RTF$

“Tucked into the second page of the syllabus was information about a locker number and its combination. Inside was a $50 bill, which went unclaimed.” It’s a story of life in college: “Professor Put Clues to a Cash Prize in His Syllabus. No One Noticed” (The New York Times).

And the syllabus was only three pages long.

A funny, sad story, but I have to question the word clues in the headline. Merriam-Webster:

something that guides through an intricate procedure or maze of difficulties

specifically : a piece of evidence that leads one toward the solution of a problem

If you tell someone looking for 123 Main Street to seek the source of acorns, you’ve given a clue. But if you tell that person to turn right on Oak, left on Main, and go two blocks, you’ve given directions, not a clue. The syllabus gave students all that was needed to get the money: a locker number and a combination. Directions, information, not a clue.

Thanks, Elaine.

[Anyone in academic life should recognize RTFS.]

Mary Miller in The New Yorker

There she is, Mrs. America, in Amy Davidson Sorkin’s commentary on the Republican response to the work of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack:

When the committee’s recommendation that [Mark] Meadows be referred for charges reached the House floor, though, the Republican members who rose to debate it barely bothered to engage with the legalities. Several used their time to urge the passage of the Finish the Wall Act. “You know who doesn’t show up for court orders?” Representative August Pfluger, of Texas, asked. “Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the illegal immigrants who are served those papers.” Members spoke about fentanyl, Hunter Biden, mask mandates, “empty shelves at Christmas,” and the unjust treatment of parents who object to “some crazy curriculum,” as if the response to any criticism of Trump is to hopscotch from one of the former President’s obsessions to another.

When the Republican members did address the matter at hand, it was in startlingly vitriolic terms. Representative Mary Miller, of Illinois, said that the committee’s work is “evil and un-American.” Yvette Herrell, of New Mexico, said that it is setting the country “on its way to tyranny.” Jordan called the committee an expression of the Democrats’ “lust for power.” And, inevitably, Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, said that its proceedings prove that “communists” are in charge of the House.

You know what’s really “evil and un-American”? Attempting to overturn an election.

This is Miller’s second appearance in The New Yorker this year. Here’s the first.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts

What’s a candy store?

I discovered this morning, only partly to my surprise, that neither Merriam-Webster nor the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for candy store. I think there should be one, because candy store does not always denote a store that sells only candy. It’s not an obvious compound. My try at a definition, subject to adjustment:

can·dy store \ ˈkan-dē-ˈstȯr \ n : an urban retail establishment usu. selling candy, chewing gum, lottery tickets, magazines, newspapers, novelties, tobacco products, and stationery, often with a soda fountain attached

Am I missing anything?

All the candy stores
4417 New Utrecht Avenue : 4417 New Utrecht Avenue, again : 4302 12th Avenue : 4319 13th Avenue : 4213 or 4215 Fort Hamilton Parkway : 4223 Fort Hamilton Parkway : 94 Nassau Street

More candy store

[Click either image for a larger view. But it’s better to click on the links below for the full-size photographs.]

From the New-York Historical Society, two more views of a candy store at 4417 New Utrecht Avenue, Brooklyn. In keeping with the N‑YHS terms of use, I’ve posted low-resolution images. It’s worth clicking through to see the astonishingly zoomable originals: 1919, 1922. Look for the Parcheesi boards in the store window.

This address still housed a candy store many years later. In my 1960s Brooklyn childhood the store was known as Picholz’s. More on the location’s history in this post.

Thanks, Brian.

Four more Brooklyn candy stores
4302 12th Avenue : 4319 13th Avenue : 4213 or 4215 Fort Hamilton Parkway : 4223 Fort Hamilton Parkway

And one in Manhattan
94 Nassau Street

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Someone at Crossword Fiend mentioned that the Newsday crossword is now in ten-year-old reruns for the holiday season. I hadn’t even heard of the Saturday Stumper ten years ago, so today’s puzzle is, as they say of TV reruns, new to me. It’s by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, no pseudonym, and it’s a good one — which means that it took me about twenty minutes to solve.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-A, seven letters, “See 23 Down.” Okay, what kind of puzzle begins with a clue like that? This one. 23-D, six letters: “With 1 Across, Baldwin’s mom on 30 Rock.” I think a better (non-giveaway) clue is in order, but I’m happy to see 23-D 1-A in the puzzle.

8-A, seven letters, “Now and then.” Clever. And have you heard John Lennon’s “Now and Then”?

11-D, five letters, “Net 26 Down.” And 26-D, six letters, “Scratch.” I am unreasonably proud to have gotten 26-D straight off, which somehow let me catch the trick in 11-D.

19-A, six letters, “It’s usually felt on the head.” A wonderful clue.

37-D, seven letters, “Put up or shut up!” The answer puts me back in my schooldays, early ones.

38-D, seven letters, “Loosen up, perhaps.” Terrific, and if you’re starting with the first two letters in place, you may be headed in a wrong direction.

43-A, eleven letters, “Food processors.” Okay. But the answer feels dated to me, maybe from a thirty-year-old puzzle.

46-A, five letters, “Host mail.” Technology makes this clue fun.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Breakfast with Nancy

[Nancy, March 17, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy. But styles in children’s breakfasts have changed.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Drinking and defending

From Assignment Paris (dir. Robert Parrish, 1952). Sandy Tate (Audrey Totter) is an Eve Arden type, cracking wise and going it alone:

“I may not believe in what you say, but I’ll drink myself to death defending your right to say it.”

The statement spoofed here is usually attributed to Voltaire. Quote Investigator suggests that it is “probably” Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s characterization of Voltaire’s attitude toward another writer. Sandy Tate wouldn’t care one way or the other.

Frank O’Hara was kidding

About the claim made in a New Yorker piece that Frank O’Hara typed the poems of Lunch Poems on a store-display typewriter while on his lunch hour: Joe LeSeuer provides some context. The source for the claim is the blurb that O’Hara wrote for the book’s back cover. From Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003):

It turned out that Ferlinghetti had nothing against — perhaps even wanted? — an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek blurb, since he immediately decided to go to press. Incidentally, it is Frank’s facetious reference to his pausing “at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations” that led later commentators to assert that he sometimes wrote his poems on an Olivetti showroom typewriter. The dumbbells — didn’t they know when they were being kidded?

I guess at The New Yorker they don’t know that O’Hara was kidding.

And yes, I’ve e-mailed the magazine.

Related posts
“Distraction-free devices” (Ralph Ellison, Frank O’Hara, and The New Yorker getting its facts wrong)
A review of Joe LeSueur’s Digressions

Distraction-free devices

In The New Yorker, Julian Lucas wonders whether “distraction-free devices” can change the way we write. I’m not sure. But I do think that they allow a writer to think about writing — and not tabs, fonts, margins, and app settings.

In 2005 I hit on my first version of what Paul Ford once called “Amish computing.” I used the Windows app Notepad2 (still available) and a spellcheck script. When I switched to a Mac in 2007, I began using TextWrangler (since superseded by BBEdit) and WriteRoom. I still stand by what I wrote in 2006: Writing is not word processing. And in 2011: I consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace. I consider Blogger’s Compose view and HTML view hostile workplaces as well, but they’re tolerable if I’m writing a short post.

I now do almost all my writing in iA Writer. For anything that’s to be printed (that is, a “document”), I still use Apple’s Pages app to “process” — ugly word — my words. For writing of any length, I still start with pen or pencil and paper.

[Two mistakes in the New Yorker piece: Ralph Ellison didn’t begin his second novel (published as Juneteenth and Three Days Before the Shooting . . .) on a computer. And Frank O’Hara didn’t write the poems of Lunch Poems on a sample Olivetti, not as what Lucas calls “a cute stunt,” nor as anything else. O’Hara’s claim to have written on a store-display typewriter is just a bit of urban pastoralism, part of the “blurp” the poet wrote for the book’s back cover. (You can see the blurp here, in a letter to City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.) If you do take the blurp as factual, well, it also describes the poet on his lunch hour withdrawing to “a darkened ware- or fire-house to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth.” LOL. Come on, fact checkers.]

The Greek alphabet and us

“Never did anything I learned as a drunken sorority girl prepare me more for the current world climate as learning the Greek alphabet”: from a Washington Post article about the Greek alphabet in our time.

My teaching experience makes me suspect that fraternity and sorority members learn only the capital letters of the Greek alphabet. But I could be wrong.

An odd detail from this article: a scientist who thought the names for COVID-19 variants should have “gravitas” and “familiarity” suggested using names of characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Gods help us.