“Selfie Stick”

“Selfie Stick,” a cartoon by Mark Stivers. Perhaps the best kind of selfie stick.

Thanks, Steven.

Outtakes (1)

The outtakes from the WPA’s New York City tax photographs, available from 1940s NYC, capture some remarkable moments. Sometimes kids get in the act, gathered together and peering into the camera: “Hey, mister, willya take our picture?” A wise photographer would likely oblige and be permitted to work in peace. Sometimes, as in the first of these three photographs, a kid seems to be photobombing (or whatever they called it c. 1939–1941). Notice the hole punched through: unusable. And sometimes the photographer seems to have wanted to take a striking picture. The second and third of these photographs appear to be posed.

[Click any image for a larger view.]

The background for this third photograph (yes, of course, I had to try to track it down): the Pacific Street side of the 23rd Regiment Armory, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Here, look.

These kids could be ninety or nearing ninety today. I wonder if they ever got to see themselves in these photographs.

More outtakes to come.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Jason Epstein (1928–2022)

Editor and publisher. He created or helped to create Doubleday’s Anchor Books, The New York Review of Books, the Library of America, and The Reader’s Catalog. The short-lived Reader’s Catalog (where’s my copy now?) gave rise to New York Review Books.

The New York Times has an obituary.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by S.N., Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. It’s an easier Stumper: though 1-A, eight letters, “Step-saving route” might start the solver off on the wrong foot, the clue is not a sign of things to come.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of interest:

4D, six letters, “Minimalist furniture maker of old.” My first thoughts were of Charles and Ray Eames.

33-A, fifteen letters, “Best female character of all time, per a Hollywood Reporter poll (2016).” Of all time? The only fifteen-letter response I can think of is the more plausible ELIZABETHBENNET.

33-D, eight letters, “Diner descriptor misnomer.” Heh.

48-A, four letters, “Stall starter.” I thought of horses and cars.

54-A, eight letters, “Long tubes of war.” Their descendants are part of today’s news.

60-A, eight letters, “It started as a playing-card seller (1889).” I’m not a fan of factoid clues, but it’s surprising to know.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Separated at birth

[Bonita Granville as Ronnie, in Suspense (dir. Frank Tuttle, 1946). Cyndi Lauper as herself, in black and white. Click either image for a larger view.]

I found a photograph of Cyndi Lauper that bears an even stronger resemblance, but it’d cost me.

Also separated at birth
Claude Akins and Simon Oakland : Ernest Angley and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán : Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : William Barr and Edward Chapman : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Adam Driver and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska : Charles Grassley and Abraham Jebediah Simpson II : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Pat Harrington Jr. and Marcel Herrand : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Steven Isserlis and Pat Metheny : Colonel Wilhelm Klink and Rudy Giuliani : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : Markku Luolajan-Mikkola and John Malkovich : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Lunch plans

I had lunch early this morning in a restaurant on Fordham Road. The good ol’ Bronx! I found the restaurant by looking at tax photos, c. 1939–1941, in the NYC Municipal Archives Collections.

I don’t know what I ate.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

Jeff Zucker’s legacy

In The Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan considers the legacy of CNN president Jeff Zucker:

Zucker, as much as any other person in the world, created and burnished the Trump persona — first as a reality-TV star who morphed into a worldwide celebrity, then as a candidate for president who was given large amounts of free publicity.

The through line? Nothing nobler than TV ratings, which always were Zucker’s guiding light, his be-all and end-all and, ultimately, his fatal flaw.

I remember what I think of as an infamous CNN moment from May 2016, when the network devoted screentime to a parked plane: “We’ll continue to monitor the takeoff of that plane.” As I wrote back then, any complaint

about the failure of “elites” to protect democracy from the likes of Donald Trump misses the point that Trump’s candidacy is itself the product of an elite — not a political elite but a media elite, one that has kept Trump (and even his parked plane) front and center for months now.

Good riddance to Jeff Zucker.

Domestic comedy

Elaine and I were admiring a handsome Carhartt chore coat: cotton duck with water-repellent coating, quilted nylon lining, corduroy-trimmed collar, and rivet-reinforced pockets. In black, brown, orange, and army green.

The catch: it was a chore coat for dogs.

“But what kinds of chores would a dog do? Herding? That’s not a chore. It’s a lifestyle!”

“It’s a profession!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard) : Good going, Carhartt

Hating on 1-D

A clue in an ultra-nifty crossword by Rose Sloan and Norah Sharpe helped me understand why our fambly dislikes a particular brand of bottled water, not that any of us drink bottled water very often:

1-D, six letters, “Water brand with added salts (which might just make you more thirsty?).”

I make no judgment about whether the minerals added to 1-D’s purified tap water are dangerous. I’m not even sure that they make you thirstier. All I know is that we don’t like 1-D, which, many years ago, a younger family member deemed “melty.” We like our water wet, not melty.

[The answer to 1-D begins with D .]

“It is snowing”

It is time once again to recall a poem by Pierre Reverdy: “Souffle.”

[I has been snowing all day, with more snow expected tomorrow.]