From the Saturday Stumper

A nice clue from the Newsday Saturday Stumper, 20-Down, nine letters: “What a pump might hold.” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle is by Lester Ruff. Finishing a Saturday Stumper is always cause for minor self-congratulation.

A Bob and Ray motto

Bob and Ray did much to foster my youthful appreciation of incongruity and silliness. When I see an ad for prune shakes or read about tie slimming, I think of Bob and Ray.

A photograph of Bob and Ray’s stationery in David Pollock’s Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons (Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2013) shows a company motto:

PUISSANCE WITHOUT HAUTEUR

Words to live by!

Here is a photograph of a Bob and Ray letter to a young Keith Olbermann. Motto top left.

Related reading
All OCA Bob and Ray posts (Pinboard)

[Of course, using the word puissance might be the very essence of hauteur.]

Cartoon of the day

[“Net Neutrality,” by Ellis Rosen. The New Yorker, December 15, 2017.]

Manually operated elevators

“Collectively they form a hidden museum of obsolete technology and anachronistic employment, a network of cabinets of wonder staffed round the clock”: The New York Times visits some of the city’s manually operated elevators.

See also The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. And in Chicago, the Fine Arts Building.

The boy with the orange scarf

[Henry, December 15, 2017.]

This comic strip does not predate the invention of the winter coat: plenty of Henry people wear coats, just not the protagonist. I like the scarf and the scarf rack, the wintry weather in the window, and the concessionaire’s uniform. Henry would have been better off sans scarf: an irked moviegoer will soon be using it to tie Henry’s mouth shut and silence his popcorn.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Sunny Murray (1936–2017)

The drummer Sunny Murray has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary. I know Murray’s music mainly from my small cache of ESP-Disk LPs. This one, for instance. And this one.

Recently updated

Words of the Year Oxford Dictionaries announces its word.

PDB

A long feature in The Washington Post: “Hacking Democracy.” An excerpt, with my emphasis:

U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter. In other cases, Trump’s main briefer — a veteran CIA analyst — adjusts the order of his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.

Yet another indication that our president is virtually a non-reader.

A related post
Donald Trump’s spelling

At the Manor

At a nursing home called Princess Manor:


Alice Munro, “What Is Remembered,” in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (New York: Vintage, 2002).

Also from Alice Munro
“Rusted seams” : “That is what happens” : “Henry Ford?” : “A private queer feeling” : “A radiance behind it” : Opinions

Quilted steel

Dingburg beatniks:


[Zippy, December 14, 2017.]

Quilted steel? Like, this.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)