Orange Crate Art

Thursday, June 23, 2022

OED life

“We’re in trouble if the language ends, and not just professionally”: Fiona McPherson, a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary (New Statesman ). This visit to the OED offices includes astirbroad, burner phone, and what the what.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

“Don’t blame the intern”

Monica Lewinsky to Ron Johnson: “dude. don’t blame the intern.” Well played!

I wanted to post the tweet, but the embedded video won’t play here: it goes to Twitter instead. So if you want to see Ron Johnson passing the buck, follow the link to Twitter.

Eleven movies, one season

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, PBS, TCM, YouTube.]

From the Criterion Channel’s Terence Davies / A Retrospective

A trilogy
Children (1976). Snapshots of the artist as a boy and a young man. The boy, Robert Tucker (Phillip Mawdsley), a Davies alter-ego, is small, gay, diffident, alienated, a silent observer and the target of bullies. His home life is made miserable by a tyrannical father, soon to die. The boy become man (Robin Hooper) sits, thinks, collects photos of professional wrestlers, and takes pills for depression. These sentences do nothing to capture Davies’s ability to weave past and present into a cloak of sorrow and torment. ★★★★

Madonna and Child (1980). An older Robert Tucker (Terry O’Sullivan) lives with and cares for his mother (Sheila Raynor), works in an office, eats lunch alone, sneaks out at night for furtive meetings with men, and goes to confession. There is no plot unfolding here, only an arrangement of brief, sometimes cryptic scenes. Curious: such movies always seem to me much longer than they are (this one is barely twenty-seven minutes). I think that this trilogy must have influenced Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory: the shower scene in Children and the scene in this film of Robert sitting with his mother as she drinks cocoa seem to me likely points of connection. ★★★★

Death and Transfiguration (1983). “Oh, Mum, what would I do without you?” The death of his mother leaves Robert Tucker (Terry O’Sullivan) bereft. But we see him here also as a boy (Iain Munro) and as an old man, dying in hospital. Startling to me, and no doubt meant to be startling: the old Robert, death rattle and all, is played by Wilfrid Brambell, the “clean old man” (Paul’s grandfather) of A Hard Day’s Night. ★★★★

[I wonder if this final part of the trilogy influenced the Frasier episode “Rooms with a View,” which shifts unpredictably between present, past, and future in a hospital.]

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Another autobiographical film, with glimpses of a family’s life in Liverpool in WWII and after: a brutal father (Pete Postelthwaite), a bullied mother (Freda Dowie), two daughters (Lorraine Ashbourne, Angela Walsh), and a son (Dean Williams). It’s painful to see the daughters choosing husbands who carry the tradition of domestic violence into the next generation. It’s painful to see the son weeping after his wedding (we’re invited to wonder why). Amid all the pain of life, there’s music, in the form of countless popular favorites sung, sometimes as solos, sometimes all together, in parlors and pubs: “They tried to sell us egg foo yung!” ★★★★

*

Dial Red 0 (dir. Daniel B. Ullman, 1955). A veteran escapes from a psychiatric hospital to confront his wife about her decision to divorce him. When she’s murdered, he becomes the main suspect. Improbable but surprisingly good. The only actor I recognized in the cast: Jack Kruschen, the helpful Dr. Dreyfuss from The Apartment. ★★★ (YT)

*

Fear No More (dir. Bernard Wiesen, 1961). Overtones of The Lady Vanishes, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, with a scheme to frame loyal secretary Sharon Carlin (Mala Powers) for a murder on a train. As Elaine observed, this movie also looks forward to Carnival of Souls, with a young woman caught in an unintelligible nightmarish world. Jacques Bergerac (Gigi) is Sharon’s sidekick; John Harding is a sleek villain. Strange and scary. ★★★ (YT)

*

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (dir. Brent Wilson, 2021). There’s little here that will surprise anyone knowledgeable about Brian Wilson and his music: we see Brian riding in a car driven by journalist Jason Fine (with whom he is said to feel comfortable), giving short, often familiar answers to leading questions (e.g., declaring that the next big project will be a rock ’n’ roll album, something Brian has been talking about for many years). A series of musical personalities extol the goodness of Brian’s music, heartfelt (the late Taylor Hawkins) or blathering (Don Was, likening to keyboard fingerings of “California Girls” to Mozart’s string quartets). The most affecting moment: Brian silently taking in the news that one-time Beach Boys manager and occasional lyricist Jack Rieley died in 2015. My main takeaway from this documentary: just how difficult it must be to be Brian Wilson, and to persist. ★★★ (PBS)

[A much better look at BW: Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (dir. Don Was (!), 1995).]

*

The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971). As it began, I said aloud, “It’s just like _______”: a nearby town where there’s no longer any there. In 1950s Anarene, Texas, people pair off in various partnerships because, face it, there’s not much else to do. A great, bleak, funny film about what it means to be of — and stuck in — a place, with echoes of Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, and Cybill Shepherd. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Illegal Entry (dir. Frederick De Cordova, 1949). Crossing the border, yes, but by plane, and that’s where Howard Duff comes in, as Bert Powers, an unemployed pilot working undercover to crack a smuggling outfit. Paul Stewart is an arrogant villain; Märta Torén is a cafe owner whose life is complicated. Brief appearances by official-looking men and brief voiceovers add a semi-documentary veneer. A so-so movie that would be more enjoyable in a print that would show off William H. Daniels’s cinematography. ★★ (YT)

*

Hacks (created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky, 2022). I just read the sentences that I wrote about the first season, and I think they offer a fair description of this second season. There’s more attention given to the lives of the secondary characters, and genuinely funny non-cringeworthy material as Deborah Vance’s (Jean Smart) new stand-up set takes shape. Vance’s relationship with her young writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder) continues to be a real-life theater of cruelty. Fun one-off appearances by and Susie Essman and Harriet Sansom Harris, and a downright scary appearance by what looks like an animatronic model of Wayne Newton. ★★★★ (HBO Max)

*

Thieves’ Highway (dir. Jules Dassin, 1949). Richard Conte is Nick Garcos, truckdriver and son of a truckdriver, looking to get even with Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), the crooked produce dealer whose schemes left Nick’s father without his legs. A great cast, with Valentina Cortese as a sometimes trustworthy prostitute, Millard Mitchell as a sometimes trustworthy trucker, and Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney as comic relief. It’s the only film I’ve ever seen that I’ve imagined as a post-war European film with subtitles: does that make it American neo-realism? The only weak point is the ending, a little too moralizing, a little too pat. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

How They Got Over: Gospel Quartets and the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll (dir. Robert Clem, 2018). Getting over: moving an audience. This documentary will move even the most secular viewer to something like religious ecstasy. Brief bits of knowledgeable historical commentary, longer comments from singers themselves, and numerous archival performances, many of them complete (thank you, director, for your good judgment). With performances the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Blind Boys of Mississippi, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and more. ★★★★ (TCM)

[A performance that appears in the film.]

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

Sluggo’s singular they

[Nancy, August 20, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s yesterday’s Nancy has a nice instance of singular they.

Related reading
A handful of OCA posts about singular they (Pinboard)

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

“But he targeted me”

Ruby Freeman, in taped testimony for the January 6 committee. Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who testified today, were election workers in Georgia and the target of attacks by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani:

“There is nowhere I feel safe, nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small-business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen, who’d stand up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.”

As Freeman also said in taped testimony, “I can’t believe this person has caused this much damage to me and my family.”

Freeman’s testimony and her daughter’s testimony, like Rusty Bowers’s testimony, was beyond compelling. The damage Trump and his allies do to our democracy and to individual emotional well-being is ongoing and incalculable.

Theories and evidence

“We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence”: an apparently Rudy Giuliani to Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R), as Bowers ecounted the conversation earlier today. I was listening to the January 6 hearing while driving.

Bowers’s testimony was beyond compelling. The members of this committee know what they’re doing.

[“An apparently Rudy Giuliani”: not a typo, just a novelty.]

Eggs ’n’ acid

A brilliant way to improve scrambled eggs: whisk a small amount of Dijon mustard with the eggs. More flavor!

But also: better texture. It’s science. From Samin Nosrat, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (2017):

Acid encourages the proteins in an egg white to assemble, or coagulate, more quickly but less densely than they otherwise would. Under normal conditions, strands of egg proteins unravel and tighten when heated. As they do, the strands squeeze out water, causing eggs to toughen and dry out. Acid draws egg proteins together before they can unravel, which inhibits them from joining too closely. A few secret drops of lemon juice will produce creamier, more tender scrambled eggs. For perfect poached eggs, add a capful of vinegar into boiling water to help speed up coagulation of the white and strengthen the outer texture, while preserving the runny yolk.

Acid aids in stabilizing whipped egg whites by encouraging more, finer air pockets, helping to increase the volume of the egg white foam. Though cream of tartar — a by-product of wine-making — is the form of acid traditionally added to egg whites as they’re whipped for meringues, cakes, and soufflés, a few drops of vinegar or lemon juice per egg white will yield a similar result.

Nosrat doesn’t mention mustard. But yes, mustard is acidic.

Thanks, Ben, for better scrambled eggs.

[I’ve followed the title on the book’s cover, which differs from the Library of Congress version inside.]

Append reddit

“One of the most-used tools on the internet is not what it used to be”: Charlie Warzel, “The Open Secret of Google Search” (The Atlantic ).

A suggestion therein: append reddit to any Google search to generate better results.

[No mention of other search engines in this piece.]

Monday, June 20, 2022

Unshaky

If you have a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with a so-called butterfly keyboard, you may noticee one or more keeys repeating, always or intermitteently. For months I have had the problem with my MacBook Air’s e key, as I just demonstrated. Elaine has had thee proobleem, always, with thee e and oo keys. Such problems make typing a ridiculously frustrating effort. Hey, Apple: a functioning keyboard should have always been a given. (Not a giveen.)

There’s an app that solves repeating key problems: Xinhong (Sam) Liu’s Unshaky. Unlike compressed air (often recommended for keyboard woes), Unshaky is free. And unlike compressed air, it solves the repeating-key problem. I set a delay of 80 milliseconds for my e key and and can once again make just my own misteaks.

Anyone using a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with a butterfly keyboard — here’s a list of models — should know about Unshaky. I only wish I had known about it sooner. My gratitude to Sam Liu is immense.

Related reading
All OCA Mac posts (Pinboard)

[In just two days, Unshaky has corrected 116 double-letter presses.]