WCBS Newsradio 880 to disappear

After fifty-seven years, WCBS Newsradio 880 is going off the air. Taking its place: ESPN New York.

One of the strange pleasures of driving late at night in downstate Illinois is pulling in WCBS 880 or WINS 1010. I always like hearing about traffic and weather from a distant land. You can still listen to WCBS 880 online, while it lasts.

WCBS newstime: 10:34. (It’s Eastern.)

Siamese connections

[“Pipe Down!” Zippy, August 13, 2024.]

Today’s Zippy honors a bit of urban design: the Siamese connection. Here’s a sampling, along with an explanation.

Attention, Zippy: “th’ 1860s” seems to be more accurate.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Earworms

Last Thursday’s word from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day was earworm :

1. A catchy song or tune that keeps involuntarily repeating in one’s mind.

2. An agricultural pest commonly known as corn earworm, of the species Helicoverpa zea or Helicoverpa armigera.

I did not want to call attention to this word last week, as I had an pernicious earworm raging: the Jardiance jingle. I dared not do anything to provoke it. But when my son asked me where “Hi-de-ho” came from, Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” stepped up and kicked that other worm out before it got to my brain. Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi.

Click on either of the Jardiance links at your own risk. They’re really swell.

Eleven movies, one mini-series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Fandango, Max, TCM, Tubi, YouTube.]

All My Sons (dir. Irving Reis, 1948). From the Arthur Miller play. Wartime manufacturer Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson) has let his business partner take the rap and go to prison for okaying defective plane parts, parts that led to the deaths of twenty-one pilots. That revelation, withheld until late in the story, is meant to be a surprise, but it isn’t, because without it, the story would be pointless. Robinson and Burt Lancaster (as Joe’s son!) do well, but the story is contrived, and the production is painfully stagy. ★★ (TCM)

*

A Hatful of Rain (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1957). From the Michael Gazzo play. A Korean war vet (Don Murray) struggles to hide his morphine addiction from his wife (Eva Marie Saint) and father (Lloyd Nolan) as he’s repeatedly saved from his dealer’s vengeance by his sad-sack brother (Anthony Franciosa). Saint, as a neglected partner who’s almost ready to quit, is the most persuasive of the principals; Murray is plausible as an addict almost ready to commit robbery to fund a fix; Franciosa and Nolan are loud in a way that suits a stage, not a screen. As the dealer and his henchman, Henry Silva and William Hickey are chilling. ★★★ (TCM)

*

A Touch of Love, aka Thank You All Very Much (dir. Waris Hussein, 1969). Rosamond Stacey (Sandy Dennis), a London doctoral student, is a magnet for men but avoids relationships — she’s sworn off men, she tells a friend. And then she finds that she’s pregnant. A deeply bittersweet story, with an actor whose expressive face was made for it: Dennis’s smile never seems far from tears. WIth Ian McKellen in his first film appearance. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Emile (dir. Carl Bessai, 2003). Ian McKellen stars as a celebrated academic returning to his native Canada to receive an honorary degree. There he attempts to establish some relationship with his sole surviving family members, a niece, Nadia (Deborah Kara Unger), and great-niece, Maria (Theo Crane). An understated, highly Proustian story, as Emile confronts things done and not done in his earlier life, with many matters left to the viewer to notice and figure out. Try to count the clocks. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor star in a suspenseful story with a simple premise: a police detective is hiding and protecting a mob boss’s widow on a train from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she will name names at a trial. Two thugs looking to prevent her from testifying are also on the train. A long game of cat and mouse ensues. One of the great train movies, and I cannot understand why it hasn’t already shown up in these pages. ★★★★ (F)

*

Trio (dir. Ken Annakin and Harold French, 1950). I’m not sure about W. Somerset Maugham’s ability as a novelist (I’ve never read him), but he was certainly a fine storymaker. “The Verger” is an O. Henry-like tale of an illiterate man’s (James Hayter) surprising good fortune. In “Mr. Know-All,” a jewelry dealer (Nigel Patrick) swallows his pride and tells a lie to preserve a relationship. “Sanatorium,” the longest of these stories, dwells on the lives of tuberculosis patients, with special attention to two (Michael Rennie and Jean Simmons) who fall in love. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Teen Torture, Inc. (dir. Tara Malone, 2024). A thoughtful three-part documentary about the “troubled teens” industry — the multi-billion-dollar array of residential facilities where young people (as young as ten), having been separated from the families and communities, are subject to various forms of psychological, physical, and, sometimes, sexual abuse. These facilities, often unregulated due to religious exemptions, are schools in name only: not one of the ex-inmates interviewed mentions a book or a classroom. Perhaps the most compelling story: a young woman who hid extra underwear under the insoles of her shoes when she attempted an escape. Two well-known faces in this documentary: the television personality Phil McGraw, who profited mightily from his relationship with one of these facilities, and Mitt Romney, co-founder of Bain Capital, a prominent firm in the industry. ★★★★ (M)

*

Murder Most Foul (dir. George Pollock, 1964). Loosely based on an Agatha Christie novel, it replaces Hercule Poirot with Miss Jane Marple (Margaret Rutherford), here the lone holdout on a jury. Ever skeptical, she begins her own investigation of the murder case, joining an amateur theater company to do so. Two more murders follow. DNA analysis of this movie suggests that it’s a not-distant ancestor of Murder, She Wrote: amateur female investigator, male sidekick (played by Rutherford’s husband Stringer Davis), clues galore, suspects galore, investigator in danger, touches of whimsy here and there. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Luzhin Defense (dir. Marleen Gorris, 2000). From the Nabokov novel. John Turturro is Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, a shabby chess master covered in cigarette ashes and sweat. Arriving in an Italian city to play a championship match, he meets and immediately falls for Natalia Katkov (Emily Watson), a wealthy woman who also somehow falls for him. Their relationship and the evil doings of Luzhin’s former tutor Valentinov (Stuart Wilson) form the stuff of the movie, which spreads itself thin trying to be a chess story (with multiple chess errors), a love story, a study of an obsessive mind, and a tour of opulent early-twentieth-century houses. ★★ (TCM)

*

Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird (dir. Steven-Charles Jaffe, 2013). The cartoonist Gahan Wilson was indeed born dead and brought to life by a persevering doctor, but there’s nothing particularly weird here: this documentary shows Wilson to be a hardworking artist, though I wish there were more about the artist, either talking about his art or doing the work. Instead we get brief commentaries from an array of artists and celebrity fans. My favorite scene: cartoonists having lunch on the day they come to Manhattan to pitch cartoons to Bob Mankoff, then comics editor at The New Yorker. My least favorite scene: cartoonists showing their work to Bob Mankoff, which is like watching students fail an oral exam. ★★ (CC)

*

Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy‌ (dir. Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, 2024). A documentary urgently worth watching. I’ve written about it in a previous post. All I’ll add here is that every reference to a Democratic candidate as “demonic” or “evil” is wholly literal for some Trump voters. And every reference to a coming civil war in wholly literal too. ★★★★ (T)

*

The Commandant’s Shadow (dir. Daniela Volker, 2024). A reckoning with the past: in this documentary we meet Hans-Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, whose family life is dramatized in The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023). We also meet Hans’s sister Brigitte (still given largely to rationalizations and denials about her father’s actions) and Hans’s son Kai, a minister perhaps more tormented by the past than his father. The documentary reaches a high point when Hans (who early on says “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz”) and Kai visit Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of Auschwitz, and her daughter Maya. Anita: “It’s very important to talk about these things.” ★★★★ (M)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Tim Walz’s military service

Two pieces about Tim Walz’s military service:

Adam Kinzinger, “The Swiftboating of Walz is Sick, Inacurate, and Will Fail.”

Stephen Robinson, “Desperate times: Trumpers launch Swiftboating 2.0.”

Trump, breaking?

From Forbes :

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed a crowd that gathered to see Vice President Kamala Harris arrive at a Michigan airport for a campaign rally was “fake,” insisting her campaign used artificial intelligence to mask the fact that “there was nobody there” — a claim refuted by images, videos and accounts of the event.

“There was nobody there”? It sounds to me as if someone might be having a psychotic break.

Charles Crumb (Robert’s brother, in the documentary Crumb ):

“When narcissism is wounded, it wants to strike back at the person who wounded it.”

If you measure out your life in crowds, someone else’s bigger crowds might be intolerable.

See also George Conway’s 2019 Atlantic article “Unfit for Office” and his Anti-Psychopath PAC.

Schrafft’s, plural

Two weeks ago I posted a tax photograph of a Childs restaurant. I realized after the fact that next to that Childs stood a Schrafft’s. You can see both restaurants, albeit at distance, in this tax photograph:

[Schrafft’s, 291-293 Broadway, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Like Childs, Schrafft’s restaurants were once ubiquitous in Manhattan: the 1940 telephone directory lists twenty-nine of them. When my mom and dad, not yet parents, worked in Manhattan, they would sometimes meet for lunch at a Schrafft’s. Noticing this Broadway outlet made me want to look for the Schrafft’s where my mom and dad may have eaten lunch.

So I called the Paul Drake Detective Agency and told what I know: my mom would walk from American Cyanamid (30 Rockefeller Plaza); my dad would walk from Johns Manville (22 E. 40th Street). Drake’s conclusion is that they must have met at the Schrafft’s at 556 Fifth Avenue: an eight-minute walk from Rockefeller Plaza, a ten-minute walk from 22 E. 40th. (Paul Drake is never wrong.)

[Schrafft’s, 556 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Wikipedia has a brief history of the chain. Vanishing New York has some good photographs. The New York Public Library has menus that take forever to load. Here’s one from 1955, when my parents, not yet my parents, may have been Schrafft’s-ing. And here’s a description of Schrafft’s from a 1964 guide to New York.

There’s a website for a revived Schrafft’s whose tone — “Where the Forward Thinkers and Life Seizers, the Night Owls and the Morning Dealmakers banter amongst the Famous and soon-to-be Famous, the Old Guard and their Tiny Titans to be” — and spelling — “fashionable not fadish” — leave me cold. The revival as yet seems to be more idea than reality.

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

Stack up with?

[The New York Times, August 9, 2024.]

Stack up with? Does the Times consider against too divisive?

In the Google Ngram Viewer, stack up against is about eleven times more common than stack up with in American English.

[Our household this week: ten of eleven answers.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Whenever I see Matthew Sewell’s name on a Newsday  Saturday Stumper, I know I am likely in for it, “it” being perhaps forty-five minutes or an hour of struggle. And so it was this week.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A and 62-A, four letters each, “Without a hem?” I thought the first of these had to be ASIS.

1-D, six letters, “Word from the Greek for ‘panting.’” My starting point.

10-D, eight letters, “What you can fix it with.” I’ve seen this trick before.

11-D, eight letters, “What’s put in infusers.” But not this trick.

16-A, ten letters, “Charger in an outlet.” MADSHOPPER? I was thinking of someone charging through the aisles in a Black Friday frenzy.

19-A, fourteen letters, “‘Dear me!’” Really?

25-A, five letters, “A whole bunch?” See 19-A.

26-D, four letters, “Directional letters.” I was sure it had to be OTOH.

29-D, four letters, “#1 reacher in each of the past seven decades.” Strange but true.

32-A, twelve letters, “Very badly.” A clue that leads everywhere and nowhere.

36-A, seven letters, “Put out.” See 32-A.

39-A, seven letters, “Have the chops, say.” Groan.

40-A, twelve letters, “Science practiced by multiple Nobel laureates.” My first guess was ASTROPHYSICS. Why not?

51-D, five letters, “Alpine trail.” Probably useful for future crosswords, not to mention sojourns in the Alps.

54-A, fourteen letters, “Nicely named beef/mozzarella dish.” I have to believe it’s real.

55-D, four letters, “Consciousness raiser.” Oh brother.

My favorite in this puzzle: 60-A, ten letters, “Book subtitled 100 Ways to Work Out With Your Dog.” Aww.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Harris Walz”

Elaine Fine has written a one-minute waltz for piano: “Harris Walz.”