250 to 250

“A series of one-minute stories of the many people, places, and events that have built our country and remind us of the power of each person to make history”: 250 to 250 is a new effort from Heather Cox Richardson and friends. Twelve stories so far.

Memorial Day 1926

[“Booing of Fascisti Stirs the Paraders: Blackshirts Near Blows with Taunters Who Tell Them They ‘Don't Belong’ in Line.” The New York Times, June 1, 1926.]

The article ends by quoting Dr. E.G. Citriolo, one of the leaders of the Fascist contingent:

“I understand that some protest was to have been made this morning at City Hall,” he said. “I understand from my informant that those opposed to us are anti-Fascisti. They are purely Communists. They have no country and no religion. Our three symbols are: Country, religion and family.”

And the past, as William Faulkner wrote, is never dead. It’s not even past.

Clarence Williams’s house

[171-37 108th Avenue, Jamaica, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

A fellow lover of the music asked me if I knew the address for Clarence Williams, who lived across the street from James P. Johnson. I didn’t, nor did I know that Williams and Johnson were neighbors. But no. 171-37 was Williams’s house. The address is in his New York Times obituary.

Clarence Williams (1893 or 1898–1965), pianist, composer, and record producer, was a ubiquitous presence on blues and jazz 78s in the 1920s and ’30s, and another of the eminent Black Americans in music and sport who made Queens their home. (Wikipedia has Williams and his wife Eva Taylor living in Queens from the 1920s.) Among Williams’s credits as composer or co-composer: “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Cake Walking Babies from Home,” “Royal Garden Blues,” “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” and “Sugar Blues.”

Here are just two samples of Williams on record:

From 1925, “Cake Walking Babies from Home” (Williams–Chris Smith–Henry Troy), by Clarence Williams’ Blue Five: Williams, piano; Eva Taylor (Mrs. Williams), vocal; Louis Armstrong, cornet; Sidney Bechet, soprano saxophone; Charlie Irvis, trombone; Buddy Christian, banjo. At 1:32 you can hear the piano preparing the charge into the last two choruses, in which Armstrong and Bechet take over.

And from 1929, “I’m Wild About That Thing” (Spencer Williams), with Bessie Smith and Eddie Lang (guitar). I love the way Smith’s performance builds in intensity from a sedate beginning. Williams takes it up a notch at the start of the sixth chorus. And as I wrote in a 2005 post, “Lang’s obbligato practically dances it way off the record.”

If you’re wondering, Williams was the grandfather of the actor Clarence Williams III. The resemblance was strong.

And if you’re wondering why address numbers in Queens are hyphenated, here’s an explanation.

Also in the Queens tax photographs: Fats Waller’s house. Like the Johnson house and the Waller house, no. 171-37 still stands.

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

[If you click for large, you’ll see that what appear to be holes in the fencing are shadows from the basement windows. I’d prefer Williams’s as the possessive at all times, but the record identifies the band as Clarence Williams’ Blue Five.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Kate Chin Park, left me at a loss. And then I saw 23-D, eleven letters, “Big name in confessional poetry.”

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “Develop a crush?” Oof.

5-D, six letters, “Worked, as much wood.” Kate Chin Park is a furniture maker and craftsperson.

9-D, nine letters, “A maize-ing creation.” Could it be CORNMAZE? No, it couldn’t.

11-D, eleven letters, “Bit of kid lit.” I like this answer, which is a reminder of what it’s like to grow as a reader.

13-D, five letters, “Endure no longer.” This seems like an odd forced note in a terrific puzzle.

21-A, seven letters, “Bubblegum kin.” My first thought was of music.

36-D, four letters, “Rodin’s thinker.” A carefully worded clue.

41-A, four letters, “Commencement wear usually bought.” I didn’t know about this.

53-A, seven letters, “Matter of opinion.” Just one example of why I was grateful for 23-D.

54-D, four letters, “What an Eliot novel isn’t about.”Clever.

65-A, five letters, “Whom a Congressional caucus has advocated for since 2021.” I didn’t know about this either.

My favorite in this puzzle: 37-A, fifteen letters, “Erstwhile home for a paper tiger.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Three Colbert footnotes

Last night’s last Late Show had at least one error of fact,¹ at least one very hidden joke,² and many surprises.³
__________

¹ The song one guest recalled hearing early in life was Fred Fisher’s “Chicago (That Todd’ling Town),” published in 1922. Stephen Colbert mistakenly identified Sammy Cahn as its writer. Cahn wrote the lyrics for the 1964 song “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” (music by Jimmy Van Heusen).

² Look at the electrical boxes.

³ You think I’m going to mention them here?

’Mame

All singing, all dancing, all soy!

It’s ’Mame, now playing at the Shubert Theatre.

[Just a short flight of fancy, and at least it’s an improvement over ghastly southern nostalgia.]

Penguin typos

From the BBC Radio 4 program Word of Mouth . Michael Rosen is interviewing Rebecca Lee, senior editor at Penguin and author of Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and Misadventures in the World of Books . The subject is typos:

Lee: Not all typos are equal. So, for example, spelling an author’s name wrong on the jacket of a book is an absolute nightmare.

Rosen: Has that happened?

Lee: Not to me.

It’s not clear whether Lee is referring to books she’s edited or books she’s written, but it’s happened at Penguin. The Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Nashe volumes from our Penguin Little Black Classics sets misspell the authors’ names on their covers. I wrote to Penguin three times about this series, once for each misspelling and once about the six blank pages in the volume of Wilfred Owen’s poems — never no reply.

Related posts
Caveat emptor (Penguin) : Caleridge : Nasha

[“Never no reply”: a nod to Duke Ellington’s “Never No Lament.”]

A librarian’s Mongol

[It’s Your Library (Teaching Films, Inc., 1947.]

Elaine was first to call it. It’s a Mongol, a WWII-era Mongol, with a plastic ferrule. Example here.

It’s Your Library is a short educational film. Not exceptionally great (i.e., weird), but still fun.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

Q: “Who do they think is watching this show?”

A: “People in pain?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Watching The Late Show last night, we saw the same Salonpas commercial two — or was it three? — times. I know that the answer above was also a question. There’s always another question to be asked.]

Why RSS

Brent Simmons, developer of NetNewsWire, a free open-source RSS reader for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, interviewed on an episode of John Gruber’s podcast The Talk Show (my transcription):

I want people to use RSS. By the mid-2010s or whatever, it was clear that the social networks were leading down a very, very dark place. And RSS is still a thing, and it’s not owned by billionaires who are trying to monetize outrage or whatever, so I wanted to make sure that there was an RSS reader that was free, right? So people had no excuse not to use it other than they don’t want to. But there wouldn’t be any excuse like, Oh, I can’t afford it. Nope — totally free. It’s not supported by ads or any other thing. Doesn’t phone home, doesn’t trick anybody into anything, just perfectly free and just right there. That is my goal, remains my goal.

See also Brent’s statement of purpose: Why Write an RSS Reader.

I’ve been relying on NetNewsWire since October 2022. It’s a great app. Long may it wave, if apps can be said to wave. Or even if not.

[The episode aired in January 2026. I’m catching up.]

Gmail Live

“To help find something in your inbox, you can just ask a question with your voice”: Gmail is introducing Gmail Live, “a new AI-powered voice mode” (The Verge ). But wait, there’s more:

Google is bringing voice-driven AI features to Docs and Keep, too. With Docs Live, you can talk over your ideas with Gemini and it will help structure a document and pull in details from places like your Gmail and Google Drive. In Keep, as you talk about things you might want the app to track, it can put together things like reminders and grocery lists for you.

No thank you.

Have I mentioned how much I like using Mimestream? Oh, yes, I see that I have.

“Sardines and shprinkles”

Mooch is hopeful.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[I snagged several cans of King Oscar Mediterranean Style in a supermarket last week. No shprinkles.]

Who wants to be a millionaire?

$1,776,000,000 ÷ 1600 = $1,110,000.

In a January 2026 reports, Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee noted “nearly 1,600 rioters and insurrectionists [pardoned] for crimes connected to the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Of course, some of those who will share in this obscene use of our tax dollars will get more than others.

Recently booed, recently updated

AI, booed: Now co-starring Eric Schmidt.

Dreaming up footnotes

From Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989):

Nobody wants a complete set of footnotes to The Post Card any more than they want one to Finnegans Wake, Tristram Shandy, or Remembrance of Things Past. The reader’s relation with the authors of such books depends largely upon her being left alone to dream up her own footnotes.

But what would count as a complete set of footnotes? And how could ever know that it was complete?

Me, in something I wrote for students some years ago: “Literature exceeds criticism. There are no complete interpretations; there are only complete poems, novels, plays.”

Related reading
A handful of OCA Richard Rorty posts (Pinboard)

[La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (1980) is a work by Jacques Derrida.]

Drawings from John Ashbery’s collection

At the Morgan Library: Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery’s Collection . You can see eleven of the twenty-five drawings at the Morgan website.

Related reading
All OCA John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

Some Lexikaliker rocks

At Lexikaliker, Gunther found einige Steine , or “some rocks.” Bonus: his handsome dog Kisho.

Related reading
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Not quite teleportation

Charles Dickens, from Bleak House (1853).

Dickens believed in the spontaneous combustion of persons. He did not, as far as I know, believe in teleportation. But Tulkinghorn’s form of movement is at least close.

Also from Bleak House
At Peffer and Snagsby’s : Bucket’s Moleskine? : Dickens in the house : Five sentences : Gridley’s monologue : “It must be a strange state” : Jellyby closets : Learning to write : Living on credit : “London particular” : Reading don’t pay : “Town-talk”

A Theater of War production about AI

From Theater of War: A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem , an adaptation of an essay by Paul Bloom, performed by Oscar Isaac, Bill Murray, and Lois Smith.

On stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, May 27, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, on the air at WNYC 93.9 FM, and in the air at WNYC.org.

[Re: A.I. : Paul Bloom’s essay appeared in The New Yorker, which insists on periods. The rest of the world doesn’t.]

Sunlite Diner

[3914 Queens Boulevard, Sunnyside, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Rest rooms and booth service? I’m there.

A Facebook post describes the Sunlite Diner as “a beloved Sunnyside spot where locals gathered over coffee, pancakes, and stories.”

And there’s a diner at this location today, Pete’s Grill, est. 2007.

As for Hub Homes, a 1937 New York Times article places this real-estate development of small, stately two-story houses south of Queens Boulevard between 60th and 64th Streets. Here’s one such house, within walking distance of the diner, if you like a long walk. In remembrance of things past, carry a keyring sporting a Sunlite Diner doodad.

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

“Game changer!”

In today’s Zippy , “a walk through the thicket of commonly overused words & phrases.”

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is a delightful puzzle — sometimes surprisingly straightforward (37-D, letters, “Shadow in the sky”), sometimes unexpectedly tricky (2-D, four letters, “Half the alphabet”). I started with 1-A, five letters, “Source for ‘kiwi’” and 3-D, four letters, “City that thanks London with an annual Christmas tree,” then dropped down to 57-A, ten letters, “Non-nutritive food for thought” and 55-D, four letters, “‘I wish to tune my quivering ____’: Byron.” And then jumped from place to place.

The one cross that had me baffled for a while: 12-D, four letters, “Big sports bet” and 16-A, four letters, “Moniker for those with no id.” Yow.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

10-A, four letters, “Person who’s short and lacks credit.” Clever.

10-D, six letters, “Aww-ful assessment.” Knowing someone who hates the word helped me get it.

16-A, fifteen letters, “Misdirection metaphor.” Every day in these Untied States. (Not a typo.)

21-D, four letters, “Best Score Oscar nominee name for Gandhi.” I’ve never seen it, but I guessed (correctly).

24-D, four letters, “Drop a line.” My first thought was SEND. My second was FLUB.

30-D, five letters, “Seasonal concern?” ALLERGIES doesn’t fit.

35-D, four letters, “Tavern’s light reading.” Oof.

My favorite in this puzzle: 49-A, fifteen letters, “Person who grew up on the Oregon Trail.” A term I know from my kids, who find it hilarious.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“You know who he is”

Just one moment from Nick Shifrin’s reporting on the PBS NewsHour tonight:

Shifrin: “But President Trump also did not commit to approving $14 billion worth of arms sales to Taiwan that are already teed up.”

The current occupant, speaking to reporters on Air Force One: “I’m gonna see. I have to speak to the person that right now, as you know — you know who he is — that’s running Taiwan.”

Hard to say whether “you know who he is” is a cover for cognitive decline or a cover for ignorance. The Taiwanese president is named Lai Ching-te, and an American president who’s just been to China should have that name on hand.

AI, booed

“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution”: Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate executive, praised AI in a commencement speech to arts and humanities and communications graduates and found herself booed. And then said that she had “struck a chord.”

No, lady, you struck a nerve.

Read all about it: “Graduates Boo Commencement Speech About A.I.” (The New York Times, gift link).

And here’s a longer excerpt from the speech.

*

May 19: Ex-Google executive Eric Schmidt was booed in Arizona. Wipe that smirk of your face, mister. Nobody wants the future you’re selling.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[Like The New Yorker , the Times punctuates AI . Merriam-Webster deems the punctuated form less common.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Yes, he’s in disguise. But a more significant element of misdirection: he’s laughing, at something genuinely funny. Yes, that guy, laughing.

A hint: the actor was known for violence both offscreen and on.

Another hint: he made an appearance on Seinfeld .

The answer is now in the comments.

Leave your guess(es) in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA mystery actor posts (Pinboard)

What’s that smell?

[Dustin, May 15, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

I thought that yesterday’s Dustin was a joke. And then I saw today’s strip and discovered that UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship, coming soon to the current occupant’s front yard) has indeed put out a line of colognes (packaged in fist-in-glove-shaped vessels).

The scent that prompts Dustin’s sister Meg’s snark is Ultimate K.O., and it’s real: “Sweet like a knockout punch yet grounded in the power and persistence that drives every fight.”

Recently updated

The pickle turns: Now with an explanation of the mystery at the center of Capt. Park’s awning.

“The ‘Cento’ Secret”

[Google AI, May 13, 2026.]

Google’s take on M.A. Jenene keeps changing, but there’s no doubt that she was a real poet. I wanted to catch this account of her work in poetry before it disappears.

Related reading
All OCA M.A. Jenene posts

[I love “such as.”]

Kanopy?

A reader asked if I’ve tried Kanopy for movies. I have. The service is available from my university library (not my public library), with very limited “educational” offerings.

Years ago, the university library made all of Kanopy’s offerings available. Then it became necessary to fill out a form explaining why you wanted to watch something. (I once wrote “curiosity,” and the library obliged.) And now there’s very little available: “Alas, your selection isn’t available at your library.”

It’s a money thing, of course.

DOWDY

[No spoilers. It’s yesterday’s Wordle.]

In 2005 I wrote a first post about “the dowdy world,” or modern American culture as it was before certain forms of technology redefined everyday life. It’s the world of payphones, telegrams, and laundry on lines.

Orange Crate Art has 412 posts tagged dowdyworld. And now, 413.

Related reading
All OCA “dowdy world” posts (Pinboard)

[I always begin the Wordle with STARE. If that gets me nothing, I always try DOILY next.]

Twelve movies

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

Random Harvest (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1942). A bonkers story of double amnesia, from what must be a bonkers James Hilton novel. Ronald Colman plays an amnesiac veteran, ”John Smith,” who leaves the asylum where he’s confined after WWI, meets and marries a singer, Paula Ridgeway (Greer Garson), suffers an accident that restores his memory of his early (wealthy!) life while wiping out all memory of his marriage, and begins to succumb to the charms of a much younger woman (Susan Peters). Can Paula find her husband and help him recognize her again? Best moments: the creak of the gate, and “Smithy!” ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Mad Doctor (dir. Tim Whelan, 1940). Basil Rathbone as Dr. George Sebastien, a sham psychiatrist and, in off-hours, the suave murderer of a succession of wives. Ralph Morgan and John Howard play a small-town doctor and big-city newspaperman devoted to uncovering the truth about the doctor; Ellen Drew is the fragile personality who falls under Sebastien’s spell. Genuinely eerie, and the most provocative element is the relationship between Sebastien and his assistant/housemate Maurice (Martin Kosleck): an unmistakable queer subtext there. My favorite line: “Possible tragedy — what are you talking about?” ★★★★ (YT)

[Maurice and Dr. Sebastien. Dialogue from another scene, but it fits here: ”You’re like all the other clever ones, clever until they meet a woman, and then they suddenly become fools, and the law gets them, standing still, with a faraway look in their eyes.”]

*

The Thief Collector (dir. Allison Otto, 2022). A documentary about the theft and recovery of a Willem de Kooning painting from an Arizona museum, the retired teachers who stole it, and the antique dealers who restored it to its proper home. I noticed the 2017 news of this painting’s recovery and wrote in a blog post, “The details make the story sound like something for the Coen brothers.” And it turned into a movie after all, one which presents the story’s ever-deepening strangeness with great imagination and wit. To say much more would give too much away. ★★★★ (A)

[A point I have to make: A young relative of the thieves who appears on camera suggests that the title of The Cup and the Lip, a book of stories by one of the thieves, is an odd one for English speakers. But in Yiddish, the relative says, cup refers to the mind; lip, to the mouth: what’s unsaid and what’s said. A much more obvious and likely meaning lies in the adage “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” which goes unmentioned in the movie. To my mind the adage suggests the elements of error and risk that would appeal to the thieves, characterized in the documentary as adrenaline junkies. I wrote to the director about it many weeks ago — no reply.]

*

The Librarians (dir. Kim A. Snyder, 2025). The far-right’s efforts to get its people on local school boards began years ago. This documentary shows the results of such efforts, with school boards authorizing the removal from libraries of books that address LGBTQ issues and race, and school librarians protecting the right to read branded as “groomers” and pedophiles and subjected to death threats from members of their communities. As one Texas librarian says, “Librarians are the firewall.” She first appears in the documentary unnamed and in shadow; she later speaks in her own person as Audrey Wilson-Youngblood, no longer willing to be anonymous. ★★★★ (PBS)

[The Librarians is available from PBS with Passport.]

*

It’s Your Library (Teaching Films, Inc., 1947). See Dick play with a piece of coal as he walks to the library to return a book for his mother. See Dick enter the library, eagerly seize upon a book about boats, dirty up the pages, and be told by a librarian (nicely!) to go wash his hands. See the librarian help Dick find books about airplanes and games. See Dick begin to appreciate the library. ★★ (YT)

*

King of the Newsboys (dir. Bernhard Vorhaus, 1938). Lew Ayres and Helen Mack star in a story of a young man’s rise from ruffian to newsboy to publishing magnate, all after his “girl” leaves him and their Hell’s Kitchen environs to live as the mistress of a gangster until — I’ll stop there. Odd and discontinuous, but with real Depression pathos: dreams of Venice, a $50 watch with a ninety-week payment plan. Watch for Billy Benedict of the Bowery Boys and Horace McMahon, later of television’s Naked City. It’s a Republic picture, so it’ll only take an hour of your time before The Late Show comes on. ★★ (YT)

*

Caterpillar (dir. Liza Madelup, 2023). An overly long documentary about a fifty-year-old biracial man, David Taylor, who travels to India to receive color-changing iris implants from a company called BrightOptical (free, in exchange for publicity), an utterly dubious surgical procedure (its usual cost never made clear) with the potential for disastrous results. It’s all hard to look at — eager clients (one of whom understands almost nothing of what company personnel are telling him in English), company personnel who shut down every complaint when things go wrong — but it’s also hard to look away. The movie’s weakness is its vagueness about David’s life: we learn that his past includes a stepfather with green eyes, abuse, “the streets,” drugs (and that’s about it, the words themselves) and a life in Brooklyn, to which he returns by the movie’s end; in the present he appears sadly deluded, with no clear source of income, but posing for photographs as if he’s a celebrity. I wonder if he’s ever heard of The Bluest Eye. ★★★ (N)

*

Cloak and Dagger (dir. Fritz Lang, 1946). Gary Cooper plays Alvah Jesper, a nuclear physicist working on the Manhattan Project, pressed into government service to subvert Nazi development of an atomic bomb. The story moves from “Midwestern University” to Switzerland to Italy, as Jesper seeks to make contact with Hungarian and Italian physicists (Helene Thimig, Vladimir Sokoloff). Along the way, Jesper falls in love with Gina (Lilli Palmer), a member of the Resistance. Best moment: death by strangulation as Rossini’s “La Danza” plays diegetically. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Beware of Pity (dir. Maurice Elvey, 1946). From Stefan Zweig’s only finished novel. As the Great War approaches, Austro-Hungarian lieutenant Anton Marek (Albert Lieven) meets and begins a friendship with Edith de Kekesfalva (Lilli Palmer), a beautiful baronness crippled from a riding accident. It soon becomes clear to the viewer, though not to Marek, that Edith’s feelings for him far exceed his feelings for her, and before long, he’s an unwitting partner in a relationship he doesn’t even realize was in formation, with complications increasing when the possibility of a cure for Edith’s condition arises. The frame story, with a WWII-era Czech Marek in England telling his story to a young Czech soldier, adds an important commentary on the difference between pity and compassion. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Body and Soul (dir. Robert Rossen, 1947). For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the world championship, and lose his own soul? John Garfield and Lilli Palmer star in a story of money and honor in the world of boxing. Adding value: Abraham Polonsky hard-boiled screenplay, James Wong Howe’s cinematography (the fight scenes look like genuine newsreels), and Hugo Friedhofer’s variations on Johnny Green’s title song. With Hazel Brooks as an ultra-glamorous singer, William Conrad as a sleazy fight promoter, and Canada Lee as a boxer undone by the sport. ★★★★ (YT)

*

City of Joel (dir. Jesse Sweet, 2018). I dislike fundamentalism in all its varieties. Here it’s the fundamentalism of the Satmar variety of Hasidism, whose adherents left Brooklyn and created a village, Kiryas Joel [City of Joel], in the upstate New York town of Monroe, building massive multi-family houses for an ever-growing population and electing officials (particularly one evangelical Christian) to do their bidding when it comes to rezoning. Only a handful of more or less official Satmar representatives speak for the camera, when it might be more interesting to hear from the community members who eye the filmmakers suspiciously or laugh among themselves during zoning meetings (but who would likely never speak on camera). Another weakness: the documentary makes no mention of darker matters in the Satmar community (think hepatitis, sexual abuse, and voter fraud). ★★ (N)

*

The Passing of the Third Floor Back (dir. Berthold Viertel, 1935). A British film that offers the opportunity to see Conrad Veidt as something decidedly other than a Nazi officer: here he plays a faintly glowing nameless man who takes a room in a boarding house and proceeds to work his benevolent influence on his fellow residents. They include a tyrannical landlord, a young maid with a reform-school past, and a older couple who have agreed to marry their daughter off to a craven businessman for financial reasons. Opposing the stranger at every turn is the craven businessman (Frank Cellier), in a story that takes shape as an allegory of good vs. evil, angel vs. devil. Best moments: everyone off on a boat trip. ★★★ (YT)

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

Mentally unwell

From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American : The biggest story in the country, today and always, is that the president of the United States is mentally unwell.”

But how many of the details in HCR’s report made “the news” last night? I watched the long opening segments of ABC and NBC and much of the PBS NewsHour, and I saw none.

Thom Yorke and his teachers

At “a posh private boys’ school full of assholes,” Thom Yorke’s art teacher and music teacher told him that they could see something in what he was doing:

“You don't realize until after how important that is. I’m absolutely convinced that if both those kind men — if they had not done that, I wouldn’t be here today doing this. Convinced.”

“Have you ever thought about where you might have ended up if that hadn’t —?”

“God no.”

Thom Yorke was Lauren Laverne’s guest on the BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs in 2019. The episode is available through May 31.

A pencil runs for governor

NPR reports that in Oregon Pencil, a pencil, is running for governor. And there’s a website: pencil4gov.com.

“Father” is best

From the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey :

Antinous to Telemachus: “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard.”

Telemachus, in what sounds like a reply: “My dad is coming home.”

Daddy? Dad? Really? He’s the goddam paterfamilias!

There’s nothing wrong with bringing Homer into vivid contemporary English (as, say, Stanley Lombardo does), but that English has to sound right. “Daddy” and “dad,” to my ear, don’t.

In Homer’s poem, Telemachus calls his father πατὴρ (patēr), “father.” He calls the swineherd Eumaeus ᾰ̓́ττᾰ (atta), which also means “father.” In Lombardo’s translation, Telemachus calls Eumaeus “Papa” — a wonderful way to mark the swineherd as Odysseus-like (a royal son and displaced person), countrified, and grandfatherly. (Lombardo’s Telemachus calls Odysseus “Father,” of course.) The Phaeacian princess Nausicaa addresses her father Alcinous as πάππα (pappa). Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles, and Lombardo all bring that in English as “Daddy,” which seems appropriate for a teenaged daughter asking to borrow the car(t). Robert Fitzgerald has more fun with the word: his Nausicaa addresses her “dear Papà.”

But Telemachus’s Odysseus? That’s his father, not his dad. And I can’t imagine even the surliest suitor using the word “daddy.”

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard) : Whose Homer?

[Anyone who’s seen O Brother, Where Art Thou? will recognize a borrowing in this post.]

Your guys’s

We saw three people dressed for their prom strolling the aisles of Five Below, amusing themselves and others.

“I like your guys’s sense of fun,” I said. Pronounced /'gī-ziz/. I was surprised to hear myself saying that. But it fit the occasion.

The Thomas’ carriage rides on

I am pleased to see that the horse-drawn carriage (coach and four) that once appeared on packages of Thomas’ English Muffins still appears on Thomas’ trailers, or at least one of those trailers. You’ll have to take my word for it: I was driving.

The coach and four disppeared from the package several years ago: Thomas’ missing carriage.

[Thomas’ spells its name without an s after the apostrophe.]

The pickle turns

[351 East 61st Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Neither a horseradish and pickle company nor a wood turner would find much of a welcome on East 61st Street today, even if they agreed to share the same building.

Capt. Post advertised in the Stewards Manual (Stewards Association of New York City) as early as 1904. In 1921 the business was incorporated. The Captain is listed in Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder’s The Pickled City: A Biography of New York Pickles (2026), a work that lists an astonishing number of New York pickle makers.

[A 1904 advertisement.]

[The New York Times, February 22, 1921.]

[The Spice Mill, February 1921.]

[The masthead.]

Max Deutsch was working as a wood turner and twister as early as 1931, when he was listed in American Lumberman, and as late as 1953, when he was listed in the Industrial Directory of New York State.

I like the Captain’s awning: “CAPT. POST [?] & PICKLE COMPANY.” Maybe an H filled that space? Notice too the graffiti, the Deutsch sign, the MYERS who also worked in wood, the man carrying — what?, and the Italian-American grocery store. Thanks, Brian, for noticing this building. Its neighbors stand, but it’s now gone.

See also the Home of Piccalilli and the Hungarian Pickle Works.

*

May 14: Brian figured out the mystery at the center of the Captain’s awning:

[Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office (1928).]

Get it? Horse-red-ish. I used Acorn to give this mark some color. I don’t know what to make of “Claims use since Apr. 15, 1830.”



*

May 16: Now I sort of do. Trow’s New York City Directory (1886) has a listing for a Captain Post’s horseradish:


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

Mother’s Day and Mothers’ Day

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day” — with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural — actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society.

And the story follows.

Happy Mother’s Day and Mothers’ Day to all.

[Wikipedia: Howe’s “Mothers’ Day for Peace” was meant to be observed on June 2.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, easy going. This puzzle might be a good one for someone wanting to try their hand at solving a Newsday Saturday. With 1-D, three letters, “Mobile utility” crossing 13-A, five letters, “___ al Ajillo (garlicky entree),” I started (for once) in the upper left corner and went from there.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

14-D, nine letters, “2020s’ youthful ‘zero reaction.’” I have to admit that I find it refreshing to encounter something different. “Is that a Tilley hat?!” It wasn’t, but we had a fun conversation about hats.

16-A, ten letters, “Screen’s space savers.” This clue can’t be about patching holes in window screens, can it?

19-A, six letters, “Hamlet’s dagger.” I’m not sure if it’s meant as the giveaway I think it is.

27-D, ten letters, “Pandowdy cousin.” I have my seventh-grade English teacher to think for this answer, which was part of the joke he made again and again of the name of a girl in the class. This teacher also had fake stairs down pat.

32-D, four letters, “___ a primera vista.” At a glance, I misread this clue as asking for the name of a dish.

35-D, eight letters, “Velvety milk drinks.” The ways in which simple ingredients can be combined to make things that bear different names always has me looking slightly askance.

36-A, five letters, “Woman of Canadian extraction.” I must be on Matthew Sewell’s wavelength.

37-D, six letters, “Encyclopedia Brown, enduringly.” I got on an EB kick as a grownup, as these posts will attest.

41-A, five letters, “Bandleader autograph with a pentagram.” Oh — of course.

44-A, thirteen letters, “Unplanned minor meetings.” I found the start of this answer cleverly misleading, but I’m not sure that I was supposed to.

48-D, five letters, “Whom Woolf praised with ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.’” Yes, Virginia. My snark inspired by David Markson.

56-A, ten letters, “Unwritten endorsement.” Well, it might be written, kinda, or have been written, at some point, maybe, in the past, at least in a manner of speaking, no pun intended.

58-D, three letters, “What the tennis US Open is played on.” I don’t like cluing this answer in this way, even if I see it right away.

63-A, three letters, “LFB’s putative Wizard inspiration.” Got it, but I had to look it up to understand.

My favorite in this puzzle: 25-A, thirteen letters, “Soft numbers.” Because the clue sounds to me like the title of a John Ashbery poem.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A day in the life of a failing democracy

I think I learn more about what’s happening in our country from one installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American than from an hour or more of televised news. And there’s no need for anyone to say “Look at this.”

Mental acuity

Via Aaron Rupar:

“What’s going on with Marty Makary?”

“Nothing much. He’s [doing?] fine.”

“Are you going to fire him?”

“Uh, I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it.”

It’s been widely reported that the current occupant is planning to fire Marty Makary, the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)

Mimestream iOS Beta

Exciting news for Mac users: the excellent Gmail client Mimestream is now in a private iOS beta version:

We’re sending invites every week, starting with our earliest customers first and working our way through from there. If you have a Mimestream subscription, you’ll automatically receive an invitation when it’s your turn. There’s no waitlist to join.

I’ve been using Mimestream to manage my mail on a Mac since November 2021. Back then I wrote,

I wish I had known about Mimestream sooner — it’s been around for more than a year. I plan to pay for the app when it goes to market, even (so help me) if it’s available only by subscription.

When the app went out of beta in 2023, I subscribed. Mimestream remains the only app I’ve been willing to use on a subscription basis. It’s great to have it available for iOS.

Yes, I got my invite today.

Recently updated

FSRC: annual report: I left out Mark Lilla.

Over-handed

Charles Dickens, from Bleak House (1853).

Bleak House is full of these moments. The most fleetingly present characters get their chance in the spotlight.

If you teach the novel, I think it’s appropriate to demonstrate the toss and catch. A quarter works nicely.

*

A comment on this post notes that G.K. Chesterton said something similar about the attention Dickens gives to minor characters. Call it anticipatory plagiarism: Chesterton had the idea before I did. This passage, which mentions characters in The Pickwick Papers and Our Mutual Friend , captures the idea. From Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906):

[I]f Dickens had written the Sherlock Holmes stories, every character in them would have been equally arresting and memorable. A Sherlock Holmes would have cooked the dinner for Sherlock Holmes; a Sherlock Holmes would have driven his cab. If Dickens brought in a man merely to carry a letter, he had time for a touch or two, and made him a giant. Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered it with minor characters. Mr. John Smauker, the servant of Mr. Cyrus Bantam, though he merely passes across the stage, is almost as vivid to us as Mr. Samuel Weller, the servant of Mr. Samuel Pickwick. The young man with the lumpy forehead, who only says “Esker” to Mr. Podsnap’s foreign gentleman, is as good as Mr. Podsnap himself. They appear only for a fragment of time, but they belong to eternity. We have them only for an instant, but they have us for ever.

Also from Bleak House
At Peffer and Snagsby’s : Bucket’s Moleskine? : Dickens in the house : Five sentences : Gridley’s monologue : “It must be a strange state” : Jellyby closets : Learning to write : Living on credit : “London particular” : Reading don’t pay : “Town-talk”

Domestic comedy

“I’m a sardine eater from jump street. From jump street!”

“You were a sardine eater from before jump street was paved.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[There appears to be a shortage of decent sardines in downstate Illinois. I’ve tried three supermarkets. Are tariffs to blame? Or supply-chain problems? Or the faddish sardine diet? Whatever the cause or causes, I am bummed.]

Two Guys

From The New York Times (gift link): “A Mistaken Guy: The 20-Year Legacy of a Live TV Blunder.”

Take the time (under two minutes) to watch the BBC video that accompanies the article. The greatest moment: “Exactly.” Bravo, Guy Goma!

[The post title is a nod to the now-defunct discount department store where I worked while in college.]

“Let’s write two”

[Chicago Cubs bat-pencil hybrid, with the Dixon Ticonderoga ferrule (and name). 18″. Click for a larger view.]

A gift. Thanks, guys!

[“Let’s play two” was the catchphrase of the Cubs’ Ernie Banks.]

Kash’s stash

Sarah Fitzpatrick of The Atlantic, now the subject of an FBI investigation for this article — “The FBI Director is MIA” — has further news to report: “Kash Patel’s Personalized Bourbon Stash” (gift links). An excerpt:

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)

Photographs of two bottles accompany the article.

A related post
Why is Kash Patel called Keystone Kash?

“No gobbledygook”

Barack Obama, interviewed on The Late Show, commenting on liberal–left rifts in the Democratic Party:

“What I’m more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we’re not in a college seminar? Can you talk plain English to folks?... No gobbledygook. Just talk like normal people talk. You know what? Like, ‘The rent is too high.’“

I’m trying to decide whom he has in mind when he refers to gobbledygook.

One question I would like to ask the former president: how can it be that the country that elected him twice also elected the current occupant twice? And what does that portend for the future?

[I suspect that Obama was thinking of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eleventh year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read:

From the Penguin Little Black Classics series, nos. 3 through 80:

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue

Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorisms on Love and Hate

John Ruskin, Traffic

Pu Songling, Wailing Ghosts

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Three Tang Dynasty Poets

Walt Whitman, On the Beach at Night Alone

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

Baltasar Gracián, How to Use Your Enemies

John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes

Thomas Hardy, Woman Much Missed

Guy de Maupassant, Femme Fatale

Marco Polo, Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls

Suetonius, Caligula

Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and Medea

Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Petronius, Trimalchio’s Feast

Johann Peter Hebel, How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light

Hans Christian Andersen, The Tinder Box

Rudyard Kipling, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows

Dante, Circles of Hell

Henry Mayhew, Of Street Piemen

Hafez, The nightingales are drunk

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath

Michel de Montaigne, How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night

Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

Mary Kingsley, A Hippo Banquet

Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra

Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Well, they are gone, and here must I remain

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings

Charles Dickens, The Great Winglebury Duel

Herman Melville, The Maldive Shark

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse’s Story

Nikolay Leskov, The Steel Flea

Honoré de Balzac, The Atheist’s Mass

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper

C.P. Cavafy, Remember, Body...

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One

Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart

Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

Samuel Pepys, The Great Fire of London

Edith Wharton, The Reckoning

Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet

Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, My Dearest Father

Plato, Socrates’ Defence

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

Sindbad the Sailor

Sophocles, Antigone We substituted Peter Woodruff’s translation for Robert Fagles’s.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man

Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need?

Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci

Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

Shen Fu, The Old Man of the Moon

Aesop, The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon

Matsuo Bashō, Lips too chilled

Emily Brontë, The Night is Darkening Round Me

Joseph Conrad, To-morrow

Richard Hakluyt, The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe

Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings

Charles Darwin, It was snowing butterflies

Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom

Catullus, I Hate and I Love

Homer, Circe and the Cyclops

D. H. Lawrence, Il Duro

Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill

Ovid, The Fall of Icarus

Sappho, Come Close We substituted Mary Barnard’s and Stanley Lombardo’s translations for Aaron Poochigian's New Formalist translation.

Ivan Turgenev, Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands

Virgil, O Cruel Alexis

H. G. Wells, A Slip under the Microscope

Herodotus, The Madness of Cambyses

Speaking of Śiva

The Dhammapada

And several non-littles:

Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, This Is Not a Novel

Herman Melville, The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles

Thanks to the translators who brought many of these works to us: Katrina C. Attwood, Mary Barnard, George Bull, Nigel Cliff, Archibald Colquhoun, Carol Cosman, Dick Davis, Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Robert Fagles, Richard Freeborn, Robert Graves, John Hibberd and Nicholas Jacobs, Mary M. Innes, Kimberly Johnson, Donald Keene, Guy Lee, Stanley Lombardo, David Luke, Meredith McKinney, Siân Miles, John Minford, Samuel Moore, Tiina Nunnally, Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui, E.V. Rieu, Jeremy Robbins, G.W. Robinson and Arthur Cooper, Jay Rubin, Elisabeth Stopp, J.P. Sullivan, Robert and Olivia Temple, Peter Whigham, Ronald Wilks, and Peter Woodruff.

We are now making our way through Dickens’s Bleak House.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Many books. Really many!

Barack Obama on The Late Show

I thought he was to be Stephen Colbert’s guest for the final episode. Maybe, still? But he was on last night. I will watch today.

Related reading
All OCA Barack Obama posts (Pinboard)

Fitness

C-SPAN has the hour-long event that went with the current occupant’s signing of a memo to reinstate the Presidential Fitness Test Award. Fitness, heh.

Gridley’s monologue

The setting: a room in a building in Bell Yard, a London alley. The room is home to three newly orphaned children. Mr Gridley, another resident of the building, is present. He has found his life consumed by a lawsuit in the High Court of Chancery, where he is known as “the man from Shropshire.” His suit has dragged on for years, with costs amounting to at least three times the sum in question. The suit, Gridley says, “has fallen into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else.”

Kind, generous John Jarndyce, who has assiduously avoided all contact with the Chancery suit that bears his family’s name, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, commiserates with Gridley, seeing him as yet another person “unjustly treated by this monstrous system.” Esther Summerson, an orphan who has become a housekeeper of sorts for Jarndyce and his two wards, narrates:

Charles Dickens, from Bleak House (1853).

As the father to two ex-speech-team kids, I can’t help hearing Gridley’s monologue as perfect for Prose Reading. The change in tone as this passage closes would make for a knockout ending. Free to any taker.

Also from Bleak House
At Peffer and Snagsby’s : Bucket’s Moleskine? : Dickens in the house : Five sentences : “It must be a strange state” : Jellyby closets : Learning to write : Living on credit : “London particular” : Reading don’t pay : “Town-talk”

Domestic comedy

[After preparing scrambled eggs, leftover potatoes, toast, and coffee, perfectly timed.]

“I think I’m ready for part-time employment at a Waffle House.”

“You can teleport yourself there.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[In truth, I will never be ready for the Waffle House. See this video, all of it. And, if you missed it, this travel story.]

In Miss Barrett’s class

From Up the Down Staircase (dir. Robert Mulligan, 1967) and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Miss Barrett (Sandy Dennis) is introducing a new book to her class. And — yikes — she learned just this morning that the principal will be dropping in to observe.


Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Another kind of AI

“This LLM has over 217,000 rigorously defined parameters”: it’s an LLM I’m happy to use.

Keats letters, stolen and recovered

From The New York Times: a bound volume with eight letters from John Keats to Fanny Brawne, stolen at some point from a New York estate and reported missing in 1989, has been recovered, along with sixteen other books, all seized after a would-be seller offered them to two dealers in rare books.

You can find a volume with all of Keats’s letters to Brawne at Google Books and Project Gutenberg.

Thanks, Lu!

Related reading
All OCA John Keats posts (Pinboard)

Seymour Bernstein (1927–2026)

“An acclaimed pianist who struggled to overcome a stage fright so severe that he cut short his performing career and shifting into teaching and composing”: from The New York Times obituary.

Seymour Bernstein was the subject of Ethan Hawke’s 2014 documentary Seymour: An Introduction . I wrote about it then and recommend it highly.

George Gershwin was born here

[242 Snediker Street, East New York, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday I posted a photograph of the building that, unbeknowst to me, was the birthplace of Ira Gershwin. This Sunday I’m posting with deliberation: here’s the birthplace of George Gershwin.

Here’s some background, some more background, a 1976 New York Times article about an effort to save the building, and a Chicago Tribune article about the building’s demise. You’ll notice that the building in the Times photograph looks nothing like the building in this tax photograph. A comment on a post in a Brooklyn-centric Facebook group says that the building was “bricked over” in the 1960s. The Gershwin side of the street is wholly industrial now. The synagogue at no. 247 is now an Assemblies of God church, Iglesia Pentecostal, still with a Star of David above the doors.

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

AI school

From The Boston Globe : “Boston AI-powered school promises students will ‘crush’ academics in two hours a day — no teachers required.” Mrs. Current Occupant is for it. Former professional-wrestling executive Linda McMahon is for it too. And it’s only $55,000 a year.

[An Alpha School room. Aside from the stepstool, little shoes, and the (one?) pencil, it looks disturbingly like the common area in a prison.]

Thanks, Ben and Rachel!

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Tyler Hinman, is a real challenge. 1-A, ten letters, “Pickup after dragging” is an apt starting point. I’m short on time this morning, so I’m going to recognize five clues that kept me going when I was almost ready to start looking up answers. 1-A, 1-A.

My five:

8-D, six letters, “Checking promise.” I thought that the idea of payment had to be in there somewhere.

20-A, nine letters, “Scout’s recognition.” I was fixed on the idea that the answer had to do with a hand gesture or knot-tying trick, something I, never a Scout, Cub or Boy, must have been in the dark about.

42-D, seven letters, “Back soon.” Well, maybe.

46-D, six letters, “Nickels and dimes.” No more pennies.

This helpful clue was also my favorite: 12-D, seven letters, “Miniature pan.” No RAMEKIN here. Which I misspelled as RAMIKIN anyway.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Democracy, measured in years

From the PBS NewsHour, Jonathan Capehart commenting on this week’s Supreme Court’s decision regarding voting rights:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is what killed Jim Crow. The VRA is only sixty-one years old.

When it was passed and became law, it was the first time America truly was a democracy, meaning that the words in the Constitution equally applied to all of its citizens, including African Americans, by giving them the right to vote.

Sixty-one years. I am fifty-eight years old. My mother is eighty-four. So my mother is older than true American democracy. And so for those justices in the majority to say that, oh, well, racism is over in voting and we don't need this anymore, I keep thinking about what Justice Ginsburg said in her dissent in the Shelby v. Holder case, which invalidated Section 5, the preclearance portion. And she wrote:

Throwing out preclearance, when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes, is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

And so for Justice Alito to focus on the elections of 2008 and 2012, when there was a Black man on the ballot, to say that racial disparities are no longer a problem, and then ignoring that Shelby in 2013 led to just a rush of changes in voting laws in the states, is to ignore reality and to ignore history and to drag us back to a time when America was not America.

[I’ve made changes to the PBS transcript’s paragraphing and punctuation.]

A Markdown to HTML shortcut

I use two beautiful macOS and iOS apps, Byword and iA Writer, to write in Markdown and convert what I’ve written to HTML. But I wanted to create a shortcut to convert Markdown to HTML from any app (say, from BBEdit or TextEdit). And so I made one, even though I had very little idea what I was doing. I don’t know if this shortcut is the most efficient one to convert text, but it works:

In the Mac Shortcuts app, click the + sign to create a new shortcut.

From the array of actions on the right:

Search for Copy to Clipboard and drag that item into the workspace. Make the variable Shortcut Input.

Search for Make Rich Text from HTML and drag that item into the workspace. Change the variable to Clipboard.

Search for Make HTML from Rich Text and drag that item into the workspace. Change the variable to Rich Text from Markdown.

Search for Copy to Clipboard and drag that item into the workspace. Change the variable to HTML from Rich Text.

Click on the ⓘ (information symbol, top right) and check Show in Share Sheet, Use as Quick Action, and Services Menu. Add a keyboard shortcut if you like.

And add a name before you’re done (top left). I chose Markdown → HTML.

The finished shortcut looks like this:

[Click for a larger view.]

Don’t ask me about Receive Any ... line. The Shortcuts app added it.

To make the shortcut work, just highlight a stretch of text written in Markdown and use your keyboard shortcut, quick action, or the services menu.

Shortcuts work in macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, so this shortcut will be available from the share sheet on a phone or tablet.

[The lunacy of the news sometimes makes me think small.]

“Wise Men Fish Here”

[From The Booksellers (dir. D.W. Young, 2019). Click for a larger view.]

That’s as close as I’ll ever get to the Gotham Book Mart sign (by John Held Jr.), now in the Gotham Book Mart Collection at Penn Libraries.

Related posts
Gotham Book Mart : A Gotham bookmark, by Edward Gorey : A Gotham tumblr : Gotham Glen Baxter books