Mystery actor

[Who? Click for a larger view.]

You may have seen her on television — dozens and dozens of times. Do you recognize her? Leave your best guess in the comments. If necessary, I will add a hint.

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A hint: You may have seen her at the Stellar Employment Agency or in a sweltering apartment.

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It’s been very quiet today. The mystery actor is Betty Garde, seen here as Wanda Skutnik in Call Northside 777 (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1948). Garde is probably best known to television viewers as Thelma, the maid in the Honeymooners episode “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done,” and as Mrs. Bronson in the Twilight Zone episode “The Midnight Sun.” “Dozens and dozens of times” was meant as a bit of misdirection: I was thinking of seeing that one Honeymooners episode again and again and again. “The chubby one’s gonna be trouble.”

More mystery actors
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[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I’ll use actor.]

Recently updated

Review: Walks with Walser Now that I have the published book and an accurate page count.

Nomenclature

Elaine and I have a garden going, for the first time in many years. She is the brains of the operation, the planner and the planter. I do whatever she asks of me — hauling dirt, filling the watering can. We have been trying to figure out a name for my role in this project. Am I “the hired man,” or what?

Elaine came up with a fitting name today: sous-farmer.

A related post
Dream jobs (Including soda jerk and sous-jerk)

Our alphabet and how it got that way

ABCDEFGHI_KLMNOPQRST_V_XYZ: from The American Heritage Dictionary, it’s a succinct account of the differences between the alphabet the Romans used (twenty-three letters) and our own.

I had to laugh when I began reading: ”As everyone knows, there are 26 letters. . . .” Well, not everyone. I recall a Great Moment in Teaching from the early 2000s, when I was explaining to a class that the Iliad and Odyssey had each been divided into twenty-four parts for the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. In other words, the episodes had been lettered, not numbered. A hand went up: “How many letters are there in our alphabet?” I didn’t bat an eye: “Twenty-six.” Yes, this was in college.

When I told recounted this moment to Elaine, she suggested a different response, to be said in a kindly, speaking-to-a-child tone of voice: “You can count them yourself.”

Life’s “we”

These thoughts don’t belong in a post about comic strips and Hula Hoops, but I don’t want to let them go either. Consider this sentence from an Editors’ Note in Life, January 31, 1964:

And don’t forget the Hula Hoop. What American didn’t climb into a colored plastic hoop in 1958 and undulate his torso?

Life’s question is rhetorical: the editors assume that we all climbed in. But consider how limited that “we” is. Set aside the generic “his” (because it’s 1964), and Life’s sense of an American still fails to account for the very young, the very old, those with disabilities or medical conditions that make movement difficult or impossible, those who might find the Hula Hoop an insult to (or unnecessary supplement to) their own traditions of dance, those living in the kind of privation that might have made Hula Hoops unaffordable or unavailable. Were Hula Hoops for sale in deepest Appalachia? That question too is rhetorical.

My point is not to hate on Life or the year 1964; it’s only to point out that anyone’s sense of who “we” are is informed by countless unexamined assumptions. Mine too.

Risking ruin in a TED talk

A delightful headline that will likely see much attention from the syntax-minded. A better headline: “In TED talk, Pope warns powerful to act humbly or risk ruin.” Or in what sounds to me more like journalese: ”Pope, in TED talk, warns powerful to act humbly or risk ruin.”

[Got a hat tip at Language Log.]

Joubert on Homer

Joseph Joubert:

If a superior intelligence wanted to give an account of human beings to the inhabitants of heaven and to give an exact idea of them, he would express himself like Homer.

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

Also from Joseph Joubert
Advancing without aging : Another world : “As real as a cannon ball” : Being and nothingness : Brevity : Doing something well : “Everything is new” : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Justified enthusiasm : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine : Writing, too much or not at all

Odysseus in the North Atlantic

A startling bit of dialogue, from Action in the North Atlantic (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1943). The speaker is merchant seaman Boats O’Hara (Alan Hale):

“You know what I’m doin’ when this is over? I’m puttin’ into port, I’m gettin’ off the ship, I’m puttin’ an oar on my shoulder, and I’m startin’ inland. And the first time a guy says to me: ‘What’s that on your shoulder?’ that's where I’m settlin’ for the rest of my life.”

That’s Homer. In Odyssey 11, Odysseus recounts what the ghost of the seer Tiresias told him he must do if he makes it home to Ithaca and kills Penelope’s suitors:



There’s no place for winnowing fans or animal sacrifices in 1943. And Odysseus, unlike Boats, would never settle inland. As Tiresias foretells, Odysseus will return to Ithaca after his inland journey, offer sacrifices to the gods, each in turn, and thereby be assured of an easy death in old age.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[The quoted passage is from Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Odyssey (Hackett, 2000).]

The Forger

“My pen, my ink, my stamps, and my stapler”: tools of the trade for master forger Adolfo Kaminsky, the subject of The Forger, a great short film from The New York Times.

[The Times went with quill for plume. I chose pen as more appropriate.]

Bad coffee

Maxwell House Instant FTW? Keith Pandolfi makes a case for bad coffee. Found via Matt Thomas’s Submitted for Your Perusal.

A related post
Whiter instant? (A 1972 Instant Maxwell House ad)

[It used to be Instant Maxwell House; now it’s Maxwell House Instant.]