Today’s Weekend Edition Sunday has a segment on Hallmark Christmas movies. Linda Holmes and Lulu Garcia-Navarro are fans, even as they acknowledge that Hallmark’s unreality is utterly heteronormative and nearly all-white.
Related reading
All OCA Hallmark Movies posts
Sunday, December 17, 2017
NPR on Hallmark Movies
More bad words
The Washington Post reports that the Centers for Disease Control is not alone in cuts to vocabulary:
A second HHS [Health and Human Services] agency received similar guidance to avoid using “entitlement,” “diversity” and “vulnerable,” according to an official who took part in a briefing earlier in the week. Participants at that agency were also told to use “Obamacare” instead of ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, and to use “exchanges” instead of “marketplaces” to describe the venues where people can purchase health insurance.Related reading
At the State Department, meanwhile, certain documents now refer to sex education as “sexual risk avoidance.”
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)
The seven words you can’t write at the CDC
Saturday, December 16, 2017
The seven words you can’t write
at the CDC
From The Washington Post:
The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.Related reading
Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)
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 HAUTEURWords 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.]
Friday, 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.
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