Orwell would understand

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

And Vladimir Putin is a humanitarian.

Twelve movies

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

*

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

*

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

[Much more at the Josef Ganz Archive.]

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

Gatorade and life

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

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

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

An Aaron Rupar compilation

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

RemoveMacAI

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

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

Tomcat redux

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

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

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

No news (spot the Ardea herodias)

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

Do you see the great blue heron?

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

News

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

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

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

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

Roy’s Tavern

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

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

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

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

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

Who wore it better?

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

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

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

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

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

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

Sold a Story returns

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

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

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

Related reading
Some OCA Sold a Story posts

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

Block that metaphor

From an NPR story:

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

And all fall down?

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Fancy groceries, anyone?

A second curious term in the signage at Sam’s Dairy: fancy groceries . Like table luxuries , the term is missing from the OED and from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third. My casual browsing suggests that the term was typically paired with staple groceries . Here’s an explanation of the fancy from Proceedings of The Second Pan American Scientific Congress (1917):

The fancy grocery. — To solve the problem of the downtown store two means have been tried — one, to secure larger margins; the other, to seek greater volume. The former has given rise to the fancy store. In nearly every community there are some exceptional people who will pay an extra price for the best, and there are many people who will buy extra-priced articles for exceptional occasions. This trade, like the shopping trade of the textile lines, tends to concentrate, but unlike the shopping lines, the goods are bought without comparison of value, hence there is nothing to prevent a single store securing a monopoly and frequently a single grocer does secure a marked leadership if not a positive monopoly of fancy lines. The chief difficulty with these stores is to secure sufficient volume and to supplement the rather limited trade in fancy groceries. In many large cities the fancy grocers have added wines and liquors.

Though the term has long since fallen out of use, specialty shops, with high-end items in tins and jars and bottles, carry on in the spirit of the fancy grocery.

Here’s a sampling of fancy groceries, in an extraordinary Macy’s advertisement from 1927:

[The New York Times, February 10, 1927. Click for a larger view.]

Do click for a larger view: the oh so precious text is worth reading. Then reach for the bicarb.

A related post
Table luxuries, anyone?

Zippy and Proust

[“Quote Slam, Cont’d.” Zippy , October 15, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Zippy is spending a second day visiting the Père Lachaise. Yesterday he was trading remarks with Edith Piaf.

The words from Proust appear in Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way ] (1920). Dr. du Boulbon is speaking to the narrator’s grandmother:

«Supportez d’être appelée une nerveuse. Vous appartenez à cette famille magnifique et lamentable qui est le sel de la terre. Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d’autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d’oeuvre.»

In Mark Treharne’s translation (Penguin, 2002):

“Feel comfortable to be called a neurotic. You belong to the splendid, pitiable family that is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art.”

Strange: when I opened my copy of The Guermantes Way and began to thumb pages, I landed almost immediately on page 299 and this passage.

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

One more MacGuffin

I missed this one. From Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that’s raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, “What does he do?”

The counterintelligence man replies, “Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter.”

“But what does he sell?”

“Oh, just government secrets!” is the answer.

Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!

I must note: Phillip Vandamm, James Mason’s character, was not an importer or exporter of table luxuries.

Related reading
Egg MacGuffin : All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Mike Love on stage

My daughter Rachel warned me that it’s painful to watch. It is.

Musicians, like boxers, need to know when to stop.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Table luxuries, anyone? Now with a familial connection, albeit a tenuous one.

Egg MacGuffin

From a movie review:

[Graham] Moore throws in a Hitchcock-style McMuffin in the shape of a secret tape recording which will reveal just who has been betraying the gangsters. The problem is that no-one has a machine on which to play it.

The writer has egg on his face, or ought to: the Hitchcock device was called the MacGuffin. He explained it to François Truffaut in one of the conversations preserved in Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

Well, it’s the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after. I’ll tell you about it. Most of Kipling’s stories, as you know, were set in India, and they dealt with the fighting between the natives and the British forces on the Afghanistan border. Many of them were spy stories, and they were concerned with the efforts to steal the secret plans out of a fortress. The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So the “MacGuffin” is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever.

You may be wondering where the term originated. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”

And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”

The first one asks, ”What’s a MacGuffin?“

”Well,“ the other man says, ”it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”

The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!” So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

Hitchcock and Truffaut mention the formula for the construction of an airplane engine in The 39 Steps (1935), the little tune in The Lady Vanishes (1938), and the secret clause in a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940). Each a device to propel a narrative, each egg-free.

Thanks, Seth!

Related reading
All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing

Good Lord, it’s painful. Don’t miss the journalists turning to one another with smiles at the end.

But if you can’t take it, Aaron Rupar has selected moments.

*

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

“Total degradation”

AI is in the air at the university where I taught for thirty years. The news that a faculty member had ChatGPT design two senior-level courses and create reading material for those courses (in the form of authorless handouts) has led students to petition university administrators to create a university-wide policy governing faculty use of AI in courses.

The administrative response to the petition has emphasized the problems AI presents for branding (e.g., inaccurate depictions of university buildings and sloppy typography) and skirted the possibility of a university-wide policy about the use of AI in teaching, stating that such a policy would threaten academic freedom. Each department should establish its own policy: that’s the mantra, though a department policy could be said to pose the same threat to academic freedom.

To my mind, saying that faculty must not generate course design and reading material via AI should be no more controversial than saying that math classes must use Arabic not Roman numerals. (An alligator rule.) But I can’t imagine any department coming up with a policy that does more than leave decisions about AI use to the discretion of the individual faculty member.

At least some students already recognize that branding is not what’s most important. A student-government leader points out that the larger issue is the “total degradation” of academic integrity at the institution. Hitting the nail on its head.

Table luxuries, anyone?

The signage at Sam’s Dairy has a couple of curious terms. One of them: table luxuries .

The term is missing from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third, and it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary only in a 1903 citation for laver , an edible seaweed. From P. W. Joyce, A Social History of Ancient Ireland (1903):

The marine-plant called Porphyra vulgaris, a species of laver, found growing on rocks round the coast, was esteemed a table luxury: it is now often sold in fish-shops and eaten with pepper, vinegar, &c.

It’s fair to say though that seaweed is not what people typically had in mind when speaking of table luxuries. What they did seem to have in mind: anything beyond main staples such as coffee, flour, sugar.

That might even include fruits and vegetables. Here’s a photograph (c. 1890–1915) by Jenny Young Chandler of a wagon belonging to Fehrenbach Table Luxuries. Look closely: fruits and vegetables on the sign, vegetables on the wagon. Carrots, cauliflower: table luxuries. Or perhaps they were just to get customers to visit a store.

A swanker version of table luxuries appears in Eva A. Alvey Richards account of her Milwaukee family’s situation in 1893:

Father at that time was importing luxuries — table luxuries, such as truffles and pâté de foie gras, caviar, olives, wines, and cordials — a business he had followed for many years.

That sentence seems just made for an OED citation, no?

And from New York, 1894 (A.F. Parsons, 1894), a helpful list:

The importation of table luxuries constitutes a most important feature of New York’s commerce. Among the most recently established of those engaged in the trade is Mr. Geo. K. Etienne, who began operations in September, 1894. He is sole agent for the United States for the Paris house of Mr. Joseph Ramell, dealer in sardines, peas, mushrooms, beans, macedoine, olive oil, truffles, macaroni, candied and preserved fruits, etc. These products are guaranteed to be the the finest of the kind the market affords.

I’m amused to think that sardines are once again a table luxury: a couple of weeks ago I saw a Portuguese brand selling for $12 a tin.

From The New York Times , October 23, 1916 (gift link), an article with an urgent headline: “Rush Heavy Imports of Table Luxuries; Dainties Worth $2,000,000 Brought In for Holiday Dinners”:

Among the things now coming in from abroad for the holiday dinner table are currants, dates, figs, grapes, lemons, olives, raisins, preserved fruits, nuts of many kinds, together with cured and canned fish of the higher grades. The countries furnishing these delicacies were Greece, England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Japan, China, and the West Indies.

In 1925 tomatoes and cucumbers were table luxuries in New York. From The New York Times , January 11, 1925 (gift link), “Vegetables in Liberal Supply”:

Cucumbers and tomatoes now head the list of table luxuries, according to the weekly review of local food markets made public yesterday by Dr. Arthur E. Albrecht, Director of the New York office of the State Department of Farms and Markets. The review among other things says:

“Cucumbers and tomatoes at this season are generally to be classed with the luxuries, the price for cucumbers in the stores lately being mostiy 10 and 15 cents each and tomatoes 25 and 30 cents a pound.”

No indication of where those cucumbers and tomatoes were coming from, but the article also mentions “fancy hothouse grapes” coming from Belgium. (Belgium!)

Okay, that’s enough investigating for me. Now I want to drive to St. Louis and visit DiGregorio’s Italian Market.

For sentimental reasons, here’s the final Times appearance of “table luxuries” — meaning food, not china and cutlery — in an October 29, 1980 advertisement for a now-defunct delicatessen:

[Click for a larger view.]

*

October 13: Elaine recalled that her grandfather the accountant worked for an importer of foods in Chicago. That was almost certainly an importer of table luxuries.

Origin of an idiom: “full of beans”

From Why Do We Say That? The Suprising Origins of Everyday Idioms (2012), by May Dopp:

You’ve no doubt heard the expression “full of beans.” In the United States and the United Kingdom, it means “full of energy and life.” In the United States it also means “full of nonsense.” But did you know that this expression began its life with a capital B ? That’s just one more surprising fact about our weird and wonderful language.

The story begins with Charles Foster Bean (1930–2017), actor, raconteur, and game-show habitué. Bean did most of his acting on the stage or in television, but in 1966 he had his first and last starring role in film as Charlie Gallagher, a put-upon father of seven in The Refrigerator’s Running, and I Can’t … Keep … Up! (dir. Michael Gordon), the first film to feature two ellipses in its name. The seven child actors who played the rambunctious Gallagher children, all Beans themselves, were billed as “The Bean Team.” (I omit their names here to spare them embarrassment.) Their characters were called Andy, Candy, Dandy, Mandy, Randy, Sandy, and Tandy — which alone should give a suggestion of the film’s comic content: names shouted and misheard (“No, I said MANDY!”), water balloons hitting the mailman, prank calls to the drugstore about Prince Albert, a sheepdog tearing through the house and managing to yank out the telephone line, all while Mrs. Gallagher (Doris Day) is away at work as a “lady executive.”

Some reviewers were amused; some, not. Whether awarding one star or four, any number of reviewers described the movie as “full of Beans.” “It’s full of Beans and a laugh a minute, a riotous, colourful celebration of childhood energy and of life itself,” wrote Barry Norman (Daily Mail, November 29, 1966). “Yes, the movie is full of Beans, which is to say full of nonsense. But I prefer my nonsense neat, untainted by sugary drool,” wrote John Simon (New York, December 3, 1966).

Love it or hate it, a long-forgotten movie gave rise to a phrase we still use today, with two different meanings.

And if you have Prince Albert in a can, let him out.

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

[If AI is going to be scraping us all, I’d like to contribute to its wealth of knowledge. And I’m happy to report that my post about the idiom “Don’t cry over spilled milk” is receiving a significant number of visits via Google.]

Domestic comedy

[Surveying the books and writing materials ranged across the sofa .]

“I think we need to get another sofa.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Empire of signs

[4116 Avenue U, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

One more trip back to Avenue U.

I count twenty bits of signage at Sam’s Dairy, not including the Kool penguin (look closely) and the Beech-Nut Coffee advertisement that must appear on the hidden plate-glass window. The penguin’s name was Willie.

And I count at least six more Brooklyn stores in 1940 calling themselves Sam’s Dairy, three listed in full-page Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum advertisements, three more listed in the telephone directory. Nothing consistent about their signage, which makes me doubt that Sam ran an empire of stores.

In 1926 this address housed the Erasmus Realty Co. By 1928 it housed a fruit and vegetable market. At some point, Sam moved in (ESplanade 7-9284). The space is now ceded to the parking lot of a strip mall that includes a CVS.

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

[Post title, wrenched out of context, from Roland Barthes.]

Russia, Russia, Russia

So now, after more than a decade of pretending that he is not associated with Russia and that he would honor the U.S. national security position of support for Ukraine and our European allies, Trump is openly backing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

In the most recent installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson provides a helpful recap.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Let t equal time and p equal pleasure: sometimes, only sometimes, the t and p of a Newsday Saturday Stumper will begin to move in opposite directions. The longer the puzzle takes, the less pleasure it will offer. So it was, at least for me, with today’s puzzle, by Frank Longo.

Too much obscurity: 7-D, three letters, “How a ...Silence title starts.” I looked up silence , title , and the answer, and I think I understand, though this bit will not be going into long-term storage.

Too much obscurity: 11-D, seven letters, “Company with a $25 billion IPO (2014).” Ah yes, a wonderful year for IPOs.

Too much obscurity: 29-A, five letters, “Sports great who wrote the novel The Academy: Love Match .” We are speaking of a young-adult novel published in 2014. (Ah yes, a wonderful year for YA novels.) There is no reason anyone should be expected to know this answer.

Too much obscurity: 57-A, four letters, “Head of the services, for short.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen the answer in print.

11-D and 29-A seem like a matter of taking unobjectionable answers and finding out-of-the-way factoids with which to clue them. The clue for 57-A might be a matter of making an awkward string of letters fit. As for 7-D, who knows? Granted, these answers can all be had via crosses, but there’s little pleasure in that. What’s the point?

And one clue-and-answer that even for a nonbeliever might be jarring: 50-A, six letters, “Party with the Host.” I thought the context might be some reality show with a host named the Host. I did not think the Stumper would go where it went.

I did appreciate the four spanners in this puzzle, one of which was a giveaway (thank you), and one of which I really enjoyed:

17-A, fifteen letters, “Didn’t save face.”

36-A, fifteen letters, “Their last windows are opened on Christmas Eve.”

53-A, fifteen letters, “How humanity exists, per Kant.”

And my favorite, 31-A, fifteen letters, “I may stand for it.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

Morning becomes Ernie Bushmiller: Now with a link to a New York Times article.

Nobel wit

“If you clap a little more, I may share this award with Trump”: Navi Pillay, on learning that she will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Hours after the announcement, the current occupant’s administration announced sanctions on the International Criminal Court. As The New York Times reports (gift link), Pillay served for nine years as an ICC judge. The sanctions have been in the works for a while, but the timing of the announcement is curious, to say the least.]

VDP and Eva Marie Saint

Van Dyke Parks mentioned to me that he and Eva Marie Saint were both on a television show when he was a child. Sure enough: Saint appeared in the pilot episode of the single-season situation comedy Bonino . Van Dyke came on board in the fourth episode, playing Andrew Bonino, the youngest Bonino child. The series starred Ezio Pinza as a widowed singer raising his eight children. You can see them all in this photograph. Van Dyke is front and center, with glasses.

As Van Dyke’s IMDb page shows, he had quite a career as a child actor. Of special interest to me: he appeared as Tommy Borden in “The Hero,” a “lost” (kinescope) episode of The Honeymooners. And it wasn’t a bit part: his character has long stretches of dialogue with Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason), just the two of them. You can find the lost episodes at Amazon and Tubi.

Related reading
All OCA VDP posts (Pinboard)

“One autumn night”

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Christ of Nanjing.” 1920. In The Essential Akutagawa: Twenty-Two Short Stories by Japan's Master Storyteller, trans. Richard Medhurst (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2025).

This story’s opening paragraphs made me think right away of James Joyce’s “Eveline.” So I was excited to learn that in 1919 Akutagawa purchased copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and one other book by Joyce. Was it the slim poetry volume Chamber Music , the Ibsen-like play Exiles , or Dubliners ? My guess is that it was Dubliners . Akutagawa later translated excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist into Japanese.

I caught on to Akutagawa by reading The Life of a Stupid Man , no. 56 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Also from Akutagawa
Cut ear, long pipe

Recently updated

Lowlights, a children’s magazine: Now with a refund.

Arthur turns thirty

Daughter Number Three reminds us that today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the premiere of the PBS kids’ show Arthur.

When our son Ben worked at GBH, he did a series of YouTube videos with items from the station’s archives. So of course he did an (unembeddable) episode about Arthur, featuring an archival interview with Arthur’s creator Marc Brown. If you watch, you’ll get to see a yearbook photograph of the teacher who inspired Mr. Ratburn.

My favorite Arthur episode: the one in which Miss Sweetwater subs for Mr. Ratburn and the kids get sick of being babied.

[N.B.: Ben has since lost the beard.]

Twelve movies

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

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (dir. Charles Waters, 1960). From Jean Kerr’s bestseller. David Niven plays a retired professor who now works as a New York theater critic; Doris Day is his wife, who insists on moving to “the country” (seventy miles from New York) with their four boys and one dog. She fixes up their sprawling house while he resists the metropolitan allure of an actor (Janie Paige) whom he panned. A couple of meta moments — Day singing a bit of “Que Será, Será” and referencing Rock Hudson — made me more alert. But the comedy here is on the level of, say, The Brady Bunch. ★★ (TCM)

*

Crow Hollow (dir. Michael McCarthy, 1952). A variation on Rebecca : a whirlwind romance, followed by married life in a strange, great house with three aged aunts and a surly servant girl. Also on the premises: strychnine, a tarantula, and poisonous mushrooms. Newlywed Anne (Natasha Parry) is at a loss for what to do when someone tries to murder her while her dimbulb husband Robert (Donald Houston) goes about his country doctoring. A thoroughly satisfying B movie. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Frightened Man (dir. John Gilling, 1952). Not much here for anyone to be frightened about. It’s a story of jewel thievery, with a young man sent down from Oxford who turns to a life of crime. Both he and his antiques-dealer father will be in for a surprise. Some tension in the breaking-through-the-wall safe-cracking effort, but nothing of real interest here. ★★ (YT)

*

The Snorkel (dir. Guy Green, 1958). That last one was a dud, but there are so many superior movies waiting in obscurity at YouTube. This one is a variation on Shadow of a Doubt, with a teenager (Mandy Miller) who saw her stepfather (Peter van Eyck) murder her father and is now convinced that her mother’s locked-room suicide is another murder. But how did the stepfather do it, and how can his stepdaughter prove it? Van Eyck, Miller, and Betta St. John (as the teen’s nurse/chaperone and perhaps the stepfather’s new love interest) are all terrific, and the ending is sure to throw the viewer off balance. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Whole Truth (dir. John Guillermin, 1958). We’re in Nice, or a recreation thereof, in a story that begins with a chase through twisty narrow streets, winds back the clock, and moves forward to pick up the chase. The plot: a volatile actress (Gianna Maria Canale) is found dead, and the film producer (Stewart Granger) with whom she was having an affair is accused of murder. An inspector from Scotland Yard (George Sanders) steps in to investigate, as the producer’s wife (Donna Reed) looks on with dismay. The plot is tricky — too tricky, really, but still fun. ★★★ (YT)

*

A Tale of Two Cities (dir. Jack Conway, 1935). Watching the crowd scenes, I wondered, as I do when watching The Grapes of Wrath : where did they find people who looked like that? I know; they’re actors — but still. Ronald Colman shines as gentle, dissolute Sydney Carton; Blanche Yurka is a terrifying Madame De Farge; as the Marquis St. Evrémonde, Basil Rathbone looks eerily like Stephen Miller. The storming of the Bastille, worked out by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, is a crowd scene to end all crowd scenes. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

I Want You (dir. Mark Robson, 1951). A family and their associates on the eve of the Korean War, as men are called up for service. It’ll be over in two weeks, says one man in a bar — in a movie released a year and a half after American involvement began. There are moments of frank desperation about the reality of war — a father’s plea that his son be classified as an indispensable worker, the dread with which another son reads his draft notice — but the movie wraps up on a weirdly happy note. With Dana Andrews, Peggy Dow, Farley Granger, Dorothy McGuire, and a surprising moment from bit player Walter Baldwin. ★★★ (A)

*

Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal (dir. Jenny Carchman, 2024). I had a vague recollection of “the eBay scandal,” the effort by high-ranking employees to terrify and silence a husband and wife team who blog about e-commerce. Their sin: they dared to criticize eBay. But the details of what these eBay employees did (authorized, it appears, at a high level) were new to me. A well-made and angry-making documentary about the corporate will to power. ★★★★ (A)

*

Sister Carrie (dir. Daniel Nearing, 2022). That this black-and-white, nearly silent movie has no ratings or reviews at IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes might make it an object of curiosity, but our curiosity turned to boredom to exasperation. Though the title is Sister Carrie, the end credits state that the movie also draws upon fiction by Sherwood Anderson, Alexandre Dumas Fils, and Antonie Francois Prévost — which must explain why the foreman at the Chicago shoe factory where Carrie works murders his wife and ends up in jail. Text, including lines from Philip Larkin’s “High Windows” and a postscript from Jonathan Safran Foer, appears on the screen in a highly unreadable font. It’s all a pretentious mess, though I did like seeing the Bean. (A)

[That’s right, no stars.]

*

Carrie (dir. William Wyler, 1952). It’s a big picture, beautifully made, and true to the urban poverty and glamour of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. But I have misgivings. This adaptation deprives Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) of self-direction: she is instead present only as a victim or victimizer of men. As George Hurstwood, Laurence Olivier emotes all over everything; the movie, unlike the novel, even ends with him (whose life is it anyway?). But Eddie Albert is delightful as peppy, blithely libidinous Charles Drouet. ★★★ (A)

*

The Big Shakedown (dir. John Francis Dillon, 1934). Husband-to-be Jimmy Morrell (Charles Farrell) is a pharmacist; his wife-to-be Norma Nelson (Bette Davis) runs the register and the soda fountain, providing stamps, ice cream, and nickels for the telephone. Their drugstore, they admit, is more a community service than a flourishing business. All that changes when a gangster (Ricardo Cortez) stops in for a headache powder and persuades Jimmy to manufacture sham brandname products. Cortez is the real star here, brutish yet suave; with Davis in second place and Farrell a distant third. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Hamnet (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2025). Better late than never. It’s a curiously modern story, with a husband and father, Will (Paul Mescal), away at work or away in his own head, and a mother, Agnes, or Anne (Jessie Buckley), left to manage a house and children largely on her own. The glaring anachronisms (“Hello,” “OK”) are thus less jarring than a viewer might expect. I think the movie too often substitutes over-the-top emoting for genuine feeling, and in the final scene at the Globe, things really go off the rails. ★★★ (N)

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

VDP on BW and “Heroes and Villains”

In an interview with Dutch television, Van Dyke Parks talks about “Heroes and Villains” and the loss of Brian Wilson: “What I’ve lost with the death of Brian is a witness, a person who was there. Brian took an era with him.”

Venn reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts : Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks posts : Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

Lowlights, a children’s magazine

A certain children’s magazine appears to be notorious for renewing subscriptions without a customer’s approval. Ask me how I know this.

Okay, I’ll tell you.

Last year I ordered a one-year subscription for a kiddo. (More than a year doesn’t make sense: kids outgrow this stuff pretty quickly). Last night I noticed an unauthorized renewal charge in my bank statement. Very sneaky: the subscription doesn’t expire until January, and the charge was made one day before my then-current card expired. I filed a fraud report with my bank, and I’m watching now for the refund that the magazine’s customer rep promised (though not before trying to get me to renew anyway).

Nasty company. Friends of children, beware.

*

October 9: Subscription canceled, money returned, no fraud investigation required. But still, it’s unconscionable for a company to push through a renewal without the customer’s consent, and to do so months in advance so as to catch a card before it expired. Think of the automation that must go into making that happen.

Eva Marie Saint (1924–2026)

[Eva Marie Saint at the Academy Awards, 1955. Photograph by Michael Rougier. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

From The New York Times obituary:

Nine months pregnant with her first child when she picked up her Oscar at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood, she told the audience, ‘I’m so excited I may have the baby right here.’ Her son was born two days later.

The Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was for her role as Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront .

A treat of my life as an English prof was getting to introduce students to that film (deeply Iliad-like) and North by Northwest (deeply Odyssey-like, with Saint’s Eve Kendall as Athena, Circe, and Penelope.)

[Movies: Never during class time, always in a reserved classroom at a time or times that accommodated most students. Students who couldn’t make it watched a DVD on reserve in the library. Remember DVDs?]

An NYRB cover

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

The cover is a detail of a William Wegman photograph, Beach Scene (1996). I think it’s the greatest New York Review Books cover of them all. But you have to read Asleep in the Sun to know why. And you shouldn’t take this cover literally.

Related reading
A handful of Bioy Casares posts

Dianas

Lucio Bordenave has agreed to have his wife Diana, aka the missus, taken off to Dr. Reger Samaniego’s Psychiatric Institute. In her absence, her lookalike sister Adriana María has moved in. The aged relative doña Ceferina is still on the scene. And in Diana’s absence, Lucio has taken in a dog whom he names Diana.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).

It’s impossible to describe what goes on in this novel without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that it combines domestic comedy and mad science into a surreal allegory of national and sexual politics.

Related reading
A handful of Bioy Casares posts

Recently updated

Morning becomes Ernie Bushmiller: Now with a link to a New Yorker piece about A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller.

Recently updated

“You can do either” Now with a suggestion that Iran could destroy Los Angeles or San Diego. And other mishaps.

“You can do either”

Via Aaron Rupar:

Q: Why are you telling your supporters to vote by mail if you think it’s fraud?

A: They’ll vote by mail or vote in person. I’d rather have them vote in person, but they can vote by mail if they want, because we seem to have no choice, because, ahh, a lot of people wanna vote by mail but a lot of very good people also wanna vote in person. You can do either. What we’re concerned about is there seems to be a lot of cheat — not seems to be, there is a lot of cheating in vote by mail.

Q: Where? Where’s the evidence?

A: I’ll tell you what: start off by taking a look at California. Take a look at —

Q: There’s no evidence in California.

A: Take a look at — no evidence, with millions and millions of ballots? You are fake news.

Watch this clip and the others that Aaron Rupar collected this afternoon and you’ll see a man who cannot respond to questions coherently and who falls back on empty stock phrasing: “We’re looking at it very strongly.” “It will all work out very well.” It’s gonna work out very well.” His response to a question about pneumonic plague shows him pretending to scientific expertise. When asked a question about María Corina Machado returning to Venezuela, he doesn’t even attempt to answer.

Help.

*

October 6: This post now looks a bit nitpicky in light of his suggestion last night that Iran could destroy Los Angeles or San Diego (NYT gift link). And there were many other problem spots in his discourse. I am creating a new Pinboard tag: OOHFM. (Out of his, &c.)

The New York Times offered a curiously delimited headline: “Fury in California After Trump Suggests Iran ‘Take Out’ L.A. or San Diego.” Fury everywhere there are clear-thinking people, even in downstate Illinois.

Writing and thinking

I wish I had missed this one. In The New York Times (gift link), Joe Cruz, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science, opines: “I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.” See? He’s a professor. So he must know stuff.

And he begins by fabricating straw people, with the assertion that “Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing.” Only by writing? I don’t think so. I don‘t know anyone who thinks so. Why discount the value of writing by leading with a false premise? As you might suspect, AI soon enters the argument.

Natalie Wexler offers a carefully reasoned response: ”Yes, Writing Does Advance Thinking.” As someone who has again and again not figured something out before sitting down to write, I must agree.

I like the Leuchtturm motto Denken mit der Hand: think with the hand. Or in a formulation that Wittgenstein approved, “I think with my pen.” The pencil is also a means to advancement.

Jeff Tweedy annotates Woody Guthrie

In The New York Times (gift link), Jeff Tweedy annotates Woody Guthrie’s “America Singing,” a prose piece published in the Times on April 4, 1943. An excerpt:

I think we need to get better at defining the stakes we face today. Because, while the people who are systematically dismantling our institutions and violating Americans’ rights don’t wear the uniforms of the Fascist Party, the consequences of their actions are similar to the ones Guthrie feared.

Guthrie’s piece, which I can see in its original form in ProQuest but not via the Times itself, appeared on a page titled “Music of the Times,” otherwise devoted to classical music. That might explain Guthrie’s seemingly out of the blue reference to “real honest classical music.”

The condescending subhead the Times added to Guthrie’s piece: “Author of ‘Bound for Glory’ Recalls What The Plain People Sing.”

Related reading
A handful of OCA Woody Guthrie posts (Pinboard)

Morning becomes Ernie Bushmiller

A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller, a play about the celebrated cartoonist, soon begins a six-performance run in Brooklyn. More information at BroadwayWorld.

*

The New Yorker has a much longer piece about the play: “Ernie Bushmiller’s Sunday Morning, Live.” I didn’t know that Bushmiller was the butt of a joke on Saturday Night Live.

*

The New York Times (gift link) has an article: “He Wrote for Seinfeld . Now He Wants You to See the Genius of Nancy .”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

”Dine at the Ritz”

[27 Union Square West, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like the cheeky sign: “Dine at the Ritz.” Yes, let us dine at the Ritz, after which we can have our press conference at the Four Seasons. Just don’t bring along any gangsters.

Here’s another view of this Ritz, with the candy store and a shoeshine parlor to the side. A five-story building owns this corner today. A later Ritz Diner at 1133 1st Avenue appears to have recently closed. That restaurant’s website gives the address as 1079 1st Avenue, which is the address of another diner under the same ownership, the Tramway. Mixing up those two establishments would be considerably less embarrassing than mixing up one Ritz or Four Seasons with another.

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

”Are we having beer yet?“

[Zippy , October 4, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

On Friday, Zippy became Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon . Yesterday he turned into Lee Marvin, and he continues in that role today (in Point Blank ?).

When I read the dozen comics I read daily, I close read. So I embiggened to see what’s on Zippy Lee’s bottle: Google Zippy Lemon Ale . Yes, it was real, 7.2 ABV (strong), available in Idaho and Washington. What did Bill Griffith ask for as compensation for the use of Zippy’s likeness? Two six-packs. The story is behind the link just above.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[The post title is part of the beer’s logo.]

Belated birthday

I missed the date: Orange Crate Art turned twenty-two on September 15. Twenty-two!

Elaine says that it’s okay to have missed the date. After twenty-one, she says, it’s all just adulthood.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Joel Fagliano of NYT Games. It’s the first time I’ve seen his name on a Stumper, and it’s a terrific one — tricky, amusing, with enough toeholds to get started and keep going. For instance, 29-A, four letters, “‘He was       , take him for all in all’: Hamlet.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, nine letters, “Tangentially.” I’m given to tangentiality.

2-D, nine letters, “What children make a stand for.” I was a little uncertain about filling in what seemed like the obvious answer. How could it be nine letters?

6-D, eight letters, “Leaves home.” Lovely.

12-D, five letters, “Friday the 3rd?” Groan.

20-D, eight letters, “Deal with your in-box.” See 2-D: how could the answer be eight letters? Perhaps (to my mind) the extra letters are to make the puzzle a bit trickier.

23-A, ten letters, “Short-term lab job.” Cute.

27-A, six letters, “Subject to slamming.” NOGOOD? A nice bit of trickery.

36-A, four letters, “Soul’s foregoer.” I tried to think of other Kia models.

39-A, five letters, “Edges of some calendar line lists.” I think I get it.

46-A, ten letters, “City near Manhattan not related to a sand bag brand.” I love it.

46-D, five letters, “Half a bubble gum brand.” Remarkable the way such stuff just sticks in my head.

57-A, six letters, “Loud buzzer.” I have lived it.

49-D, five letters, “Informal term of endearment.” I use this word often and typed it just yesterday.

My favorite in this puzzle: 61-A, six letters, “Layers of floors.” Just because.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

The folk process

Three wonderful granddaughters have each altered the venerable “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” substituting the fifth note of the scale (sol) for the second (re) in the song’s final line: “How I wonder what YOU are.”

One kiddo explained: “I like a little burst of excitement at the end.”

Yodeling

A great episode of 99% Invisible : “Tootle of a Devilish Song,” all about yodeling.

Two musicians missing from the episode who deserve mentioning: Emmett Miller, the minstrel show (blackface) performer whose “Lovesick Blues” (with yodeling) was taken up by Hank Williams, and Tommy Johnson, the Mississippi blues singer and guitarist with a signature understated yodel. As on, for instance, “Canned Heat Blues.”

[“Canned heat”: Sterno, an extremely dangerous subsitute for alcohol beverages. Johnson’s song is the source for the name of the blues-rock band Canned Heat.]

“Lightly edited,” but still wildly incoherent

Have you read the transcript of the current occupant’s September 28 interview with Time ? The transcript has been “lightly edited,” Time says, but it’s still wildly incoherent. With lots of lies. I wonder what it was like before editing. A sample:

Do you trust Sam Altman?

I like him. Do I trust him? Who do I trust? I like Sam Altman. Smart. Dario’s smart. They’re all smart. We’re dealing with a very high level of IQ. Very very high level. That’s a good thing. I like that. I like it. Did you see the story about my uncle?

The one who taught at MIT?

I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a — I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.

What I’ve done is I’ve created, for instance, these massive plants have no — We have no electricity in our grid. These massive plants now are allowed to make their own electric —

Are you worried you can’t bring the American people along with you on that?

I might not be able to. I don’t know.

The child-like appraisal of a person (“I like Sam Altman”), the obsession with IQ, the uncle story, the bragging, the weird JFK touch (“the new frontiers”), the preposterous claim to have created “massive plants,” the struggle to say something clearly (“We have no electricity in our grid”), the surprising moment of self-doubt. What a long strange trip.

For me, the biggest tell comes in two words: “I’m fine.” No, he’s not.

Sherry Turkle on the world she’d like

From a Here and Now interview with Sherry Turkle about her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines :

I'm not looking to a world where we evolve with AI into a posthuman thing. I'm not looking to a world where we leave to go to different planets and it doesn't matter what we did to the earth. I'm not looking for a world where robots raise our children. I'm really looking to a world where human beings, our species, maximizes what we are best at, which is caring for each other, loving each other, making communities, making culture, not leaving that all behind because computers can’t do it.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Big Jim

“Big Jim is a nearly 32-foot-tall aluminum statue of a fisherman, clad in old-style yellow oilskins, holding a giant can of Maine sardines”: you can see him in this report about the Penobscot Marine Museum’s SardineFest.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Sad: the newscasters make no mention of the sardine’s new status as a fad food.]