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Words of the year Now with pandemic.

¿Quién es más confiable?

¿Joe Namath, o Tom Selleck?

Joe Namath did call the Medicare Coverage Helpline, or at least he said so in an earlier version of his commercial. Maybe he called, maybe he didn’t. But I’m pretty confident that Tom Selleck has never looked into getting an AAG reverse mortgage for himself. And I doubt that he’s even done his “homework.” ¿Quién es más confiable?

Such questions come up when one has watched too much cable news.

[Who is more trustworthy?]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Do you recognize her? Leave your best guess in a comment. I’ll drop hints if needed.

*

Here’s a hint: She’s best known as the co-owner of a Santa Monica aoartment complex.

*

The answer is now in the comments.

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

[Garner’s Modern English Usage notes that “support for actress seems to be eroding.” I use actor.]

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with doomscrolling.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, November 29, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

I don’t know where the colors come from, but it’s weird and wonderful to see resonator guitars in today’s Hi and Lois. And the guitar on the far left, is that supposed to be a Gibson? A Stella?

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Garry Trudeau Mongols

Garry Trudeau chooses ten strips that define Doonesbury (The Washington Post ).

If you look closely at the photograph, you’ll see that in 1972 Trudeau was using Mongol pencils.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is exceedingly difficult. It's also hard, rough, tough, knotty, thorny, Herculean, and uncompromising. I’d say that this puzzle is synonymous with “difficult.” I missed by one letter, unable to rethink an answer that I knew could not be right. Oh well.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-A, ten letters, “Growth profession.” I defy any solver to get this answer first thing.

4-D, eight letters, “Dollar stores.” Clever.

10-D, eleven, letters, “Augustus collected them.” Nobody expects the Roman Empire!

13-D, six letters, “Bird that eats oranges (!).” This feels like a giveaway, but I’m not sure it is.

15-A, ten letters, “Brief romances, e.g.” Here’s the clue that messed me up. I never suspected that the first letter of my attempted answer could be wrong.

18-A, four letters, “Go along with, in a way.” Adding a noirish atmosphere to the puzzle.

21-D, five letters, “Candlelit performance.” Possibly. But I like the suggestion of coziness.

37-D, eight letters, “Stevenson’s ‘gift which cannot be worn out in using.’” RLS is in the air in our house, as Elaine is one of the many composers who have set his poems to music.

51-A, six letters, “Curated cuts.” I thought there must be a pun on deli meats here, but no.

58-A, ten letters, “Casual canvas shoe.” Seems very 1960s to me. I know that’s not accurate.

64-A, ten letters, “Rumble in the Jungle pairing.” At least one giveaway in this puzzle. Thanks for that.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Domestic comedy

[Shouted from floor to floor.]

“Jonathan Capehart is growing a beard!”

The people on the news, it’s like we know them now.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“The ethical is not halfway”

Rebecca Solnit, “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway”:

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

I wince when I hear Joe Biden say that we must come together. But notice: every description of “us,” of American culture, that he presents makes no room for hatred, racism, or delusional thinking. I think — or hope — he’s showing considerable political intelligence in a dangerous time.

On a helical staircase

I like this passage on purism in language use, from Follett’s Modern American Usage (1966):

Purism is another form of the pedantic. It singles out in the language of science and scholarship what is literal and minute, as pedantry does the abstract and long-winded. Purism haggles over trifles and refuses to know when errors and confusions no longer matter. We all understand what a spiral staircase is; the purist reminds us that a spiral lies flat in one plane, so that our staircase is properly a helix. But even if each of us has his own one or two pet pedantries, collectively we shall not go down the helical staircase. We shall continue to drink a cup of coffee aand assuredly not a cupful; we shall speak of captions below the text, though caption by a confused etymology suggests head; we shall refer to the proverbial man of straw, though he is not the subject of a proverb; we shall speak of being buttonholed by a bore and not buttonheld, from the supposedly correct buttonhold; we shall say it is no use when we speak, though we may want to write it is of no use; we shall certainly cross the bridge (but not till we come to it), instead of agonizing over the truth that it is the river that is crossed and not the bridge. And if the world, faced with a new and inspiriting phenomenon, wants to say outer space, we shall not affect to be puzzled on the plea that space cannot be inner or outer. If there is an outer darkness there can be an outer space, which we may even hope to visit.

Wilson Follett died with this book unfinished. Jacques Barzun and several other hands took up the work of revising and editing.