Old Bay

“I admit there’s nothing I’d like more than for Old Bay to take over the world”: in The New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about what she calls “the greatest condiment in America.” There’s also a recipe for Mr. Keith’s Crab Soup.

[In the recipe, “mixed vegetables” is a tad vague. A cursory search suggests celery, corn, carrots, green beans, lima beans, onions, and potatoes as among the possibilities.]

How to improve writing (no. 125)

Another sentence in need of repair, this one from The Washington Post, about Donald Trump’s repeated references to Hannibal Lecter:

He typically mentions the fictional serial killer in the context of immigration, claiming without evidence that migrants are coming in from insane asylums and mental institutions and often using dehumanizing language.

I tried out this sentence in the Orange Crate Art test kitchens, where it met with puzzlement. The false parallelism of coming and using is the problem. It’s so easy to fix:

He typically mentions the fictional serial killer in the context of immigration, dehumanizing migrants and claiming without evidence that they are coming in from insane asylums and mental institutions.

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

[This post is no. 125 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

How to improve writing (no. 124)

My son Ben pointed me to a awkward-sounding sentence in The New York Times. It’s about Nancy Pelosi’s friendship with Joe Biden:

What she did not say is that you can’t make friends of 50 years when you are in your ninth decade, the kind who knew you way back when.

Is this sentence as oddly phrased as Ben thinks it is? I think so. The two not s at the start are confusing, at least for a moment. And the kind falls strangely after ninth decade.

What I think this sentence wants to say is something like this:

What she left unsaid is that you can’t begin fifty-year-long friendships when you’re in your eighties.

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

[This post is no. 124 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Writing on a train

I knew I’d seen it somewhere in a movie. Here’s a train with a writing desk for passenger use. The desk accessory and the drawer below no doubt hold stationery.

[From The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Click for a larger desk.]

Possessive forms of Harris and Walz

Harris’ and Walz’s? Or Harris’s and Walz’s? “Grammar geeks are in overdrive,” says a New York Times article, which presents the choice as “apostrophe hell.” Not really. The best solution is to add ’s to make each name possessive.

Bryan Garner looks at Harris and Walz in today’s LawProse Lesson, “Possessive Anomalies.” The AP Stylebook, he points out, would have the possessive forms as Harris’ and Walz’s. But:

The better policy, followed by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is to reject the AP rule on this point and to follow instead the rule specified by The Chicago Manual of Style (followed by most book publishers). Just add ’s to any singular noun to make the possessive.

I’ll add that Chicago recommends ’s even for names from antiquity, which are often treated as exceptions: Euripides’s, Jesus’s.

Garner adds another reason to follow the Chicago rule. Both Harris’ and Harris’s are pronounced with an additional s, and with the Chicago rule, “what you see is what you get.” Though that wouldn’t be the case with Euripides’s.

The Chicago Manual of Style is a reference conspiciously missing from the Times survey of apostrophizing. As is Garner’s Modern English Usage.

[This latest LawProse Lesson is not yet online. I trust that it will soon be available here. You can subscribe to the (free) e-mails here. For the unusual exceptions to ’s, see Chicago 7.20–22. The plural possessives of Harrises and Walzes: Harrises’ and Walzes’. ]

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.

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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.”