23C and 23D

Safe to say that the intended audience for today’s George Bodmer cartoon includes me.

Context: this past Saturday’s Newsday Saturday Stumper.

Thank you, George, for brightening the corner where I am.

Free Jazz Against Paludan

“We’re fighting noise with noise”: in Denmark, musicians play to drown out a far-right politician.

Nancy old and new

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy is back at GoComics. And today Olivia Jaimes continues the Bushmiller tradition of taking off on holidays. See also Jaimes’s 2019 Labor Day strip.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“Welder making boilers for a ship, Combustion Engineering Co., Chattanooga, Tenn.” Photograph by Alfred T. Palmer. June 1942. From the Library of Congress Flickr account. Click for a larger view.]

The Rabin Glove Company (“Jersey City Pride”) is now Rabin Glove & Safety Company, in Newark, New Jersey, offering “a full line of high quality work gloves, work clothing and personal protection equipment.”

An M-W Word of the Day: heyday

I’ve been meaning to write about the word heyday for months now. Too late: Merriam-Webster has done the work for me. Heyday, “the period of one’s greatest popularity, vigor, or prosperity,” was yesterday’s M-W Word of the Day:

In its earliest appearances in English, in the 16th century, heyday was used as an interjection that expressed elation or wonder (similar to our word hey, from which it derives). Within a few decades, heyday was seeing use as a noun meaning “high spirits.” This sense can be seen in Act III, scene 4 of Hamlet, when the Prince of Denmark tells his mother, “You cannot call it love; for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame. . . .” The word’s second syllable is not thought to be borne of the modern word day (or any of its ancestors), but in the 18th century the syllable’s resemblance to that word likely influenced the development of the now-familiar use referring to the period when one’s achievement or popularity has reached its zenith.

My hopeful guess was that heyday had something to do with reaping: “Yay, it’s hay day, what a big deal, everybody’s out there going full force!” Nope.

“Suckers”

From The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946).]

Dana Andrews is Fred Derry, counterman. Harold Russell is Homer Parrish, fellow veteran. I’m unable to identify the man in the hat.

The language in this clip is of its time and ours. Racial slurs: “Japs” then; “China virus” now. “Plain old-fashioned Americanism” then; “America first” now (and then). But I never could have imagined that an American president would join the man in the hat in characterizing service members killed in war as “suckers.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Anna Stiga, or Stan Again, the puzzle’s editor Stan Newman. Not an especially difficult puzzle, but a satisfying one, with some surprising content. I believe the technical term for such a puzzle is “crunchy.”

Clues and answers I found to like:

4-D, eight letters, “Venerable wind instruments.” A novel answer, at least in my experience. Crunch. I have one of these instruments but never thought it venerable until now.

12-D, seven letters, “Oscar winner portraying Romeo.” I dunno — Olivier? Crunch.

16-A, six letters, “Slip stream?” The answer seems to be showing up often in crosswords these days. But this clue makes it new.

29-A, four letters, “Assumed name's assumed name.” I find this kind of clue a bit painful, but I have to admit that the phrasing is clever.

33-A, four letters, “Farewell interrupter.” I take inordinate glee in having seen this answer straight off.

37-A, nine letters, “It can roll down while rolling.” A little awkward, as it isn’t rolling, but clever.

38-D, seven letters, “Orajel alternative.” I haven’t thought of this stuff in years. Crunch.

44-D, six letters, “They’ve come a long way in anime.” Okay, that’s cute.

51-D, five letters, “It's often between 23C and 23D.” There must be more to the number 23 than I know. No, wait — 23 is just misdirection.

60-A, six letters, “Whom Rocky named his restaurant for.” Bullwinkle? Gideon? Magill? Oops, wrong Rockies. Easy to guess, but still crunchy, I’d say, and a surprise, at least for me, to learn that Rocky had (or has?) a restaurant. I’ve seen about five minutes of anything Balboa.

Yo, no spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Beware of user error

Last night I wrote a cranky post about trying to obtain two (of three) 13mm × 10mm cam lock fasteners from Wayfair in a timely fashion. Twenty-four larger fasteners were all there.

This morning Elaine asked if I might have used two small fasteners in place of larger ones. I looked carefully. Yes, I had. The larger fasteners are 15mm × 12mm (I think). Whatever their size, they’re virtually indistinguishable from the smaller ones. I called Wayfair today to explain what happened, to apologize for wasting so much of their time, and to cancel the complete hardware set they were planning to send from a warehouse.

My cranky post (now removed) was titled “Beware of Wayfair.” I still think that the Wayfair business model, one of selling stuff from “the warehouse,” with no ready access to a supply of extra hardware for the furniture sold, is a lousy business model. No one can pick out a fastener or screw or knob or bolt and send it out. “The warehouse” does not send parts, much less send them in a timely way. Thus the complete hardware set that was due to arrive a week from today.

As I mentioned in my now-removed post, I ended up ordering 13mm × 10mm cam lock fasteners from Amazon. Not sold in any store! At least not in our town’s incredible Ace, an unabridged dictionary of hardware, nor in a nearby Home Depot. The fasteners have already shipped, and they’re scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Anyone need some cam lock fasteners?

“Losers,” “suckers,” and Trump*

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reports on Donald Trump*’s contempt for service members killed in battle:

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Also, no amputees in military parades: “Nobody wants to see that.”

Trump* says in an angry tweet that he “never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES.” Of course that’s the same Donald Trump* who said publicly that he likes people who don’t get captured.

To paraphrase (once again) something Gertrude Stein may have said, There ain’t any bottom, there ain’t going to be any bottom, there never has been any bottom, that’s the bottom.

Christopher Fame

I was at an art show, where I noticed a tall, thin, pale man painting pictures of vases. His booth also displayed what looked like pages from graphic novels, mostly cityscapes with stores whose signage rearranged itself — in real time — into pithy or snarky anagrams. There was also a page depicting a low-rent entertainer, a short, blond fellow in a dinner jacket.

Something about this artist’s work seemed familiar to me. “Your work seems familiar to me,” I said. “Would I know your name?” He turned to me and said that while I lived in a world of commercial something-or-other, he lived in a world of color. I later found out that his name was Christopher Fame.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)