Mystery actor

He seems to be realizing that he likes the taste of blood, even his own. Do you recognize him? I think I would have, but his name flashed on the screen (opening credits) just as this shot began. Leave your best guess in the comments.

More mystery actors
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Mystery actor

Do you recognize him? I didn’t. Leave your best guess in the comments.

Here are links to posts with a dozen more mystery actors, from Naked City , Route 66 , and “the movies”:

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Robert Walser: “When a child cries”

Robert Walser, “Frau Scheer,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Another world

Joseph Joubert:

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Also from Joseph Joubert
Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

Pencil stocks threatened

It begins:

A surge in the number of people buying adult colouring books has threatened pencil stocks world-wide as manufacturers struggle to cope with an increased demand for quality crayons.
 
The world’s biggest wooden pencil manufacturer, Faber-Castell, say they are experiencing “double-digit growth” in the sale of artists’ pencils and have been forced to run more shifts in their German factory to keep up.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Crayon is Britspeak: “a pointed stick or pencil of coloured chalk or other material, for drawing” (Oxford English Dictionary ). For “It begins,” see here.]

A joke in the traditional manner

How do amoebas communicate?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the produce clerk, the toy, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, Santa Claus, and this one. He was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.”]

A job listing

Excerpts from a genuine job listing, describing a tenure-track position in philosophy:

Our students tend to be poorly prepared for college level work, intellectually passive, interested primarily in partying, and culturally provincial in the extreme. . . .

The academic environment at SEMO is distinctly non-intellectual — somewhat like a Norman Rockwell painting — and the candidate cannot expect to attract students by offering courses that assume innate curiosity about ideas and books, or intellectual playfulness, or independence of moral and political thought.

Snopes calls this listing cynical. Other readers might call it honest. The fellow who got the job now heads the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, and Religion at Southeast Missouri State University.

Marketplace on Illinois

From American Public Radio’s Marketplace , a helpful introduction to the public higher education crisis in Illinois.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

Steve Young (1942–2016)

The musician and songwriter Steve Young has died at the age of seventy-three. He is the subject of Van Dyke Parks’s extraordinary song “The All Golden,” which appeared on Parks’s first album, Song Cycle (1968).

Here is a solo Parks performance of “The All Golden,” from 2010. Next to you-know-what, it’s my favorite Parks song, suggestive of Edward MacDowell, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” showtunes, Gertrude Stein’s word portraits — and Steve Young.

Words, phrases, etymological cages

Sir Ernest Gowers, or a second- or third-generation reviser, writing about what has come to be called the etymological fallacy, the mistaken idea that a word’s present meaning must be related to that word’s etymology:

[T]here is a point where it becomes idle pedantry to try to put back into their etymological cages words and phrases that escaped from them many years ago and have settled down firmly elsewhere. To do that is to start on a path on which there is no logical stopping-point short of such absurdities as insisting that the word anecdote can only be applied to a story never told before, whereas we all know that it is more likely to mean one told too often.

The Complete Plain Words , rev. Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut (Boston: David R. Godine, 1988).

This book is full of quick bits of wit.

Also from The Complete Plain Words
Buzz-phrase generator : “Falling into incongruity” : Thinking and writing

[Anecdote : from the Greek anekdota, unpublished items. A choice word to illustrate the etymological fallacy: decimate .]