More than twelve hours

It’s been more than twelve hours ore more since the current occupant’s last social-media post (10:52 EST last night). Too dispirited to “truth”? Poor guy.

11:57 a.m.: He’s now self-soothing by freestyling in front of what C-SPAN calls “White House Construction Site.” Hair flying, microphone buzzing.

12:15 p.m.: “Now envision chandeliers all over your ceiling. Envision marble floors. This will be the most beautiful ballroom.”

Interesting: this event is not listed on the occupant’s schedule today.

[“Truth Social”: as Orwellian a name as “House Freedom Caucus.”]

Twelve movies

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

‌Prix de Beauté, aka Miss Europe (dir. Augusto Genina, 1930). Our Miss Brooks (Louise), in a movie that may have helped inspire Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novella The Invention of Morel (no spoilers). Brooks plays Lucienne Garnier, a typist who wins a European beauty contest, thereby making life with her possessive partner André increasingly difficult for her (the title suggests both a prize and a price to be paid). One of the great pleasures of this movie, aside from the chance to see Louise Brooks, is the attention the camera pays to so many details of everyday life — someone removing shoes at the beach, women typing, a waiter carrying plates, a man hawking newspapers — much in the spirit of People on Sunday (dir. Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930). And there’s an bizarre ultra-meta ending. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Night Holds Terror (dir. Andrew L. Stone, 1955). It‘s two movies in one. First, a thriller (of sorts), based on a true story, in which three killers on the run hold an aerospace engineer and his family captive in their house, before taking the engineer hostage and demanding an enormous ransom from his grocery-chain father. And then, in the final half hour, what might be called a telephone-company procedural, in which the full forces of Ma Bell are tasked with tracing the killers’ phone call. With Vince Edwards, John Cassavetes, Jack Kruschen (the doctor neighbor in The Apartment ), and some striking mid-century interiors. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). When a boy given to telling tall tales witnesses a murder, no one believes him, save for the killers. Bobby Driscoll is the boy in danger; Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale, his parents; Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman, the killers one flight up. It’s a perfect small-scale noir, played out in a Manhattan tenement and an abandoned building (alas, Driscoll, just thirty-one, would be found dead in such a building).That this movie has made it into a twelve-movies post for the fourth time would suggest that I’m willing to watch it whenever I’m aware of it. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Disputed Passage (dir. Frank Borzage, 1939). A strange, compelling movie that pits the head against the heart. Dr. Foster (Akim Tamiroff), or “Tubby,” as his more derisive students call him, is a surgeon and med school professor, a man of reason, insisting on emotional detachment and undivided devotion to work. John Howard (John Wesley Beaven) is a med student who makes room for emotion in his life. That includes his relationship with a Chinese med student, Audrey Hilton (Dorothy Lamour), a relationship that “Tubby” insists must end. Yes, Lamour is playing an Asian woman, but the movie is blessedly free of orientalism, with its Chinese characters and locales presented with nothing but respect. ★★★★ (YT)

[The title comes from Walt Whitman, “Stronger Lessons”:

Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?

Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?]

*

Mystery Broadcast (dir. George Sherman, 1943). A meta start, as a crime in progress turns out to be a moment in a radio drama, and more moments of sly comedy follow. The premise: a writer of radio mysteries (Ruth Terry) teams up with her sound woman (Mary Treen) and the star of a rival detective show (Frank Albertson) to work on a unsolved real-world crime. The plot is baffling, in a low-budget way. Fun to see Albertson and Treen, probably best known from It’s a Wonderful Life, where they appeared as Sam Wainwright and Tilly, the secretary at the Building and Loan. ★★ (YT)

*

One Crowded Night (dir. Irving Reis, 1940). A movie that honors the Aristotelian unities of time and place and action: everything happens from one morning to the next at a desert oasis (gas, food, and cabins), with various life stories knit into a whole as travelers stop for gas, food, and shelter. But improbable possibilities (which Aristotle frowned on) abound. I recognized just two cast members: Ann Revere (a stoic matriarch) and Gale Storm (a young waitress looking to get out). The most interesting character here: Brother Joseph (J.M. Kerrigan), a Micawber-like patent-medicine hawker who rises to a crucial occasion. ★★★ (YT)

*

Grace of My Heart (dir. Allison Anders, 1996). Loosely based on the life of Carole King, and starring Illeana Douglas (whom I knew only as the art teacher in Ghost World and Kenny’s nameless wife in Frasier ) as Edna Buxton, a singer-songwriter in a world that knows no such category. As Denise Waverly, Edna forsakes singing for writing, cranking out hits from the Brill Building, where she works for Joel Milner (John Turturro), a Phil Spector-like (in appearance, not personality) producer, before coming into her own. Along the way, the story takes a baffling (wrong) turn when Denise moves to Los Angeles and begins a doomed relationship with a Brian Wilson-like savant (Matt Dillon) at work on an album reminsicent of SMiLE. Great music throughout, with songs by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, Gerry Goffin, Joni Mitchell, Carole Bayer Sager, and others. ★★★ (CC)

*

Dark Mountain (dir. William Berke, 1944). YAMBAFNWI: a forest ranger (Robert Lowery) in charge of Dark Mountain reconnects with the woman (Ellen Drew) he thought he was waiting for him, but she’s already married — to a businessman who turns out to be a black marketeer (Regis Toomey), and who’s put her name on the warehouse leases. The movie turns into something of a low-budget High Sierra, complete with a mountain cabin and a little dog (and Toomey, in white shirt and black vest, looking like Humphrey Bogart’s Duke Mantee). It’s cliché after cliché for fifty-six dull minutes. But it’s fun to see Toomey (the mild-mannered soda jerk in Meet John Doe) as a murderous bad guy. ★★ (YT)


[YAMBAFNWI: Yet Another Movie Billed As Film Noir Which Isn’t.]

*

Murder on the Waterfront (dir. B. Reeves Eason, 1943). The IMDb says that it’s the shortest Warner Bros. release, but it’s not short enough. It begins with song and dance, as entertainers put on a show at a Navy camp and add perhaps ten minutes to the proceedings. When the inventor of a new piece of military hardware arrives at the camp and is promptly murdered, suspicion falls in several directions. Nothing about the events that follow is even remotely plausible. ★ (TCM)

*

White Echo (dir. Chloë Sevigny, 2019). A short film about to leave the Criterion Channel, so we watched it. Five young women make a short escape from the city to an old country house, where, one claims, something terrible once happened. The women try a Ouija board, dance and drink, and talk about patriarchy. Some mildly spooky moments, and one grisly spooky moment, but the pieces don’t add up, at least not to a sum I can figure out. ★★ (CC)

*

Appointment with Danger (dir. Lewis Allen, 1950). Al Goddard (Alan Ladd) is one hardass postal inspector. Assigned to investigate the murder of a fellow inspector — a man he promptly announces he didn’t like — he gives the work his all, posing as a corrupt inspector and getting in on a plan to stop a train and seize a large money shipment. With Paul Stewart as the leader of a criminal gang, Phyllis Calvert as a nun who can identify one of the gang, Jan Sterling as a bop-loving moll, and Harry Morgan and Jack Webb as gang members (Webb’s character is particularly vicious). Close calls and tight spots abound, and the movie is well worth the $3.99 Amazon charges to rent it, seventy-six years after the fact. ★★★★ (A)

*

You Can See Everything (dir. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, 2026). At home with fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, and their children. I thought of the title of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method as a way to think about this unforgettable documentary: Nathan Fielder sets out to figure out the truth about Holmes’s character and her failed biotech project Theranos, and he uses his usual method of asking awkwardly probing questions to get there. And the project runs up against what seems to be the radical unknowability of an other, whoever that other might be. And just when the story seems to be wrapping up, it begins again, Vertigo-like. ★★★★ (T)

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

Blue!

Last night our daughter texted “Is this real life!!!!” Yes, it is.

Here in downstate Illinois, it’s not all blue. In our IL-15, Mary Miller easily won reelection to the House of Representatives. She will now be a member of a diminished minority (the House Freedom Caucus) within a diminished minority (House Republicans). But she’ll continue to be as effective in representing her constituents’ interests as always — which is to say not at all. I expect more of the same from her: fulminations about the “Green New Scam” and invaders inside the gates (yes, really) and boys in girls’ sports and bathrooms. Keep fighting your way to utter irrelevance, Mary.

Revenge of the narcissist

Awaiting the results of today’s elections, I’m thinking about Charles Crumb’s words in the documentary Crumb (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 1994): “When narcissism is wounded, it wants to strike back at the person who wounded it.”

Or persons. I expect that the current occupant will soothe himself with criticism of Republican candidates: the voters like me, they didn’t like him; I tried to help him, but he choked; I worked so hard for him, but he needed to carry it over the finish line himself, &c.

*

Later in the night, from ABC News:

The White House’s mood is “defiant” as results are coming in, a White House official told ABC News.

After weeks of President Donald Trump urging voters to pretend like he is on the ballot this election, the White House official is now highlighting that Trump wasn't actually on the ballot.

“President Trump was not on the ballot, and it’s proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot,” the official said when asked if they had any response to tonight’s results so far.

The official added: “Also, candidate quality matters, and President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.”

Words of the year

And so it begins.

From Dictionary.com, maxxing : “Maxxing is a word that refers to the practice of pursuing an activity to the fullest or optimizing a certain aspect of your life.” As in looksmaxxing , &c.

My suggestion for 2026: affordability .

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive. Please, can we have some grownup words?

Word of the day: chryselephantine

From a New York Times article (gift link) by Shawn McCreesh with a surreal headline: “Trump Delivers a Closing Midterm Message. Mostly About Landscaping”:

And now here he was, using his final in-person address before the election to talk more about his chryselephantine fantasies of ballrooms and arches and Corinthian columns.

Merriam-Webster: “composed of or adorned with gold and ivory.”

And from the Oxford English Dictionary (account needed): “of gold and ivory: applied to statues overlaid with gold and ivory, such as the Olympian Zeus and Athene Parthenos of Phidias.” There’s also a figurative meaning, which might better suit non-ivory structures like military complexes and ballrooms. Though elephantine does seem apt.

[Spoiler alert. Highlight the blanks to see the words below.]

Chryselephantine is now the number-two lookup at Merriam-Webster. Chorister , which appears in today’s Times Strands game, is number nine. Crooner , also in Strands today, dropped out as I typed.

Elaine and I watched half an hour of the current occupant’s pool party on C-SPAN yesterday. It’s worth watching. Don’t hide the madness.

[χρῡσελεϕάντινος: “of gold and ivory.” You can see the elephant in the word.]

How to improve writing (no. 137)

From a Washington Post article:

Then the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” begins to play. Trump pumps his fists and sways his hips, his feet planted in place, as supporters cheer, reach toward the stage and raise their phones to capture one of the most recognizable rituals in American politics.

Much better:

Then the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” begins to play. Trump pumps his fists and sways his hips, his feet planted in place, as supporters cheer, reach toward the stage and raise their phones to capture one of the most bizarre rituals in American politics.

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

[This post is no. 137 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Another codger

[Click for a larger view.]

A codger of coots, on their way to audition for a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Alas, they were unable to execute the quick takeoffs needed for the part. (Or parts?) And during the audition, one of them couldn’t stop looking at the camera.

Codger is this blog’s collective name for coots. Old or young, they form a codger.

“Welcome in,” again

I first noticed it in a television commercial in June. And then I learned that it’s been a thing for some time. Not long after that, I heard it in a bookstore: “Welcome in!” I asked about it, explaining that I was interested in language, and the much-younger-than-me employee expressed surprise that people once said “Welcome,” no adverb needed. And then I heard it in a restaurant: “Welcome in!” (Thank you.)

And last week, I heard it in an Ace Hardware store in downstate Illinois. I’ll take that as a sign that “Welcome in!” has conquered the American-English-speaking world.

I checked to make sure: in is indeed an adverb there. As I said, “interested in language.”

NOW

[333 Mulberry Street, Little Italy, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Today this address falls in Nolita. Ick. Let’s say northern Little Italy. The Shell station is gone (no surprise); Google Maps shows a sandwich shop and clothing store. And the clothing store appears to have or have had a Hummer on display. Farther forward, out of camera range, was and is the Broadway–Lafayette Street/Bleecker Street subway station.

I am regarding the enigmatic NOW as a message from one perilous time to another. NOW is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their endangered democracy and vote.

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

Beetle Bailey imitates life

[Beetle Bailey , November 1, 2026. Click for a larger can.]

Do people really hide in garbage cans to shirk work? It happens.

[I have to read Beetle Bailey : Beetle is Lois Flagston’s brother.]

Halloween 2026

Halloween 2026: not one trick-or-treater. We had twenty in 2024, ten last year. (I counted.) So we’re left with Milky Ways, Jolly Ranchers, and close to 200 miniature Tootsie Rolls. It’s the last year for trick-or-treating at our house. You hear that, kids?

Perhaps it’s just as well that we didn’t have any visitors last night: Tootsie Rolls, as I discovered (too late), are an utterly vile candy. Either they’ve changed since I was a kid, or I have. We are tossing them, along with the Jolly Ranchers, and keeping the other candy whose first name ends in ē.

[The miniature Milky Ways are labeled “fun size.” But wouldn’t a regulation-size Milky Way be the real fun?]

Story.

[Click for a larger view.]

As found at the Library of Congress. The library reminds us, “This is a digitized catalog card, not an audio recording.”

I hope it’s a good night for trick-or-treating. Happy Halloween to all.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Lester Ruff” — the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, offering an easier Saturday puzzle. I often find Les’s puzzles pretty Ruff, but this one is indeed easy. It’d be a good puzzle for anyone who wants to test the Stumper waters, say at the four-foot end of the pool.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Dessert with coffee.” A nice start, or finish.

1-D, seven letters, “’59 Eldorado claim to fame.” Must be seen to be believed.

8-D, fifteen letters, “New England attraction named by Washington.” Attraction might be slightly misdirective.

13-D, seven letters, “Kind of case.” Where’s mine? Oh, I know.

17-A, eight letters, “Takes for a trial.” My first thought was BETATEST — not something third-person singular.

23-A, five letters, “Canterbury pilgrim.” I haven’t thought of him in years.

30-D, four letters, “It might have to wait for a second.” Yikes, I’m back on a university committee.

36-D, seven letters, “Square structures.” Mildly Stumper-y.

42-D, three letters, “Signal officially replaced in 1992.” I learned something.

44-A, four letters, “Ken Burns topic.” Not one of his best efforts.

My favorite in this puzzle: 49-D, four letters, “Skip.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

*

Crossword Fiend has a discussion of 30-D, which crosses 41-A, five letters, “Distinctive aspect.” If you follow through to the comments, you’ll see that Evan Birnholz thinks that there was some sort of mix-up and that the puzzle’s answers for 30-D and 41-A are mistakes. I think he’s right (and that my answers are the intended ones).

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

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

*

No hint needed; the answer is now in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

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

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , October 30, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

“Remember when the night before Halloween was ‘Mischief Night’?” Hi asks.

Credit where it’s due: the panel that follows Hi’s question is nicely done. The Waning Gibbous moon even fits today’s date.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Dan and Dan and Cornel and Elon

I think a ballot-stacking effort is a nasty thing, in Alaska or anywhere else. But for something far nastier, consider the Elon Musk effort to prop up Cornel West’s presidential ambitions. From Sludge (archived) , “Musk-Linked Dark Money Network Funded the Group Behind Cornel West’s Ballot Push”:

People Over Party raised $7.7 million in 2024, all of it from the nonprofit behind the Fair Election Fund, which in turn got every dollar from a Musk-funded dark money group.

Another reminder that a vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West or some other “progressive” third-party candidate is a wasted vote, sometimes for reasons one hasn’t imagined.

Two related posts
Allegory and Allegory redux (My theory of voting)

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Still of the Night (dir. Robert Benton, 1982). Click for a larger view.]

Okay, it’s a datebook. But there is a prescription pad, and the datebook’s owner is using one of its pages to write a note. Yet another movie moment in which a surface for writing fills the screen.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

Scheduled

The schedule for next year’s classes was out. What’d I get?

Fall: freshman comp, freshman comp, freshman comp.

Spring: freshman comp, freshman comp, freshman comp.

There was, really, nothing more left to teach. All the literature classes were gone. Maybe, I thought, it was time to retire.

This is the thirty-third teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In only two of them has nothing gone wrong.

Related reading
All OCA teaching 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).]

Recently updated

A Dartmouth provost and AI: He’s resigned and left the university.

RhymeHamster

Jeremy Desmon, a bookwriter and lyricist for musical theater, has created a (free) online rhyming dictionary: RhymeHamster. I think it’s a worthy companion to such resources as Etymonline and Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

How good is RhymeHamster? I tried meh and rizz — they’re both in there, which I think is a sign that this dictionary is “with it.” (You can also find hep .) Elaine tried the Gilbert and Sullivanesque hypotenuse , and the dictionary obliged with 103 perfect rhymes of one, two, three, four, and five syllables.

And I had to try orange , which yielded 123 imperfect rhymes. For as the poet and novelist Gilbert Sorrentino reminds us, “Nothing is the thing that rhymes with orange.”

Thanks, Jeremy, for sharing your project.

[“With it”: I’m joking. “Nothing is”: a line from the poem “The Crown,” in The Orangery (1978).]

Zippy preps

[“Clean Palate.” Zippy, October 28, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy , we learn that Zippy prepares all his meals in the sink. “Dishes are so 20th century!” he says.

See also Cosmo Kramer’s shower prep.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Shoutout to our daughter Rachel, who introduced us to Dawn Platinum Powerwash Dish Spray, which makes dishwashing more fun. Way more fun than Seventh Generation. And dish spray makes it unnecessary to decide whether to say dish soap or dishwashing liquid .]

A Dartmouth provost and AI

From Inside Higher Ed, “Dartmouth Provost’s ‘AI Dependency’ Sparks Backlash”:

Some students and faculty are calling for the provost’s firing after he allegedly used generative AI to write professional articles. He’s admitted to using ChatGPT, but says it didn’t replace his own intellectual judgment or authorship.

The provost is one Santiago Schnell. Semafor found that Pangram identified a Washington Post opinion piece by Schnell as 100% AI-written. (Schnell disputes that.) Dartmouth’s student newspaper, The Dartmouth, found that Pangram identified 96% of nine professional articles by Schnell as “AI-written.”

I’d say that Schnell’s intellectual judgment went down the drain when he chose to have AI do the work of writing for him.

*

October 29: Inside Higher Ed reports that Schnell has resigned and left the university.

A before-and-after headline

[The New York Times, October 27, 2026.]

My son Ben noticed the ambiguity of the original headline — though given the current occupant’s affection for all things Russia, it would probably be safe to guess that sanctions were being discontinued, not imposed. And then before I could do anything with the first headline, Ben noticed that it had been emended.

Google/Blogger is listening

Over the past few months, I’ve posted to the Blogger Help Community about four problems:

~ the malfunctioning Newer Post link at the bottom of posts

~ a post missing from the sidebar’s monthly archive

~ the switch to a spindly font for typing comments

~ Blogger’s (apparent) default to Anonymous for comments

The fourth problem, as Blogger expert Arkadiusz Narowski explained, arises when Safari prevents cross-site tracking. That was on me. The other three problems are now fixed: the Newer Post link works, the limit for monthly posts has gone from 100 to 128 (a fittingly computer-y number, as in 128K), and the font for typing comments is once again substantial and readable.

If you look at Google’s Blogger blog, it’s reasonable to wonder whether the company is paying any attention to Blogger: the last post there is from May 2020. But these improvements suggest that, indeed, someone is paying attention.

Tad’s White House

In today’s Zippy, “Chew On This,” Zippy speaks to a giant bust of Abraham Lincoln:

“You wouldn't believe th’ White House! It looks like a Tad’s Steakhouse from 1962!”

N.B.: daily comic strips are prepared weeks ahead of time, which means that Zippy’s comparison of the White House to Tad’s Steakhouse predates Barack Obama’s comparison of the White House to a Saddamesque Cheesecake Factory.

A Times Square Tad’s appears in person (so to speak) in a previous strip. I put one panel and some background on Tad’s in this post: Zippy’s Tad’s.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

OOHFM watch

Yesterday the current occupant wrote or dictated 1,321 words about “this COMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSER, Bill Maher.” Laser-focused, as always. And out of his, &c.

WindowShade Redux

From Totally Not Malicious Software: WindowShade Redux, a Mac app that brings back the option to roll up windows to their title bars. For me, that’s enough, but the app does much more, as this short video shows. Note: the sound effects and animations are optional.

I began rolling up windows with WindowShade X not long after switching to a Mac in 2007. When that app stopped working, I switched to WindowMizer in 2013. And when that app switched to a subscription model, I decided to forget about rolling up windows.

WindowShade Redux is free to try and inexpensive to buy ($10, or $7 until October 31). My only connection to the app is that of a happy paying customer.

Now I just wish that macOS 27 didn’t make title bars so ginormous.

AppDelete

The venerable Mac app AppDelete, which I wrote about in 2012 (and began using in 2009), won’t work in macOS 27 without Rosetta, the app that allows Intel-based apps to run on M1+ Macs. And Rosetta will no longer work when macOS 28 arrives. So it’s time for a new app. I chose the free app AppCleaner.

AppDelete hadn’t been updated in a long time, and I never wondered why — the app just worked. But now I see that Reggie Ashworth, the app’s creator, died in 2017. As I could tell from a handful of e-mails I exchanged with him, he was a good guy. I offer belated sympathy to his family.

Recently updated

Hidden Bar: Updated to work with macOS 27.

Amity Bar & Grill

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

I’ve already posted four tax photographs from Avenue U in Marine Park. Bear with me. The avenue stretches across four and a half to five miles. This morning we’re close to its western starting point.

When I saw the Amity Bar & Grill (ESplanade 2-9690), I immediately thought of Roy’s Tavern. The two establishments are almost twins. And then I looked more closely and saw how much there is to like in this photograph: the split personality (pizzeria and restaurant, bar and grill) the curtains in the doorways, Bell Telephone, the promise of a frankfurters party (“Everybody Welcome”), the Beer Garden (also touting the Pizzeria Napolitana), the open cellar doors, and the laundry.

  [Near twins. 4017 and 105 Avenue U. Click either image for a larger view.]

By 1950, the Amity had become Tarry’s Inn, and under that name, it was for sale.

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 6, 1950.]

By 1959, Tarry’s Inn had become Jay’s Lounge.

Today no. 105 is home to BGPS Group, “a full-service security, communications, and technology solutions provider founded in 1998.” The corner that once housed the beer garden is now home to AvenUe Pizza. You can see them both via Google Maps.

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

You Can See Everything

I had a brief conversation with a theater employee on my one bathroom run, about an hour and a half in. I had to say something about the movie:

“It’s absolutely insane. Unbelievable.”

“Insane in a good way?”

“Yes.”

If you plan to see You Can See Everything (dir. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim), don’t read anything about the movie beforehand. Don’t let anyone ruin it for you.

A non-spoiler: there’s a daytime glimpse of the venerable Los Angeles restaurant El Coyote.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber, whose last Stumper appeared last October. (The alias is an anagram of the names Bradley and Douglas.) It’s another one of those puzzles that (for me) began to look impossible on paper but became doable when I switched to an online version. I turned on Autocheck and finished the puzzle with only two or three letters that needed more than one try. What really surprised me is that guesses I was reluctant to try on paper — 1-A, ten letters, “Grey’s Anatomy production company”; 27-D, ten letters, “Succeeds at mediation” — turned out to be correct on the screen. Maybe I don’t need training wheels after all.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Org. finding places for unwanted toys.” I was not fooled.

4-D, three letters, “Early word in Sarandon’s Wikipedia entry.” A very odd clue. Does someone just have a thing for Susan Sarandon?

10-D, nine letters, “Network purchases.” Another reluctant guess that turned out to be correct.

12-D, ten letters, “Marked by turpitude.” Something to do with morals, eh?

25-A, five letters, “The Road to Wealth author.” I thought it had to be GETTY, having seen a book titled something like that in the Getty Museum gift shop. No, that was How to Be Rich.

26-D, ten letters, “Bit of paste.” I was thinking about the red sauce I’m going to make this afternoon.

30-A, eleven letters, “Doesn’t curb one’s enthusiasm.” The answer brings back a happy moment from teaching. (Stefan Hagemann, I’m thinking of you.)

31-D, nine letters, “Coiner of ‘sellyfish’ and ‘nectacled’.” Just gets on my nerves.

35-A, four letters, “Dickinson’s percher ‘in the soul.’” Stay right there.

38-A, eleven letters, “Copenhagen premiere on 1879.” There might be an argument to make here.

48-D, four letters, “Layout measure.” You were going to say ACRE, no?

52-A, ten letters, “Band of the soundtrack of The Hunger Games.” I’ve never seen THG, but I guessed the answer from the first letter.

My favorite in this puzzle: 37-A, three letters, “Space Needle’s midpoint.” Wherever it is, you could never really see it from Frasier Crane’s apartment.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A Big Bad Wolf

Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver. 1982. Trans. Thomas Teal. (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).

The setting is a remote snowbound village. (Finland? Sweden?) Anna is a celebrated illustrator of children’s books. Katri is a villager who seems determined to take over Anna’s life. It’s a dark, dark novel.

Also from Tove Jansson
Q & Q & Q & A

Beach Boys futures

The New York Times (gift link) asks “What’s Next for the Beach Boys?”:

Mike Love has been a constant, and sometimes contentious, steward of the band’s performances. Health problems and a recent concert appearance have prompted fans to ask what the future holds.

Sad to say, just more of the same, until they fold the tent.

If one wants to hear Beach Boys music rightly performed, seek out Al Jardine & the Pet Sounds Band. Al, a founding Beach Boy, now eighty-four, is an eminently capable musician, and his group includes his son Matt (hitting the high notes) and several musicians from Brian Wilson’s band (Darian Sahanaja, Debbie Shair, Paul Von Mertens, Bob Lizik, Mike D’Amico). It’s a group with mad skills, instrumentally and vocally, and they’re deep in the catalog. Try “Heroes and Villains.” Or for sheer strangeness, “Solar System.” If I ever have the chance to hear this group in person, I’m there.

A related post
On seeing musicians before or after it’s too late

Breaking the globe

From The Washington Post : “Hegseth wanted Eisenhower’s globe for his office. His staff broke it.”

Breaking the globe is a fitting metaphor for American foreign policy right now.

Revising or correcting

From the Professor T episode “Ring of Fire” (first aired September 3, 2023). Cambridge professor of criminology Jasper Tempest (Ben Miller), who’s already assisted the police on a season’s worth of cases, has wandered into the station — he was in the neighborhood, he explains. Detective Sergeant Dan Winters (Barney White) wonders if the professor is at loose ends and looking for something to do.

Professor T: On the contrary, a long and tedious task awaits me.

D.S. Winters: Hmm, and a stack of essays to revise.

Professor T: You do not revise essays, Detective Sergeant; you correct them. To revise something is to improve it. As in, “He needed to improve his use of language.”

Oof. I would say read or grade essays, not correct . You read student writing to evaluate it, strong points and weak points, what ideas have merit, what’s not as persuasive, what improved from last time, what the student should think about for revision or the next piece of writing. And you make corrections along the way — agreement, punctuation, reference, even spelling, dammit, all the things that make student writing student writing. But nobody wants just to be corrected.

Our household stumbled upon this series by chance. It’s wonderful, and it’s all available at pbs.org. And as I just discovered, the series is adapted from a Belgian series, Professor T. , also at PBS. There are French and German adaptations too.

A related post
At the Continental Paper Grading Company

[The British show: no period after T .]

A pocket notebook sighting

In the British series Professor T , Detective Sergeant Dan Winters (Barney White) carries a Moleskine Reporter notebook. It’s seen in several episodes, but here’s the glimpse that allows a positive identification.

[From the Professor T episode “A Fish Called Walter” (aired June 3, 2021). Click for a larger view.]

Note the elastic band, and click for a larger view to see very slight bulge at the back of the notebook where the pocket for papers is attached to the inside cover.

The green-gloved hand belongs to Ingrid Snares (Sarah Woodward), Professor Jasper Tempest’s secretary. Miss Snares ia aligning the pen and notebook as D.S. Winters and D.S. Lisa Donckers (Emma Naomi) talk to Professor T (Ben Miller), a criminologist who’s already assisted the police on a case. “Thank you, Miss Snares,” he says. “I’m sure the feng shui is fully restored by now.” Yes, he lives with OCD. And he’s on the autism spectrum.

Years ago, Ricky Gervais turned up with a Moleskine Reporter in an episode of Extras .

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts : All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard) : The disappearance of the Police Pocket Notebook : Police notebooks

Orwell would understand

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Igorance is strength.

And Vladimir Putin is a humanitarian.

Twelve movies

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

Two Seconds (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). The title references the two seconds before brain activity supposedly ends after the switch is thrown on an electric chair. Thus we have John Allen (Edward G. Robinson) reliving the events of his sorrowful life in a movie-long flashback, as all goes wrong because of his marriage to Shirley (Vivienne Osborne), a sharp, faithless operator. The movie is grim in a pre-Code way, but stagy in the extreme (it’s from a play by Elliott Lester). Robinson’s performance is the wildest, most feral acting I’ve seen from him. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Last Year at Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961). We watched because the movie is reputed to be influenced by Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel. And I can see some connection. But Bioy Casares’s novel is sly, comic, mysterious, and thought-provoking, and this movie is a mere muddle of pretension with claims to portentousness. A handful of slick television commercials for high-end fragrances would serve as well and leave the viewer plenty of time for a different movie. (A)

*

The Target Shoots First (dir. Christopher Wilcha, 1999). One world of work, at Columbia House, the mail-order outfit that enticed the listener to buy some number of LPs, cassettes, or CDs for a nominal sum (say, a penny). Wilcha, an NYU philosophy graduate, was hired as an assistant product manager after an interview during which he was able to explain Nirvana’s popularity, and he was permitted to carry around his camcorder, with which he recorded all manner of moments at work, funny and serious. Lots of shenanigans (attempting to steam open an executive’s paycheck after it went into the wrong mail slot), but also a serious effort to create more eclectic and appealing monthly catalogues (placing musicians as different as Mississippi John Hurt and the Pixies on the same page). The title suggests that whatever you might do, the consumer has already decided. ★★★★ (YT)

[As Rolling Stone reports, Columbia House is shutting down. There’s still a (sad) website.]

*

Harlan County U.S.A. (dir. Barbara Kopple, 1976). Another world of work, as members of the United Mine Workers of America, with strong support from their wives, go on strike in 1973 in “Bloody Harlan,” a Kentucky county with a long history of union-management conflict and violence. Barbara Kopple made a record of what might be called barbaric capitalism, which spirals into the point-blank murder of a young miner on the picket line. It’s impossible to look at the gun thugs (as a miner’s wife calls them) who serve the interests of the mine operators without thinking of both Klan terror and the the state-sponsored terror now turned on citizens and non-citizens across the United States. I learned after watching that the head of the strikebreakers, Basil (or Bazel) Collins, who pointed a gun at Barbara Kopple and allegedly offered a bounty for her murder, now has a bridge named for him in the city of Harlan. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Youth Run Wild (dir. Mark Robson, 1944). Children, don’t let your parents grow up to work in defense plants: that’s one takeaway from this movie, as unsupervised teenagers find their way into all manner of trouble (truancy, joyriding, stealing tires, frequenting dancehalls), as their parents work, sleep, drink, and play cards. Interesting to see Bonita Granville (Nancy Drew and co-producer of TV’s Lassie ) as a semi-bad girl; interesting to see Kent Smith as an earnest veteran helping kids; interesting too to see Lawrence Tierney as a semi-, very semi-, good guy. But interesting isn’t the same as good, and this movie isn’t very: though it was inspired by a 1943 Look photo essay, Look panned it, and Val Lewton, the movie’s producer, disavowed it. ★★ (YT)

*

State Department: File 649 (dir. Sam Newfield, 1949). Wikipedia calls it film noir. It’s not, nor is it a good movie. Lifeless acting and clumsy dialogue in a story of a Mongolian warlord threatening American Foreign Service staff. One odd reward: the chance to see John Holland, who played Alice Kramden’s boss Tony Amico in The Honeymooners episode “Brother Ralph.” ★ (YT)

*

Vivacious Lady (dir. George Stevens, 1938). It wasn’t until the twenty-six-year-old associate professor of botany (Jimmy Stewart) climbed out the window of his nightclub-singer wife’s (Ginger Rogers) dorm room [sic ] that I realized that we’d seen this movie before — and in 2024, no less. It’s a screwball comedy that made almost no dent in my hard head. But there are at least two reasons to watch: an opening nightclub number, and a brief scene in which Rogers, Beulah Bondi, and James Ellison dance the Big Apple, as college president Charles Coburn watches in shock and loses his monocle. It’s reassuring to understand that when the Murphy bed drops at the movie’s end, the young marrieds will finally have a chance to consummate their no-longer-secret marriage. ★★ (TCM)

[I’ve warmed a little from my first viewing. But still only two stars.]

*

Still of the Night (dir. Robert Benton, 1982). A newly divorced psychiatrist (Roy Scheider) embarks upon an insanely dangerous relationship with a mysterious woman (Meryl Streep) whose murdered (and married) lover was the psychiatrist’s patient. Did she do it? There’s every reason to think so but maybe not to think so — heck, she’s pretty hot. Seven jump scares, Hitchcock tropes galore, and for some reason the smokers all smoke Gauloises. ★★★ (A)

*

Ganz: How I Lost My Beetle (dir. Suzanne Raes, 2019). Josef Ganz (1898–1967) designed tiny cars. One problem: he was a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, forced to flee the country in 1934. Though there seems to still be debate about his contributions to what became the Volkswagen Beetle, similarities between his Standard Superior and the celebrated Beetle seem undeniable. Designer and journalist Paul Schilperoord and Ganz’s descendant Lorenz Schmid uncover the life and work of a lost automobile innovator. ★★★★ (A)

[Much more at the Josef Ganz Archive.]

*

Where’s My Roy Cohn? (dir. Matt Tyrnauer, 2019). A henchman to Joseph McCarthy, a mentor to Roger Stone and the current occupant, a lawyer for Mafiosi, a closeted gay man who fooled no one, who lived with his mother until she died, and who himself died of complications from the AIDS he vehemently denied having: imagine getting your one lifetime and living it as Roy Cohn. The rules upon which Cohn built his career — always attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory, never admit defeat — are, of course, the principles on which the current occupant founded his adult life. This documentary teems with revealing clips of Cohn and those who knew him. For me, the biggest surprise was the story of Cohn’s relationship (whatever form it took) with G. David Schine and its importance to the Army-McCarthy hearings. ★★★★ (A)

*

The Apprentice (dir. Ali Abbasi, 2024). Teacher and student: Roy Cohn and a young real-estate man from Queens being schooled in Cohn’s rules (see above). Sebastian Stan is convincing as the young man from Queens, awkward, crude, impulsive, violent, utterly lacking in self-awareness. But Jeremy Strong steals the movie as the morally and then physically decrepit Cohn. With Maria Bakalova as a wily but pathetic Ivana and Martin Donovan as the gradually enfeebled Fred. ★★★★ (A)

*

The Social Reckoning (dir. Aaron Sorkin, 2026). Call it Spotlight for big tech, or Algorithms for Dummies — a somewhat heavy-handed story of investigative journalism that assumes an audience as naive about social media as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) was in 2019 when he began investigating Facebook’s efforts to manipulate its users into spending more time on the platform by serving them incendiary content. As Facebook engineer Frances Haugen, Mikey Madison is an adorable nerd who wants to believes that the company is a force for good but agrees to share the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t. As Mark Zuckerberg, Jeremy Strong is uncannily awkward, like a robot working hard to look like a human being. A reference to Frank Capra seals the charge of heavy-handedness, but there are some great scenes: Zuckerberg being coached for a Senate hearing; Zuckerberg standing, frozen, Queeg-like, as he watches the events of January 6, 2021, play out. ★★★ (T)

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

Gatorade and life

[“Clauditude Adjustment.” Zippy , October 21, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy Claude Funston is writing a list of his reasons to live: the White House ballroom, the Gulf of America, &c. But even Claude has reservations.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

An Aaron Rupar compilation

Choice moments from the Oval Office today. It’s disinhibition on parade, and not a moment of it will show up on “the news.”

RemoveMacAI

I updated my MacBook Air to Golden Gate 27.0.1 last night. And this morning I downloaded and installed RemoveMacAI, a free app to remove Apple Intelligence. (Apple itself, to its discredit, offers no way to do so.) Any number of venerable Mac observers have taken note of RemoveMacAI (including Daring Fireball). It’s easy to use — just make sure to install the profile the app creates. You can undo all changes at any time.

I had planned to use this app from the getgo, but when I saw the squiggly little AI circle next to the cursor as I was about to write the story of our mouse, I knew I had to install this app at once. Human intelligence, please.

Tomcat redux

We heard a mouse last night and put out a trap. Half an hour later that mouse met a timely demise in a Tomcat Kill & Contain Mouse Trap. When I checked online to see if our hardware store had more in stock, I saw that six people were looking at the same item. I guess that colder weather has driven many a mouse indoors.

In the thirty-five years we’ve lived in our house we’ve had six mice, one at a time, four killed, two scooped up with a deep dustpan and released. The Tomcat is the least ickiest way I know to remove a mouse.

A post with a mouse in it
“HOME SWEET HOME”

No news (spot the Ardea herodias)

[Yesterday afternoon. Click for a much larger view.]

Do you see the great blue heron?

Walking, on sidewalks, or in the street when there is no sidewalk, or, best of all, on a nearby trail system, is a great respite from the news. As is reading. As is listening to music. What are your respites?

News

Noah Berlatsky reports on the rise and fall of Katie Zachariah. A tad stalker-y.

Lucian Truscott reports on Katie Zachariah’s husband. With a special appearance by North Korea. (Thanks, Kirsten.)

Heather Cox Richardson reports on our now-overt alliance with a Russian dictator.

And the Chicago Tribune reports on one downstate Illinois family torn apart by ICE.

Roy’s Tavern

[4017 Avenue U, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I’ve posted three other tax photographs from Avenue U. I fear that the fourth will not be the last. What drew me to this photograph: it reminds me of David Plowden’s photographs of fading midwestern towns. Was this really Brooklyn? It was.

Roy’s Tavern was still going in 1949, when it found a new owner. To my surprise, the building still stands, still with a vacant lot to its east. Google Maps shows a Chinese-Japanese-Mexican restaurant in 2012. By 2017, a Chinese restaurant took over. By 2022, a Thai restaurant. By 2024, an Asian fusion restaurant.

If you click for a much larger view, you’ll notice some choice details: the flag (why?), the beer mugs on the sign, and “Ladies Served.” Just don’t fall into the open cellar.

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

Who wore it better?

[Jonathan Capehart (MSNOW) and Matthew Continetti (Wall Street Journal columnist) on the PBS NewsHour last night. Click for a larger view.]

I thought this kind of thing only happened in TV shows.

Wait — this is a TV show. But it’s not, say, I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners. The synced apparel went unremarked on the NewsHour. In an I Love Lucy or Honeymooners episode, it would have been a plot point. (Lucy got there first.)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is one satisfying puzzle. A handful of gimmes, a few tricks, a reasonable number of opaque clues, and an astonishing (at least to me) fifteen-letter answer. I started with 10-D, 4 letters, “Name on the cover of Breathing Lessons” and 53-A, six letters, “Nicaraguan nana,” two gimmes, and went from there.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

6-D, nine letters, “Undoing of many Bard protagonists.” I just wish they’d call him Shakespeare. Or, in the manner of Lord Buckley, Willie the Shake. Why? Because he shook everybody.

12-D, ten letters, “Trend scout.” I need to get out more. No, wait, I don’t.

13-D, ten letters, “Starting order.” It’s odd how often crosswords have me programmed to think about appetizers.

22-A, three letters, “Party      .” It took me a long time to see it.

26-D, ten letters, “Baker’s butter substitute.” Yes, I remember that.

28-D, three letters, “OED initialism since 2011.” IMO, a lousy way to clue this answer. Does anyone remember the year a given initialism made it into a dictionary?

34-A, fifteen letters, “Reason for diminished returns.” Whoa. Or woah.

37-A, six letters, “Far beyond patched.” I thought RAGGED. This clue though works in a different way.

38-A, four letters, “‘        it pretty to think so?’ (The Sun Also Rises ender).” One of the great last sentences. Another gimme, but maybe it’ll prompt someone to pick up the novel.

44-A, three letters, “What a larva may become.” This clue is wildly arbitrary. My first thought was the crossword favorite EFT. Or is it ANT? BEE? It’s like “Color you might paint a wall.”

52-D, four letters, “Possible cause for a time-out.” A great example of misdirection.

My favorite in this puzzle: 31-D, four letters, “Undo a body modification, perhaps.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing: She’s out.

Sold a Story returns

“Our team at APM Reports dug up a whole new story about teaching and learning — and what happens when deeply held beliefs clash with evidence”: there’s now a second season of Emily Hanford’s podcast Sold a Story that focuses on teaching itself and investigates Direct Instruction, an approach to teaching created by Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann. (I know: who?)

Natalie Wexler has had access to the first four episodes and suggests that what’s missing from Engelmann’s approach is an emphasis on knowledge, or what E.D. Hirsch calls cultural literacy:

Both Engelmann and Hirsch had keen insights about what has been missing from American education, with Engelmann focusing on how to teach and Hirsch on what to teach. Neither model is complete, but if applied judiciously in tandem, the two approaches could be hugely powerful.

Related reading
Some OCA Sold a Story posts

Tenuously related reading
Fluke life (How I got on the tenure track, with an appearance by E.D. Hirsch)

Block that metaphor

From an NPR story:

So if you’ve got 20 minutes this week, think about a strength that you’d like to invite into your life and take a baby step to lean into it.

And all fall down?

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

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
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

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.

*

October 16: I learned from a comment on this post that she’s out. Now I wish I had followed my snarky impulse to add a parenthetical “and last?” to this post’s title. The New York Times has the news, served with pointed understatement: “She was not a deft communicator.”

“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.