Domestic comedy

[Star Trek. Shatner front and center.]

“What acting.”

“What acting?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. Though SZ is known as maker of difficult puzzles, her Stumpers tend to be relatively easy. Not today’s puzzle though, which took me half an hour to finish. A solid Stumper. So I can finally throw back my head like a baying hound and bellow “Stella! Stella!” And mean it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, ten letters, “Diva designation.” This clue seemed to me a giveaway. A good start. Thank you.

6-D, six letters, “Region abutting Switzerland and Germany.” Of note to me because Elaine and I and our friend Margie King Barab once rendezvoused at a restaurant with this region’s cuisine. We were in Manhattan.

9-D, eight letters, “Went over.” Dig the vagueness.

12-D, ten letters, “Bit associated with Elvis.” I once saw an exhibit of Elvis artifacts at the local mall. The saddest exhibit I’ve ever seen. Sunglasses with the TCB insigina (Taking Care of Business.) Many 12-Ds.

17-A, ten letters. “Foldable food.” Yes, indeed.

18-A, four letters, “Badly in need of a wash.” Ick.

25-A, seven letters, “Much consumed juice.” A little deceptive, but I was not deceived.

25-D, ten letters, “Ready to go.” Oof.

27-D, ten letters, “Evincing one’s annoyance.” Oof. Oof.

31-A, five letters, “It’s in tanks a lot.” A wonderful clue. My first thought was SANKA.

46-D, five letters, “A little relief.” Very clever.

38-A, eight letters, “Drying out, perhaps.” ONTHEWAG — no, it doesn’t fit.

50-D, four letters, “County with radio station KVYN.” Now I get it.

56-A, ten letters, “Got nowhere.” I think the first four letters are meant to mislead.

61-A, ten letters, “Absents oneself.” Lovely.

My favorite: 36-D, eight letters, “Redundant reckoning.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[“I can finally throw back,” &c.: paraphrasing the stage direction from the play.]

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.