Just some guys hanging out?

[285 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the older fellows did their hanging out leaning against or sitting on cars. Maybe these guys are just hanging out. Maybe not. They might be waiting for someone to unlock the garage door so that they can get to work. Notice that the guy on the far right has a newspaper. Is it opened to the sports pages? To Nancy ? Maybe the guy who’s out in front is demonstrating a new dance step. Maybe he’s goofing off for the camera. Is he really that tall? Or is he just out in front?

[Click for a larger view.]

It’s hard to tell what’s at this address today.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, teems with obliquity. I thought it’d be fun to say that. It’s a very difficult Stumper — an hour’s worth for me. It teems with obliquity.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Hoe foe.” There’s an obvious answer to guess here, and it would seem to fit with 1-A, four letters, “Significantly lessen,” but it would be wrong.

10-D, thirteen letters, “Royal news source since 1665.” Whoa.

14-D, four letters, “Virtual reality purveyor.” Interesting to see clues that blur digital and analog categories.

15-D, six letters, “Quick charge.” Really clever.

17-A, fifteen letters, “They say it ain't so, formally.” Great clue and answer.

18-D, thirteen letters, “Seat of power.” Robert Moses’s swivel chair at the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority? Uh, no.

20-A, eight letters, “Hand axes?” Obliquity, teeming.

23-D, five letters, “Smart devices.” See 14-D.

28-A, five letters, “Primary course.” I can’t believe I got this one, no crosses.

37-A, three letters, “Galaxy part.” Which kind?

41-D, six letters, “Beatles ‘Be thankful I don't take it all’ tune.” Maybe the only giveaway in the puzzle.

50-D, four letters “Forest* A *___ (online woods management tool).” I’ve seen this strange clue before, with slightly different wording, in a Brad Wilber Stumper. I never thought I’d see it again.

51-A, fifteen letters, “Iconic song on AFI’s 100 list (recorded 1500+ times) named for a ’55 film you've likely never heard of.” You’re right about that. It’s quite a song.

54-A, three “Letter letters more often seen with one S.” Slightly awkward.

55-A, six letters, “Standing trial.” See 14-D.

My favorite in this puzzle: 4-D, eight letters, “Special feature.” My first thought: the goodies the Criterion Collection adds to a DVD.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

End of a garbage era

The invoice that came in yesterday’s mail marks the end of one era and the beginning of another: our garbage service has, finally, abandoned its dot-matrix printer and tractor-feed perforated forms for a laser printer and shiny multi-color forms.

[What do you take out: the garbage, or the trash?]

What It’s Like to Be ...

A newish podcast: What It’s Like to Be ... , hosted by Dan Heath. Short interviews with people from varied lines of work. I’ve listened to “A Forensic Accountant,” and “A Long-Haul Trucker,” “A Stadium Beer Vendor,” and “A TV Meteorologist.” Smart, respectful, not a moment wasted. It’s one of the best podcasts I’ve heard.

[I think I’ve been listening long enough to suspect that there will be not be a George Costanza joke in the episode with a marine biologist.]

Drag and drop, broken in Sequoia

What was I doing wrong? I couldn’t drag a file to a folder. I couldn’t drag an image into an app.

I tried restarting — no soap, and looked around online. The problem is in macOS 15, and I find it almost unbelievable that Apple could release new system software with such a glaring problem. Hardly an intelligent move. (Ahem.)

A temporary fix, from the developer of Yoink and other apps: open the Activity Monitor, choose CPU or Memory, and quit the process ScopedBookmarkAgent. I’m not sure how long that fix will work, but it’s working for me now.

*

And still working, even though ScopedBookmarkAgent is up and running again.

“A goddamned Greek chorus”

As time went on, Robert Caro writes, Robert Moses “had no respect for anyone’s opinion but his own.” From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

Once Moses had at least listened to his own aides, allowed them to argue with him, tested his opinions against theirs. But now that had changed, too. In the In the first days of his power, he had hired aides whose opinions were worth listening to. He had selected men for ability, engineering ability, legal ability. The aides he was hiring now had also to possess an additional ability: the ability to say, “Yes, sir.”

“Lunches at Moses’ office were really starting to get pretty sickening,” recalls one top La Guardia official. “Even if he only had one guest, he would always have six or eight of his ‘Moses Men’ — ‘my muchachos,’ he used to call them — at the table and it was all ‘Yes, sir, RM,’ ‘No, sir, RM,’ ‘Right as usual, RM!’ When he laughed, they laughed, only louder — you know what I mean. Christ, when he made a statement, you could look around the table and see eight heads nodding practically in unison. It was like a goddamned Greek chorus.”

Reuben Lazarus, invited by Moses to become chief counsel for the Triborough Bridge Authority, refused — “I didn’t want to be a doormat for any man” — and when Moses asked him to recommend one of his assistants, Lazarus selected the one who, he had noticed, “doesn’t answer back,” and in the taxi taking William Lebwohl to lunch with Moses, told him what was going to be expected of him: “You’re going to have to be able to bend over and take a kick in the ass and say ‘Thank you, sir,’ with a smile. ” At the luncheon, Lazarus recalls, “Lebwohl did not answer back.” Moses hired him — and kept him on as Triborough counsel for more than thirty years.

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

[It’s not that the chorus necessarily agrees with someone in authority; it’s that the chorus speaks as one, at least usually.]

Deco elevator

[From Shopworn (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). Click any image for a larger view.]

Yes, the display takes up the screen as the elevator rises.

Shopworn (starring Barbara Stanwyck) is streaming in the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Columbia collection.

William Labov (1927–2024)

He was a giant of linguistics. The New York Times has an obituary.

I had the chance to hear William Labov give a talk in 2007, “The Growing Divergence of English Dialects in North America.” I took that chance, and wrote something about the talk.

A Labov comment about communication and truthfulness that has stuck with me: “A parrot can say ‘I will meet you downtown at 8:00’ — but he won’t be there.”

Two related posts
The long e : A vowel shift in the wild

A Christmas song

I’ve come to think of it as the greatest Christmas song of all time (sorry, Mel Tormé). From 1929, it’s the Cotton Top Sanctified Singers, with “Christ Was Born on Christmas Morn.”

Christmas 1924

[“Yule Joy for Poor, Aged, Young And Ill.” The New York Times, December 26, 1924.]

In 2024, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate it. Happy Kwanzaa to all who celebrate it. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote yesterday, “Happy holidays to you all, however you celebrate ... or don’t.”