“The corruption is just too much for one article”: here’s the first installment of Adam Kinzinger’s three-part series chronicling the current occupant’s long history of corruption.
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Typos
From Smithsonian Magazine: “A new exhibition at Yale Library explores the history of typos across five centuries.”
Getting movie titles wrong
“Staffers at Film at Lincoln Center keep a list of the incorrect movie titles they’ve heard from patrons. That list is very, very long:” “The Unintentional Art of Getting Movie Titles Wrong” (The New York Times , gift link).
Featuring the Coolidge Corner Moviehouse Theatre, where Lincoln Center’s list began.
[It was Moviehouse when Elaine and I went to double bills there, several times a week.]
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
The evolution of the Flagston thermostat
[Hi and Lois, March 18, 2026. Click for a larger view.]
I’ve been noticing the thermostat (or the “thermostat”) in the Flagston house every so often: in 2009, in 2012, and (a partial view) in 2022. Today’s Hi and Lois reveals that the Flagstons have replaced whatever it was they had on their wall with something more recognizable as a thermostat.
[Through the years.]
Did I plan on posting about a comic-strip thermostat this morning? No. Did I have to anyway? Yeah, I did.
Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
“The man with the X-ray eyes”
From Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024):
At the back of the classroom, or two stools down the bar, you’ll find him — the man with the X-ray eyes. He sees through it all. Whatever subject you discuss, he recites the same catechism: noble actions always have selfish motives, institutions only serve those who run them, beliefs are manufactured to oppress, and every book, every idea, every artwork, every utterance expresses a hidden agenda. Nothing is what it seems. This is the esoteric wisdom that joins in intellectual matrimony the sophomore smart aleck and the college professor whose vanity is fed every semester by revealing the truth that truth is an illusion and that everything is permitted. (Which his students, a step ahead of him, take to mean that nothing is worth doing.)Also from this book
Gears and springs
EXchange name sightings
[CAnal 10000? A distant ancestor of KLondike-5? A Manhattan Delaware Street is also a fiction.]
[Marian Marsh, Anthony Bushell, and REgent 4-1000. Both screenshots from Five Star Final (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1931). Click either image for a larger view.]
Strange but true: REgent 4-1000 was the telephone number for the Manhattan office of the New York City Department of Parks.
Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
PBS, sheesh
On the PBS NewsHour tonight, Amna Nawaz and Nick Schifrin both said that Joe Kent refuted the current occupant’s claims about an imminent Iranian threat and a clear path to victory. No, Kent rebutted those claims.
From Garner’s Modern English Usage :
Rebut means “to attempt to refute.” Refute means “to defeat (an opponent’s arguments).” Hence someone who rebuts certainly hopes to refute ; it is immodest to assume, however, that one has refuted another’s arguments.*
Thanks to a comment, I realized this morning that the word I needed is reject . Kent didn’t rebut anything; he only asserted that the current occupant’s claims were lies.
(And yes, Kent’s letter has a place in “the long tradition of conspiratorial anti-Semitism.”)
Related reading
All OCA “sheesh” posts (Pinboard)
Windmills, windmills
Today the present occupant once again claimed that China manufactures but does not use windmills. Perhaps someday a reporter will be bold enough to respond with the truth: that China generates more electricity via wind than any other nation.
Maybe someone could even show him pitchers.
Gears and springs
From Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024):
A story about someone who discovers that a truth has been kept from him by someone else reveals nothing particularly interesting about what it is to be human (except that some people are liars). A story about someone who has kept the truth from himself immediately becomes a work as complex as any watch, with innumerable gears and springs that labor just below the surface of a deceptively lethargic face.We spotted this book on the front table at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore and bought copies for our household’s two-person reading club. Lilla begins with Plato and Sophocles and moves forward to the nostalgia of fascism’s yearning for a glorious past. A book for these times.
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