“Suckers”

From The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946).]

Dana Andrews is Fred Derry, counterman. Harold Russell is Homer Parrish, fellow veteran. I’m unable to identify the man in the hat.

The language in this clip is of its time and ours. Racial slurs: “Japs” then; “China virus” now. “Plain old-fashioned Americanism” then; “America first” now (and then). But I never could have imagined that an American president would join the man in the hat in characterizing service members killed in war as “suckers.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Anna Stiga, or Stan Again, the puzzle’s editor Stan Newman. Not an especially difficult puzzle, but a satisfying one, with some surprising content. I believe the technical term for such a puzzle is “crunchy.”

Clues and answers I found to like:

4-D, eight letters, “Venerable wind instruments.” A novel answer, at least in my experience. Crunch. I have one of these instruments but never thought it venerable until now.

12-D, seven letters, “Oscar winner portraying Romeo.” I dunno — Olivier? Crunch.

16-A, six letters, “Slip stream?” The answer seems to be showing up often in crosswords these days. But this clue makes it new.

29-A, four letters, “Assumed name's assumed name.” I find this kind of clue a bit painful, but I have to admit that the phrasing is clever.

33-A, four letters, “Farewell interrupter.” I take inordinate glee in having seen this answer straight off.

37-A, nine letters, “It can roll down while rolling.” A little awkward, as it isn’t rolling, but clever.

38-D, seven letters, “Orajel alternative.” I haven’t thought of this stuff in years. Crunch.

44-D, six letters, “They’ve come a long way in anime.” Okay, that’s cute.

51-D, five letters, “It's often between 23C and 23D.” There must be more to the number 23 than I know. No, wait — 23 is just misdirection.

60-A, six letters, “Whom Rocky named his restaurant for.” Bullwinkle? Gideon? Magill? Oops, wrong Rockies. Easy to guess, but still crunchy, I’d say, and a surprise, at least for me, to learn that Rocky had (or has?) a restaurant. I’ve seen about five minutes of anything Balboa.

Yo, no spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Beware of user error

Last night I wrote a cranky post about trying to obtain two (of three) 13mm × 10mm cam lock fasteners from Wayfair in a timely fashion. Twenty-four larger fasteners were all there.

This morning Elaine asked if I might have used two small fasteners in place of larger ones. I looked carefully. Yes, I had. The larger fasteners are 15mm × 12mm (I think). Whatever their size, they’re virtually indistinguishable from the smaller ones. I called Wayfair today to explain what happened, to apologize for wasting so much of their time, and to cancel the complete hardware set they were planning to send from a warehouse.

My cranky post (now removed) was titled “Beware of Wayfair.” I still think that the Wayfair business model, one of selling stuff from “the warehouse,” with no ready access to a supply of extra hardware for the furniture sold, is a lousy business model. No one can pick out a fastener or screw or knob or bolt and send it out. “The warehouse” does not send parts, much less send them in a timely way. Thus the complete hardware set that was due to arrive a week from today.

As I mentioned in my now-removed post, I ended up ordering 13mm × 10mm cam lock fasteners from Amazon. Not sold in any store! At least not in our town’s incredible Ace, an unabridged dictionary of hardware, nor in a nearby Home Depot. The fasteners have already shipped, and they’re scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Anyone need some cam lock fasteners?

“Losers,” “suckers,” and Trump*

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reports on Donald Trump*’s contempt for service members killed in battle:

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Also, no amputees in military parades: “Nobody wants to see that.”

Trump* says in an angry tweet that he “never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES.” Of course that’s the same Donald Trump* who said publicly that he likes people who don’t get captured.

To paraphrase (once again) something Gertrude Stein may have said, There ain’t any bottom, there ain’t going to be any bottom, there never has been any bottom, that’s the bottom.

Christopher Fame

I was at an art show, where I noticed a tall, thin, pale man painting pictures of vases. His booth also displayed what looked like pages from graphic novels, mostly cityscapes with stores whose signage rearranged itself — in real time — into pithy or snarky anagrams. There was also a page depicting a low-rent entertainer, a short, blond fellow in a dinner jacket.

Something about this artist’s work seemed familiar to me. “Your work seems familiar to me,” I said. “Would I know your name?” He turned to me and said that while I lived in a world of commercial something-or-other, he lived in a world of color. I later found out that his name was Christopher Fame.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

Goodbye, legacy Blogger interface?

After I posted the previous post, Blogger switched Orange Crate Art to the new Blogger interface, with no option to revert to the legacy interface. Grr. But I created this post from the legacy Dashboard (open in another tab), saved it, went back to the Dashboard, and the old interface was still there. But I fear its days are now really numbered. I will hit Publish, see what happens, and report back.

*

The legacy interface still stands.

*

Oops— not anymore.

*

5:58 p.m.: And now, on “the desktop,” as they say, the legacy interface has returned. I couldn’t reach it by phone.

A “publicity-inflamed dummy”

Ezra Grindle, industrialist and spiritual seeker. Also mark:


William Lindsay Greshman, Nightmare Alley (1946).

Scratch the contained waistline and the rowing machine. Still, eerily reminiscent.

Nightmare Alley is available as a New York Review Books Classic. I’m reading it again for the Four Seasons Reading Club. The novel is a great example of what I just decided to call demotic modernism. Epigraphs from The Waste Land, including one of that poem’s epigraphs!

Also from this novel
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY”

Misheard

Elaine misheard it. From Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942): “A dictionary is just right for Beatrice. At sixteen they get the urge for grammar.”

Related reading
All OCA misheard posts (Pinboard)

[For a dictionary and grammar, substitute that jewelry and grammar.]

Postcards to Voters

[One of mine.]

“Friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast”: Postcards to Voters.

Something I learned from my dozen cards: it is difficult to draw a relay box. But I like this one.

Greek tragedy and Theater of War

“No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you, however modern and unprecedented you thought it was”: in The New Yorker, Elif Batuman writes about Greek tragedy and Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War.

There’s a new Theater of War event for Zoom tomorrow: The Oedipus Project UK. I’m going to have to miss this one — too, too much to do.

Related reading
All Theater of War posts