Separated at birth

 
[Ernie Bushmiller, cartoonist; Red Rodney, musician.]

The forehead, the hair: I can’t unsee the resemblance. And Bushmiller, too, was a redhead, at least in his early years.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

All the news that’s print

Farhad Manjoo:

Getting news only from print newspapers may be extreme and probably not for everyone. But the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.

Those lessons, summarized in the Michael Pollan manner: “Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.”

Domestic comedy

[Reading the Nutrition Facts.]

“The Chessmen are twice as healthy as the Milanos.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

The best and the brightest

How did Peter Navarro make it to the White House? As reported in Vanity Fair in April 2017, Jared Kushner was at work, sort of:

At one point during the campaign, when Trump wanted to speak more substantively about China, he gave Kushner a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research. Kushner simply went on Amazon, where he was struck by the title of one book, Death by China, co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser. (When he joined, Navarro was in fact the campaign’s only economic adviser.)

The Washington Post revived this bit yesterday.

[“Simply went on Amazon”? I’d quibble with simply, but Jared Kushner does seem simple. The alarmist red is mine.]

“It’s Automatic”

[Zippy, March 7, 2018.]

Today’s Zippy, “It’s Automatic,” channels a postcard explanation of what to do in a Horn & Hardart Automat. In 2017 Zippy himself was patronizing an Automat.

I have a dim memory of sitting in an Automat with my friend Aldo Carrasco, sometime in the early 1980s, having cake and coffee. Or pie and coffee. Or something. The Automat felt as depressing as hell. I don’t think I knew enough then to appreciate the place.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : Automat beverage section : New York, 1964: Automat : One more Automat

Russia and Rex

The March 12 issue of The New Yorker arrived in our mailbox yesterday. About a fifth of this issue’s pages are devoted to Jane Mayer’s article “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier.” One stunning excerpt:

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy — and an incoming President.

As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it. In a humiliating public spectacle, Trump dangled the post before Romney until early December, then rejected him. There are plenty of domestic political reasons that Trump may have turned against Romney. Trump loyalists, for instance, noted Romney’s public opposition to Trump during the campaign. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump aide, has suggested that Trump was vengefully tormenting Romney, and had never seriously considered him. (Romney declined to comment. The White House said that he was never a first choice for the role and declined to comment about any communications that the Trump team may have had with Russia on the subject.) In any case, on December 13, 2016, Trump gave Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, the job. The choice was a surprise to most, and a happy one in Moscow, because Tillerson’s business ties with the Kremlin were long-standing and warm. (In 2011, he brokered a historic partnership between ExxonMobil and Rosneft.) After the election, Congress imposed additional sanctions on Russia, in retaliation for its interference, but Trump and Tillerson have resisted enacting them.

In the news yesterday (I know it was in there somewhere): sanctions are supposed to be coming soon. “In the next several weeks,” according to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Check’s in the mail.

[And now I wonder if Sam Nunberg’s media tour was timed to deflect attention from Mayer’s article. A search of the CNN website suggests that the network has left the article untouched. Mayer has appeared on two MSNBC shows, Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show.]

“Black as a giant tortoise”

Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, trans. Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt (New York: New York Review Books, 2006).

Stormy weather, yes, with no scandal-related pun intended. Zweig’s fiction is so often the stuff of a great black-and-white film.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

Walking, not a sport

“Walking is not a sport. Putting one foot in front of the other is child’s play”: Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2014).

I like the spirit of this book. But there’s considerable repetition, and too many abstractions and unsupported assertions. After all, walking, for some people, is a sport, and for others, it’s impossible or nearly so. The translation is often ungainly: “One can plunder the streets delicately like that for ages.” This book is best borrowed from a library. The library is best reached on foot.

Mystery actor

Do you recognize her? Leave your best guess as a comment, and enter as often as you like. I’ll drop a hint if necessary.

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A hint, before I go for a walk: This actor is best known for a role in a television series.

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Another hint: the role involved a struggle with the bottle, or with a bottle.

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Solved! The answer is in the comments.

More mystery actors
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Sam Nunberg Day

It appears that March 5 has been designated Sam Nunberg Day.

All I know is that if you’re serious about ducking a subpoena, you slip out of the country, quiet-like. Today’s mediafest is a stunt, meant, I think, to let Nunberg’s “mentor” Roger Stone know that his mentee will not betray him.

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A better guess, maybe: Nunberg is presenting himself as an inherently unreliable witness. I’m not crooked enough to understand how these people think.

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The Washington Post offers four theories.

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Another thought: a Stone prank to discredit CNN and MSNBC.

[Sam who? The Ballotpedia biography is much more helpful than Wikipedia.]