Illinois-15, COVID-Central

Here, from Geographic Insights, is a map of Illinois showing vaccination rates by congressional district as of June 6:

[COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout Across U.S. Congressional Districts. From the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and the Center for Geographic Analysis.]

The ungainly pale-green area to the east is Illinois-15, the congressional district represented by Mary Miller. Geographic Insights shows us having the lowest rate of vaccination in the state: 40.62% initiated, 29.65% completed.

When I step into my friendly neighborhood multinational retailer, where more and more people now do without a mask, and where many people have never worn a mask, I remind myself that I live in a place where I can pretty much assume that seven of every ten people I see are unvaccinated. Which, yes, is pathetic.

Who would want to move to Illinois-15? I know: COVID. We’re great hosts!

[Thanks to Elaine for finding the site.]

“A stilly pause”

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

From the dowdy world

A pangram from the dowdy world, in today’s New York Times Spelling Bee.

A handful of pay phone posts
A Blue Dahlia pay phone : A Henry pay phone : A Naked City pay phone : A subway pay phone, 1932 : Chicago pay phones : “If your coin was not returned”

[Pay phone is dowdier than payphone.]

Today’s Newsday Saturday

When I saw the credit for today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword — Stella Zawistowki — I knew I was in for a difficult time. Stella! It was only when I got 1-A, ten letters, “It’ll let you in,” late in the game, that I felt confident that I’d finish this puzzle. It let me in.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

9-D, four letters, “Reason for a dryer discount.” Why a dryer? The alliteration is pleasant.

12-D, ten letters, “Move all around.” Lovely.

15-A, ten letters, “Practice delayed infuriation.” A great (risqué?) way to clue the answer.

22-D, eleven letters, “Destination of some Scandinavian ferries.” Five letters of this answer took me forever. What? What?

41-A, six letters, “Big name in the oil business.” Okay, but which kind?

45-A, five letters, “Helps with fencing.” A good clue for a common answer.

51-D, three letters, “Macaroni, as in ‘Yankee Doodle.’” The answer makes me think of a scene in a film.

53-A, four letters, “Zoom, perhaps.” Of our time.

56-A, ten letters, “Recycled paper from long ago.” A good example of a clue that defamiliarizes its answer. You’re thinking of something in a green bin maybe?

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A John Wayne movie

I was showing a movie in class, something I never liked to do. I preferred to show movies outside of class, all at once, the way they’re almost always meant to be shown. This movie was a documentary about wages and employment. Of the two computers in my office for movie projection, I picked the older one, heavy white plastic, with two switches, like light switches, sticking up from the keyboard.

After starting the movie, I took a seat in a back corner of the classroom. And who came in and sat next to me? One of my worst students. He had appeared on a reality-TV show and had been mocked on social media for his Dunning–Kruger witlessness. In class he liked to lean forward and glare at me.

And then in came John Wayne, wearing an enormous corduroy cap. He took the first seat in my row of desks, blocking the view of the two or three of us behind him. The bad student began talking to Wayne about hunting. Then bad student stood up, walked up to Wayne’s desk, and continued to talk as the movie ran. I told bad student that if he didn’t stop talking and sit down, I’d have to ask him to leave. He kept talking, I asked him to leave, and he did.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[My (pre-streaming) strategy with movies: get one or two time slots when nearly everyone was free, and reserve a classroom. I would cancel one class in exchange for students’ willingness to show up, and I would lend the videotape (!) or DVD to the one or two students who had to miss. There was always something strange and wonderful about watching a movie at night in a nearly empty building. The bad student in this dream is real. John Wayne, too, is real, but he was never in one of my classes. This is the twenty-second teaching-related dream I’ve had since I retired. In all but one, something has gone wrong.]

Domestic comedy

“Joe Flynn from McHale’s Navy is in this episode of That Girl.”

“Win win!”

“How do you punctuate ‘win win’?”

“I don’t know — I wasn’t talking with punctuation.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“Delicious Chewing Gum”

[National 4-H Club News, April 1941. Click for a larger, stickier view.]

To every thing there is a reason, not to mention a time and a place. I was looking for an advertisement that touted gum as an aid to concentration. I found this one.

“Try it yourself around the house, when reading, studying, driving or doing any number of other things”: what a pleasantly lackluster pitch.

Our tube

Michael Ansara, Jane Greer, Clifton James, Martin Milner, Richard Roundtree, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., all in the Murder, She Wrote episode “The Last Flight of the Dixie Damsel” (December 18, 1988). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television.

See also this cast.

Bye, pseudo-blogger

Like so many blogs, Donald Trump**’s blog is defunct. The Washington Post reports that mockery and a small readership are the reasons for the shutdown. Sheesh, if Trump** was bothered by the idea of a small readership, he shouldn’t have started a blog.

[Pseudo, because it’s unlikely that he wrote much of it himself.]

For those who fuss over spacing

I had hoped that the non-breaking thin space would change everything.

Here’s an italicized word in parentheses: (test).

Ugly, no?

Here’s the same text with the addition of a thin space —   — before the closing parenthesis: (test ).

Better, yes?

But the thin space functions like an ordinary space. With the insertion of a thin space, characters that should stay together can end up split across two lines, like so: (test 
).

That’s a faked example. But it does happen. You can guess how I know that.

Enter the non-breaking thin space —   or  . It’s slightly wider than a thin space, and it’s supposed to be, as its name suggests, unbreakable. But it breaks. You can guess how I know that too. Here’s what I saw as a Preview while working on an earlier post:

[That’s what I get for making a silly plural.]

I think that   and   are interchangeable, but I could be wrong. What I know is that they both break in Safari. So I’m still looking for a non-breaking thin space that does not break. And I’d like to know why the allegedly non-breaking thin space displays differently in macOS and iOS. On iOS devices, it’s indistinguishable from no-space.

[For collectors only: the ordinary non-breaking space is  . And if anyone wants to asks, “Who cares?” — I do.]