Initialism

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

The Twenties was an age for heroes, of course, and if 1927 was Lindbergh’s year in the New York press, 1928 was Moses’. Albert Einstein, who announced his theory of relativity in that year, was all but ignored in the city’s thirteen daily newspapers, but New York’s reporters strove for new adjectives to describe the park builder, one writer concentrating on his physical attributes (“tall, dark, muscular and zealous”), another on the mental (“a powerful and nervous mind”), a third on the moral (“fearless,” “courageous”) to describe “Rhodes Scholar” Robert A. Moses, Robert B. Moses, most frequently Robert H. Moses (reporters could not seem to reconcile themselves to his lack of a middle initial).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)

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

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

I did not draw the glasses.

Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll drop a hint when I can if one is needed.

*

9:17 a.m.: That was fast. The answer is in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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Work Scotch

“They stole my work Scotch”: no, not Pete Hegseth speaking. It’s receptionist Sheila Portnadi (Pat Vern Harris), in “Mort Crim,” an episode from the second and final season of the short-lived series Detroiters (2018).

Detroiters, streaming on Netflix, is by turns funny and smart and funny and stupid. For anyone who knows Detroit (I don’t), the inside jokes must be plentiful. Did you know that many of the commercials produced by Cramblin Duvet have their origins in real-life local television?

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with brain rot.

New York words

I am pleased to see that in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), Robert Caro refers, at least twice, to sliding ponds. A New-York-City-ism. But he also refers to jungle gyms, not monkey bars.

Related posts
Sliding pond : Jungle gym and monkey bars

MERCURY ALERT

I saw this warning, with a proper diamond orientation, at my post office. Prohibited, yes, with good reason. But I think the messenger god — the original mail carrier, if you will — cannot be happy about it.

[Click for a larger view of the warning.]

Street arithmetic

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy is Bushmiller-like today in its transformation of things into other things: a crosswalk into equals signs, a street into a blackboard. (The street must have been shut down for Nancy.)

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

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 someone 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.