Overheard

“I only care about three things: the Catholic Church, swimming, and dancing. And I had to give them up”: Little Edie, Edith Bouvier Beale, in Grey Gardens (dir. Albert and David Maysles, 1975).

Why “overheard”? Because I was watching with only cursory attention. And having seen the film before, I didn’t watch to the end. I had to get out of that house.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Mr. ZIP

Steven Heller writes about Mr. ZIP. With a large likeness of the now-retired public servant.

Related posts
New York 19 : Snail Mail : A ZIP Code promotional film

The red and the blue

At Lexikaliker, Gunther has listed some established uses for two-color pencils: Rot und Blau. Google Translate offers an unbeautiful but readable translation.

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June 12: More red and blue from Lexikaliker, in the form of Venus Postal pencils. And here’s the Google Translate version.

Nineteen Eighty-Four at seventy

At The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about why we still read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published seventy years ago today. Menand says that we’re all Winston Smiths, “knowing that something is wrong, that we are losing control of our lives, but also knowing that we are powerless to resist”:

A trivial example is when we click “I Agree” on the banner explaining our app’s new privacy policy. We did not know what the old privacy policy was; we feel fairly certain that, if we read the new one, we would not understand what has changed or what we are giving away. We suspect everyone else just clicks the box. So we click the box and dream of a world in which there are no boxes to click. A non-trivial example is when your electoral process is corrupted by a foreign power and your government talks about charging the people who tried to investigate this interference with treason. That’s Orwellian. And it’s no longer a prophecy. It’s a headline.

Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Once again, Frank Longo has made my life difficult — I hope not for the last time. Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper felt like a challenge and a half. I started in the southwest with 49-D, eight letters, “What a cranial nerve serves,” got that section of the puzzle done, moved through the middle to the northeast, then to the northwest, and stumbled around lost for a long time in the southeast. Had I been more familiar with the ingredients of old-timey candy, as in 1-D, six letters, “Morsel in Chunky,” I might have had a different solving experience. But solve I did.

Clue and answer pairs I especially admired: 52-A, eight letters, “Many nicknamed eras.” 56-A, six letters, “Book report of a sort.” And the strange 42-D, five letters, “Tongue depressor?” It’s a lovely answer, when you finally see it.

One odd clue: 35-A, nine letters, “Common romcom feature.” To say that it’s common in romcoms is like saying that songs are common feature of musicals. How about “Hugs and kisses for the camera”?

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[When did you last see a Chunky?]

Moony

For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019

After reading and commenting on student writing for more than thirty years, I’m very good at discerning what a writer may have meant to say. Though Donald Trump said that the moon is part of Mars, I don’t think that’s what he meant to say. I can think of two possible explanations of “of which the Moon is a part”:

1. Trump thinks that the moon orbits Mars. If so, he is, on this point as on so many other points, misinformed.

2. Trump envisions a trip to the moon as part of a long-range project to reach Mars. That’s NASA’s Project Artemis. But you can’t go to Mars from the moon without going to the moon first. If going to the moon is part of getting to Mars, NASA should be talking about going to the moon.

Imagine Trump’s sentences as they might appear in a first-year college essay taking a position on space exploration:

For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!

You’d wonder — or at least I would — how the hell this guy ever got into college. But those sentences are the public thoughts of the ostensible leader of the free world.

And as for “doing” “Science!”: “White House blocked intelligence aide’s written testimony saying human-caused climate change could be ‘possibly catastrophic.’” In The Washington Post tonight.

[Mars? I don’t think of the human future as playing out on other planets. Earth’s the right place for love, as the poet said.]

Word of the day: coolth

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times crossword, by Stu Ockman, traded in rarely used antonyms: couth, gainly, kempt, ocuous, onymous, ruthful. And one more, which was new to me. From Webster’s Second:

coolth (kōōth). n. [cool + 1st -th.] Coolness. Humorous.

Webster’s Third offers a nuanced definition and drops the usage label:

coolth \'külth\ n -S [cool + -th (as in warmth)]: the state or occasion of being cool

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to 1547, gives the definition “coolness,” and adds the tags “chiefly literary, archaic, or humorous.” A citation I like, from Tom Taylor (1863): “In pleasant dreams Of English coolth and greenery.”

A later meaning (1748?): “a cold; the common cold. Now rare.” And from 1966:

colloquial (orig. U.S.). Chiefly humorous. The quality of being relaxed, assured, or sophisticated in demeanour or style.

A citation from The Christian Science Monitor (1983): “Music lovers might argue the relative coolth of the newer jazz groups.” Which makes me imagine that in a parallel universe, people might be listening to Miles Davis’s The Birth of the Coolth.

Domestic comedy

“New Age-y at this point is sort of like Old Age-y.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Peanuts and D-Day

As I discovered only after making a post earlier today, Charles Schulz marked D-Day in a number of Peanuts strips. So I looked them up:

1993 June 6
1994 June 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
1996 June 6
1997 June 6
1998 May 31

No D-Day strip in 1999. The last new Peanuts strips appeared in January and February 2000.

Pianos, drinking and non-

Billy Joel: “And the piano sounds like a carnival, / And the microphone smells like a beer.”

Tom Waits: “And the carpet needs a haircut, / And the spotlight looks like a prison break.”

It took me lo these many years to realize that Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) must have been the jumping-off point for Tom Waits’s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” (1977). Here is Waits’s studio version, from the album Small Change. My favorite Waits performance of the song is from Fernwood 2 Night (August 1, 1977). In the post-performance interview with Barth Gimble (Martin Mull) and Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard), Waits plays his part to the hilt.

And of course, in 1939 Earl Hines and His Orchestra recorded “Piano Man,” a Hines composition, no relation.

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December 26, 2019: Aw, jeez, I just discovered that I had this thought in 2017.