“All hotels”

William Lindsay Greshman, Nightmare Alley (1946).

Add a blinking neon sign and it’s “the movies,” save that one of the two bedmates would have to have at least one foot on the floor.

Nightmare Alley is available as a New York Review Books Classic.

Also from this novel
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY” : A “publicity-inflamed dummy”

NYC in color (1937)

Behold, color footage of New York City in 1937. I’m surprised to instantly recognize locations I haven’t seen in many years — the West Side Highway, for instance, and the area along the docks where people sold Christmas trees.

My greatest delight: the benches (at the 12:15 mark), concrete and thick wooden slats, same when I was a kid. Speak, memory!

Thanks to Mike Brown for passing on the link.

“Nov shmoz ka pop?” redux

Look — it’s a hitchhiker.

[Mutts, September 20, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Mutts has a guest star: The Little Hitchhiker, a character in Gene Ahern’s comic strip The Squirrel Cage. Ahern was born on September 16, 1895.

The catchphrase “Nov shmoz ka pop?” turned up earlier this year in Zippy.

[Yes, it’s late in the day to be posting something from the comics, but they’re the Sunday comics, and it’s Sunday all day.]

The Mailman

[The Mailman. Encyclopedia Britannica Films (1946).]

Even in 1946, not every “mailman” was male. From a USPS PDF, Women Mail Carriers: “Women have transported mail in the United States since at least the mid-1800s.” See also the National Postal Museum’s online exhibit Women in the U.S. Postal System.

A related film
Your Postal Service

The fix we’re in

We’re in a terrible fix when so many possibilities of preserving or achieving freedoms and justice depended, at least largely, upon one eighty-seven-year-old Supreme Court justice’s not dying.

Democracy is fragile. Vote.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough puzzle that took me forty-one minutes to solve. (Your minutes may vary.) I started briskly with 1-A, three letters, “Color close to silver”; 1-D, four letters, “Tender feeling”; 9-A, four letters, “Latter-day cheaters”; and 12-D, four letters, “Marvel debut of ’63.” And then my pace slowed considerably.

Matthew Sewell knows how to put the um in Stumper. 28-D, five letters, “Fortes”? 32-A, three letters, “Bar display”? Um . . . no idea. At least not right away.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

3-D, seven letters, “Thrown-together attention-getter.” I just discovered that the answer is in Merriam-Webster.

14-D, eleven letters, “They take the edge off.” I was thinking of files and sandpaper.

25-D, ten letters, “Medieval military governments.” Just a surprising word to see.

35-D, eight letters, “Two shovels for ‘work available,’ for example.” I should have known this one immediately.

43-A, five letters, “Rome’s ___-Shelley Memorial House.” Every crossword reference to ___ or Shelley reminds me of my friend Rob Zseleczky.

43-D, six letters, “Submits for approval, perhaps.” Clever.

57-A, four letters, “Snow the heat, maybe.” Also clever.

61-A, three letters, “Common rack range.” The clue redeems the answer.

My favorite from this puzzle; 8-D, eight letters, “Kingston trios, often.” I wrote in an answer, no crosses, no nothing. It had to be, thought I. And it was. Is the answer plausible, really? Trios? I’m not sure. But for a moment I felt that Matthew Sewell and I were having a mind meld.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020)

[Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1977. Photograph by Lynn Gilbert. From Wikimedia Commons. Notice the poster for Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.]

This year of nightmares just got much worse: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court’s Feminist Icon, Is Dead at 87” (The New York Times).

*

There’s now an obituary from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Love thy neighbor?

[Click for a larger view.]

What might it take to persuade some people to take COVID-19 seriously and act accordingly? I’ve wondered if this message might work. I know that I’m not the first person to think of it. (Thanks, Internets.) But I did think of it, and I offer it here, made with Friedrich Althausen’s beautiful Vollkorn font.

A pocket notebook sighting

Language trouble. The driver is flummoxed. “Jerry, haven’t you got a piece of paper? Draw it out for him.” A piece of paper? Jerry can do better than that. He carries a pocket notebook.


[Frank Puglia, Paul Henreid, and Bette Davis. Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942).]


[Click either image for a larger view.]

I’ll leave it to you to figure out what Jerry is saying.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

[“It is time to draw a boat.”]

“Made to Be Broken”

From August 7, one of the best episodes of This American Life I’ve heard: “Made to Be Broken.” (I’m catching up.)

Listening to this episode reminded me of a time when I tried to get someone in authority to break a rule. I had a student who was not going to pass the course. It was not mathematically possible. I had tried to persuade her to drop and make a fresh start next semester. No, she was determined to continue.

One day past the deadline for dropping a course, she told me that she realized I was right. I got on the phone and asked that an exception be made to allow her to drop. Every rule and requirement on campus had some room for exceptions, I said. The student had made a difficult and smart choice, I said, and there was no reason for her GPA to be burdened with an F (zero) from her first semester in college. No, no exception would be made. She would fail the course. Thanks, authorities.

[These events took place before drops were done online, and before retaking a course removed an earlier grade. It would have been a simple matter to process a drop one day after the fact.]