Leo Wright, unexpectedly

I was surprised to see the alto saxophonist and flutist Leo Wright (1933–1991) in a photograph that accompanies the New York Times obituary for the pianist and composer Lalo Schifrin.

Leo was a dear friend to Elaine when she lived in Vienna, even, she says, something of a surrogate father. She has written about him on her blog.

“Very antique”

The setting: a Scottish castle. A bit of droll dialogue from The Ghost Goes West (dir. René Clair, 1935):

“This place seems very antique.”

“It’s six hundred years old, Mother.”

“I knew I could feel a sense of the past here.”

The movie is streaming at the Criterion Channel.

A choral “God Only Knows”

In Toronto, a project called Choir! Choir! Choir! brought more than five hundred people together to sing “God Only Knows.”

Related reading
All OCA Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

“It’s fine”

The most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American reports on four news items that demand attention. Richardson credits this one to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

At a press conference in the Netherlands last Wednesday, Trump said he had given Iran permission to bomb a U.S. air base in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program sites. “They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”

Marshall expressed astonishment that this admission has attracted very little attention. He suggested that, if it is true, it represents “the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief,” and he wondered how Republicans would have reacted if a Democratic president had said he had let “a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation.”

You can watch a clip from the press conference here, at the 6:37 mark.

I haven’t seen “I said it’s fine” reported anywhere. How about you?

[A correction: Sarah Posner, not Josh Marshall, wrote the article at TPM.]

Brooklyn biker gang

Back on Stillwell Avenue.

[2812 Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]



Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, started so well for me: 10-D, five letters, “_____ eterno (passionate pledge)” and 11-D, five letters, “‘Low’ language” got me the whole northeast. The southeast followed. Smooth sailing, thought I. But no. The temperature is already rising, and we want to walk before it rises too much, and thus I ended up looking up four words to finish, the most I’ve ever looked up in a Stumper. It’s funny how looking up just a single word makes it easier to look up another.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, nine letters, “Legalese for ‘all the more.’” I had to look it up, hereinafter referred to as “IHTLIU.”

14-A, six letters, “Checked out.” A decidely sneaky clue.

21-A, eleven letters, “Legendary flier.” Neither Dedalus nor Icarus helps out here.

25-D, four letters, “Carb source.” I didn’t think about the informality of carb soon enough. IHTLIU.

29-A, six letters, “Metaphorical goal.” See 14-A.

32-D, nine letters, “Where Elvis was before G.I. Blues.” Heh.

39-A, eight letters, “Group with celebrity bloggers.” In 2025, this notion feels dated.

44-D, six letters, “Bit of Thanksgiving decor.” Really? Well, no, not really, not on its own.

46-A, five letters, “Biscuit close kin.” Wanting the answer to be SCONE made the southwest corner of the puzzle difficult to work out. IHTLIU.

50-D, five letters, “Protection and support.” I tend to think of the answer too specifically, but I’m sure that’s okay with her. (Her? Who? She’s in the comments.)

56-A, ten letters, “Citrus sinensis.” Thank you for that.

61-A, three letters, “Umbrella for Outlook.” Outlook, gah! My university now makes us use it — no forwarding from an .edu account to another service. Outlook is the worst e-mail interface I know.

My favorite in this puzzle: 14-D, eleven letters, “Grandma Moses, for instance.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

The Civil War and paper clips

The current occupant of the White House places the end of the Civil War in “1869, or whatever.” No.

And he places the invention of the paper clip in 1817. Also no.

From Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things (1992):

As with many new devices, especially ones of modest proportions and few pretensions, the origins of the first bent-wire paper clip are not without their uncertainties, including those induced by chauvinism. According to an oft-repeated account, a Norwegian named Johan Vaaler should be credited with the invention of the paper clip in 1899. However, as the story goes, Norway had no patent law at the time, and though Vaaler’s drawing was accepted by a special government commission, he had to seek an actual patent in Germany. Norwegians are said to have remembered proudly the humble item’s origins in their country when, during World War II, they “fastened paper clips to their jacket lapels to show patriotism and irritate the Germans.” Wearing a paper clip could result in arrest, but the function of the device, “to bind together,” took on the fiercely symbolic meaning of “people joining against the forces of occupation.

Vaaler’s fin-de-siècle notion was granted an American patent in 1901, and the document describes the “paper clip or holder”:

It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions.

But there’s more:

There were indeed other paper clips by the time Vaaler’s American patent was issued, and it appears to have been granted more for his variations on some common themes than for any seminal contribution. Matthew Schooley, a Pennsylvanian, filed a patent application in 1896 for a “paper clip or holder which, while simple in its construction, is easy of application and certain in the performance of its functions.”

And:

When all is said and done, any attempt to sort out the origins and the patent history of the paper clip may be an exercise in futility. For there appear to have been countless variations on the device, a great multiplicity of forms, and some of the earliest and most interesting versions seem not to have been patented at all, which is perhaps not so surprising for such a modest artifact.

But at least we can say that the paper clip was not invented in 1817.

I believe that the current occupant pulled both dates out of his — no, out of his head. What a scustumad.

There’s also an 1867 patent, issued to Samuel B. Fay, for a “ticket fastener,” “a loop made of wire for the purpose of holding tags or tickets to fine fabrics to supply the place of pins.” It’s often cited as the first paper clip, but notice: it’s for holding tags or tickets to fabrics, not for holding papers together. Petroski doesn’t mention it.

Related reading
On paper clips : Paper clips (A prose poem) : My dad’s paper clips

UVA president resigns

From The New York Times: James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, is resigning under pressure from the Justice Department:

The University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, has told the board overseeing the school that he will resign in the face of demands by the Trump administration that he step aside to help resolve a Justice Department inquiry into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to three people briefed on the matter.

For the leader of one of the nation’s most prominent public universities to take such an extraordinary step demonstrates President Trump’s success in harnessing the investigative powers of the federal government to accomplish his administration’s policy goals....

Mr. Ryan, the university’s ninth president, has held that post since 2018 and was unanimously approved for another contract in 2022. During his seven years in the job, Mr. Ryan developed a reputation as a champion of diversity. He encouraged community service and helped drive an increase in the number of first-generation students.

He summed up his philosophy as one aimed at making the university “both great and good,” describing his goal of striving for academic excellence in a manner that would benefit society. But that rankled conservative alumni and some Republican board members, who accused him of imposing his own ethics and values on college students.

Our household heard James Ryan speak in 2016, when he was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dean Ryan’s talk at that year’s HGSE diploma ceremony became the stuff of a book, Wait, What? And Life’s Other Essential Questions. The questions are six:

Wait, what?
I wonder why, or if?
Couldn’t we at least?
How can I help?
What really matters?

And a “bonus” question, from Raymond Carver’s poem “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so?” (Slightly misquoted as “And did you get what you wanted out of life, even so?”) Listen or read, and you can tell that James Ryan is a good guy.

And now we have to ask, Wait, what? A president and his minions have taken down yet another university president?

A related post
HGSE’s speech at Open Culture

Washington Post crossword redesign

Could The Washington Post have come up with a worse way to redesign a crossword? I’ll be doing the (same) puzzle in the Los Angeles Times.

The weirdest thing about the redesign: on Wednesday, when I typed the first T of the fourteen-letter answer UCANTTOUCHTHIS, CANT disappeared, the puzzle jumped back to the second box, and a screen reader kicked in: “Second box selected.” The screen reader was functioning only on the puzzle page. Quitting the browser and restarting my Mac made no difference: I was able to replicate this weirdness any number of times.

UCANT do the puzzle here, the Post seemed to be telling me. Well, I did unsubscribe last October.

*

July 22: I solved the mystery of the disappearing letters. But I still find the redesign awful.

Word of the day: scustumad

Scustumad : Italian American slang for an idiot or an ill-mannered person. Here’s an entertaining explanation. And another.

The word comes up in “Soubise,” the second episode of the new (fourth) season of The Bear. Our household is seven episodes in. The best ones so far: three, four, five, six, and seven. Best of all: episode four, “Worms.” Give Ayo Edebiri all the Emmys.