[Click for a larger view.]
The actor in question is the boy, not the man. I play fair.
Leave your guess(es) in the comments. I’ll check in now and then and drop a hint if one is needed.
*
The answer is now in the comments.
Related reading
One hundred more mystery actor posts (Pinboard)
Monday, March 3, 2025
Mystery actor
Word of the day:psychophant
Speaking of searching for the right word, I thought of one last night:
psychophant \ ˈsī-kə-ˌfənt \ nounI would like to see this word catch on. (Sure, sure.) It joins three other words I’ve thought of for our political discourse: misinflame, misinflammation, and skeptiphobia. Unlike those words, psychophant didn’t come to me in a dream.
: a sycophant of a psychopath
Sample sentence: Mary is a psychophant , lost in servile adulation of a deeply unstable person.
“Plenty of poor people”
The News-Gazette (Champaign-Urbana, IL) is hardly known for progressive politics. But here’s Tom Kacich, a News-Gazette editor and columnist, writing about the harm Mary Miller’s vote in favor of the House Republican budget resolution will do to her district:
The resolution, she noted, will include “$4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in spending cuts.”Nearly a quarter of the population. I thought it was nearly a fifth. No one corrected me when I called the local office and cited that figure.
All those cuts would hurt the poor and mostly benefit the wealthy, contend Democrats and economists. And there are plenty of poor people in Miller’s sprawling 15th Congressional District in central Illinois. But Miller, a Trump acolyte, is all-in on this 2025 version of trickle-down economics....
Budget analysts say the spending cuts — which have not been detailed — will have to include lacerating the Medicaid program that provides health care for lower-income Americans. In Illinois, that’s 3.6 million people, or about a quarter of the state’s population. In Miller’s district, it’s about 180,000 people, or about 24 percent of the population. Even in the Douglas County village where Miller lives, about 14 percent of the 708 residents are on Medicaid.
Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)
Searching for the right word
“The search for the right word to fill the right place can occupy a lifetime. And, I’m convinced, make a self along the way.” In The New York Times Margaret Renkl writes about why writers should not use AI:
The writing teachers I know struggle to persuade their students not to use these tools. They are everywhere now, impossible to swat away. Who could blame a young writer for wondering how using these “assistants” is any different from using spell check or letting Siri supply the next word in a text? Besides, if they don’t use these tools, won’t they be falling behind the many students who do? It’s a fair point.Alas, I can hear (in my head) English Department types worrying: “Our students need to know this.” Maybe they will. But they first need to know how to read and reason and write.
But letting a robot structure your argument, or flatten your style by removing the quirky elements, is dangerous. It’s a streamlined way to flatten the human mind, to homogenize human thought. We know who we are, at least in part, by finding the words — messy, imprecise, unexpected — to tell others, and ourselves, how we see the world. The world which no one else sees in exactly that way.
Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to Renkl’s essay.
“Casimir Pulaski Day”
[Sufjan Stevens, “Casimir Pulaski Day.” From Illinois (Asthmatic Kitty, 2005).]
It’s Casimir Pulaski Day in Illinois, and I now see that I made more or less this same post in 2022. I care not: a good song is worth repeating.
Related reading
All OCA Sufjan Stevens posts (Pinboard)
[See also the sidebar’s Words to Live By for something from Sufjan.]
Sunday, March 2, 2025
A repurposed margin
In today’s Nancy, Olivia Jaimes and Nancy repurpose a margin. Wonderful stuff.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
SNL, hopeful and hopeless
There ought to be a word for the phenomenon of tuning in to Saturday Night Live each week, hoping for something worthwhile, and giving up. Last night’s cold opening: meh. Bowen Yang was a poor J.D. Vance (makeup doesn’t take the place of a good impression); Mike Myers’s Elon Musk was overly manic, underly evil, and sounded far too British. James Austin Johnson as the FFCKUS was terrific as usual, but a proper treatment of the horror show in the Oval Office would have required a far more brutal kind of comedy.
And then the opening monologue: who was this guy? I looked him up and found out (ugh), and was cheered to see Bluesky users (some no doubt much younger than me) asking, Who is this guy? Given the opening skit, the show couldn’t have been a repeat, but here was a host making “jokes” (unfunny) about Ken Burns’s Civil War series, which first aired in 1990, and its resident historian (of ill-repute) Shelby Foote.
Oh, wait, Frasier.
Two pedestrians and a tinsmith
[354 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.]
The pedestrians caught my eye. “Bundle up!” some overly protective parent must have said. But it must indeed be cold: you can see what look like tiny Christmas wreaths in some of the upper-story windows. A third girl appears with (I think) these two in another photograph from Van Brunt Street.
And then I looked closely at the sign in the storefront window:
[Click for a larger view.]
Something Bachmann, Tinsmith. Rudolph, it must be. It’s in less legible form on the door of the truck. And there’s Mr. Bachmann, in the 1940 directory:
By 1949, Rudolph’s son Alfred, or some other Alfred in the family, must have taken over the business. In that year Alfred ran a handful of newspaper advertisements. These two are the most arresting:
[The Brooklyn Eagle, March 13 and 27, 1949. Via Brooklyn Newsstand.]
The Bachmann building still stands, now as 356. In October 2024 Google Maps showed a bank due to appear at that address. A new one-story building to the right is now 354, housing Docky’s, a bar.
Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Saturday, March 1, 2025
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Doug Peterson, was for me a highly unusual solving experience. I began with 8-D, four letters, “He lets Louis win at roulette” and 52-D, four letters, “Conversación starter.” Pretty obvious, I know, but any port in a storm. And then I bounced around, from corner to corner, side to side. And then, with three or four widely spaced letters already in place, I saw 33-A, fourteen letters, “Guide for gardening.” And like that, the rest of the puzzle fell into place. Ta-da. Or less commonly, Merriam-Webster says, ta-dah.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
1-A, seven letters, “Chiefs’ group.” I’m not sure if this clue is a giveaway or something to trick someone who knows as little about it as I do.
1-D, six letters, “Bore.” Noun? Verb? Tense? On edge?
2-D, ten letters, “Opposite of ‘remote.’” Having just read Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength, I thought “Getting up to change channels?”
[From The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021). Click for a larger view.]
10-D, eleven letters, “Navigation device.” I have a friend who designed them.
29-D, four letters, “Wind, ding, or sting.” Having some idea how these things go, my first thought was NOUN.
31-D, ten letters, “Napoleon’s place.” Wonderful.
37-A, seven letters, “Teacher of Beethoven and Schubert.” News to me, but when I saw the last letter, I thought it had to be he. Or him.
38-A, seven letters, “Literally, ‘prompt answer.’” Learning etymology on the fly.
39-A, fourteen letters, “Wishful thinker’s phrase.” I do a lot of wishful thinking these days.
47-D, five letters, “Original head writer of SCTV.” I didn’t know that.
53-D, four letters, “Very little opening.” Sneaky.
55-A, seven letters, “In type.” Stumper-y.
61-A, seven letters, “1972 Match of the Century loser.” Weirdly timed.
My favorite in this puzzle: 33-A. See above.
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
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