Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, constructing as Lester Ruff. And this puzzle was, for me, less ruff. I started with 25-D, six letters, “Family Fun Month” — I know how to spell my months. It wasn’t long before I noticed a marked culinary emphasis: 15-A, five letters, “Stir-fry staple”; 16-A, three letters, “Sichuan staple”; 24-A, four letters, “German Vollkornbrote, e.g.”; 43-A, ten letters, “Cacciatore alternative.” The English muffin I had for breakfast couldn’t compete.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

6-D, nine letters, “Disney Christmas Day Parade host, 2001–2009.” I’m not sure anyone aside from the host and family should be expected to know the answer, but I’m amused rather than irked.

10-D, three letters, “Nicely named former Archbishop of Manila, Jaime ___.” I suspect that finding such a delightful clue took some work.

21-D, seven letters, “Adjective for the earliest talkies.” But not one you’d have seen in an advertisement.

29-A, thirteen letters, “Bond and Powers.” Beginning a stack of thirteen-letter answers. The last six letters are easy; the first seven, not so much.

32-A, thirteen letters, “Lower one’s voice?” Carefully phrased.

33-A, thirteen letters, “Amazon MGM subsidiary.” What doesn’t that guy own?

45-D, four letters, “Who first spoke of ‘the green-eyed monster’ (1604).” I first saw that phrase in a thesaurus back in high school, long before I read the source.

47-A, five letters, “Brownstone turned art museum.” I was trying to think of a name.

53-A, five letters, “Street of fame is one.” I’m not sure how I saw through this clue so quickly.

54-A, five letters, “Caterpillar product.” This clue had me hung up for some time. BALER? ROTOR? SOWER?

My favorite in this puzzle: 12-D, eight letters, “Carver of cartoondom.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

No way

Jonathan Capehart, on the PBS NewsHour just now, responding to an obtuse conservative commentator (one Gary Abernathy) who says that people should just stay out of the way as ICE does its work:

“I’m coming at this as an American. There is no way you can expect people to see their friends, their neighbors, their co-workers, maybe even people they don’t know, but who live around them, being abused, treated roughly, by a government that folks are paying taxes to pay for.”

At the movie

Am I linking to two George Bodmer cartoons in a single day? I am. Today’s Oscar’s Portrait takes us into a movie theater of the artist’s mind.

Catherine O’Hara (1954–2026)

“‘You’re so lucky if you’re raised with humor,’ she said. ‘It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, because life is full of the dark and the light. You gotta look for the light‘”: Catherine O’Hara, actor and comedian, quoted in a New York Times obituary.

I’ve followed Catherine O’Hara’s work since the SCTV days. I’m glad that Elaine and I stuck with Schitt’s Creek despite being unpersuaded by the first couple of episodes: O’Hara’s Moira Rose was the role of a lifetime.

[I’ve already used up my NYT gift links for the month.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

She’s making her fourth screen appearance. Do you recognize her?

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

*

The answer is now in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

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

“There’s good news tonight” (There is?)

Why do I no longer watch commercial nightly news? An Oscar’s Day cartoon by George Bodmer says it for me.

My usual sources: Aaron Rupar and Ron Filipkowski (from Meidas Touch) on Bluesky, Heather Cox Richardson and Margaret Sullivan (both on Substack), NPR, Pro Publica, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the PBS NewsHour. And because I have a free (university) subscription, The New York Times. I see a greater number of revelatory clips of the current occupant from Aaron Rupar than from any other source.

“City of Heroes”

“City of Heroes” is a song from Billy Bragg:

I wrote this song yesterday as a tribute to the bravery of the people of Minneapolis who, knowing that these trigger happy ICE thugs operate with seeming impunity in their midst, are still willing to put themselves in harms way to defend their community. Their resistance is an inspiration to us all.

Thanks, Sean.

AI apologies

A story from The New York Times (gift link):

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.

But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had.

Using AI to write an e-mail to a professor seems an especially witless way to use AI, as if that professor could not possibly have seen a nearly identical or identical such message before.

In 2023 I made the following addition to my read-all-over post How to e-mail a professor:

Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.

When I asked ChatGPT in 2023 to generate an e-mail requesting an assignment, here’s what resulted. The first sentence: “I hope this email finds you well.” And it gets better (worse) from there.

Have the results improved? Don’t know. Don’t care either.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[The Illinois story is from last October. I sincerely apologize for missing it then. Thanks, Lu!]

“You’ve Got to Be Modernistic”

A James P. Johnson composition. Because you’ve got to have music.

[James P. Johnson, piano. January 21, 1930.]

[James P. Johnson and His Orchestra: King Oliver, Dave Nelson, trumpets; Jimmy Archey, trombone; unknown clarinet and alto; Charles Frazier, tenor; James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, pianos; Teddy Bunn, banjo; Harry Hull, bass; unknown drums; The Keep Shufflin' Trio, vocals. New York, November 18, 1929.]

I heard the second version for the first time while driving the other day. I had brought along a CD from Fats Waller’s Complete Recorded Works (JSP Records) for company. At the 2:36 mark, other drivers must have thought I was having a seizure.

Could the closing tag be spoofing the advertising slogan “Wilson, ‘That’s All’”? I wonder.

That’s all.

Related reading
All OCA Fats Waller posts (Pinboard)

John Gruber on Tim Cook’s memo

At Daring Fireball, John Gruber has written two posts about Tim Cook’s memo regarding “the events in Minneapolis”: Tim Cook Wrote a Memo, Politics and the English Language, January 2026 Edition. The second post ends:

Using words, not to make a point, but to avoid making a point while creating the illusion of having made one, is the true sin. From Orwell’s closing paragraph:

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

It’s colder in Minnesota, but the wind is gusting in Cupertino.

Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard)

“Streets of Minneapolis”

“Streets of Minneapolis” is a new song from Bruce Springsteen:

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free, Bruce Springsteen

State terror . Pulling no punches.

Reading pleasure, doubled

On a plaque in a small library, I saw this sentence, attributed to Katherine Mansfield:

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

I thought immediately of our household’s two-person adventure in reading, the Four Seasons Reading Club (now on the Dhammapada, the final volume in the Penguin Little Black Classics series). But I also thought that Katherine Mansfield was certainly not writing about reading two people reading two copies of one book at the same time. What she was describing though is close to that.

The sentence on the plaque is a slight modification of a sentence in a letter Mansfield wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell, January 1922. From The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1928):

I love reading good plays; and so does M. We have such fun talking them over afterwards. In fact, the pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. It is one of the many pleasures of our solitary life. Pleasures we have — ever increasing. I would not change this kind of life for any other.

Related reading
All OCA Katherine Mansfield posts (Pinboard)

[M. is John Middleton Murry, then Mansfield’s husband.]

“The investigation is the cover-up”

At Public Notice, Liz Dye writes that “the investigation is the cover-up”:

Seems like the results of this “honorable investigation” [into the killing of Alex Pretti] have been predetermined, and the pivot [away from terrorizing Minnesotans] was more of a head fake after all. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that there’s no statute of limitations on murder charges.

A Roberts Court in ancient Persia

As Herodotus tells it, the Persian king Cambyses, already married to one of his sisters, wanted to marry another one of his sisters. So he asked the Royal Judges (appointed for life) whether there was a law that required someone who wanted it to marry his sister to do so.

Herodotus, from The Histories , trans. Tom Holland (2013).

The Madness of Cambyses, an excerpt from The Histories, is no. 78 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Advice for apiarists

Build bridges so that your bees have a place to dry off:

Virgil, from The Georgics , trans. Kimberly Johnson (2009).

O Cruel Alexis, excerpting the Eclogues and the Georgics, is no. 76 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Faces

“Do not compare Border Patrol agents to the Nazis. That’s an unfair comparison. The Nazis were willing to show their faces”: Stephen Colbert, a few minutes ago.

How Sinners lost me

Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2025) had barely begun when a portentous voiceover by the character Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) made me reach for a dictionary:

“There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death.... In West Africa, they’re called griots.”

Merriam-Webster gives just one pronunciation of griot, a word borrowed from French: /ˈgrē-ˌō/, the only pronunciation I’ve known. In the movie it’s /ˈgrē-ˌot/. The Oxford English Dictionary gives five pronunciations, one of which, from West African English, has a sounded t : /ˈɡriɔt/. Perhaps the filmmakers were striving for an authentically African pronunciation, though I’d call the pronunciation in the movie markedly different from the one in the OED sound file, and emphatically American (Wunmi Mosaku, born in Nigeria, grew up in Manchester, England). From what I’ve read on the Internets, the sounded t has struck many viewers as a puzzling mistake. It certainly puzzled me.

At the thirteen-minute mark, we see a street in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the non-diegetic music playing is the Willie Dixon song “Wang Dang Doodle,” first recorded by Howlin’ Wolf in 1960, and here performed by an electric blues band. The subtitles say “Groovy music playing.” It’s 1932 in Clarksdale.

At the twenty-one minute mark, a Dobro is said to be “Charley Patton’s guitar,” won in a card game by a character in the movie. Gosh, no. According to a contemporary witness, Patton played “a black Stella with a white neck.” Here’s a luthier’s page with more about Patton and Stellas. I’ve been listening to pre-war blues music since I was a teenager, and I can say with certainty that I’ve never heard a Dobro (or National) resonator guitar on a Patton record. And I’ve never read anything suggesting that Patton ever played a resonator guitar.

Charley (or Charlie) Patton was the founder of the Delta blues, as Yazoo Records once called him, the first star of the music. In other words, he’s no non-entity. Pairing Patton with a Dobro might be analogous to pairing Jimi Hendrix with, say, a Gretsch Country Gentleman. For anyone who knows anything about one or the other guitarist, the pairing is merely ludicrous. I can only assume that the filmmakers, having found a strange-looking guitar from 1932, decided to make a Patton connection — and make it for an audience that knows little or nothing about Mississippi music. In which case, they could have made up a name for an imaginary musician.

I’m not evaluating the movie here. I’m reporting only that it lost me. I fast-forwarded through most of the remaining two hours, though I did slow down long enough to appreciate the scene in which musicians and dancers, ancient to the future, inhabit the shared space of a juke joint.

*

Later that day: The matter of that guitar is more complicated than I thought. (See the comments.) All I’ll say here is that any character in Sinners who believes that guitar belonged to Charley Patton is one gullible character.

[“Ancient to the future”: not a phrase from the movie. It’s from a motto associated with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future.]

Nouning the verb

“It’s what I need to finish my groom”: as heard in a commercial for a hair-trimming gadget.

Floyd Vivino (1951–2026)

“From 1974 to ’98, Mr. Vivino oversaw a ludicrous, freewheeling weekday program — an unrehearsed blend of music, featuring his stride piano playing; skits; puppets like Oogie, a wooden clown, and the testy skeleton character Bones Boy; parodies of local personalities; and an oddball troupe of actors with names like Weenie, Mugsy and Netto”: from the New York Times obituary for Floyd Vivino, Uncle Floyd, whose UHF television show was a delight of my college years (gift link). Anarchy on the airwaves!

See for yourself: you can find many Uncle Floyd clips at YouTube.

A statement from the family of Alex Pretti

As shared with CNN:

We are heartbroken but also very angry.

Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However his last thought and act was to protect a woman.

The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed.

Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.

And as my friend Fresca says, “We all live right next door.”

The House of Sandwiches

[379 Columbia Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The House of Sandwiches, now Defonte’s Sandwich Shop, is a third-generation family establishment. Nicola Defonte started out with a grocery store at this address in 1922. This page of Red Hook history tells the rest of the story: Defonte’s Finally Gets Their Way (Joe Enright’s Stuff). And here’s the menu in 2026. Yow!

It’s worth clicking for large to see the front window. And to wonder about the man in the doorway, who puts me in mind of the Oysterette man.

[Click for a larger man.]

Thanks, Brian, for not letting this corner get away.

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

Propaganda, streaming

In the most recent installment of Letters from an American , Heather Cox Richardson references recent writing about the current administration’s use of Nazi-like imagery and language in its social media accounts:

Instead of rooting itself in the real history of the United States of America, Ali Breland of The Atlantic noted on Wednesday, the Trump administration is embracing Nazi propaganda, trying to convince Americans that the nation’s roots are not in human equality but in the hierarchical system of European fascism. Rejecting the idea of liberty and equality proposed in the Declaration of Independence and defended by people like Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s foundational principle, they are trying to define the United States of America in an entirely new way: one made up of white Protestants who, in their minds, “belong” to the land here. Rather than a nation based in ideals, they want a nation based in “blood and soil.”

Here’s a gift link to what Breland wrote: “The Trump Administration Is Publishing a Stream of Nazi Propaganda.” That title is no exaggeration, and Breland assembles copious evidence to make the case.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is David P. Williams’s fifth Stumper in the last five months. It’s another excellent puzzle, with tiny answers made tricky (e.g., 22-A, three letters, “Forum crowd”) and surprising long answers sprinkled generously throughout.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Operatic soprano from Charleston.” Yep, knew it.

7-D, four letters, “Inedible waffle.” Truly misdirective. I thought first of foam cushioning.

8-D, three letters, “Limits of navigation.” Another tiny answer made tricky.

10-D, ten letters, “Emulating peacock feathers.” I thank Marianne Moore for embedding the idea in my head.

11-D, five letters, “C student at work.” Surprising, at least to me, to see something like this in a Stumper.

14-A, four letters, “All of Vatican City.” Another tiny, &c.

23-D, eleven letters, “Erstwhile patent medicine.” Ha.

24-A, thirteen letters, “Quality time and physical touch, per Psychology Today.” Whatever you say.

26-D, ten letters, “Gen Z-created atmospheric gauges.” See 11-D.

40-A, thirteen letters, “Defendant in double jeopardy.” I was inordinately happy to figure out this answer.

48-A, four letters, “Anagram of TIMBERLAKE minus TAKE MR.” I got it but had to look it up to understand. Overly weird.

49-A, four letters, “Keel over.” Nice one.

57-A, three letters, “Circles kept in squares.” Clever.

My favorite in this puzzle: 16-A, ten letters, “Seasonal flier.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

Chicken, or hen? Let’s eat.

ICE Out of Minnesota

As you may already know, there’s a general strike today in Minnesota: ICE Out of Minnesota. No work, no school, no shopping.

For anyone anywhere, there are many ways to contribute to organizations helping immigrants in Minnesota: Stand with Minnesota.

Chicken, or hen?

We wanted a whole chicken for the snowed-in weekend that looms ahead. A chicken yields dinner, another dinner, and soup. We tried two stores: no whole chickens. So we bought a hen. Here’s the difference:

A hen is an adult female chicken that has reached sexual maturity. Once a female bird starts laying eggs, she’s classified as a hen. Egg laying typically begins around 18 to 20 weeks of age, depending on the breed and health conditions.

Hens are the backbone of egg production in the poultry industry, and breeds are selectively bred for productivity. After their productive years, they may be processed as hen meat, although it’s tougher than typical broiler cuts and often used in stews.

So Elaine is going to stew a hen — something never before attempted in this household. And I think we might glean a better understanding of the expression “tough old bird.”

For everyone about to endure the weekend storm: be safe, be prepared. See this painting.

*

The hen was delicious: it spent five hours in the oven in a covered Dutch oven, first at 325°F, then at 300°. The meat was slightly dry, very tender, and more flavorful than chicken. Elaine and I thought our bird tasted rather old-timey.

[Which came first: the chicken, or the hen?]

Recently updated

Training Now with “classically trained.”

Training

[From an old text file.]

“Training” is an element in a rhetoric of academic professionalization: “our training prepares students to,” “our graduate students are trained to,” and so on. In humanities study, I’d suggest, there’s no such thing as training. Training is systematic, rigorous. Reading and learning are haphazard and unpredictable matters, with courses taken for all sorts of reasons, and works read (and resonating) in no uniform sequence.

Speaking of the haphazard: in The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton tells a story of walking into the wrong classroom and ending up in a great class with Mark Van Doren:

It was when I had taken off my coat and put down my load of books that I found out that this was not the class I was supposed to be taking, but Van Doren’s course on Shakespeare.

So I got up to go out. But when I got to the door I turned around again and went back and sat down where I had been, and stayed there. Later I went and changed everything with the registrar, so I remained in that class for the rest of the year.

It was the best course I ever had at college.

*

As I remembered only when I asked Elaine to read this post, she wrote in 2008 about cringing when she hears the words “classically trained.” My text file dates from 2012.

[I’ll grant that graduate students are trained in the forms of hierarchy and deference that operate in academic life, but that’s hardly what’s meant by “our graduate students are trained to.”]

Manolo Villaverde (1936–2026)

“A Cuban émigré who had a central role on ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? — believed to be the first bilingual sitcom in the United States”: from the New York Times obituary.

In 2020, when the Times listed ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? as one of fifty PBS shows that have made “a lasting imprint” on American culture, PBS had a handful of episodes available. Today it appears that nearly all episodes are online.

I watched ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? as a student of Spanish back in the day. I still consider it one of the funniest sit-coms I’ve seen, full of Lucy-esque lunacy. The series was funded by grants from what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. Impossible to imagine that happening today.

Dol

Elaine has shared what’s been happening in our lives: Dol.

[If you’d like to say something, please leave a comment on Elaine’s post so that she’s sure to see it.]

Young-woo likes dad jokes

From the episode “Mr. Salt, Ms. Pepper and Attorney Soy Sauce,” Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022):

The owner of the pub where Woo Young-woo (Park Eun-bin) hangs out with her friend Dong Geu-ra-mi (Joo Hyun-young) disgraced himself on a blind date with an attorney from Young-woo’s firm by making dad jokes. Geu-ra-mi, who works at the pub, is furious: “When’d you turn into a dad?” So the pub owner, Kim Min-shik (Im Seong-jae) aka Mister Hairy Boss, explains: “Obviously, I’m not usually like that. But I guess I was more nervous than usual.”

Young-woo, a young attorney with autism spectrum disorder, asks, “What are dad jokes?” So Min-shik shares what he said:

“Orange you glad to see me?”

“I asked if adding Parmesan was cheesy.”

“Do you find bananas appealing?”

Young-woo: “Oh! Are these the type of jokes with words pronounced similarly? I think they’re quite funny.”

Geu-ra-mi thinks that Min-shik should have told attorney jokes. She gives an example:

“An airline company got sued from a guy recently. It happened after they lost his luggage. Guess what happened.”

Young-woo: “Mmm, what?”

Geu-ra-mi: “The man who sued them lost his case.”

Young-woo: “His case? [Pause.] Ah!”

And Min-shik joins in: “Eight vowels, five consonants, a comma, and an exclamation mark appeared in court because they — they were all due to be sentenced soon.”

Young-woo: “Due to be sentenced? [Pause.] Ah!”

After general laughter, she calls for more.

Geu-ra-mi: “There’s no more. There is no more.”

I highly recommend Extraordinary Attorney Woo, sixteen episodes, available from Netflix. There is no more, at least not yet, though there were plans for a second season to arrive in 2024.

You can see a condensed version of this scene at YouTube. I would love to know what’s going on in the Korean. I even tried scanning the subtitles at Netflix, without luck. But here’s an explanation of one of the Korean jokes. The English jokes are, of course, not translations.

[“Whether it’s read straight or flipped, it’s still Woo Young-Woo. Kayak, deed, rotator, noon, racecar, Woo Young-Woo.” Here’s an explanation of what’s going on in the Korean original of that repeated bit.]

A joke in a neo-traditional manner

An eight-year-old at work:

What kind of car can’t you ride in?

Notice the eight-year-old perspective: ride in , not drive.

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.]

Dryer January (no Wi-Fi)

When we shopped for a new dryer last week, I wondered why some machines have Wi-Fi. Wi? What for?

The salesperson told us that you can use Wi-Fi to troubleshoot. Okay. (But then you’d still need to call for service.) She also mentioned that you can check where the machine is in its cycle, so if your machine is, say, in the basement and you're upstairs, &c. And as she explained this stuff, she couldn’t keep a straight face. Nor could I. Elaine mentioned an old joke about a refrigerator that could do children’s homework.

Suffice it to say we bought a dryer without Wi-Fi.

Bringing out the crazy

If you think the current occupant’s letter to the Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Store is the height of crazy, you haven’t read the letter to the Belarusian president (read: dictator ) Alexander Lukashenko offering a seat on the occupant’s as yet imaginary Board of Peace. The letter begins:

It is my Great Honor to invite you, as President of the Republic of Belarus, to join me in a critically Historic and Magnificent effort to solidify Peace in the Middle East and, at the same time, to embark on a bold new approach to resolving Global Conflict!

The cost of a permanent seat on the board of this ersatz United Nations, a cost not mentioned in the letter: $1 billion. And Vladimir Putin has been invited.

Seeing the letter itself (I’ve found photographs only on X and Instagram) really brings out the crazy. I found myself most unnerved by the all-caps first-name-only signature, followed by a jumbo-sized full signature. We are long, long past Twenty-fifth Amendment time.

The current occupant, sulking

Or pretending to sulk. Who knows his mind?

From The New York Times (gift link):

President Trump is now claiming that one reason he is pushing to acquire Greenland is that he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a text message he sent to Norway’s prime minister over the weekend.

Jonas Gahr Store, Norway’s leader, received the text message on Sunday, an official in the prime minister’s office said on Monday.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Mr. Trump wrote in the message, which was first published by PBS.

Nothing about Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the occupant’s social media. Of course not.

MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929.

I’ll repost (for obvious reasons) a sentence that I posted in 2020 and 2025. From Why We Can’t Wait (1964):

Perhaps the most determining factor in the role of the federal government is the tone set by the Chief Executive in his words and actions.

And I’ll add a passage from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963):

You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I don’t believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I don’t believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I’m sorry that I can’t join you in your praise for the police department.

And now it’s not a city force but a federal one, ICE, terrorizing protestors and anyone who doesn’t look like a so-called “heritage American.” And now it’s not the city jail; it’s internment camps and foreign prisons. What would Martin Luther King Jr. say about our country in 2026?

Related reading
All OCA MLK posts (Pinboard)

Back to the land

[Zippy , January 18, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy is a parade of toons: Nancy, Chip and Dale, Daffy Duck, and in the final panel, Pluto and — who? A clone? K.B., Pluto’s kid brother?

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : Pluto (Disney) (Wikipedia)

Early Sunday Morning-ish

Still on Columbia Street.

[376 Columbia Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Figure at a window. Wildroot. (Still made!) But what immediately struck me was the Edward Hopper feeling. If it were really Early Sunday Morning though, there’d be no one at the window, and the barbershop would have a sign saying CLOSED.

I looked into the name Rinascente and learned nothing about this barbershop. (No barber lived at this address in 1940, only two longshoremen and their families.) But I did learn that Rinascente is the name of an posh Italian department-store chain, founded in Milan in 1865:

The name Rinascente, which means “she who is reborn,” was invented by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1917. The author found it “a simple, clear and appropriate name” because it indicated the action of rebirth that would carry into the future.

I suppose the barbershop was aspiring to some reflected glory.

What makes it all a bit weird is Rinascente’s present-day marketing of a line of men’s grooming products called Bullfrog:

Bullfrog is an Italian brand that draws inspiration from the concept of modern American Barber Shops and traditional Italian barbershops.

No. 376, no longer housing a barbershop, stands.

[No waiting.]

Related posts
Another Columbia Street barbershop : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Google Maps places this block of Columbia Street in Carroll Gardens. But everywhere else, it’s Red Hook. I amended other posts accordingly.]

Back to analog

“Shoppers overwhelm Chicago stationery shops as social media touts ‘return to analog’” (WBEZ).

I always thought this kind of thing would happen. And I approve, even if I’m typing on a phone.

Related reading
All OCA analog posts : pen posts : pencil posts (Pinboard) : A visit to Atlas Stationers

Take, take, take

“I heard they have a little surprise. Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s the stick and not just the shirt. That stick looks beautiful. That looks beautiful. Maybe I get both, who the hell knows. I’m president, I’ll just take ‘em”: in the latest installement of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about Greenland, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a golden hockey stick.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Ben Zimmer. It’s solid, man, solid. Just three clue-and-answer pairs of note, the long and short of it:

8-D, fifteen letters, “Sci-fi staples.” And other office supplies?

34-A, fifteen letters, “DJ sound effects.” I’d think of them as music, not sound effects.

48-A, three letters, “His name is mud.” Ah!

My favorite in this puzzle: 47-A, four letters, “Dr. King’s ‘highest good.’

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Hunger

Hunger on the move:

Ovid, from Book VIII of Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (1955).

When I read this passage, I immediately flashed on Stranger Things.

The Fall of Icarus, with excerpts from Books VIII and IX, is no. 73 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Mediterranean hospitality and diet

Jupiter and Mercury enjoy Mediterranean hospitality and diet courtesy of Baucis and Philemon of Phrygia. Baucis serves:

Ovid, from Book VIII of Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (1955).

The food that’s piping hot: smoked bacon. It’s ”a small piece of their long-cherished meat,” not a staple of their diet.

The Fall of Icarus, with excerpts from Books VIII and IX, is no. 73 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Forty-three ways of looking at Sappho

Or at one Sappho poem, from c. 50 BCE to 2023.

Missing from this gathering is my favorite: from 2002, it’s Stanley Lombardo’s translation, which begins,

Look at him, just like a god,
that man sitting across from you,
whoever he is

“Whoever he is”: perfect haughty contempt.

I suppose that in the new Texas order of things, this poem, like Aristophanes’s discourse on love, would not be permitted. But I suppose Catullus’s version of the poem, which might be said to straighten Sappho’s original, would be allowed. Poor Texas.

Related reading
All OCA Sappho posts (Pinboard)

Two takes on macOS Tahoe icons

“I complained about this on the socials, but I didn’t get it all out of my system.” Jim Nielsen writes about icons in macOS Tahoe.

“It’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!” Nikita Prokopov does likewise.

Master and tyrant

Jamelle Bouie, writing in The New York Times (gift link):

The American public, then, is left not with a president but with a man who imagines himself master and behaves like a tyrant. A man whose agents brutalize ordinary citizens and then defame them in the wake of their deaths, who has turned the nation’s law enforcement apparatus against his political enemies and who threatens the nation’s allies with military force. A man who takes no interest in the work of government but welcomes corruption and who treats half the country as conquered territory — vassals to abuse as he sees fit.

If the only things Trump thinks can stop him are his own morality and his own mind, our task — at least for those of us who view the state of things with outrage and anger — is to show him the folly of his words.

Storage unit

[Click for a larger nut.]

Sometimes I hear odd little sounds outside the room where I work, sounds low to the ground. Critters, I assume. And then I noticed this black walnut tucked into the corner of the side storm door. Today, it’s gone.

[Is writing really work, Michael? Or is it a rarefied kind of play?]

On first hearing “She Loves You”

On an episode of Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4), the writer Lee Child talks about hearing “She Loves You” for the first time:

I was eight, going on nine, and I was depressed, because I was trapped in this strict home, this grey postwar austerity. I felt no horizons. And we were on some dreadful family holiday in a caravan in Wales, and the rain was lashing down, and my other family members were getting me down, so I went out to sit in the car. And I turned on the radio — and it was an old valve radio; it sort of warmed up slowly, crackly. And the first thing I heard was Brian Matthews, on the Saturday Club. He said, “Here it is, the new one from the Beatles.” And it was “She Loves You,” which starts out with a tiny little drum fill from Ringo and then the first chorus. It's about eleven seconds, I think, and in those eleven seconds my life changed totally. I felt the sun had come out. I felt there was joy, there was happiness, there was energy in the world. Most of all, I felt there was something for me.

Related reading
Lee Child : Saturday Club (Wikipedia)

[My transcription.]

Mary Miller: ICE isn’t going too far

NEWSNATION: There's new video of a woman in MN saying she's trying to get to a doc appointment & federal agents bust into her car. Is it fair to say some of these operations are going too far? REP. MARY MILLER: If you break the laws & resist arrest, it's not going to be pretty. This is what happens

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 13, 2026 at 3:44 PM

That’s “my” representative in Congress. Christ, what a heartless asshole.

I know that’s redundant: assholes don’t have hearts. Nor do they have brains.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Hutch

[H.C. Westermann, Hutch the One Armed Astro-Turf Man with a Defense (1976). AstroTurf, pine, aspen, ash, chestnut, and saplings. Photograph by me.]

As seen in the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition H. C. Westermann: Anchor Clanker, running through May 17, 2026. The museum placard reads:

Westermann's gripe with the shoddy workmanship that followed a rise in 1970s consumer culture is represented in this sculpture by AstroTurf, originally invented to cover the field of the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. The artificial product eliminated the need to meticulously plant, water, and mow grass. This convenience created a loss of proximity to nature and care — an afront to Westermann, an environmentalist who valued craftsmanship and attention to detail. Hutch the One Armed Astro-Turf Man with a Defense, whose arm has seemingly broken off, signals a condemnation of the manufacturers creating objects that do not last.

I think I see more comedy than condemnation in this work, which reminds me of Monty Python’s Black Knight. The Westermann exhibition is housed in a narrow alcove above the museum library. So easy to overlook, and I’m glad we didn’t.

[I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add that this exhibit marks the first time I’ve spotted a misspelled word in a museum placard. Did you catch it?]

Markdown and world domination

Anil Dash explains how Markdown took over the world:

The format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team.

But it’s worth understanding how these simple little text files were born, not just because I get to brag about how generous and clever my friends are, but also because it reminds us of how the Internet really works: smart people think of good things that are crazy enough that they just might work, and then they give them away, over and over, until they slowly take over the world and make things better for everyone.

I tried Markdown c. 2012 and began using it regularly in 2021. It’s a great way to write.

[The curmudgeonly guy: John Gruber of Daring Fireball. The Kubrick movie: The Shining . The team: the Phillies.]

Saturday night deer-er

[Click for a much larger view.]

Not a great photograph — it was a really cold night, so I photographed through the storm door, and even with all the lights off, the additional light of the long exposure created that slight brightness on the left.

But it is a photograph with eleven deer. Count ’em: they’re all there. Our backyard has never been deer-er. Notice that our friends are looking in all directions: keeping everyone safe.

They left later that night, maybe to shoot pool, maybe to see a movie, maybe to just hang out elsewhere.

Related reading
All OCA deer posts (Pinboard)

In today’s news

The acting president of Venezuela is seeking to indict the chair of the Federal Reserve.

[Just another reminder that the acting president, el presidente interino, is out of his mind.]

NO ICE

[Nancy, December 28, 1944. Click for a larger view.]

I’m reposting these panels, first posted last October.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[In the missing panels, Sluggo wonders if the lake surface is hard enough for skating, and Nancy tests with a stick. They’ve just left school — thus the book bag.]

An Atlantic crossword error

I suspect that somebody somewhere will be looking online for this:

In today’s Atlantic crossword by Will Nediger and Matthew Stock, there’s a mistake in a clue: 24-A, five letters, “Third-person possessive pronoun with two apostrophes.” The answer: YALLS. But that’s second person, not third.

Fun answer, but mistaken clue. It’s gonna be fixed.

The carriage’s in the midst of all

Sorry, Yeats.

[369 Columbia Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just one more look at Columbia Street, and one more unattended carriage. The unattended carriage has become an unexpected motif in these WPA tax photographs. The Unattended Carriage : that could have been the title of an Edward Gorey volume.

My eye went from the carriage to the store at no. 369: Maria Mazzella Grocery.

The name Mazzella had a long history at this address. On May 12, 1924, The Brooklyn Eagle reported a marriage license issued to Natalina Mazzella (1904–1996), then living at no. 369, and Robert Nocera (1900–1980), then living at 5 Luquer Street, just down the block and around the corner. They are reported living at no. 369 in the 1930 census, which also has Mary and John Mazzella living at this address, a widowed mother, fifty-five, born in Italy, and her son, twenty-nine, born in New York. Robert and John are both listed as “loader,” “wharf” — in other words, they were longshoremen. I think it’s safe to assume that Mary is the Maria on the awning in this tax photograph. But there’s no grocery store with that name yet.

The 1940 census has only Mary and John at no. 369, now sixty-six and thirty-seven, and now Mary is identified as a grocery-store owner. The 1930 census shows a grocery-store owner already at no. 367, Nicholas DeMonte. Was there a single store that changed hands and, somehow, its street address? No, there’s another store at no. 367 in the tax photographs, Nick’s Italian-American Grocery, with its own detail-laden tax photograph.

A 1941 full-page Brooklyn Eagle advertisement for Doublemint Gum lists Maria Mazzella’s store as a purveyor: “You hit the nail on the head, Brooklyn! Doublemint Gum gives you real chewing satisfaction.” In the 1950 census, Mary and John, now seventy-five and fifty, remain at this address. Mary, in a third census, is not yet a naturalized citizen. John is now identified as “salesmans,” “wholesale barsup” (bar supplies?), and there’s no grocery store attached to Mary’s name. But Nicholas DeMonte, his name recorded as Nick Domonte, is still at no. 367, now listed as the proprietor of a candy store.

I will assume that someone had come for the carriage by then.

[Click for a larger view.]

Sources: Brooklyn Newstand, Find a Grave, and census records via Steve Morse. My starting point, as always, is Julien Boilen’s Street View of 1940s New York. I was able to turn up nothing about Sal Laundry.

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

Mental acuity

Laser-focused — on his own mind. It might be Kaitlin Collins asking the question. Via Aaron Rupar. My transcription:

“The state officials there [in Minnesota] have said that the FBI is not sharing evidence with them. Typically, they would conduct a joint investigation, as you know. Do you believe that the FBI should be sharing evidence with state officials in Minnesota?”

“Well, normally I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and, eh, Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor, a fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person. And it looks like the number could be nineteen billion dollars stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote. They vote in a group. They buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost — can you imagine? You come over with no money, and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. So they’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. It — nobody’s won it — since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state. And the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have a safe election. But I won Minnesota three times and I didn’t get credit for it. I did so well in that state every time. The people were — they were crying every time after. That’s a crooked state. California is a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a doozy. Whole lotta stumpin’ goin’ on. I began with two giveaways, 1-D, four letters, “Rock band with a lightning bolt in the middle of its logo” and 36-D, eight letters, “Subject of the book subtitled Magic, Kareem, Riley….” And then I scratched and clawed my way to the finish line.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-A, ten letters, “Beneficiary of ‘special provisions’ in the Indian Constitution.” I think this answer could have been better clued.

6-D, five letters, “Old school fuddy-duddies.” Carefully clued.

13-A, four letters, “Appropriate.” A shining example of the unhelpful clue. FINE? TAKE?

14-A, seven letters, “Corona concoction.” Never heard of it. I guess I’m not much for concoctions.

18-A, ten letters, “Nostalgic evocations.” I will always associate this word with my daughter, who once observed that a stranger on the street was one.

26-A, seven letters, “Flooring.” Uh, SHAGRUG?

27-D, ten letters, “No longer an option.” Fun, because there’s a much more common idiom here. The Google Ngram Viewer shows it as eighteen times more common.

28-D, four letters, “Brit’s ‘your honor.’” Yow.

34-A, three letters, “Lady in the House of Lords.” And for a moment, I was right on this puzzle’s wavelength.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Just kidding!” Yeah, sure.

37-D, six letters, “Schumann’s Dichterliebe.” I asked Elaine not to tell me if my answer was wrong. She didn’t, and it wasn’t.

39-A, three letters, “Cross hairs.” That’s a lot for a simple answer.

42-A, seven letters, “Parker’s charge.” I tried to figure out how to fit an hourly or daily rate into this seven-letter space.

48-A, five letters, “Asian cooling condiment.” I like things hot. I thought that this condiment was just for flavor.

52-A, eight letters, “Held in low regard?” Pretty Stumper-y.

54-A, ten letters, “ Zeppole’s Canadian kin.” You don’t need to understand the answer to get credit for it, right? (I looked up the kinfolks when the puzzle was done.)

My favorite in this puzzle, because it’s just so weird: 32-A, five letters, “Drawn thermometer raiser.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Putting out a record

Jonathan Capehart on the PBS NewsHour tonight. My transcription:

“I applaud people who are going out into their communities, seeing what’s happening, and pulling out their phones and recording it. You’ve seen multiple people were recording what happened to Renee Good. And good for them, good for Minneapolis, good for Minnesota, but also good for America, because as long as people are bearing witness to this with their phones and putting out a record, then the administration, from the president on down, cannot lie, baldly lie to the American people, without there being video evidence that they are lying.”

See also advice from the ACLU about taking photographs or video at a protest and John Gruber’s advice about hard-locking an iPhone.

Not from The Onion

It’s real.

Domestic comedy

Something I never thought I’d hear Elaine say:

“I think I’m gonna watch my soap.”

The soap in question is Do You Like Brahms?, a Korean offering about music students (Netflix).

And now I’m thinking of John Ashbery’s poem “Korean Soap Opera.”

Elaine asks me to add that her flu is a long story arc. I am taking good care of her.

*

5:39 p.m.: She’s now well enough to have written a post about the show.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“The weight of non-zero”

Garrett Graff writes about “the physical weight” of life under the current occupant:

That heaviness you feel, that drag on your mental health, that drain on your emotional energy and lethargy in the face of world events, like yesterday [Wednesday the 7th], is real. We are all carrying a lot of new weight in the era of Trumpism.

It’s the weight of non-zero.

As it turns out, that simple switch from zero to non-zero — even if it any or all of the above is still infinitesimally unlikely, it is no longer effectively zero. And that tiniest bit of switch, that binary shift from 0 to greater than zero, turns out to be something that we can all feel in our daily lives.

He gives twenty-two examples of the weight of non-zero. This is the twenty-second:

Before last year, if you were a mom, with a glovebox full of stuffed animals, driving your SUV through a peaceful suburb, eager to see your six-year-old child at the end of the day — a wife with no criminal record who had committed no federal crimes, not being sought by any authorities anywhere — a poet who cared about your neighbors — there was, effectively, a zero percent chance you had to worry about being shot in the face by masked, ill-trained, aggressive federal officers who would then pull their guns on a doctor who tried to help you and let you die in the street.

Now that chance is at least non-zero.

Goodbye, Plato

Inside Higher Ed reports that the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University is flagging gender- and race-related materials in at least 200 courses:

One faculty member — philosophy professor Martin Peterson, who is supposed to teach Contemporary Moral Problems this spring — was asked by university leadership to remove several passages by Plato from his syllabus.

As you can probably guess, one of the passages in question is from the Symposium, from Aristophanes’s discourse on human nature and love, which begins:

“First you must learn what Human Nature was in the beginning and what has happened to it since, because long ago our nature was not what it is now, but very different. There were three kinds of human beings, that’s my first point.”

I taught that speech several times in intro lit classes. A passage from its close, about love and human wholeness, is often read at marriage ceremonies. You can read the speech in its entirety in Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff’s translation (Hackett, 1989) at Google Books.

More on the Texas A&M story, including e-mails from Professor Peterson and his department chair, may be found at Daily Nous. And there’s a New York Times article (gift link).

Orwell again

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

That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting [of Renee Nicole Gold] even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test.

But it is not working.

Orwell again: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

A message for ICE

Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis, this afternoon, has a message for ICE. My transcription:

“To ICE: get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized. And now somebody is dead. That’s on you. And it’s also on you to leave.”

If you watch the video of an ICE agent shooting and killing a driver whose vehicle was blocking the street, you’ll agree that it’s absurd to characterize the driver’s movement as “domestic terrorism” and the ICE agent’s response as self-defense, as Kristi Noem has. The driver was driving away. The shooter was not injured, much less run over, as the current occupant alleges. Having watched the video many times, I think that the driver may have backed up so that she could move forward at an angle that let her avoid hitting the ICE agent who then shot her in the head.

Mayor Frey: “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: that is bullshit.”

George Orwell: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

To my friends in Minneapolis: I am sorry for what has happened in your city.

Wittgenstein’s Zippy?

[“Solitary Definement.” Zippy , January 7, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy appears to be channeling David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, but with a diner, an empty one. (Appears to be : as I now know, today’s strip is inspired by the Netflix series Pluribus. Thanks, Bill.)

Wittgenstein’s Mistress earned the Orange Crate Art Seal of Approval in 2013. What I wrote then:

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is unlike any other novel I have read. That alone would not be reason to recommend it. The novel’s strange and baffling premise, its comic timing, its pathos: they clinch the deal.

I’m not sure when Zippy earned the OCA Seal of Approval. But long before I first read Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : Two posts with excerpts from Wittgenstein’s Mistress : The Salem Oak Diner (Facebook)

A joke in the traditional manner

I was told yesterday by an eight-year-old informant that this joke’s premise is already on the wane: “The brainrots wanted to make a fresh start.” So before the sell-by date recedes further into the past:

What number went to see the doctor?

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 traditional manner”: à la my dad, who was making dad jokes long before they were called dad jokes.]

Cussing demanded

Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson) tells her teacher Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens) what’s what. From “The Rightside Up,” the deeply satisfying if not entirely coherent final episode of the Netflix series Stranger Things :

“This isn't Intro to Science. This situation demands cussing.”

[Erica is the younger sister of Lucas, who’s a high-school senior in the final episode. But Priah Ferguson is nineteen, so I think the cussing is okay.]

January 6, 2021, and others

From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, which looks back to January 6, 2021 and other times in American history:

Trump has taken on himself the right to go to war with another country in order to take its oil, and is openly working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since the 1940s. Today, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

That vision is a profound rejection of the principles of the rules-based international order, which was designed to use power for deterrence rather than domination. It is also a profound rejection of the principles of American democracy, a system of checks and balances to channel power into a government that could deliver stability and prosperity to all the people, not just a select few.

In 1863, when that system was unraveling under pressure from those who wanted to base society on a system of enslavement that enriched an elite, Republican president Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to remember those who had died to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln asked Americans to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion,” and to resolve that “these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Miller’s comment about strength, force, and power make me think of what Simone Weil wrote:

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.

Simone Weil, The “Iliad,” or the Poem of Force , trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956).

“5 Easy Pieces”

From Benjamin Dreyer, “5 Easy Pieces,” five ways to improve your writing in 2026.

In December Dreyer offered forty-nine observations about writing to close out the year. For instance: “Please stop being afraid of semicolons.”

A related post
My review of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Recently updated

Woof redux Now with exactly two dogs in the window, one outlined for clarity.

Capture, or kidnapping?

From Aaron Rupar. A reporter speaks with the current occupant:

“She [Delcy Rodríguez] called it kidnapping, of Maduro.”

“That’s alright. That’s not a bad term.”

What does the occupant mean? That “kidnapping” is not a bad description? That kidnapping is not a bad thing to do? That’s it neither a bad description nor a bad thing to do?

Let’s drop “capture,” U.S. media, and call it what it is.

“Soul Music at 25”

I know of only one podcast that (for me) brings tears with almost every episode: Soul Music (BBC Radio 4). The episode marking the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary is no different: “Soul Music at 25.”

What did it for me: the story that goes with Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1 .

Related reading
All OCA Soul Music posts (Pinboard)

Loft dissonance

When we had a friend over for dinner, this memory came up in conversation. I hadn’t thought of it in years.

When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I was invited to play guitar at the local Catholic church’s weekly folk mass. Someone had told the authorities that I played guitar. I was one of three guitarists, born Catholic, yes, but a non-churchgoer, and the only guitarist who did not take Communion before the mass. All of which seemed to be okay.

My most vivid memory of our performances from the choir loft: Nancy and I played acoustic guitars, always in tune. Paul played an electric, always out of tune with the two of us. And he refused to retune. Maybe he lacked the confidence. I remember wincing as the three of us played “Kumbaya” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and whatever else.

I have no idea how many weeks I lasted in that loft.

Dire warnings

Dire warnings about the doings of autocrats and dictators:

M. Gessen, “Maduro’s Ouster Plays Right Into Putin’s Hands” (The New York Times , gift link).

Brynn Tannehill, “Trump Has Started Carving Up the World. Now It’s Putin and Xi’s Turn” (The New Republic ).

Notice especially Fiona Hill’s warning in 2019 about a swap of Venezuela for Ukraine.

Recently updated

Woof redux Are there two dogs at the window?

Woof redux

[362 Columbia Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The arrow points to no. 364, but I’m here for no. 362. Brian called my attention to this second tax photograph in which the dog at no. 362 appears. This post is for Brian and for Fresca, who liked that first photograph.

It’s now clear to me that there’s a railing of some sort placed outside the window sill — handy for both dogs and pillows. And it’s now clear that this dog was watching the street, the whole street, in both directions.

Eyes on the street — long before Jane Jacobs coined that phrase.

*

A reader has suggested that there are two dogs in this photograph. Thoughts, anyone? Here’s a link to the full-size photograph.

*

I finally see them both.

[Click either image for a larger view.]

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

Mental acuity

Follow along:

“It dated to the Monroe doctrines, and the Monroe doctrine is a big deal. But we've superseded it by a lot. By a real lot. They now call it the Donroe document, I don’t know. Monroe doctrine. We sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don’t forget about it anymore.”

And follow along as he slurs and “blinks.” Just blinking! But remember: he aced his third “Congnitive Examination.”

And he has posted to his social-media account seventy-four times in the last six hours.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by S.N., Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. If I can be said to have a wheelhouse, this puzzle was right in it. The one sticky wicket (if a wheelhouse can contain a wicket) was the northeast corner, where an unexpected answer and an unfamiliar answer had me hung up for a bit (if a sticky wicket can hang someone up in a wheelhouse). Enough hijinks.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

4-D, nine letters, “Billboard biggest young-male group, 1987-2012.” Now how do you spell that again?

13-D, eight letters, “Mac partner.” The unxpected answer in the northeast.

14-D, eight letters, “Where Alda shouts ‘I’ve eaten a river of liver.’” A amusingly specific way to clue the answer. (But is it really Alda who says it?)

15-A, nine letters, “Cameo role in eight 007 films.” I think I can name one of them.

21-A, six letters, “Reading on concert hall walls.” My first thought was of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, whose backstage hallways bear the signatures of countless guest artists. “Viva a música,” Yamanadu Costa wrote there.” But I know that the clue wasn’t looking for that.

24-A, seven letters, “Form-fitting fabric.” The unfamiliar answer in the northeast.

27-A, four letters, “Special disposal.” I always enjoy seeing a common word made Stumper-y.

31-A, four letters, “End of seven UN member names.” Heh.

31-D, nine letters, “STORM + GALE weathery anagram.” Not the only cryptic-style clue in the puzzle.

32-A, fifteen letters, “Major turning point.” Even with the first two letters in place, I think the answer is not easy to see.

34-D, eight letters, “Parting suggestion.” I always like hearing or saying these words.

37-A, four letters, “Guy embodied by nonchalance.” I was not fooled.

38-A, threeletters, “Flat tip.” I was ready to say that I didn’t understand the answer when I suddenly understood it.

44-A, six letters, “Grammy category first won by Black Uhuru (1985).” Anyone remember “Chill out, chill out, chill out, New York”?

49-A, six letters, “Recipe’s kick addition.” Oblique, but not unfair.

50-D, four letters, “Hook model.” I never realized that.

My favorite in this puzzle: 55-D, three letters, “Spring summer.” See 27-A. So simple, but so Stumper-y.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

What the actual

Congress? International law?

Just another day in the Untied States.

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The current occupant, later this morning: “We’re going to run the country” — until we (?) choose a successor.

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As for Maria Corina Machado, she doesn’t have “the support or the respect” to run the country.

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Just now, Marco Rubio on Cuba: “It’s run by incompetent, senile men.”

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The occupant just now: “I settled eight and one quarter war [sic].

The White House is occupied by a man who is out of his fucking mind. Nothing new about that, but I feel the need to say it.

Uncle Felix’s potage Mongole

From Christmas in Connecticut (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1945). Uncle Felix (S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall), who’s a chef, not an uncle, at least not to Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck), at whose pretend farmhouse he’s now cooking, tells the publisher Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) what’s on the menu:

“And for dinner, Mr. Yardley, we will have potage Mongole with roast goose bernozz with walnut stuffing.”

“Oh, Uncle Felix, stop, please. You make my mouth water.”

Bernozz is my approximation of Felix’s pronunciation of Béarnaise. Potage Mongole is of course purée Mongole, a once-fashionable soup, and an apocryphal inspiration for the name of the Eberhard Faber Mongol pencil.

The advertisement accompanying this exploration of soup and pencils is from the October 15, 1937 issue of Life. You can click for a larger view.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol pencil posts (Pinboard)

Christmas in Connecticut sardines

From Christmas in Connecticut (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1945). Felix Bassenak (S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall), chef at a nearby restaurant, brings Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) a mushroom omelet for breakfast. What’s she already eating as she sits at the typewriter in her apartment?

“Gee, I knew it! Such breakfast. Sardines. [Unintelligble .] You mad at your stomach, darling?”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)