Even a little chillier than was prophesied—colder than I ever remember it being in the Swamp. Here’s hoping everyone subject to winter’s winds has shelter and heat.
While looking up something today, I got lost in the dictionary (an almost daily occurrence around here). I ended up finding out that scale in the sense of “a calibrated line” (etc.) isn’t related at all to scale from a fish or dragon, or scale “an instrument for weighing”.
Fishy or judicial scale comes from PIE *skel- “to cut” and is cognate with shell, shale, scalp, skill, shelf, etc.
Calibrated scale comes from Latin scalae “flight of steps; ladder”, and ultimately from PIE *skand “to jump, climb”, so it’s cognate with the –scend in descend, ascend (etc.) but also scan, scandal, slander, and echelon. Watkins (in the AHD) says the –nd– assimilates to a following suffix –slā– to form scalae and its derivatives.
I found all that out, and more besides, but I’m not sure if I found what I was originally looking for. Now I can’t remember what it was.
Tim Kirk’s rendering of Smaug
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Stanislaus Zagorski’s cover illustrations for The Case of the Three-Sided Dream, images snerged from Discogs.com
The story is accompanied by a wonderfully pulpy 2-page illustration by Chris Arneson, and the issue has a lot of great stuff in it–Howard and Joe’s reports of Gen Con, a new Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story by the redoubtable Nathan Long, new fiction by New Edge stalwarts like S.E. Lindberg and Tais Teng.
My conscience smote me when I looked at the “About the Author” section, though. In it, I promised that the Morlock collection Evil Honey and Other Stories would be available by the time this issue came to light. Well–it’s not. I was teaching a new course in Fall 2022 and it ate up any free time I might have had.
To try and make up for this misdeed (or lack of deed, which often adds up to the same thing), I posted something I’ve been promising for a while: A Probable Outline of the Career of Morlock Ambrosius, something that was written up for me by my cousin, colleague, and frenemy, Gabriel McNally (narrator of “A Stranger Comes to Town”).
Left: me in the Vatican Museum in 2008, with a stone Molossian (ancestor breed of boxers) peering over my left shoulder. Right: me ten years later, with a live (if not very lively) boxer (dog-detective Lennie Briscoe) snoozing over my right shoulder.
Executive summary: this is an interesting pre-Hays-Code comedy/melodrama that’s worth watching at least once.
Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett star in this fast-moving but minor movie, directed by Raoul Walsh in 19 days and written by at least seven people (and it shows).
Tracy plays a cop named Danny Dolan who works the waterfront where he runs into a bunch of crazy characters including a guy who’s getting ready to drown his dog because he can’t feed him, and a waitress with a smart mouth and a heart of gold. He saves the dog, romances the waitress, catches a crook and gets promoted to detective. That happens in about 10 minutes of screen time, and I’m leaving out most of the wacky characters who come and go without an impact on the plot.
“Be a good pal and marry me, will ya?”
The waitress, Helen Riley (played by Joan Bennett), has a sister, Kate, who’s also engaged marry to a cop, Sarge. They live with their father, Pop Riley, an ex-cop who’s almost completely paralyzed from an injury in the line of duty.
Everything is rosy in this monochrome landscape of working girls dating cops, except that there’s a snake in the gray grass: a murderous gangster, Duke Castanega, played in a sneering monotone by the director’s younger brother. Kate used to date him and is still in love with him, and when he’s on the run he comes to Kate and convinces her to hide him in the attic. So the police force are looking all over town for for a guy who’s hiding in the attic of a retired cop.
Pop the ex-cop is fully aware that the gangster is in his attic, but he can’t speak or write. When Helen and Danny stop by to visit with him, he tells them the whole story by blinking in Morse code. They don’t read Morse code, but they take down the message and decode it later. That sets up the climax of the plot where Helen saves her sister from charges of aiding-and-abetting and Danny, after being shot, kills Duke off-camera. The good and semi-good guys live happily ever after, and the ungood guys are dead.
This movie tends to confirm my theory that screwball comedy is the funhouse-mirror of noir. There are a lot of darker elements here that the Hays Code would have ruled out—the illicit affair of the cop’s fiancée and the gangster, for instance. Also, Danny kills the guy. From Duke’s point of view, this movie is a noir. From Danny’s, it’s a light-hearted comic romance with a little light danger.
The wacky dockside characters were sometimes tedious but always brief. The smart dialogue between Bennett’s character and Tracy’s wasn’t as smart as it thought it was, but the actors delivered the lines with style. I liked it that a disabled guy cracked the case and is treated throughout as a person, not a piece of furniture. And the depression-era cynicism about institutions was frostily refreshing. At one point, the counter guy at the diner tells Danny about a bank robbery, and Danny says, “Oh yeah? Who’d the bank rob?”
The business of America is giving America the business.
Lines like this probably brought the house down in 1932. Ninety years later, we’re much more sophisticated and we know that billionaires won’t harm us if we just tickle their egos in exactly the right way, and also surrender ownership of the world to them.
A gryphon holding up the corner of a sarcophagus. I took this photo in the Vatican Museum, in the now-distant summer of 2008. I was collecting gryphons that year.
“I’m sick of that Merv joke. Nobody remembers Merv Griffin anyway.”
