Our tube

Paul Burke, Lloyd Nolan, Mackenzie Phillips, Lurene Tuttle, and Robert Walden, all in the Murder, She Wrote episode “Murder in the Afternoon” (October 13, 1985). Familiar faces in new (and semi-startling) arrangements: one of the pleasures of television.

See also this cast. And these.

A working search box

For whatever reason, the DuckDuckGo search box that I’ve had in the sidebar for several years no longer works. As Elaine said, it DuckDuckWent. The DDG page for making a search box is gone, and I’ve been unable to make a new working search box with an independent generator. It all makes me think that the company has disabled embedding. So I’ve switched back to a Google search box.

Blogger being Blogger, the code for the search widget is crummy. And the code is invisible in the Layout window. But if you’re willing to edit the HTML for a Blogger template, you can make things nice. Go to Theme, choose Edit HTML, click on the pile of boxes to find and select the Search widget (labeled BlogSearch1), and change

cellpadding='1' cellspacing='1' to

cellpadding='3' cellspacing='3'.

That’ll give the search box a proper left side and make a little more space between the box and the button.

Before:


After:


[If conspiracy theorists are indeed turning to DuckDuckGo, the company might have good reason to disable embedding.]

Helvetica for free

Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary Helvetica, now fifteen years old, is streaming free through March 30.

When I first saw this film, almost fifteen years ago, I wrote something about it. My favorite lines (still) are from Erik Spiekermann:

“Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls’ bottoms. I get kicks out of looking at type. It’s a little worrying, I must admit. It’s a very nerdish thing to do.”

Outtakes (7)

[Outtakes from the WPA’s New York City tax photographs, c. 1939–1941, available from 1940s NYC. Click any image for a much larger view.]

Related posts
Outtakes (1) : Outtakes (2) : Outtakes (3): Outakes (4) : Outtakes (5) : Outtakes (6) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough one, half-hour territory for me. My spirit sagged at 1-A, five letters, “Norwegian flatbread.” (NJAAN?!) I found a better start at 14-A, five letters, “Ladderback chair elements.” 18-A, nine letters, “India, essentially” helped a lot, as did 39-A, eleven letters, “Overlong addresses.” That last answer is one of several unusual longish ones in this puzzle.

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, nine letters, “Guitar-and-castanets performances.” It took me a long time to see that the answer was not another nine-letter word.

15-A, five letters, “Part of a Moscow mule, perhaps.” And with a complicated history. No thanks.

21-D, eight letters, "What some game app developers work with." Not every pun deserves respect.

23-A, thirteen letters, “Xenomorph.” You see what I mean about unusual longish answers?

25-D, eight letters, “Insects that coevolved with tropical trees.” Also unusual medium-length answers.

27-D, four letters, “The Bard's ‘being next to Devil,’ per Coleridge.” Misparsing the clue makes the easy answer much more difficulty to see.

30-D, nine letters, “Mustard or cocoa.” Someone understands me.

37-D, eight letters, “The ’40s Motorette, e.g.” What?

My favorite in this puzzle: 29-A, eleven letters, “It may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

First word, first syllable

We were reminsicing over breakfast this morning about WILL-TV, our local PBS outlet, which turns 100 this year. For many years, late on weeknights, the station aired Silver Screen, something of a miniature version of TCM (pre-TCM), with a top-notch movie and a host, Thomas Guback, well-versed in film, providing an intro and outro.

I asked Elaine if she remembered what movie blew our minds when we first saw it on Silver Screen. We had tuned in when the movie had already started and had no context: even more reason for it to blow our minds.

Elaine was at a loss. Inspired by our recent reading of Robertson Davies, I pressed on:

Three words, first word, three syllables, first syllable.

[I held an imaginary steering wheel.]

First word, second syllable.

[I gave an indifferent sideways shake of the head.]

That was all it took. Can you identify the movie?

A solemn vow: this will be the only time I use an OCA post to play charades.

*

No one’s guessed. The title is now in the comments.

Thomas to Meadows

From the Washington Post story about text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows. Thomas to Meadows, November 5, 2020:

Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

The criminality and craziness in these messages is staggering. I can’t even can’t even.

Walking every street

From The New York Times, “One Cure for Pandemic Doldrums: Walking Every Street in Your City.” With Peoria, among others.

I am reminded of a story about the poet Charles Reznikoff, an inveterate walker. The story goes that when was asked why he had never traveled to Europe, he replied that he still hadn’t walked every street in New York City.

Ted Cruz’s afterglow

From The Independent : “Ted Cruz photographed checking his Twitter mentions after ‘performative tantrum’ at Supreme Court hearing”:

Senator Ted Cruz was caught checking his phone for Twitter mentions by a photo journalist after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.

The Texas Republican was accused by social media users of a “performative tantrum” at the hearing after he ignored repeated requests from senator Dick Durbin, the chair of Senate Judiciary Committee, to stop speaking after his allotted time.

That first sentence though could use improvement: “Twitter mentions by a photojournalist”? No. Asking who did what makes it easy to see how the sentence might be made clearer:

A photojournalist caught Senator Ted Cruz checking his phone for Twitter mentions after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.

If “his phone” leaves any ambiguity about whose phone, the sentence could go this way:

A photojournalist caught Senator Ted Cruz checking for Twitter mentions after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.

The sentences that follow make clear that the junior senator was using his (own) phone.

The article’s headline is a reminder that performative has become what Fowler’s Modern English Usage would call a “worsened word,” once neutral or commendatory but now pejorative.

[The Independent has used three spellings: photo-journalist, photojournalist, and most recently, photo journalist. I’ve used photojournalist, which is overwhelmingly more frequent in both British and American English.]

A Homeric ring

Reading a review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate made me think back to ring composition in Homer. Here’s an explanation, from Ralph Hexter’s A Guide to The Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1993):

Ring composition is a characteristic archaic Greek device that poets frequently employed to organize their material and that we presume helped singers and listeners to keep both details and the whole clearly in mind. In other words, it functions in part as a mnemonic device. A ring may involve words or phrases within one sentence, thoughts in a paragraph, or [. . .] narrative blocks. The classic form involves the treatment of elements a, b, and c, after which the poet takes them or variants of them and presents them in reverse order, c′, b′, a′, so that he or she concludes where he or she began.

There are many rings in Homer’s epics (for instance). My favorite is the one that structures the wanderings of Odysseus. I would ask students to memorize it and, in the spirit of oral tradition, recite it (for some number of 100s for quizzes). So I’d have students coming in before or after class or during office hours to recite. Many students thought the memorizing would be daunting. But I never had a student who was unable to do it. Along the way I heard some wonderful stories from students being helped and cheered on by roommates while practicing.

The following schema is from assignment pages that would go out with books 9–12 (Odysseus’s account of his wanderings):

[Click for a larger view.]

I just remembered: I once spoke to a high-school English class about the Odyssey, and an account of my visit appeared on the school’s page in the local newspaper. I was said to have given the students “inside information” on Homer’s poem. In other words, I showed them this ring.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve spelled proper names as found in Stanley Lombardo’s translation. Contra the review that prompted this post: ring composition is not a matter of digression.]