David Gergen on the country’s future

“On a recent afternoon as we were sitting together watching the migrating birds and capturing the last of the autumnal sunshine, my father awoke to more words of clarity.” Katherine Gergen Barnett, David Gergen’s daughter, wrote down her father’s fleetingly lucid thoughts: “My father, David Gergen, has dementia. Here are his reflections on the path forward for our country” (The Boston Globe ).

Fiorello La Guardia, a balanced ticket

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). Fiorello La Guardia was running for mayor:

La Guardia possessed qualifications for making the run beyond the fact that, half Jewish and half Italian, married first to a Catholic and then to a Lutheran of German descent, himself a Mason and an Episcopalian, he was practically a balanced ticket all by himself.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

Jimmy Walker’s Versailles

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). The Central Park Casino was “a quiet little night club,” built for Mayor Jimmy Walker and friends in what had once been a “Ladies Refreshment Salon” in Central Park:

But the Casino was more than a restaurant or a night club. The Casino was Jimmy Walker’s Versailles. Friends joked that the Mayor spent more time there than he did at City Hall. When his limousine pulled into view, the doorman would scurry inside and signal the orchestra, so that when Beau James and Betty entered, it would be to strains of “Will You Love Me in December?” Holding hands with Betty, sipping champagne while she sipped beer, the Mayor would receive the parade of visitors to his table with careless ease, and sometimes, when Betty asked him to dance, he would even arise, pinch-waisted and slim in the tuxedo with the shiny lapels that people were beginning to copy, and glide with her around the floor.

Caro adds: “Mrs. Walker’s place was apparently Florida, the state to which she had been packed off for an extended vacation.” One person in Manhattan, one in Florida: shades of a contemporary couple.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

[Betty: Walker’s mistress, Betty “Monk” Compton.]

Things into other things

Today, in Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, a speech balloon thought cloud becomes a real cloud. See also street arithmetic.

All OCA Nancy posts (Raindrop.io)

“Just the one?”

I went to pick up a prescription. Name: last, first. Date of birth. Picking up one prescription. And the question: “Just the one?”

Just the one? Meaning merely the one? Or the one alone, the one being the one thing absolutely needful?

James Brown can explain.

Moses and Dressler

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

Now Robert Moses’ eyes were turning again to the city around which, as a youth, he had wandered “burning up” with ideas for its improvement.

I never thought to think about it before, but I would wager that Steven Millhauser read The Power Broker in doing the research that went into his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996). Martin Dressler walking around the city and imagining its possibilities is a nineteenth-century version of Robert Moses walking around his New York. The difference is that Dressler imagines the vertical possibilities; Moses, the horizontal ones.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Raindrop.io)

Moses Mongol

[Click for a larger view.]

Robert Moses with a Mongol pencil, as seen in “City of Tomorrow,” the sixth episode of Ken Burns’s New York: A Documentary Film (2001).

From childhood’s hour, the Mongol has been my favorite pencil — and remains so, even if Robert Moses used one.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol pencil posts (Raindrop.io)

16h 57m

[No. Just no.]

Here’s what the Screen Time widget on my iPhone was showing last night. A quick search for ios screen time wrong showed that a wildly wrong time is a common problem. Turning the phone off and back on didn’t help. Nor did deleting the widget, turning Screen Time off and back on, and re-adding the widget. After trying that fix, my phone showed a never-changing 30s in the widget and 14h in the app.

What finally worked: turning Content & Privacy Restrictions on and back off.

Through it all, the bar graph kept looking realistic.

A 2025 calendar, last call

Free: a 2025 calendar, in large legible Gill Sans, licorice and cayenne and tangerine (as Apple would have it), three months per page. Minimal holiday markings: New Year’s Day, MLK Day, Juneteenth, Halloween (rhymes with tangerine) , Thanksgiving, Christmas. Readable from the other side of the room, depending on the room.

As the print-center person said last year, “It looks like an old-fashioned calendar.” Because it is one, made in the new old-fashioned way, with the Mac app Pages and tables.

You can download here (via Google Drive): a 2025 calendar.

[Vignette effect not included.]

Censor Breath

[Yours for the Asking (dir. Alexander Hall, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

The joke fills the screen — perhaps a joke on the Code, but certainly a joke on Sen-Sen, which masked all sorts of stuff on one’s breath. (Ida Lupino’s Gert Malloy is three sheets to the wind.)

Here’s more than anyone needs to know about Sen-Sen.

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Sen-Sen movie dialogue : Sen-Sen and Zippy