Domestic comedy

[The Salada teabag tag read: “Crashers at the boat party just barge in.”]

“God, it’s like being stuck in a room with a bad version of me.”

“How do you think the other teabags feel?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Did you know that Salada is still a brand? I didn’t. The tea is not very good. But each bag has a tag with a punny or fortune-cookie-like sentence that reminds me of the little fillers in Parade or Reader’s Digest. When we found a box of Salada in a nearby salvage grocery store (weird adventures in shopping), I had to buy it — the box, not the store.]

Baking soda for the dishes

We have hard water. It’s been a fact of our east-central Illinois household forever. Sometimes we need a chisel.

But seriously, if you have hard water and do the dishes by hand:

~ Close the drain and put everything in the sink.

~ Add a small amount of dishwashing liquid and a tablespoon of baking soda.

~ Fill the sink with hot water.

~ Proceed as usual.

Yow! Everything almost washes itself. For the first time in many years we have dishes and glasses that sparkle, with virtually no hard-water stains.

How did I hit on this fix? We’ve taken to adding a dash of baking soda to a stock pot of (hard) water when we make pasta. Elaine found that tip, somewhere. So if it works for pasta, &c.

Monday in Manhattan

[From The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). Click for larger clothes.]

It must have been a Monday — wash day and a high-wire show. That’s what laundry looked like when I was a kid in Brooklyn, long after this movie was made.

See also these WPA tax photographs: one from The Bronx, one from Brooklyn.

Bloody Trump

In The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott writes about a Getty Museum exhibit and “the ancient, volatile Christian ideas behind Trump’s obsession with blood”:

Whether or not Trump intended to suggest a literal “bloodbath” when he threatened economic chaos if he isn’t reelected, the reference to blood was part of a more thoroughgoing effort to tap into the violent energies of the pre-scientific and pre-modern symbolics of blood that is evident throughout this show. He is disgusted by women’s blood; he has good genes or blood running through his veins; he is defending the “blood” of pure Americans against infection and immigration; and the power he seeks is deeply connected to blood and violence. His inaugural address is remembered for a particularly blood-soaked image, American carnage, which is etymologically derived from butchery, flesh and slaughter. All of this gives some of his Christian supporters permission to reembrace the darkest aspects of the symbolics of blood that saturated their religion for centuries.

These are old ideas. They are deeply and historically Christian ideas. And they are terrifying.

Recently updated

Castorini and Cammareri “Cher, she goes crazy when she eats the lard bread.”

Musicians, before or after it’s too late

A column by Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post advises seeing one’s musical heroes (his word) before it’s too late (gift link). The problem though is that it may already be too late.

Thiessen mentions, for instance, seeing Frankie Valli just last weekend: “though he does not move much onstage anymore, his voice is still crisp and strong.” And there’s a link to a 2022 performance.

All respect to Frankie Valli, who might be my first pop-music memory (via a Zenith transistor radio). But browse through that performance and it’s clear that Valli is not doing that much singing. It’s his recorded voice that we’re hearing.

I think it’s sometimes better to know the musicians one respects from their recordings. I am happy that I got to see Brian Wilson in 2000 and 2004 (the first Pet Sounds and SMiLE tours). But I would not want to have seen the Brian Wilson of recent years, sitting behind a silent piano and staring straight ahead. Some performances are too sad to witness. And I’d never want to see the Beach Boys in their present incarnation.

I have deeply mixed feelings about linking to anything written by Marc Thiessen (defender of waterboarding), but I think the topic here makes linking worthwhile. Readers’ thoughts about musicians seen before or after it’s too late are welcome in the comments.

[First pop-music memory: I would like it to have been the Beatles, but ”Sherry“ came out in August 1962. But I know I didn’t have a transistor radio of my own then.]

Castorini and Cammareri

[19 Cranberry Street, Brooklyn Heights, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

That’s the Castorini family’s house in Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987). It’s a wow of a house, with considerable history in the world of non-fiction.

And here’s the Cammareri Bakery, which became the corner bakery in Moonstruck. It didn’t even have to change its name. “Cammereri’s Bake Shop,” Chrissy (Nada Despotovich) says when she answers the phone.

[502 Henry Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

In 1940 Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Cammareri lived at 502. I’d like to think that’s Mr. Cammareri out in front.

[Click for a larger view.]

[Click for a larger telephone directory.]

And look: another bakery, in Boro Park. Any relation? That’s a rabbit hole down which I will not go. But you can see Cammareri’s Bakery (as its sign says) in the Municipal Archives.

A 1943 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the 11th Avenue bakery mentions Angelina and Grace Cammerini, “handsome Italian girls,” originally from Palermo. A plaque in the bakery marked their brother Andrew’s second year in military service.

In 1998, the Henry Street bakery, by then known as the Cammereri Brothers Bakery, closed after nearly eighty years. No. 502 today houses MozzLab, a cheesemaker and food purveyor. No. 5910 is now a residential behemoth.

A wonderful bit of TV from when the bakery was flourishing: WABC-TV’s Chauncey Howell went to Carroll Gardens and interviewed residents about Moonstruck. Priceless stuff.

*

April 1: A reader sent links to the Daily News articles with the bakery: one and two. “Cher, she goes crazy when she eats the lard bread.” Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski, and it’s very difficult. I had at it for about forty-five minutes, went out to dinner, came back, tried, tried, tried some more, and looked up three or four words to finish.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “Speak up for.” I may be missing something, but I don’t see how the clue and answer mesh.

5-D, fifteen letters, “I might stand for it.” I learned something.

10-D, fifteen letters, “Subject of The Whole-Brain Child.” Last nine letters easy, first six not so much.

11-D, five letters, “Relative of Rudolph.” All I could think was reindeer. I had to look it up. And then later last night I saw the name in movie credits.

12-D, four letters, “Relative of Inga.” All I could think was Frozen. I had to look it up.

17-A, nine letters, “Rising cost.” Clever.

18-A, five letters, “Monroe’s opposition in 1820.” It’s a trick, I tell ya.

24-D, five letters, “End of a ‘wrathful’ palindrome.” I think many solvers will invent this palindrome on the spot. A value-added clue.

25-D, five letters, “Name derived from an evergreen.” Poetry pays off.

32-A, nine letters, “Urban kids’ pastime.” It was, and I hope it still is.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Notes on notes.” Not an exciting answer, but the clue makes it worthwhile.

37-A, nine letters, “Regional figures.” I caught on right away, but I would have liked AREAWOMEN as the answer here.

49-D, four letters, “I might stand for it.” See 5-D.

50-D, four letters, “Husky parts.” Really sneaky.

53-A, nine letters, “ARTMOBILE anagram.” You never know how awkwardly untimely an answer might turn out to be.

56-A, nine letters, “Prior to delivery.” I have never heard or seen the answer before, and I suspect that if I see it again, it’ll only be in a crossword.

My favorite clues in this puzzle: 29-D, five letters, “Horned mascot (associated with 30 Down)” and 30-D, five letters, “Horned mascot (associated with 29 Down).”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Washington Week in Review misses the point

Talk about missing the point: the important thing to say about Donald Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible is not that it’s expensive or that it’s tacky, both points made on tonight’s Washington Week in Review. The important thing to say, and what no one said, is that this Bible is an exercise in Christian nationalism.

Is it the case that “all Americans need a Bible in their home,” as Trump says? No, not all, and not all those who need “a Bible” need one in two parts. And printing this two-part Bible with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance included is an unmistakable effort to brand the United States as a Christian nation.

Bad job, WWiR.

[Slightly puzzling: Trump is hawking is a King James Version, not the first choice of evangelicals. But: the KJV in the public domain.]

“Meticulous,” “commendable,” “intricate”

Erik Hoel, neuroscientist and novelist, on the “insidious creep” of artificial intelligence into culture:

Consider science. Right after the blockbuster release of GPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI and one of the most advanced in existence, the language of scientific research began to mutate. Especially within the field of A.I. itself.

A study published this month examined scientists’ peer reviews — researchers’ official pronouncements on others’ work that form the bedrock of scientific progress — across a number of high-profile and prestigious scientific conferences studying A.I. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” more than 34 times as often as reviews did the previous year. Use of “commendable” was around 10 times as frequent, and “intricate,” 11 times. Other major conferences showed similar patterns.

Such phrasings are, of course, some of the favorite buzzwords of modern large language models like ChatGPT. In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. And the closer to the deadline the submitted reviews were received, the more A.I. usage was found in them.

Thanks, Ben.

Related posts
ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT