A fix for the check engine light light

A possible fix: remove the gas cap and put it back on, making sure that it’s firmly in place. Then see if the light goes away.

Or does everyone already know this trick?

Manufacturing fear

From The Fearmakers (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1958). Alan Eaton (Dana Andrews), POW and victim of brainwashing, returns from Korea to Washington, D.C., only to find that his partner in a two-man public-relations and polling firm is dead and that the business has been taken over by one Jim McGinnis (Dick Foran). The new company is in the business not of measuring public opinion but of manufacturing it, with faux-roots organizations and mass-produced letters to politicians promoting Soviet-approved positions. “We turn the screws on the United States Congress,” McGinnis brags. “And from there it’s just a step to the White House.”

Eaton says that McGinnis is just manufacturing fear:

“Millions of people being lied to, taken for suckers. You know, it's a funny thing: they have pure food and drug laws to keep people from buying poison to put in their stomachs. And you're peddling poison to put in their minds.”

And Eaton to the company secretary, Lorraine Dennis (Matilee Earle), as the two stand before the Lincoln Memorial:

“You know, he was right. You can't fool all the people all the time. But nowadays you don't have to fool all the people — just enough to swing it for the Fletchers and the Jessups.”

It’s a prescient movie, streaming at TCM through July 31.

[“The Fletchers and the Jessups”: referencing other characters, lobbyists and Communist sympathizers.]

Mary Miller in The Boston Globe

Jaclyn Friedman, writing in The Boston Globe :

So many people in power have been plainly declaring their ugliest beliefs and plans lately that it ironically has become hard to hear them all. But our collective future depends on hearing the signal in all the noise.

Friedman begins the piece with House Republican Mary Miller (IL-15), and her infamous “historic victory for white life” gaffe/not-gaffe.

Miller continues on her wayward way. Recently, she voted against H.R. 8404, the Respect for Marriage Act (codifying equal marriage rights), and H.R. 8373, which would protect the right to contraception. She even voted against H.R. 7693, the National Park Foundation Reauthorization Act of 2022, one of twenty-two Republicans to do so.

There’s something about Mary.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Last words

“Mike Pence let me down”: Donald Trump’s last words before leaving the West Wing circa 6:00 p.m. on January 6, 2021. Perhaps media outlets will finally begin to address what many an unprofessional observer has long sensed: that the defeated former president is a psychopath. It’s never not about him.

What matters

Adam Kinzinger (R, IL-16): “Oaths matter. Character matters. Truth matters.”

Harmonizes nicely with what Representative Adam Schiff (D, CA-28) said in 2020.

Juxtaposition

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) raising a clenched fist for the crowd (not yet mob) at the U.S. Capitol.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) running down a Capitol hallway, then down a flight of stairs, fleeing to safety.

[From tonight’s hearing. Here’s the video. Laughter ensued.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

I hadn’t planned on posting another mystery so soon. But there he was.

Leave your guess in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

9:47 a.m.: That was fast. The answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors
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The last movie-rental clerk

“Here at Film Noir Cinema, we bring darkness to light, not light to darkness”: in The New York Times, a profile of the last movie-rental clerk in New York City.

The little theater attached to the rental store reminds me of the Snark Theater in Daniel Pinkwater’s The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982). Walter Galt narrates:

It shows movies I never heard of, and it shows them in strange combinations.

For example, a typical double bill may consist of a Yugoslavian film (with subtitles), Vampires in a Deserted Seaside Hotel at the End of August, and along with it, Invasion of the Bageloids, in which rock-hard, intelligent bagels from outer space attack Earth. Everybody gets bopped on the head until scientists figure out a way to defeat the bageloids. I won’t spoil the ending by telling what it is, but it has something to do with cream cheese.

I wouldn’t say that every movie the Snark Theater shows is good, but they’re all interesting in their way.

“Eating plums way up there”

After first reading Ulysses. From a wonderful short essay by Fintan O’Toole, “The Book That Never Stops Changing” (The Atlantic ):

Now I knew what my father and Vincent were joking about and why we were eating plums way up there above the streets of Dublin. The book was in their heads, and they were inhabiting simultaneously Joyce’s comic parable and the present-day city.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

[Click for a much larger view.]

His name was in the credits. But I still didn’t recognize him. Do you?

Please, guess and guess again. I’m going to be away from screens for a bit; I’ll drop a hint in the not too distant future if necessary.

Someone guessed Mark Hamill, and there is a strong resemblance. But this actor was born much earlier.

*

Here’s a hint: here the actor is playing a bad guy. But he’s best known for a role on the right side of the law.

*

One more hint: That role was in something whose title gave rise to a memorable bit of slang.

*

I’ll leave the name in the comments. Anyone who still wants to guess is welcome to do so.

More mystery actors
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