The case of the slipaway sidebar

As you may notice, the OCA sidebar is gone, which means that I’ve likely messed something up in the HTML for a post. Paul Drake is on the case.

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Fixed! A post to the Blogger Help Community has an easy way to spot the source of the problem: open the latest posts one by one until you find a post with the sidebar where it should be. And the post that came after that one (i.e., later in time) will be the culprit. In this case, it was a stray bit of HTML for an image — the annoying div stuff I am almost always careful to delete — that pushed the sidebar to the bottom of the page.

If you’re given to tweaking older posts — a word here, a spacing problem there — you’d best be careful, or you might be opening years of posts to find the problem. DIY: Drake doesn’t work cheap.

The New Grown-Ups: “The Devil’s Nine Questions”

As these videos drop, I’m not going to hesitate to copy and paste:

Our son Ben Leddy is a member of The New Grown-Ups, who just took first in a new-band showcase at the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Brunswick, Maine. That’s a sample above.

Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : “My Heart’s Own Love” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp

Recently updated

Just some diner? Now with an electric delivery-truck.

Zippy Hopper Now with more Hopper.

Zippy Hopper

[Zippy, September 15, 2024. Notice the E.H. in the corner.]

Today’s Zippy is a thing of beauty. The source: Edward Hopper’s Excursion into Philosophy.

Hopper’s work appears a number of times in Zippy. You can do a strip search to see them all.

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September 16: More Hopper today. Maybe it’ll be Hopper Week.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Twenty years of blogging

Orange Crate Art began on a Wednesday night, shortly after dinner, September 15, 2004. My children, Rachel and Ben, helped me get started. Rachel told me what to say for a first post.

Keeping this blog has brought me more possibilities of thinking and learning and sharing that I could have imagined. It’s made writing — work that always put my academic self in a state of high anxiety — a pleasure. More importantly, it’s kept me off the streets and out of trouble, at least for some chunk of time every day.

And now, onward.

Just some diner?

[553 Union Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

No, not just some diner. It’s Frank’s Diner. Or (look closely) Frank’s Union Diner. As in, “Say, how’s about we grab a cup o’ java while they’re changin’ th’ erl?”

Many details to notice in the photograph. The most interesting one: the advertisement for a radio show with Joe Penner (1904–1941), a comedian in vaudeville, radio, and film. His work is well represented at YouTube. You just have to watch a bit to notice a resemblance to Pee-wee Herman. You don’t even have to read his Wikipedia entry.

Thanks, Brian, who pointed me to this photograph some time ago. Now I'm there, and the java is great. The Joe (Penner), not so much.

[Click for a larger view.]

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September 16: As jjdaddyo suggested in a comment, that appears to be an electric truck. I’d say that that’s the most interesting detail in the photograph. Strange: both a bakery and an electric vehicle company were named Ward.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : 557, 561, and 571 Union Street

How to improve writing (no. 126)

[The New York Times, September 14, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

I no longer subscribe to the Times, but I’m still willing to look at the paper. I hesitated to post this bit, but I ran it past Elaine, and she had the same — instantaneous — response:

Why but ?

The conjunction makes no sense, because there’s no contradiction. What might work better:

The Democratic vice-presidential nominee has lamented the angry splits within families over politics. Indeed, he and his Republican brother rarely speak.

But (ahem) if you read the article, it’s easy to understand that it’s Tim Walz’s brother Jeff who’s on the outs with siblings:

The breach in the Walz family has been painful, according to the men’s sister, Sandra Dietrich, who lives in Nebraska, where the siblings were raised. Jeff Walz has said he has not spoken with his brother, beyond a brief phone call, in years.

“They all have their own opinions, and I have mine,” Ms. Dietrich said. “They’re my brothers and I love them.” She added that she was a Democrat and planned to vote for her brother and Ms. Harris.

“We’ve always agreed to disagree,” she continued. “That’s where I’m at with Jeff. I just wish things were different — that it didn’t wreck people.”

A cousin is quoted as saying that in 2016 Ms. Dietrich and Jeff Walz were not on speaking terms.

I’m not sure how to rewrite to remove the suggestion that the enmity here is mutual. Perhaps it is. But the article strongly implies that it’s Jeff Walz who at one point or another has cut off contact with his siblings. Here’s a possible revision if that is the case:

The Democratic vice-presidential nominee has lamented the angry splits within families over politics. Indeed, in recent years his Republican brother has had little contact with his Democratic siblings.

Pinboard
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 126 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. I began with 1-D, four letters, “Intro to a classic dilemma,” which seemed to be a giveaway but gave away nothing. But the clue was indeed the intro to a classic dilemma, the dilemma of how to solve a Saturday Stumper. I chipped away, here, there, everywhere, to get the rest of the puzzle.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

10-A, five letters, “Spot strife.” This clue stretches the meaning of strife, but this is the Stumper.

13-D, six letters, “On a higher plane.” A little woo-woo.

17-A, nine letters, “Slight manscaping.” Oh, okay. (Sigh of relief.)

24-D, five letters, “Take a second.” Very Stumper-y.

25-D, eight letters, “Time for a throwaway line.” It took me some time to see the point of line.

33-A, eight letters, “Restraining order.” Nicely colloquial.

36-A, fifteen letters, “Vodka/coffee concoction.” No thank you.

38-D, eight letters, “‘No thank you’ follower, perhaps.” Silly.

40-D, three letters, “Graph add-on.” Yes!

52-A, three letters, “Preceder of up or down, in or out, off or on.” A value-added clue. At least four words fit.

59-D, three letters, “Money-making machine.” Raise your hand if you thought the answer would be ATM.

63-A, five letters, “What some 90% of all people possess.” The answer is definitely not “the answer to this clue.”

65-A, five letters, “Subject of the biography The Right Word.” Easy to guess, but I’ll take it.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-A, three letters, “Dose, taken another way.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Blood libel redux

It occurred to me only this morning, reading a post by Daughter Number Three, that the eating-our-pets lunacy, is, like Pizzagate, a new version of the medieval blood libel. This time with Haitians, not Jews or Democrats; and with animals, not children.

It’s difficult to imagine that Donald Trump knows about the history of the blood libel. J.D. Vance, with his love of traditional Catholicism, likely does. The neo-Nazis who marched in Springfield, Ohio, likely do.

In his shambolic golf-course press conference this afternoon, Trump, ever the opportunist, declared that mass deportations would begin in Springfield and in Aurora, Colorado. What no reporter pointed out when Trump made that seemingly impromptu declaration is that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, as the city’s website makes clear.

Donald Trump has long been a stochastic terrorist. And now J.D. Vance is now one too. Springfield public schools and driver’s-license facilities are closed for a second day because of bomb threats.

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As DN3 suggests, calling your senators and asking them to censure Vance is appropriate.

The New Grown-Ups: “My Heart’s Own Love”

As these videos drop, I’m not going to hesitate to copy and paste:

Our son Ben Leddy is a member of The New Grown-Ups, who just took first in a new-band showcase at the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Brunswick, Maine. That’s a sample above.

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Oops — the song is “My Heart’s Own Love.” Post title now corrected.

Related posts
“Cumberland Gap” : The New Grown-Ups at Bandcamp