Masks

    [“Brinks Holdup.” Photographs by Ralph Morse and Yale Joel. January 1, 1950 (?). From the Life Photo Archive. Click any photograph for a larger mask.]

None of these photographs appear in the January 30, 1950 Life article about the Boston Brinks robbery. The robbery took place on January 17, so the date for the photographs must be a mistake. There is no indication that these are the masks the robbers wore. But they’re good masks. Here’s a post from 2021 with six more.

The last time Elaine and I committed to Halloween (2015!) we had six kids show up in three-and-a-half hours — pretty sad. On this Halloween there are more kids in our neighborhood than before, so we’re once again going to give out candy, or try to. We are hoping to dispose of the contents of two large bags of Reese's Cups tonight. Good stuff.

Turn up, kids! Or I’ll be the one who has to eat the leftovers.

Happy Halloween.

Related reading
All OCA Halloween posts (Pinboard)

Reaching out

This morning I have had a president, a vice president, and an undefeated former president reach out to me, one of them “personally reaching out.”

Just another Monday.

Gender and evaluations

From Inside Higher Ed: “Two new studies show how bias against women in student ratings operates over time, worsening with critical feedback and instructor age.”

I think that anyone who teaches knows there’s truth in these studies. If the instructor is a man: he’s tough, demanding. If the instructor is a woman: she’s a bitch. And I can only imagine how some students might regard a non-binary instructor.

Yet another letter to Mary Miller

[Click for a genuinely readable view.]

A note for the non-local: Mary Miller’s husband Chris Miller, our representative in the Illinois state legislature, runs a father-son Christian-themed camp with considerable emphasis on guns. But the camp doesn’t allow participants to bring their own weapons: “For safety reasons, please do not bring any firearms or archery equipment.”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

SHELL

[3437-47 Fort Hamilton Parkway, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Granted, it’s only a tax photograph, but it’s beautifully composed, with the long lines of the pavement below and the long line of the wire above, all moving toward to the station; the pipes and telephone pole projecting upward; and the globes atop the pumps (SHELL) and the clock. And the hatted man, hand in pocket, moving toward the camera. I am imagining him as Max von Mayerling, lost in Brooklyn, walking back to the car to tell Madame (Norma Desmond) that it will be a long drive back to Los Angeles.

The tax records give 1930 as the approximate date of this station’s construction. In 1931, the station was briefly in the news, as one of twenty-five Brooklyn gas stations robbed by a trio of young men. In 1949 the station appeared in New York State court records, when a station owner petitioning for a variance to expand cited the history of this Shell station to support his petition:

[Click for a larger view.]

So by 1947 this smart little station was already larger.

In 2022 the corner of Fort Hamilton Parkway and Chester Avenue is still a Shell station. At some future point someone may look at this photograph and say “That was what gas stations looked like.”

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

No[!] Hurry[!]

Teachers, tell your students: Michelle Reis, actress and former Miss Hong Kong, nearly died because of a doctor’s unpunctuated text.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Paolo Pasco, his first Stumper, I think, and truly Stumpery (twenty-six minutes for me). The northeast and southwest, relatively easy. The northwest and southeast, much more challenging. Here’s a profile of the constructor.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, ten letters, “Groups attending board meetings.” I thought of CARPENTERS. Finally getting 8-D right helped a lot here.

3-D, seven letters, “Selling points.” An answer meant to confound.

8-D, seven letters, “Figure skater attire.” My first (wrong) answer.

10-D, ten letters, “Heavy metal instruments.” My second (correct) answer. I took a chance, because I liked the possibility of seeing them in the puzzle.

23-A, nine letters, “They’re often taken out of stock.” Fees of some sort, right? Right?

26-A, nine letters, “Exercise with no running.” Nifty.

33-D, seven letters, “Dutch doctor known for his optotypes.” Who? For his what? Oh, that! Everything has a name.

34-A, three letters, “Guy going back for a plan.” Didn’t fool me.

41-D, five letters, “Trunk depression.” Weirdly defamiliarizing. But not always a depression.

49-A, ten letters, “‘Encore’ antonym.” Ha.

51-A, ten letters, “Shades worn on your feet.” New to me, though not to my feet.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Mary Miller, on it

Representative Mary Miller (R, IL-15) continues to use her official Twitter account to warn parents about the danger of fentanyl in Halloween candy. The warnings tie into the claim that we have an “open border.” “These pills are deadly, and parents should be vigilant and carefully check their child’s Halloween candy this year,” she warns in her latest tweet on this topic.

This year? Mary, a good parent checks the candy every year.

But the fear of fentanyl in Halloween candy is, according to a toxicologist and addiction specialist, “a moral panic.” And a scholar of urban legends calls Halloween fentanyl just that — an urban legend, like razor-blade-filled apples. See this The Washington Post article: “The media and the Halloween ‘rainbow fentanyl’ scare.”

Meanwhile, Mary Miller has said nothing about the attack on Paul Pelosi today and the conspiracy-driven mindset that prompted it.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 105)

Looking at the bare-bones website for the in-the-news Donda Academy, I could not help staring at this sentence:

Writing should be regarded as an activity that necessitates critical thinking, an aspect that is necessary to all good writing.

The sentence appears as Rule 58 on a page about “Who we are.” It’s meant, I think, to sound impressive, but it says in essence that writing requires critical thinking, which is required in writing. It takes about ten seconds of critical thinking to rewrite the sentence to remove redundancy and the awkward aspect.

How about:

Writing well means thinking critically.

Or:

Good writing requires critical thinking.

Or to avoid the clichéd “critical thinking”:

Good writing requires thought.

Or:

Think hard to write well.

From twenty to four or five. Omit needless words.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 105 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Guernica wear

[“Anguish, Half Off.” Zippy, October 28, 2022. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Griffy notes that museums sell Picasso everything — mousepads, T-shirtscoffee mugs. “What’s next?” he wonders. “Guernica bedsheets and party dresses??”

I wouldn’t have believed it, but you can find a Guernica skirt, complete with Picasso signatures along the waistband, front and back, at Etsy.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Did you get to see Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art? It was removed to Spain in 1981.]