A catalog saved

The Washington Post reports on an all-volunteer effort to save the contents of the card catalog at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library.

A related post
The Card Catalog (with links to more reading and a catalog-card generator)

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Who can it be now? This one would baffle me, so I’m guessing it’ll be easy for someone else. Let’s see.

Leave your best guess in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if necessary.

*

10:08 a.m.: The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Some madeleines

[“À la recherche du temps Sluggo.” Zippy, January 7, 2020.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is out for a walk when he happens upon three rocks. He thinks he might be in the wrong comic strip. And thus this final panel. I think of the rocks in today’s strip as madeleines, recalling comics past.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy, Nancy and Zippy, and Nancy posts
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Another circuit

I learned at lunch that years ago, a friend played in a rock band that traveled the upper midwest: Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula. I suggested that he must have been playing the Hotdish Circuit.

[Cf. the Chitlin’ Circuit.]

How to improve writing (no. 86)

Here’s a sentence brought me up short. From The New Yorker, December 23, 2019, page 69:

Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or heartfelt accounts of the people he meets on the trail.

Do you see the problem? You can tell a joke, but you cannot tell an account. Well, you can if you really want to, but you’d be writing decidely unidiomatic English. “He told a joke and heartfelt accounts”: yikes. From 1800 to 2018, Google’s Ngram Viewer shows no results for tell an account or told an account.

So — make sure that verbs and their objects go together:

Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or shares heartfelt accounts of the people he meets on the trail.

I’d tweak a little more:

Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or shares a heartfelt story about someone he’s met on the trail.

I’ll leave the extra changes to speak for themselves.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[The sentence has the same problem in the online version of the article. This post is no. 86 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Now would have been the time

It was Friday when I learned that “I was today years old when I learned/realized” is a meme. Thank you, Rachel.

And it was today when I realized that the name of the MSNBC show Kasie DC is a play on “K-C-D-C.”

If I were likely to take up memes, now would have been the perfect time to do so.

*

What I didn’t realize until two days after making this post: Kasie DC is a play on AC/DC.

Twitter Terms of Service

Do Twitter’s Terms of Service permit the threat of military attack? Do they permit the threat of war crimes? Because the destruction of historic cultural sites has been prosecuted as a war crime.

The Archive of Contemporary Music

“It is one of the world’s largest collections of popular music, with more than three million recordings, as well as music books, vintage memorabilia and press kits”: The New York Times reports that Tribeca’s high rents mean that the Archive of Contemporary Music must find a new home. A resource of this depth must have a home.

The Archive’s website is a browser’s delight. For instance, the catalogs-in-progress. For instance, almost Beatles. For instance, Keith Richards’s blues LPs.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Anna Stiga — that is, Stan Again, or crossword editor Stan Newman working under one of the pen names he uses with easier Stumpers of his making. This Stumper was pretty do-able, though a nest of small words near the puzzle’s center made things difficult for me: 23-D, five letters, “Gang members.” 26-A, three letters, “What 7 may be used instead of.” 26-D, four letters, “Daisy Duck niece.” 32-A, four letters, “Fell.” Wha?

Some clues of interest:

17-A, ten letters, “Old name for the giraffe.” I know the word from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I thought it hailed from the world of cryptids.

30-A, seven letters, “Popular bar since the ’20s.” I have never partaken. Have you?

30-D, five letters, “Ersatz duck calls.” An insult!

34-D, seven letters, “Introducer of ‘Trouble’ (1957).” The board game? No, that would be six letters, in 1965 (KOHNER). I had to DuckDuckGo to make sense of the answer.

43-D, six letters, “Walk.” Kinda dowdy.

44-A, nine letters, “Neon sign seen in Looney Tunes.” I thought of A Mighty Wind.

No spoilers: the answers, not in neon, are in the comments.

Trump* and lies

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump* has made more than 15,000 “false or misleading claims” while in office.

So when Trump* says that Qassim Suleimani “was planning a very major attack,” there is no reason to believe what he says.

Nor is there reason to think that targeting one man would prevent that attack.

[This post explains the asterisk.]