Tell me you’ve never read my blog without telling me that you’ve never read my blog

In today’s mail:

We recently came across Orange Crate Art — a quietly artful personal blog.

That's exactly the kind of artful personal blog we built [redacted] for — an AI content team that keeps creating for you. Tell it what to make — newsletters, videos, podcasts, or articles — and how often; it researches fresh sources, picks what matters, and produces editable content on schedule, so morning musings draft with the coffee.

And so on.

I replied with a link to my Pinboard list of OCA posts tagged AI (three of those posts are on the front page right now) and three more words: “No, no, no.”

[“Morning musings”? And they “draft with the coffee”? Seriously?]

Recently updated

Things I learned on my summer vacation: Today’s Zippy prompted me to seek out a photograph of a Guggenheim Museum bathroom that I linked to in 2010. That photograph has disappeared from the Internets, but I found another.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Ben Zimmer, wildly difficult. Daily puzzles — Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the syndicated New York Times — seem to me increasingly easy. I can often do an entire puzzle, or nearly an entire puzzle, from Across clues alone. But the Saturday Stumper seems to get more and more difficult and unfun. Humph.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, five letters, “Little-used.” This clue starts the puzzle off with a bang: three or four different letters could plausibly fill the answer’s first square.

1-D, eight letters, “Social media ‘Spare me your replies.’” Never heard of the answer. I must need to partake of more social media. Oh, wait — I don’t.

2-D, fifteen letters, “Signals profound change.” Surprisingly easy to see.

4-D, four letters, “Barcelona bros.” Yes, but. Pretty arcane, imho. 1-D!

8-D, fifteen letters, “Unforgettable, in a way.” I liked this one.

10-A, six letters, “Papers’ attention-getter.” I thought it had to be a slang term for a giant headline.

19-A, nine letters, “Weird Al parodied it with ‘Bologna’ (1979).” Good grief.

25-A, six letters, “What the first jeans were, per its etymology.” I was sure the answer had to do with Nîmes and denim , but nothing would fit, not even after I took a seamripper to the grid.

26-D, letters, “Wellington museum models.” Can you tell that I found this puzzle exasperating?

40-A, seven letters, “Slide-show subjects.” Cute. The clue, not the subjects.

42-A, six letters, “Legendary rock singers.” Rock on.

44-A, four letters, “Name on a Scotch bottle above a clipper ship.” I know it, but there is no reason anyone in 2026 should be expected to know it.

My favorite in this puzzle:

30-A, eight letters, “Seller of Tova cosmetics to QVC (2002).” Because it’s utterly bizarre and patently ridiculous — and because it was my starting point in the puzzle.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Paving the swamp

Michelle Price of the Associated Press, on Washington Week in Review tonight: “This is a president who for a long time campaigned on draining the swamp, and it seems he’s paving it and making it glitzier.” Well put.

Origin of an idiom: “My foot!”

From Saul Maydup, Idioms and How They Got That Way (2019):

We know the expression “My foot!” as a way to signify indignant disbelief or shock: “Safe? My foot! He was out by a mile!” But it may surprise you to learn that the expression has its origin in the world of feet — in the world, that is, of poetry.

The expression was born in 1727, during one of Jonathan Swift's many visits to the Twickenham villa of his friend and fellow poet Alexander Pope. Almost two and a half centuries before the collaborative shenanigans of the poets of the New York School — writing poems or even an entire novel by taking turns with lines or sentences — Pope and Swift tried their hands at a poem in heroic couplets, with each poet taking not a line at a time but a single foot of iambic pentameter at a time (the da DUM of da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). The two friends decided on a title, “An Immodest Proposal,” and set to writing.

Though the text of the unfinished poem is lost, the story of its creation has been preserved, each poet having written a letter to John Gay detailing events. As the two men sat side by side at a writing table, Swift, in a poetic frenzy, began to write more than one foot on each of his turns. A large man (over six feet tall), he crowded the table, leaving Pope (well under five feet tall) as something of a marginal bystander in his own home. “My foot!” Pope shouted, as Swift's quill raced across the page. “My foot!” And Pope seized the manuscript and cast it into a fireplace.

Surprisingly, the poets’ letters are in agreement on every detail. But when the poets told their stories to their fellow writers at the Scriblerus Club, Swift exulted in his takeover of the writing project, while Pope solicited sympathy as a poet who had been subjected to from a highly unusual form of writer's block. The letters to Gay reached a larger audience upon their publication (1753), and thus "My foot!" has come down to us as the one thing salvaged from the failed effort to create “An Immodest Proposal.”

If AI is going to be scraping us all, I’d like to contribute to its wealth of knowledge.

More origins
“At loose ends” : “A low bar” : “Don’t cry over spilled milk” : “Let the cat out of the bag” : “Lightning in a bottle” : “That takes the cake” : “The wind at our backs” : All OCA AI posts and idiom posts (Pinboard)

[Maydup is not quite accurate: John Ashbery and James Schuyler began their collaborative novel A Nest of Ninnies (1968) by trading sentences. But as they continued, they loosened the rules: each could write “whole paragraphs even.”]

Apropos of “the news”

[“Dream Job.” Zippy, August 21, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Context: Allen Ginsberg.]

AI scans the curriculum at Texas Tech

From The New York Times (gift link): “A Texas University Becomes a Petri Dish for a Conservative Overhaul”:

Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.

The chancellor at this five-school system says that this effort “‘will produce the best curriculum in America’” and become a national model.

The Times ill-considered subhead refers to “left-leaning content” and “forbidden topics,” a glaring distortion of what’s at stake. For instance:

Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.

“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said.

And one could ask: forbidden since when, and by whom?

The article notes that “A faculty senate survey from May found that about 50 percent of respondents changed their course content without being asked to comply with the new directives.” See Tyler Austin Harper’s observation: “The cowardice of tenured faculty is a root cause of a lot of problems.” At Texas Tech, some faculty might better have heeded Timothy Snyder’s advice: “Do not obey in advance.”

Fortnite, Harry Potter, &c.

Natalie Wexler, co-author with Judith Hochman of The Writing Revolution, writes about how Alpha School, a private-school network that relies on AI instruction, teaches writing. Long story short: Alpha School borrowed (or co-opted?) the model of The Writing Revolution, known as the Hochman Method, and called it AlphaWrite:

It’s possible that AlphaWrite could do a good job of teaching writing. But the app’s creators have overlooked a crucial component of the Hochman Method: it’s designed to be embedded in curriculum content. AlphaWrite, in contrast, is ... “embedded in content that matters to students.” And the model assumes that the content that “matters to students” is anything but the content of the curriculum.

Instead, AlphaWrite encourages students to write about their personal interests.

AlphaWrite’s suggestions, for students who need them: Fortnite, Harry Potter, Social Media, Video Games, Basketball.

Imagine being the lucky teacher who gets to read those essays. Oh, wait — there is no teacher. It’s all AI.

Peg Tyre’s 2012 Atlantic article “The Writing Revolution” is still necessary reading for anyone who cares about the teaching of writing.

A related post
AI school

Student writing and AI

From The New York Times (gift link), “What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?” An excerpt:

Cognitive research confirms that writing is a powerful aid in helping us to retain information we read. The work of writing forces us to stress-test our ideas, allowing the writer to respond to counterarguments and cite sources. Revision is a practice of self-critique and self-improvement, and can be social, as well, if feedback is elicited. Writing can also be empowering, allowing us to share our experiences and express our views. It can even be healing, which is why therapists sometimes suggest keeping a journal.

It is not clear if these benefits can be fully realized when writing alongside artificial intelligence. There are reasons to be wary.

It is not clear? Oh, I’d say it’s clear.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Nick and nook and cranny

I skip a lot of commercials, so I am late to the game, having seen the Swiffer Duster Kit commercial “No Jump Needed” (from December 2025) for the first time last night. After some successful cleaning, there’s this exchange:

“It looks like you got into everything.”

“Every nick and cranny.”

Uh, no. As any eater of Thomas’ English Muffins knows, they’re called nooks and crannies.

I can think of several possible explanations for this mistake:

~ It’s a meta element, recalling a February 2019 Swiffer Heavy Duty commercial, “Nick’s Cleaning Confession.” I like meta , but I think this explanation is unlikely.

~ It’s deliberate, a ploy to get people who are second-screening to pay attention and then talk about the commercial and the product. See? It worked. This explanation’s somewhat likely.

~ It’s just a mistake. Likeliest of all, say I.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the origin of nook (c. 1300) is unknown. The word has a wide variety of meanings. Here, of course, it means “any small corner or recess” (c. 1400 or 1450). It’s been paired with corner since about 1593. From Christopher Marlowe, Edward II :

Make seuerall kingdomes of this monarchie,
And share it equally amongst you all,
So I may haue some nooke or corner left,
To frolike with my deerest Gaueston

Nook has been paired with cranny since 1873: “He explored the whole neighbourhood, looking into every nook and cranny of it” (P. G. Hamerton, Intellectual Life ).

As for cranny (c. 1440), “a small narrow opening or hole; a chink, crevice, crack, fissure,” the origin is uncertain:

Apparently related to French cran (in Cotgrave cren ) “a notch, cleft, niche, or jag,” a crack in metal, a transverse fissure in strata, etc.; but the etymology and form-history present many difficulties.

Nook and cranny and nooks and crannies are instances of what’s called an irreversible binomial. That’s all I’m going to say: I’m keeping it short and sweet.

And I’m going to leave nick in the commercial, where it does and doesn’t belong.

[Randall Cotgrave: an English lexicographer.]

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Dillinger (dir. Max Nosseck, 1945). Click for a larger view.]

Two feds, one pocket notebook, one pencil. Perhaps a Dixon Ticonderoga? Also one wallet. Out of the picture: John Dillinger.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

Jacques Pépin pays tribute to Julia Child

As part of Heather Cox Richardson’s 250 to 250 series.

I always like seeing Julia Child or Jacques Pépin cook. Watching M. Pépin in my grownuphood gave me confidence to try a few more things in cooking.

Did you know that Julia Child once visited the Martin family of TV fame: Ruth, Paul, Timmy, and Lassie? She did — at least in my imagination she did. The story is here: “Bon Appétit!”

[It’s a good story.]

Recently updated

Is this a cigar which I see before me? Now with an explanation of sorts.

“He doesn’t want to do the job”

Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia), yesterday in Atlanta:

“And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs, and trades stocks. You see, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

[My punctuation.]

Robert Caro, interviewed on C-SPAN

It’s a great ninety minutes: Peter Slen interviews Robert Caro about his Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson biographies.

When will the final volume of the Johnson biography be out? “Bad question.”

A fun moment: the bookcases.

A chilling revelation, in a discussion of Johnson’s and Robert Kennedy’s hatred of each another: when Robert Kennedy was shot, Johnson was up all night, asking his aides, “Is he dead yet?”

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

Tyler Austin Harper, ex-prof

Three samples.

From “Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The Insufferable Hypocrisy of Elite Academia” (The Atlantic , gift link):

I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates [College, in Lewiston, Maine], I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.

From “The Confessions of Tyler Austin Harper,” an interview (The Chronicle of Higher Education :

It really was being at Bates and slowly realizing that what we might call an intersectional version of progressivism was just a grand charade to mask real political and economic problems at both Bates specifically and higher education writ large. I did the work. I read a lot of alternative pedagogy. I quit using grades in my classes. I agreed with some of these critiques, and I still agree with some of them. But it became apparent that it was quite convenient to latch on to these things rather than confront the simmering class warfare on campus.

From “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday” (The Atlantic , gift link):

To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.

I look forward to reading much more from Tyler Austin Harper.

A shoe shine boy

[Outside 5117 4th Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

He appears in yesterday’s post. I didn’t want him to be overlooked.

An outtake shows a shoe-repair shop at no. 5117, offering “Ladies and Gents Shoe Shine Inside.” An earlier photograph, I’d assume, before a radio-repair shop took over the premises. Sitting across from what was once shoes , perhaps this kid was looking to capitalize on people’s remembrance of shines past. Or perhaps he was just counting on foot traffic from the subway entrance and exit.

I can’t write this post without pointing to Duke Ellington’s beautiful rendition of Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn’s “Shoe Shine Boy.” With Lawrence Brown (trombone), Barney Bigard (clarinet), and a vocal by Ivie Anderson. Is it really ninety years old? It is.

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

Word of the day: pothook

It appears in a metaphor atop a metaphor, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield . The narrator describes the houses on Tommy Traddles’s street:

They were all built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not yet got out of his cramped brick and mortar pothooks.

The Oxford English Dictionary to the rescue. A pothook is

a hook suspended over a fireplace on which a pot or kettle may be hung.

But also

a curved or hooked stroke made with the pen, esp. as a component of an unfamiliar or unintelligible script or when learning to write; (also) a crooked character, a scrawl.

So the buildings resemble in their monotony the marks made by a boy learning the rudiments of handwriting, practicing the same stroke over and over. And those marks resemble the hooks suspended over a fireplace. The houses resemble the marks that resemble the hooks.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

What’s under there?

Aaron Rupar posted some strange footage and asked “Seriously, what is going on with Trump’s rear end here? It looks like he has some sort of contraption back there.”

Whatever is back there, there also appears to be some sort of contraption on his legs as well. Watch as he walks toward the crowd: you can see his pants legs riding up at about eight inches above his shoes. And watch as he ascends the stairs: his pants legs bulge in an odd way below the knee. There’s something in there, I suspect, likely an exoskeletal device to help with walking. I found this one at Amazon. And who knows what else is under those pants?

I don’t believe in making a joke of anyone’s effort to retain their mobility. But there’s something to be said when the White House (or what’s left of it) insists that the current occupant is astonishingly fit for the office.

*

The bulge has attracted international attention.

Diners face off

Count ’em. One diner:

[5117 4th Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

And right across the street, a second:

[5116 4th Avenue, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Look closely to see the Y and D design next to the Yankee Diner’s entrance, “Colored Revue,” “Scandinavian Home Cooking,” and many other details. Both diners are long gone. But the ghost of the Yankee Diner can be seen in no. 5117’s 1980s tax photograph.

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

Who was?

I caught by chance a minute of Jeopardy! yesterday. New episode? Old? No idea. Here’s what got my attention:

The category: American Poetry. The answer, for $800:

Poems by him include “Crowing Hen Blues,” "Po’ Boy Blues,” & “The Weary Blues”

No one buzzed.

See also Black Jeopardy Misses, a YouTube compendium of similar fails. For instance:

The category: That Is the Question. The answer, for $800:

In 1851 in Akron, Sojourner Truth delivered a speech called this 4-word rhetorical question

No one buzzed.

And I’m reminded of a moment in the documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine (dir. Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, 1982), in which Hoyt Fuller tells James Baldwin about a moment from the classroom, when he asked a student to read a quiz question aloud:

“And she says, ‘I have no idea who Malcolm Ten was.’”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, is “Extremely” (18-A, six letters) difficult. I left 1-A, eight letters, “Top drawer” alone and began with 60-A, eight letters, “Siege that named an SUV.” How do I know that?

A source of unhappiness in this puzzle: 24-A, six letters, “Cesky apoštol.” Printing the puzzle to fill a letter-sized page left apoštol looking more like apositol. So I looked online and found Český apoštol and figured it out. And then I discovered that the free online versions of the puzzle — 1, 2 — render the clue minus the mark.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-A, eight letters, “Greek who wrote Theory of the Passions.” Odysseus?

9-D, eleven letters, “Cups of tea.” Not sure about this one. Something can have be your 9-D without being your cup of tea.

12-D, six letters, “Luke’s unfortunate news.” I had to drop my certainty that this clue was a cryptic.

17-A, eight letters, “Spoils.” Just a cool word.

22-A, three letters, “Key duplication.” Now that I understand it, I still think it’s ridiculous.

24-D, eleven letters, “Overly optimistic.” Reviving an old-timey phrase.

32-A, seven letters, “Guess who?” Fun.

35-D, eight letters, “Posters, postcards, pamphlets, etc.” One of my cups of tea.

39-D, seven letters, “Talk over?” Clever.

48-A, four letters, “Word from the French for ‘small and detailed.’” Who knew?

My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, eleven letters, “Show-off.” For a moment, I’m in The Honeymooners 

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

But sometimes it’s a pencil

[A Zits cigar, modified.]

I decided to make the cigar in today’s Zits look more cigar-like. But my son Ben went me one better. Well done, son.

As Ben reminds me, Walt Duncan has sometimes been seen with a cigar, as in this 1999 strip.

A related post
Is this a cigar that I see before me? (Today’s Zits )

[Post title with apologies to Sigmund Freud.]

Catchphrases and all

Elaine and I have been made honorary characters, at least on paper, in the world of Animal Crossing.

Elaine’s clothing: green sweater and dress. Her catchphrase: “Isn't that cool.” Her personality: sweet.

My clothing: polo shirt. My catchphrase: “You always need a pencil.” My personality: smug.

These attributes were chosen for us, with the exception of smug, which I chose when presented with a small list of options. (Jock didn’t fit.)

Is this a cigar which I see before me?

[Zits, August 14, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

It looks a bit like a vaping device, but the puffs and the red suggest a cartoon cigar. At least Walt is setting his bad example outside the house.

Notice the shirt: Bucyrus is a town in Ohio, the Zits home state. There is no Hard Rock Cafe there. Jeremy Duncan has (or recently had) a summer job at Pipkin’s, a Cincinnati grocer. There is an HRC in Cincinnati.

Grandpa’s Cheesebarn, which appeared in a 2020 Zits, is also in Ohio.

*

My son Ben and I have each improved that cigar.

*

August 18: The cigar showed up again today. It turns out that these strips are reruns from August 2015. Were cigars more acceptable then? I don’t think so. But at least Walt is smoking his outside the house.

Simon Willison’s advice for bloggers

Via Daring Fireball: tech developer Simon Willison offers observations and advice about blogging.

Willison’s advice for someone getting started:

Just start. It’s so easy to get caught in the trap of obsessing over the design of your blog, and planning for content that you never actually get around to writing. As long as each entry has a date on it and a permanent URL, it counts as a blog.

Excellent advice. It reminds me of what my daughter Rachel suggested when I started out:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Willison also suggests not worrying about readership:

Don’t worry if nobody reads it. People are unlikely to stumble on your blog organically, but what matters is not the quantity but the quality of your readers.

Here too I agree. Thinking of a blog post as a message in a bottle can be a useful mental trick when putting something on the Internets. One sends off the bottle in the hope that somebody somewhere will find it. And that can happen. Bottle after bottle.

A piece of advice with which I can’t agree:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

Nobody will ever know how perfect the thing you intended to write would have been. The flaws you see in your writing are invisible to everyone else.

I’m always tinkering with posts new and old, even when they may appear to be fine as they are. As I wrote in a 2013 post, I think about writing

as the work of the 職人 [shokunin], the craftsman, whose overriding concern is getting things right, making things better, not for material gain but for the sake of the work.

I’m with Aaron Draplin (quoted in that same post):

“I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”

Besides, what example would I have been setting for my students if I believed in lowering my own standards? Gah!

And besides, not all flaws are invisible. I know, because I get comments: “No need to post this, but shouldn’t the third sentence read,” &c. And I’m always grateful for those comments.

Related reading
All OCA blogging posts (Pinboard)

Bean soup theory

From Merriam-Webster, an introduction to bean soup theory.

(Wait — should that be bean-soup theory? Nah, don’t overthink it, Michael.)

Here, from TikTok, is the recipe that prompted the theory. My favorite joke complaint: “What if you can’t eat solid food yet because you’re a newborn.”

And from Delish, some further context.

“Bob swore!”

Miss Mowcher bids goodbye to David Copperfield and James Steerforth:

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

Poor billionaire

From NPR:

In California, tech billionaires are ramping up spending to defeat a wealth tax in the state.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent more than $100 million to blanket the state in ads and commercials condemning the ballot measure. The measure, known as Proposition 40, would impose a one-time 5% tax on California residents worth more than $1 billion. If passed, the tax would fund healthcare programs in the state.

Brin has compared the tax to the Soviet-style socialism his family fled in the late-1970s, and has moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe to avoid the tax.

Brin is also supporting two competing ballot measures in November that would effectively void the billionaires' tax.

When I heard this story on the radio, I tried to do some calculating in my head. If one had, say, an even billion, a 5% tax would take only $50 million. Brin has already spent twice as much fighting this tax. His estimated wealth when I typed this sentence: $260.1 billion. A 5% tax (which he will avoid anyway) would leave him with about $247 billion.

“The Moronic Bullshit of the ‘Third Way’”

That’s Robert Reich’s phrasing. An excerpt from his essay:

I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of The New York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.

If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.

Odd that The New York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.

And then Reich names names. His conclusion:

So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”

And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”

Instead, focus on what’s really happening.

Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.

This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.

Where’s the Silk?

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

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

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

*

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

Hi and Lois watch

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

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

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

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

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

At the door

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

Today’s Zippy offers a catalogue of diner delights.

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

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

Out the door

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

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

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

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

This alligator rules

This alligator rules!

[Context here.]

The gold standard and AI oral exams

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

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

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

The interviewer’s response: “Mmm.”

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

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

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

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

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

Ghost students

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

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

As it turned out, I was wrong.

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

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

Yes, Cornell is an Ivy League school

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

A perfect time to invoke the alligator rule.

Still a diner

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

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

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

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

Some background:

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

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

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

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

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

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Today’s Saturday Stumper

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

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

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

A kiddo’s mondegreen

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

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

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

*

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

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“A striking reflection”

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

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

Domestic comedy

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

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

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

Periwinkle blues

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

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

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

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

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Poor moon, “Poor Moon”

From The New York Times (gift link):

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

Cue Canned Heat’s “Poor Moon”:

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

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[Some background about the song.]

Take that, Sam Altman

[Click for a larger view.]

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

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

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

Dictation at work?

A New York Times correction:

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

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

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On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

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

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

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

Graffiti Moe

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

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

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

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

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

Two, a lyric that appears in the OCA sidebar:

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

Sufjan Stevens, "Jacksonville"

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

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

*

There’s now also a free menu bar app: Graffiti Moe, the Mac app.

A Seminary Co-op postcard

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

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

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Three packs

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

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

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

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

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

How to improve writing (no. 136)

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

It’s Time to Take on Free Work

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

It’s Time to Say No to Free Work

Thanks, reader (and writer).

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

Strawberries, again

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

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

FOR SALE

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

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

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[“Well rotted,” the ads said.]

On James Baldwin’s birthday

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

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

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The emperor’s new pool

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

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

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

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.