A Christmas Eve joke in the traditional manner

Found on a whiteboard and shared by my friend Stefan Hagemann:

What did Santa pay for his sleigh?

The answer is in the comments.

One series, eleven movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Hallmark, Netflix, YouTube.]

A Man on the Inside (created by Michael Schur, 2024). An eight-episode series with a silly premise: Charles, a retired professor of engineering (an ultra-natty Ted Danson), answers a newspaper ad and goes undercover to investigate a theft in a retirement community. Anyone who’s been around the world of assisted living and memory care is likely to find this series’s representations true to life (and death). There are funny complications: the private investigator employing Charles poses as his daughter, which means that his daughter has to pose as his niece; a cranky resident sees Charles as his sexual rival. The best moments: Charles’s conversations with fellow residents Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Gladys (Susan Ruttan), and his recitation of the “seven ages” speech from As You Like It. ★★★★ (N)

*

Strange Way of Life (dir. Pedro Amodóvar, 2023). A short, in which a sheriff, Jake (Ethan Hawke), and a rancher, Silva (Pedro Pascal), once lovers, reunite after twenty-five years apart. But it’s Jake’s hunt for Silva’s son (a suspected murderer) that brings about the reunion. A witty queer western, with all the proper tropes, even a three-way standoff. Best line, spoken by Silva: “Years ago, you asked me what two men could do living together on a ranch.” ★★★★ (N)

*

The Whale (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2022). From a play by Samuel D. Hunter, in which Charlie, a morbidly obese teacher of online English composition classes, hides from his students (claiming a faulty webcam) and from the world. An estranged daughter (Sadie Sink), a friend and caregiver (Hong Chau), and a missionary from an end-times sect (Ty Simpkins) become frequent visitors, and Charlie’s hard-drinking estranged wife (Samantha Morton) drops in just once. Present in memory is the now-dead male partner for whom Charlie left his wife and daughter. A credible performance from Fraser, but the other principals are unconvincing, the dialogue stilted, the production stagey, the storyline improbable in so many ways (call 911, dammit), the ending absurd, and the talk about honest and amazing writing so patently ridiculous that I remembered what I heard a person in the row in front of me whisper to a companion during a (Broadway!) performance of ’night, Mother : “I can’t believe people are taking this seriously.” ★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Columbia feature

Ladies of Leisure (dir. Frank Capra, 1930). Barbara Stanwyck is Kay Arnold, a “party girl” (we might say “escort”); Ralph Graves is Jerry Strong, an aspiring painter from a wealthy family. Chance brings the two together, and the differences in their stations in life threaten to pull them apart. Marie Prevost as Kay’s roommate and Lowell Sherman as a client bring some comedy to the slow-moving proceedings. Best scenes: the painter’s studio, seen through a rainy window, and Kay’s impassioned speech to Jerry’s mother. ★★★

Forbidden (dir. Frank Capra, 1932). Stanwyck again, as Lulu, “old lady four-eyes,” a small-town librarian who uses all her savings for a cruise to Havana and finds herself in a cabin across the hall from Bob (Adolphe Menjou), a charming older man. Their romance continues ashore in Havana and back in the States, but Bob is married (of course) and has political ambitions. Menjou is no “Bob” (such a strange name for such a glamorous man), but Stanwyck is great as a woman torn between preserving a relationship and preserving her dignity. Ralph Bellamy appears as a cruel newspaperman and Bob’s rival. ★★★

Shopworn (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). “A waitress — oh, my heart!” Barbara Stanwyck can’t catch a break: here she plays Kitty Lane, waitressing in a college-town café, where a romance develops with medical student David Livingston (Regis Toomey). His mother (Clara Blandick) doesn’t approve, but not to worry: everything gets worked out, and surprisingly so, in a mere seventy-two minutes. Best moment: the mother and her lawyer walking to Kitty’s humble house. ★★★★

*

Best. Christmas. Ever! (dir. Mary Lambert, 2023). Heather Graham and Brandy Norwood play one-time best friends whose families spend Christmas together because of faulty driving directions. Weird inappropriateness, abundant stupidity, and snow that seems to appear and disappear. An incoherent mess. And I’ll never think of the words “moving furniture” without thinking of this movie. ★ (N)

*

Meet Me Next Christmas (dir. Rusty Cundieff, 2024). The premise: strangers Layla (Christina Milian) and James (Kofi Siriboe) met in an airport lounge and promised to meet next Christmas for a Pentatonix concert if they’re unattached. But tickets are scarce, which means that Layla must hire a personal concierge, scruffy Teddy (Devale Ellis), to find a ticket so she can meet tall, handsome James. And you can already guess that it will be Teddy who carries the day — but you could not have guessed that the quest for the ticket will require Layla and Teddy to compete in a drag-heavy lip-sync contest. As Elaine observed, the members of the Pentatonix serve as the gods in this story, watching over the mortals as they lip-sync their way to happiness. ★★ (N)

*

The Only Girl in the Orchestra (dir. Molly O’Brien, 2023). A short documentary portrait of Orin O’Brien, double bassist, the first woman to join the New York Philharmonic (in 1966), about to retire after fifty-five years as her frankly adoring niece was making this film. O’Brien must be one of the coolest octogenarians in the world: she’s smart, funny, ultra-energetic, still devoted to her students and her instrument. Fun fact: O’Brien, who never sought stardom, is the daughter of early movie stars George O’Brien (who starred in Sunrise ) and Marguerite Churchill. I’m always interested in films that show people doing their work — Crumb, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and ‌Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb come immediately to mind — and this movie does that, beautifully. ★★★★ (N)

*

Internes Can’t Take Money (dir. Alfred Santell, 1937). Barbara Stanwyck is Janet Haley, gangster’s widow, ex-con, factory worker, searching for the little daughter her late husband took away. Joel McCrea is Dr. Jimmie Kildaire — the screen’s first Dr. Kildaire — and once again a relationship develops across class boundaries. Plenty of barroom talk and gangsterism, and some lewd talk using popcorn as a metaphor (at least they weren’t talking about moving the furniture). Along with McCrea and Stanwyck, the Art Deco hospital is a star in this movie. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Night Walker (dir. William Castle, 1964). Barbara Stanwyck’s final big-screen role, as Irene Trent, the wife of a spooky blind inventor. Irene dreams of a lover; her husband dies in an explosion (or does he?); and the imaginary lover appears to Irene in what might be called waking dreams. Only a kind lawyer (Robert Taylor, Stanwyck’s one-time husband) is there to stand by Irene through this strange ordeal. Sheer craziness, lots of screams, several real scares, and a screenplay by Robert Bloch, writer of the novel Psycho. ★★★ (YT)

*

Karen Kingsbury’s Maggie’s Christmas Miracle (dir. Michael Robison, 2017). I subject myself to a random Hallmark movie every “holiday season,” but alas, this one was not as bad as I’d hoped, with its predictable elements (sad backstories, an endearing waif, the Black friend, moments of awkwardness) offset by some genuinely grown-up moments between the two (straight, white) principals. There is also an ample helping of weirdness: a diner that becomes a pop-up Christmas shop in winter, a tradition called the Christmas Stroll for which the stores on Main Street close (?!) and the storekeepers hand out cider and cocoa, the insane number of Christmas decorations in the male lead’s apartment (count the trees), and the miracle that ties the elements of the story together. ★★ (H)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Raindrop.io)

Marisa Paredes (1946–2024)

“Best known to international audiences for her work with directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Guillermo del Toro and Roberto Benigni.” Best known to me from her work with Almodóvar. The Guardian has an obituary.

Mary Miller and Fabrice Ambrosini

In Mother Jones, David Axelrod writes about Donald, Leon, and the German far-right:

“So where’s my German friends?” Donald Trump asked a fawning Mar-a-Lago crowd on Election Day, before flashing a grin and a thumbs up for a photo with a group of young men. The German friends in question: Fabrice Ambrosini, a former politician forced to resign after a video surfaced of him doing a Hitler salute; Leonard Jäger, a far-right influencer who has promoted the Reichsbürger movement, an extremist group behind a failed coup attempt in 2022; and Phillipp-Anders Rau, a candidate for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right party.

And here’s a Guardian article with more photographs and more background on the visitors.

Mary Miller, our representative in Congress (IL-15), was there too. Here she poses with Fabrice Ambrosini:

[Mary Miller (R, IL-15) and Fabrice Ambrosini. Click for a larger view.]

This photograph, credited only to “Instagram,” appeared at MeidasNews, where Miller is misidentified as “Carol.” No, that’s our Mary, the one who said that “Hitler was right on one thing.”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Raindrop.io)

[I sent MeidasNews a correction in November, but the mistaken caption remains unchanged.]

Valves, Valvoline, and singing circuits

I borrowed Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk from the library. “I want to learn more about our next president,” I told the librarian. She laughed. Once home, I opened at random and read these paragraphs:

One unfortunate trend in the 1980s was that cars and computers became tightly sealed appliances. It was possible to open up and fiddle with the innards of the Apple II that Steve Wozniak designed in the late 1970s, but you couldn’t do that with the Macintosh, which Steve Jobs in 1984 made almost impossible to open. Similarly, kids in the 1970s and earlier grew up rummaging under the hoods of cars, tinkering with the carburetors, changing spark plugs, and souping up the engines. They had a fingertip-feel for valves and Valvoline. This hands-on imperative and Heathkit mindset even applied to radios and television sets; if you wanted, you could change the tubes and later the transistors and have a feel for how a circuit board worked.

This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. They never knew the sweet smell of a soldering iron, but they could code in ways that made circuits sing. Musk was different. He liked hardware as well as software. He could code, but he also had a feel for physical components, such as battery cells and capacitors, valves and combustion chambers, fuel pumps and fan belts.

In particular, Musk loved fiddling with cars. At the time, he owned a twenty-year-old BMW 300i, and he spent Saturdays rummaging around junkyards in Philadelphia to score the parts he needed to soup it up. It had a four-speed transmission, but he decided to upgrade it when BMW started making a five-speed. Borrowing the lift at a local repair shop, he was able, with a couple of shims and a litte bit of grinding, to jam a five-speed transmission into what had been a four-speed car. “It was really able to haul ass,” he recalls.

Clichés, cheap alliteration, corny phrasing, wild generalizations — all lurching toward utter inanity in that final sentence. “He recalls” — aaugh.

This book has many other pages. But I am hauling ass back to the library.

“What’s a magazine?”

In today’s Dustin : “What’s a magazine?”

See also “What’s a BVD?” and “What’s a cash register?”

Life and print in New Jersey

[Zippy, December 22, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is on the edge, the edge of a ledge, having decided that life is not worth living if it’s in New Jersey. Why? Because print is dying.

In Februrary 2025, The Star-Ledger will go digital and The Jersey Journal will shutt down.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Raindrop.io)

Nothing orange can stay

New York City subway cars will be losing their orange and yellow seats in 2025. Replacing them: blue and yellow seats.

[I’m not happy about linking to the New York Post, but its article has the best photographs of the old and new seats.]

Another disappearing pharmacy

[5027 3rd Avenue, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Last Sunday I posted the tax photograph for a Sunset Park pharmacy, one of countless commercial and residential properties torn down to make way for Robert Moses’s Gowanus Parkway (later Expressway). Robert Caro tells the story in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, pages 520–525. Here’s a second Third Avenue pharmacy that was torn down, five blocks away, the Koblentz Pharmacy.

It’s not possible to know the date of this photograph, or any tax photograph (“1939–1941” is all we’ve got), but this one looks as if it was taken after work on the parkway had begun. Other tax photographs from this part of Third Avenue show the El tracks already gone. The pharmacy and the adjacent storefronts in this photograph look empty. And many of the windows of the apartments above the pharmacy have been boarded up.

The Moses project took out the pharmacy and the one-story storefronts on 51st Street. The rowhouses stayed. You can see them in Google Maps. And once again, a building that is now on a corner still bears scars from the removal of a neighboring building.

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor Stan Newman, composing as “Lester Ruff.” As usual, I didn’t find this puzzle significantly easier than a regular Stumper. Indeed, I stumbled around to find a couple of starting points that led nowhere: 60-A, three letters, “TV planet where humor is forbidden” and 22-D, three letters, “Easter precursor.”

And then I saw 1-D, four letters, “Romney’s former firm ___ Capital.” Elaine was working as a word processor there when we met, until she became horrified by what she was typing — pages about downsizing and outsourcing — and quit. All of which is to say that I knew 1-D, and I-D opened up the rest of the puzzle, each answer leading to others with nary a hitch.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

17-A, eight letters, “Glut.” Noun? Verb?

21-A, seven letters, “Polish place.” City? Furniture item?

15-D, three letters, “Tributary lines.” I was really thinking that there might be a very short word having to do rivers.

31-A, eleven letters, “Charles III greeter, 7/5/24.” Okay, whatever.

32-A, three letters, “2010s head of State initials.” Read carefully.

36-A, eleven letters, “Sportscast's replay ‘pen.’” A pretty macho name for what is, after all, a writing instrument.

36-D, seven letters, “First to commercialize laptops (1985).” How long ago that seems.

54-D, three letters, “____ Brum (auto accessory).” Brum? I thought this must be some foreign-car item.

55-D, three letters, “Continuously reduced.” Clever.

My favorite in this puzzle: 7-D, seven letters, “Needle holder.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.