Scam alert

A text, received today:

U.S. Post: You have a USPS parcel being cleared, due to the detection of an invalid zip code address, the parcel can not be cleared, the parcel is temporarily detained, please confirm the zip code address information in the link within 24 hours.

[Link deleted]

(Please reply with a Y, then exit the text message and open it again to activate the link, or copy the link into your Safari browser and open it)

Have a great day from the USPS team!

Our household has been receiving an inordinate number of scammy text messages and telephone calls. I suspect — who knows? — that the year’s end is a fruitful time for scammers, who hope to catch their victims off guard as packages fly or creep through the mails. A parcel? Could it be the fruitcake Aunt Jane was sending to me? Or the fruitcake I was sending to her? Quick — click on that link!

The text above, received today, is an old ploy, but I’d never seen it before. With a little close reading, the scamminess discloses itself.

And anyway, how would USPS have your mobile number? And why would they be calling from the Philippines? (Country code +63.)

Related posts
Art and dog-walking : IPS e-mail scam : Scam diction : A scam warning of a scamSlam the scam

[Scammers, may you never learn proper punctuation. And as I now know, scamming increases around the winter holidays.]

Atlas Stationers

Elaine and I made a post-Thanksgiving stop at Atlas Stationers in Chicago. It’s pen and paper bliss: several counters devoted to pens, one aisle (both sides) devoted to notebooks, another aisle’s worth of shelves devoted to inks, other aisles devoted to dip pens, pencils, greeting cards, stationery, stamps and ink pads, blotters, pen rolls, and other supplies. At the center of things, a master calligrapher doing his thing and talking to customers.

Friendly people were everywhere: I spoke at some length with Therese, “Mrs. Atlas,” about all sorts of things, including the Leuchtturm A4+ Daily Planner, a behemoth I’d never seen before. Mrs. Atlas explained that it caught on during the pandemic, when students taking online courses began buying it for note-taking. I asked if anyone from the Hulu series The Bear, filmed (mostly) in Chicago, had come in to buy notebooks — everyone in that series seems to use a notebook. (No.)

At a pen counter, I asked Sean about the store’s tournament of pens — brackets on a whiteboard, with customers having voted for the Pilot 823 over the Kaweco Sport in the final matchup. Would I like to try the Pilot? Sure. When I learned that Sean likes old Parkers — Duofolds, Vacumatics, and 51s, I mentioned the great scene in the movie Double Indemnity in which Walter Neff’s Duofold is the pen that Mr. Dietrichson uses to sign the accident policy that seals his doom. And then we got talking about the Criterion Channel.

Such a great store, and buzzing with people on a Black Friday. Analog lives!

[And, yes, of course, we spent some serious money: ink, notebooks, pencils, stationery.]

Sources of truth

Robert Reich offers sources where one might find some truth. I’ve added italics here and there:

The Guardian, Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, The Economic Policy Institute, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.

You’ll notice that some prominent purveyors of news are absent. “This Substack,” Reich’s Substack, is available here.

Two items I’d call attention to from these sources:

The November 30 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American offers a useful history of the idea of liberal democracy. An excerpt:

When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals — which was quite deliberate — they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.

And in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer recounts “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History” — and what a history. An excerpt:

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

It’s no time for internal exile.

George’s Diner

[72 Third 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. Nature abhors a vacuum. See also the Loring Grill, the Tiny Diner, the Unique Diner, and Jack’s Diner, which is right down the avenue from George’s.

The church to the right still stands, now as the Temple of Restoration. (You can see the words Church Office on that door.) The space once occupied by the diner is now a church parking lot.

Thanks, Brian, for pointing me to this diner.

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

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with demure and kakistocracy.

An interview with Wyna Liu

From The Atlantic, an interview with Wyna Liu, editor of the New York Times puzzle Connections: “The Most Controversial Game on the Internet.” (Talk about hype). An excerpt, explaining the puzzle’s color categories:

Purple is the wordplay category. The four words in that group are not defined by their literal meanings. It’s words that end with ___ or homophones or something. Blue is trivia that is maybe a bit more specialized, not just definitions. Maybe it’s all movies or certain bands. Sometimes that’s the hardest one. Yellow and green are other category types: They might be four things you bring to the beach, or sometimes they’re all synonyms for the same word. I would say that yellow is the most straightforward.

Another way to define the purple category: it’s the words that are left over after you get the yellow, green, and blue.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, using an alias that signals an easier Stumper of his making. Ehh, not that easy — half an hour for me, with the bottom half of the puzzle considerably more difficult than the top. The puzzle’s distinctive feature: two stacks of thirteen-, thirteen-, and fifteen-letter answers.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, six letters, “Talk related to ‘gargle.’” Etymologically? Maybe close, but I don’t think so. As slang? I have no idea.

3-D, five letters, “Name on the cover of I Dissent (2016).” And if only —

6-D, three letters, “Broth with tái lan.” I bet more solvers will be familiar with the broth than with this ingredient that can go with it.

14-A, thirteen letters, “The stripes of its American flag represent the Medicines of Life.” There are so many things I haven’t learned yet.

21-D, six letters, “Surname derived from oven operators.” A surprising factoid.

30-A, seven letters, “Prepares for sale, as related products.” Strange to see the present-tense verb.

31-D, eight letters, “Whom Du Bois called ‘scholar and knight.’” I don’t know how I pulled the name from my memory vault, but I did.

34-A, seven letters, “What John Appleseed promoted early on.” Read the clue carefully.

40-D, four letters, “Nickname with a despotic homonym.” Good Lord. This seems like an awful way to clue the nickname.

42-A, four letters, “Is aimless.” A verb looking odd on its own. 43-A, four letters, “Soil or schmo.” Ha!

46-A, five letters, “Nine-year-old on Swedish kronor.” Huh? What?

47-A, fifteen letters, “‘May I have more?’” My favorite of the long answers.

My favorite in this puzzle: 29-A, seven letters, “Stuffed street food.” Represent.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Separated at birth

Fresca at Noodletoon wrote a bit about George Caleb Bingham’s painting The Jolly Flatboat Men. I thought I’d seen it, but no, it’s in the National Gallery, and the painting I know is in the St. Louis Art Museum, with a different fiddler. The painting in St. Louis is Bingham’s Jolly Flatboatmen in Port, and I’ve had it in mind for years as a good item for a post, because the fiddler, to my eye, is John Hartford.

[Click either image for a larger view.]

I looked up John Hartford in the same old place and was both surprised and not surprised to find this detail:

He spent his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was exposed to the influence that shaped much of his career and music: the Mississippi River. From the time he got his first job on the river, at age 16, Hartford was on, around, or singing about the river.

I think it’s unlikely that John Hartford did not know and love this painting.

Related reading
All OCA “separated at birth” posts (Pinboard)

[I found and cropped a photograph of John Hartford from his official Facebook page — no photographer credited. The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

A third law

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

If there was one law for the poor, who have neither money nor influence, and another law for the rich, who have both, there is still a third law for the public official with real power, who has more of both. After the Taylor Estate fight, Robert Moses must have known — he proved it by his actions — that he could, with far more impunity than any private citizen, defy the law. He gloried in the knowledge; he boasted and bragged about it. For the rest of his life, when a friend, an enemy — or one of his own lawyers — would protest that something he was doing or was proposing to do was illegal, Moses would throw back his head and say, with a broad grin, a touch of exaggeration and much more than a touch of bravado: “Nothing I have ever done has been tinged with legality.”

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

[The Taylor Estate: property that Moses wanted, and got, for a state park.]

Talking about contingency

Calbert Graham (Stephen McKinley Henderson) in “From Russian Hill with Love,” an episode of the Netflix series A Man on the Inside (2024):

“Every great thing in your life, when you look back on it, feels like a miracle.”

If you watch, you’ll see that he’s talking about contingency.

A related post
Fluke life

[The eight-episode series is worth seeking out.]