A Nassau Street candy store

[94 Nassau Street, New York, New York. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Another candy store, this one serving Borden’s ice cream. The building still stands, with a CVS at street level.

If you click to enlarge, you’ll see the once-ubiquitous Bell Telephone sign and two dapper men with light-colored hats and shoes.

Two Brooklyn candy stores
4417 New Utrecht Avenue : 4319 13th Avenue

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is on the tough side. I missed by one letter, and the last time that happened was November 2020, with a puzzle by — yes, Matthew Sewell. I don’t keep track of these things, but my blog posts do.

I blame the constructor and myself: the clueing in today’s puzzle is a bit strained and sneaky, but I missed a bit of context that would have helped. Lookit: 4-D, six letters, “Stylistic bands.” That clue is rather strained, and two answers fit, with their fourth letters differing. The answer I chose seemed to me vaguely plausible. The answer the puzzle wants doesn’t, to my mind, seem nearly as plausible: indeed, it’s pretty farfetched. 4-D crosses 18-A, four letters, “Site of the craters Casanova and Valentine,” and here again, two answers fit, with their third letters (the fourth letter of 4-D) differing. I chose the four-letter answer I thought would fit. But I should have thought more about Casanova and Valentine. Sigh.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

8-D, eight letters, “Korean rice dish.” I had it this summer, streetside. I heartily recommend it, and I like its name.

15-D, four letters, “Silents superstar as Cleopatra, Salomé, etc.” I know I’ve never seen her on screen, but I also know that I know the name.

28-D, six letters, “More than a long-distance caller.” This clue-answer pairing feels extremely strained. I would borrow some rice from 8-D: rest, ice, compression, elevation. And I’d get a better clue.

47-A, seven letters, “Trailer classification.” I thought first of big rigs.

56-A, six letters, “Second Lady of the ’60s.” The name makes me think of a Tom Waits song. Careful with that spoiling link.

57-A, eight letters, “Prepares for prognostication, perhaps.” Or perhaps not!

58-A, five letters, “Folkloric banisher of the sea monster Caoránach.” I’m sorry, but that’s not the banisher’s name.

No spoilers if you don’t click on the Tom Waits link; the answers are in the comments.

[If the Newsday paywall makes it impossible for you to access the Stumper, you might try this link. Or try a different browser. Or try another source — GameLab, for instance. Newsday would do well to offer a crossword subscription. I’d happily pay for the puzzle, but I won’t pay $6.98 a week for a digital subscription to the paper.]

It’s on

Brand-new news:

Stephen K. Bannon, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s top aides early in his presidency, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on two counts of contempt of Congress, the Justice Department said. . . .

“Since my first day in office, I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people by word and deed that the department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law and pursues equal justice under the law,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

“Today’s charges reflect the department’s steadfast commitment to these principles,” Mr. Garland said.

I wonder how many shirts they let you wear under an orange jumpsuit.

Anticipatory plagiarism

[Nancy, November 12, 2021.]

It’s “a famous quote” that circulates online and off, attributed to the sociologist Robert K. Merton:

Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.

A source? There never is one. In Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998), for instance, Anne Fadiman quotes this sentence, attributes it to Merton, and adds

I am unable to provide a citation because my source is a yellow Post-it handed to me by my brother in Captiva, Florida, in November 1996.

Merton comes close to the words “anticipatory plagiarism” in On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (1965), which looks into the history of the aphorism “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Here’s Merton:

Newton then makes a profoundly sociological observation about the behavior of men in general and by implication, the behavior of men of science in particular, that, until this moment, I had thought I was the first to have made. That anticipatory plagiarist, Newton, follows the sentences I have just quoted from his letter with this penetrating observation

— and so on. Notice that there’s nothing here of a definition. Merton is making a quick joke: he had a thought, but Newton had it first, dammit.

And Winston Churchill had “anticipatory plagiarism” first, or at least before Merton. Here’s Churchill, May 19, 1927, with a remark collected in The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill (2009) and elsewhere. Churchill was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressing the House of Commons:

Mr Lowe seems to have been walking over my footsteps before I had trodden them, because he said, trying to explain what had occurred to the satisfaction of a very strict House in those days: “And so each year will take money from its successor, and this process may go till the end of time, although how it will be settled when the world comes to an end I am at a loss to know.” It was unconscious anticipatory plagiarism.

The weird thing: I recently mentioned anticipatory plagiarism in an e-mail to a friend, tried to recall the source, looked it up, and found Robert K. Merton. But had I remembered a 2013 Orange Crate Art post about cupcakes and handwriting, I would have had it right. And if I had not read Nancy this morning, I would not have thought to write this post.

[Lowe: Robert Lowe.]

Domestic comedy

“I knew it had to be a fragrance commercial, because it was completely incoherent.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

An EXchange name sighting

[It fills the screen. From Hollywood Story (dir. William Castle, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

GRanite? GReen? Both were Los Angeles exchange names. And yes, there were two-letter four-digit telephone numbers.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : 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) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Veterans Day

[“Millions to Pray for Peace Today: Celebration of Third Anniversary of the Armistice Will Extend All Over the World.” The New York Times, November 11, 1921.]

The first World War ended on November 11, 1918. Armistice Day was observed the next year. In 1954, Armistice Day became Veterans Day.

Pannapacker on academic woe

William Pannapacker will soon be leaving academia. He writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education about being “Tenured, Trapped, and Miserable in the Humanities”:

How many of us understood what we were embarking upon when we decided to become professors? How could we even grasp the accelerating rate of change in higher education: neoliberal managerial approaches; part-time, no-benefit, transient adjunct teaching; the uncapping of mandatory retirement and the graying of the profession; the withdrawal of state funding; the endless political attacks from all directions; the unsustainable increases in student debt; and, with all that, declining enrollments in any field that does not lead directly and obviously to employment?

Even now, in my experience, if you point out these trends, you risk being accused by students of “crushing their dreams” and by colleagues, in effect, of “disrupting the Ponzi.”

I would never have called myself trapped or miserable. (Tenured, yes!) But life in academia ain’t what it used to be, if indeed it ever was. Something I wrote to a colleague not long ago:

I think every day about how fortunate I am to be retired, and how fortunate I was to be in on many good years of English studies. Any of us who were in there beat some long odds, getting longer all the time.

[Pannapacker’s celebrated Chronicle piece “Remedial Civility Training” should be required reading in college. It’s back behind the Chronicle paywall, but you can read a long excerpt in this blog post. The whole piece is also here.]

Pixels and iPads

The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial (who’s also working as an attorney for the defense) appears to believe the defense’s bogus claim that pinching and zooming on an iPhone adds pixels to and thus alters an image. And the prosecutor, who couldn’t provide a clear explanation of high-resolution images, also couldn’t answer the defense’s (bogus?) question about what operating system an iPad uses. (It’s iPadOS.)

Arc, narrative, lacking in dictionary

From Decoy (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1946). Morgue attendants in conversation, as one of them reads a dictionary:

“D-i, die, c-h-o-t, chot, o-m-y: die-chot-o-mee.” ‌[Laughs.] “Ain’t that a lulu? And get this one: die-dack-tick.” [Laughs again.]

“Hey, why don’t you stop reading that junk?”

“What’s the matter with the dictionary?”

“There ain’t enough story to it.”

Film fans will recognize the dictionary reader, the anonymous “Thin Morgue Attendant” (Louis Mason) as the man who’s going back home to starve all at once in The Grapes of Wrath. His antagonist is “Fat Morgue Attendant,” aka Benny (Ferris Taylor). Perhaps inspired by the pair of clowns in Hamlet ?

See also W.H. Auden, “Prologue: Reading,” in The Dyer’s Hand (1962):

Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)