes one name that would later be familiar to moviegoers: Tom Laughlin, of the Billy Jack movies, who plays clean-cut Scotty. ★★ (A)

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

Nancy, clockwatcher

[Nancy, April 11, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy was a clockwatcher. See today’s yesterday’s strip for her workaround after the teacher scolds her.

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, too, was a clockwatcher.

As was I, and enough of a clockwatcher to draw my third-grade teacher’s ire.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Nolan’s Odyssey : Now with a link to a spoiler-filled Guardian piece on what the movie changes, invents, and omits.

Nolan’s Odyssey

Have I seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey ? No, not yet, though I expect that I’ll end up seeing it. But I’m in no rush.

So much of what I’ve seen of  the movie is a matter of special effects and spectacle. But almost everything of the supernatural wonderland of Odysseus’s wanderings — monsters and goddesses and ghosts, killers and seducers and the war dead — is present in the poem only in a long night of storytelling (books nine through twelve), as Odysseus performs for his Phaeacian hosts in his role as a man of constant sorrow. Monsters and goddesses and ghosts are, really, the least typical elements in the poem.

The Odyssey is much more about, in a phrase that I’ll borrow out of context from the poet Kenneth Koch, “the pleasures of peace”: storytelling, hospitality, food and drink, baths, dance, music, poetry, a family reunion, lovemaking, and taking what Homer calls “the gift of sleep” in one‘s own bed. Henry Fielding aptly called the Odyssey “that eating poem,” and the eating poem is barely underway before Telemachus welcomes the incognito Athena into his oikos with food and wine.

Food and wine and the forms of hospitality: those are the poem’s real special effects. So I can wait.

See also “My dad is coming home.”

*

Spoiler alert: In The Guardian , Chris Tryhorn details ways in which the movie differs from Homer: “Sex, beds and grisly executions: what Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey changed, invented – and left out.”

No Phaeacians?! No test of the bed? Maybe I don’t need to see this movie after all.

Related reading
All OCA Odyssey posts (Pinboard)

[I don’t want to sentimentalize the poem: the pleasures of peace are fully attained only after Odysseus, Telemachus, and two loyal herdsmen slaughter the suitors in a frenzy of comic violence. (Pow! Oof!) And then Telemachus presides over the execution of the household’s disloyal maids.]

Overheard

“You can’t cancel three times. You can’t cancel three times. You can’t cancel three times.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The Stagg Street Shadow

[493 Stagg Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

It’s industrial Brooklyn. The tax records say 501, but the door (of sorts) says 493. Who knows what it’s all about? The Stagg Street Shadow knows.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Rafael Musa, is relatively easy. Also delightful: clever, tricky, oblique, nearly factoid-free.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, three letters, “Woman in Arabian Nights.” Somehow this kind of clue seems to sport an ID tag.

23-D, eleven letters, “Satisfies.” I would like to know how far back the answer goes. Now I do.

26-D, eight letters, “‘Steep, strain, serve’ product.” My first thought was LOOSETEA.

27-A, eight letters, “Dressing option.” Yes, please.

35-D, three letters, “Sound from a shaker.” For a moment I thought of the doo-wop syllable SHA.

46-A, six letters, “Introductory explanation.” I know the answer in a different way, and I was never happy about it.

51-A, four letters, “Reporter to take among the earliest flash photos (1880s).” Having read his writing and looked at his photographs, I don’t mind this factoid.

54-A, ten letters, “Child’s catchphrase.” Brilliant. A more typical answer might be AMNOT or ARETOO.

59-A, ten letters, “Having caught bugs.” SICKINBED doesn’t fit. SICKASADOG does but doesn’t.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, seven letters, “Specimen, for example.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Proustian Zippy

[“Catty Remarks.” Zippy, July 17, 2026.]

In today’s strip, Zippy and Zerbina attempt to refresh their marital memories. Clam juice = madeleine.

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

A man of common sense

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Cheerful, kindhearted, gloriously eccentric (he carries around an enormous kite on which he is writing, or attempting to write, a “Memorial,” its words going up into the sky): Mr Dick must be a distant relative of Tristam Shandy’s my uncle Toby.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[As in Laurence Sterne’s novel, it’s “my uncle Toby,” not “uncle Toby.”]

A sidewalk compliment

“Beautiful couple! Beautiful couple!”

For some reason we hear this kind of thing only when we’re walking in a city. Thank you, fellow pedestrian.

Picturing

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

I love how David’s development into a novelist is something that he says so little about. “I pictured to myself” is an early sign of an imagination at play. By chapter forty-six, David is, in the words of another character, “beginning to be famous,” yet he’s said hardly anything about his writing. In chapter forty-eight, he tells us that “It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions.”

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Self-Erasure

From Geo-B: Self-Erasure.

That’s gotta hurt.

Related reading
All OCA eraser posts (Pinboard)

T and X

A sentence from The Guardian :

The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal conditions in a video posted to X.

I shudder to think what kind of performance will be required of these, uh, service members. Moving the words “in a video posted to X” to the front of the sentence makes for a less startling though still loony-tunes statement. Perhaps someone at The Guardian slipped in a deliberate touch of the loony.

As The Guardian notes, “[Pete} Hegseth’s announcement did not address the more than 231,000 women who serve as active duty service members in the US military.”

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 135 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose. The New York Times reports that women in the military will also be tested.]