Thug life

This morning: “That reporter couldn’t have done too good a job on you, eh? I think you did a good job on her, actually.”

And there’s been further retaliation against NPR.

Pete Buttigieg and Seneca

A New York Times feature: “20 (More) Questions With Democrats.” I like Pete Buttigieg’s answer about the last book he read:

“I just finished a book by Seneca. Well, it was a very short book, with his commentary on the shortness of life. He says life is plenty long as long you know how to live it, something like that.”

I think Buttigieg must be describing the Penguin Great Ideas paperback On the Shortness of Life (2005). Look at the cover:



Says Buttigieg, “With all the noise going on right now, it’s a good time to go back to the Stoics.”

Like the Joycean title Shortest Way Home and the umpteen languages, the answer “Seneca” isn’t enough to make me want to vote for Buttigieg, but it’s an arresting answer. The folksy tone — “plenty long,” “something like that” — bugs me a little. Wear your learning lightly, sir, but don’t tear a hole in it to look more down-home. Other candidates’ answers: Malcolm Gladwell, a murder mystery, a history of World War I, the history of Sherrod Brown’s Senate desk, a book about ways to reduce carbon emissions.

It’s always a good time to go back to the Stoics, but this Senecan perspective baffles me. I think I’d say that life is short — too short — if you know how to use it and can. I side with Herbert Fingarette: “I still would like to hang around.”

“Peace, prosperity[,] and”

The Guardian reports that the novelist Philip Pullman is calling for a boycott of a Brexit 50p coin. The coin carries the inscription “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations.”

“The ‘Brexit’ 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,” wrote the novelist on Twitter, while Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell wrote that, while it was “not perhaps the only objection” to the Brexit-celebrating coin, “the lack of a comma after ‘prosperity’ is killing me.”

Thanks to Gunther at Lexikaliker for passing on the news.

Related reading
All OCA comma posts (Pinboard)
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

Separated at birth

 
[Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Adam Driver.]

Watching Saturday Night Live this past Saturday, I began to think, He really does look like Gaudier-Brzeska. It was late, and the resemblance isn’t exact. But I still think it holds.

The artist and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) is known to many a student of modernist poetry by way of Ezra Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. The actor Adam Driver is known to many a student of modernist poetry by way of Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson.

Also separated at birth
Claude Akins and Simon Oakland : 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 : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : 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 : Charles Grassley and Abraham Jebediah Simpson II : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Steven Isserlis and Pat Metheny : Colonel Wilhelm Klink and Rudy Giuliani : 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

Sluggo’s noes

 
[Nancy, date unknown. Nancy, January 27, 2020.]

The Ernie Bushmiller panel, left, has been called “the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn.” I find it difficult to think that Olivia Jaimes’s no is just coincidence. As today’s strip begins, Sluggo has announced that he is good at walking around with untied shoelaces. But, Esther asks, isn’t he worried about tripping and falling? Sluggo kicks his legs and responds.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”

The latest episode of the BBC Radio 4 show Soul Music is devoted to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”

Jaimes and Nancy FTW

Best Cartoonist, 2019: Olivia Jaimes. Best Original Volume, 2019: Nancy: A Comic Collection. As voted by the writers of ComicBook.com.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

For me, solving today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, came down to choosing a letter to complete answers whose clues baffled me: 38-A, four letters, “Quintet in an ‘Executive Clicker’” and 38-D, three letters, “It means ‘resembling.’” I chose the only letter that seemed plausible, and thus — somehow — the puzzle was done. It wasn’t until I began explaining to Elaine how baffling these clues and answers were that I understood them.

Some clue-and-answer pairs that I especially liked (and understood more easily):

9-D, six letters, “Test of consumer confidence?” Seems to continue a minor theme in Saturday Stumpers.

20-A, nine letters, “Comic book collector’s supply.” An unusual answer, at least in my solving experience.

26-A, six letters, “Muddy.” A nice instance of misdirection.

28-A, seven letters, “Keeled over, to Barbra.” I loved this answer, even if I’m not crazy about Barbra.

31-D, ten letters, “Debugs.” You were thinking computers?

40-A, eleven letters, “Experiential.” I’m back in college.

And a clue that taught me something: 58-A, four letters, “Snub, so to speak.” I thought that the clue was asking for a bit of contemporary slang, but no. The answer has been colloquial American English for some time.

No spoilers: that answer and all the others are in the comments.

EXchange name sighting

[Somewhere in San Francisco. Danger Zone (dir. William Berke, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

Hugh Beaumont exits a Yellow Cab. TUxedo was indeed a San Francisco exchange, as telephone number-cards attest. TUxedo 5-1234 was indeed the number of the Yellow Cab Company. And before that, TUxedo 1234. Here’s an advertising thermometer with the shorter number. And here’s someone who recalls the added 5.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : Chinatown : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Overheard

“I have an old-fashioned stereo system. You know how you used to buy components?”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
Illustration from a pamphlet accompanying a component system (c. 1983)