University commas

From xkcd: “The Oxford one is the most famous, but many major universities have their own comma.”

*

I was won over by the joke. But as shallnot points out in a comment on this post (and as I should have remembered), the Oxford comma takes its name from the press, not from the university.

Related reading
All OCA Oxford comma posts (Pinboard)

Noisy macOS, noisy iOS

Did you know that you can get distraction-covering noise from macOS (Ventura and above) and iOS (15 and above)?

In MacOS, go to System Settings > Accessibility > Audio > Background Sounds.

In iOS, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Background Sounds.

You’ll find the same choices for each: Balanced, Bright, and Dark Noise; and Ocean, Rain, Stream, Night, and Fire. That’s a campfire — no sirens.

In macOS, you can add Background Sounds access to the Menu Bar or Control Center. Go to System Settings > Control Center > Hearing and and choose Show in Menu Bar or Show in Control Center. In iOS, adding a button to the Control Center offers similar ease.

I’ve used a variety of noisemakers on Macs. And a dozen years ago, I relied on an hour-long .mp3 of pink noise. I will quote myself from my teaching days: “Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.” Times change. The need for noise remains.

Blogosphere, alive, well

In The Guardian, John Naughton writes about blogging and the thirty-year effort of Dave Winer: “The blogosphere is alive and well and thriving. In fact it’s where much of the best writing — and thinking — of our era is to be found.”

I know I’ve “seen” Dave Winer’s blog Scripting News every now and then (via someone’s link). It’s not really my cup of Irish Breakfast (it’s a lot of tech), but it’s now in my RSS — a technology that Winer helped develop.

Voter registration deadlines

Voter registration deadlines are approaching soon. Find them at https://vote.gov/register.

“Primary rules”

From the latest installement of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, someone’s “primary rules”:

Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Sounds like Donald Trump, but it’s not. Can you guess who?

NYT, finally, sort of

At The New York Times, they’re finally willing to say something, sort of: “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.”

But as the clinical psychologists Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal have pointed out week after week on the podcast Shrinking Trump, it’s not really, or simply, a question of age. Joe Biden’s brain, they have said, is aging. But Donald Trump’s brain, they have said, is dementing.

Jack’s Diner

[56 3rd Avenue, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like seeing a diner wherever there’s space for one. Yeah, it oughta fit. See also the Loring Grill, the Tiny Diner, and the Unique Diner.

At this address today: a large building. (What did you expect?)

[From the 1940 telephone directory. Click for a larger view.]

The WPA fellow at the placard looks as if he might have time-traveled in from the Nouvelle Vague. But I could be wrong.

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

PAYPHONE

A pangram from the dowdy world, in yesterday’s New York Times Spelling Bee. And from June 6, 2021. Is the Spelling Bee in reruns?

A handful of pay phone posts
A Blue Dahlia pay phone : A Henry pay phone : A Naked City pay phone : A subway pay phone, 1932 : Chicago pay phones : “If your coin was not returned”

[Pay phone is dowdier than payphone.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

[Caution: there’s one spoiler, for 49-D.]

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, has nifty clue-and-answer pairs to begin and end the Acrosses: 1-A, five letters, “Rulers from either end” and 61-A, five letters, “Holds from either end.” Can across be plural?

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

9-D, five letters, “Homeric hound.” A faithful companion, though I’d like to see the “desperate, womanizing pretty boy” PARIS as an answer.

10-D, four letters, “Kind of mouthpiece.” For a zany moment, I thought OPED?

14-A, eleven letters, “Spring roll filling.” I was torn between thinking food and thinking sod.

19-A, six letters, “Calliope close kin.” I was not fooled.

25-A, five letters, “Great start.” Groan.

25-D, four letters, “Multifunction metaphor.” Though I’m not sure that it applies to things that function.

27-D, ten letters, “Pixar furniture merch.” Novelty itself.

38-A, six letters, “Potable Poe wrote about.” Yes, sort of.

42-A, three letters, “Pen name derived from Moses ‘with a head cold.’” I had no idea.

44-D, six letters, “Manufactured mouse manipulator.” Is it the mouse that’s manufactured, or the manipulator?

49-D, four letters, “They’re ‘made to make debt,’ per Pound.” Ezra Pound did say this, at least three times, in his wartime radio speeches from fascist Italy. An example:

Will you folks back in America NEVER realize that you are fightin’ this war IN ORDER to get into debt? I mean just that, you have been dumped into the war IN ORDER to get into debt. To get in further, to get in up to the chin, the throat. To get into the morass up to your eyebrows and no man living can see WHEN you will get out of it.

Wars are made to make DEBT.

“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978).

You can see all three statements at the Internet Archive.

Given Pound’s anti-Semitism (prominent in another of these declarations) and general crackpottery, I’d have found another way — almost any other way — to clue the answer. For instance, ”They can be civil.“ I think this clue illustrates the problem of taking something from a list of quotations without looking at the words in context.

My favorite in this puzzle: 58-A, letters, “Country discovered by Bart Simpson on Lisa’s globe.”

No more spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Trump Bible in Oklahoma

The Oklahoma Department of Education is looking to purchase 55,000 Bibles for classroom use:

According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.

A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters.

But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement.

Mardel doesn’t carry the God Bless the U.S.A. Bible or another Bible that could meet the specifications, the We The People Bible, which was also endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. It sells for $90.

As they say in Brooklyn, Jesus Mary and Joseph.