I just adore a penthouse view

[Click for a larger view.]

I don’t know what’s up (sorry) with that tree, but it’s been like that for years, though not always with a penthouse atop.

See also yesterday’s tree.

[Post title with apologies to Green Acres.]

Pinboard tags again

The behavior of Pinboard tags has puzzled me. I use a Pinboard account to create public tags for Orange Crate Art posts. The tags are supposed to work for everyone, taking an OCA reader to a Pinboard page with an index — okay, a list — of all posts with that tag.

In July 2021 I found that tags were working that way only if the reader was logged into a Pinboard account. As I’m always logged in, I thought that I must have dumbly missed something obvious — that tags always only worked for someone logged into a Pinboard account. (Two e-mails about that to Maciej Cegłowski, Pinboard’s developer, went unanswered.) In September 2021 tags were once again working for everyone, Pinboard account or no. Now tags are again working only for someone logged into Pinboard. I found a workaround:

pinboard.in/search/u:M.Leddy/?query=

And now the workaround no longer works for anyone not logged into a Pinboard account.

I found — finally — an explanation from Maciej Cegłowski in a Google Group, pinboard-dev:

The intent is for all public Pinboard pages to be visible without a login. However, user+tag pages in particular are somewhat expensive to generate on the fly, so a crawler that iterates through them can quickly bog down the site.

In the past, it was fairly easy to block or throttle this kind of crawling. But in recent months, I've seen a rise in distributed crawling from China+Singapore IP addresses, with no patterns that would make the traffic easy to block. So I’m forced to either put pages behind a login, or have the site become unusably slow for everyone.

If I have to I’ll block the entire PRC address range, though I’m looking for alternate solutions that are less drastic. But I just want people to know the reason for the back-and-forth behavior on public pages.

Ugh. I hope there’s a fix. Incidentally, there’s never been an acknowledgement on the Pinboard website of the problem with public tags. The website now announces a “big code cleanup underway.”

[And as you may have noticed, I’ve removed the widget with links to the top twenty OCA tags from the OCA sidebar.]

Towne Branch subdivision

[Click for a larger tree.]

I photographed this tree — I call it the Towne Branch subdivision — in fall 2020 and 2022 and again in fall 2023. In 2024 Towne Branch continues to be popular with established families and first-time homebuyers. Close to schools, shopping, and public transportation (power lines). This fall I counted six squirrel nests, five visible from this angle.

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)