Pencil sharpeners of the past

In action, from 1886 to 1920.

Thanks to Kevin at harvest.ink.

“Office fritters”?

There comes a time when one throws up one’s hands in the face of one’s handwriting.

Can you guess what I wrote? The answer’s in the comments.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Nick’s Diner

[Nick’s Diner, 399–405 Third Avenue, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Is it kitty-corner? Catty-corner? Cater-corner? Whichever. Nick’s Diner was diagonally across the intersection from Ralph Bozzo’s restaurant. If you click for the larger view and squint, you can see the diner’s name, along with a claim of “Home Cooking.” No need to squint to see the all-important EAT.

Today the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Sixth Street is the site of the Praxis Third Ave Shelter, providing temporary housing for adult families.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Garner’s Modern English Usage: “The original phrase, in Middle English, was catre-cornered (lit., “four-cornered”) — catre deriving from the Latin quattuor.” And: “Kitty-corner is predominant in the upper half of the continental U.S., catty-corner in the lower half. The form cater-corner, the preferred form in most dictionaries, is less common but not at all rare.”]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, July 29, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

Golf. Golf. Golf. Rake. Rake. Rake. The punchline in today’s strip: “You can’t play golf with a rake!” I somehow begin to suspect that I am not the Hi and Lois target audience.

But that doesn’t explain why there isn’t a single leaf on the ground. Might today’s strip have kept until, say, October?

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. For me, it was a Stumper that seemed impossible at first but gave up its secrets in nineteen minutes.¹ I started with 4-D, four letters, “Marcel’s mighty,” 5-D, three letters, “Evidence of unhappiness,” and 16-A, ten letters, “It holds drafts all year.” And then I drew blanks for clue after clue. What finally gave me a genuine start on solving: 48-D, four letters, “Bite on the trail.” Toss in 51-A, four letters, “Regard inappropriately,” and I was on my way.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, five letters, “Transcend.” A playful clash of diction registers.

7-D, fifteen letters, “Nursery rhyme singers’ evocations.” I love this.

11-D, nine letters, “Summarized, say.” I can’t believe I got it without crosses.

13-A, ten letters, “More than a little.” The answer feels dowdy to me. Do people say that?

15-D, five letters, “Middle name of Breyer’s successor.” I didn’t realize that it’s considered a middle name.

20-D, eight letters, “Stock market purchase.” Groan.

23-A, four letters, “Going quietly.” Going Stumpery.

24-A, twelve letters, “Deals with, after delaying.” Nicely colloquial.

24-D, three letters, “Bert alternative.” Given that the clue is in a Stumper, I thought we were playing Cheese Nicknames.

32-A, fifteen letters, “Excellent reception.” Football? Wi-Fi? I first though that the answer — which is not STANDINGOVATION — is just awkward, but no, it’s tricky.

43-A, five letters, “Legacy of a sort.” I saw what you did there.

55-A, ten letters, “Steepness warning.”I think that steep rules out anything appearing on a road sign.

Clue that most filled me with admiration for its fiendishness: 1-D, five letters, “Scale model.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

¹ For some reason, my Stumper time is often nineteen minutes and change.

🤫 🤐

My favorite detail from the updated classified-documents indictment appears in paragraph 79:

NAUTA provided inconsistent explanations to colleagues for his sudden travel to Florida. At 7:14 p.m. on June 24, he texted one person that he would not be traveling with TRUMP the next day because he had a family emergency and used “shushing” emojis; at 9:48 p.m. that night, he texted a Secret Service agent that he had to check on a family member in Florida; and after he arrived in Florida on June 25, he texted the same Secret Service agent that he was in Florida working.

Because nothing says nothing to see here folks like a shushing emoji.

A related post
🤔 ?

Reunion

Steven Millhauser, “The Place,” in Voices in the Night (2015).

Reminiscent of the Bal des têtes [masked ball] in Proust’s Time Regained. Proust’s narrator, who has been away from society for many years because of long illnesses and hospital stays, thinks he’s attending a costume party and that everyone has been made up to look old. And then he realizes: no, they are old.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Kindness as intelligence

J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, in a commencement address at Northwestern University, June 12, 2023:

The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. Let me explain. When we see someone who doesn’t look like us or sound like us, or act like us or love like us or live like us, the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgment or both. That’s evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things that we aren’t familiar with.

In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. This may be a surprising assessment, because somewhere along the way in the last few years, our society has come to believe that weaponized cruelty is part of some well-thought-out master plan. Cruelty is seen by some as an adroit cudgel to to gain power. Empathy and kindness are considered weak. Many important people look at the vulnerable only as rungs on a ladder to the top.

I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.

Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.

I’m not sure why I’m finding out about this address more than a month after the fact, via Daring Fireball. But there it is (my transcription). You can find the clip at YouTube.

Las Meninas y Nancy y Sluggo

[Alpha tool by me. Click for a larger view.]

Fresca said she’d like to see Nancy and friends as painted by Velázquez. I can sort of oblige. I hope they didn’t get ice cream on the canvas.

I thought Joe Brainard took care of this premise in one of his many Nancy homage/spoofs, but no, that was his Goya Nancy. And Goya Nancy still looks like Nancy, just as Brainard’s de Kooning Nancy still looks like Nancy. Nancy is indelible.

*

I just remembered this one: Nancy and Gustave Doré.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[This post is the kind of thing I do while waiting for news of the next indictment. I borrowed Nancy and Sluggo from their postage stamp.]

Velázquez and Tootsie Rolls

Hogan’s Alley, “the magazine of the cartoon arts,” has an interview with Bill Griffith, whose Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, will be published on August 29. Two details: Bushmiller’s favorite artist was Diego Velázquez. And about money:

He invested in the stock market with his considerable wealth. But the only stock he really followed was the Tootsie Roll Company. I checked. It’s still a privately held company. Funny and a little weird — but fitting. Sluggo would approve.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)