David Levinson Wilk crossword record

If you’re not a regular solver, you might still want to look at the New York Times crossword today (or in six weeks, on December 11, when today’s puzzle appears in syndication). David Levinson Wilk has set a record, constructing a puzzle that contains twelve — count ’em, twelve — full-length, fifteen-letter answers. And for a Friday puzzle, it’s relatively easy to solve.

My favorite answer in this puzzle is for 24 Across, “1974 Rolling Stones hit”: DOODOODOODOODOO. (No spoilers here. Highlight the empty space to see the answer.)

Why no link? The online puzzle requires a subscription.

Of weather

The weather today is inescapable, even indoors. Its mood is my mood. Bleak am I, says the weather. Woe is me, says I.

A tree in front of my house wore its fall colors for a few days and now stands almost bare. The crazy green grass that seemed amusing a few days ago now seems out of place. What, are you still here?

The picture in my window is grey and greyer. I must turn on more lights.

Student e-mail accounts on the wane?

A short piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that the institutional practice of creating student e-mail accounts may be waning:

So says a report issued by Educause, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of information technology in higher education. The “Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report” took information from nearly 930 colleges and universities regarding their IT practices and environments.

It found, among other things, that in 2008 nearly 10 percent of associate, baccalaureate, and master’s institutions as well as 25 percent of doctoral institutions were considering putting an end to student e-mail addresses because so many students were already using personal e-mail accounts. That is a large shift from the 1 to 2 percent of institutions that were considering this in 2004.

Of course students are already using personal accounts. But that’s hardly a good reason to drop student accounts, as different accounts serve different purposes. The first piece of advice in my post How to e-mail a professor:

Write from your college or university e-mail account. That immediately lets your professor see that your e-mail is legitimate and not spam. The cryptic or cutesy or salacious personal e-mail address that might be okay when you send an e-mail to a friend is not appropriate when you’re writing to a professor.

More advice for any students reading: if you haven’t yet done so, set up a Gmail account like so —

firstname.lastname@gmail.com

— or as close to that as you can get. This address will serve you well in the world beyond college, and if your school drops student accounts, you’ll have an appropriate address for academic use.

Ulysses “Seen”

Robert Berry is adapting James Joyce’s Ulysses as a webcomic, Ulysses “Seen.” Above, a moment from the novel’s first episode, “Telemachus.” Buck Mulligan is referencing Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “The Triumph of Time”: “I will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea.”

U.S. Postal Service sells greeting cards

Not from the Onion: the U.S. Postal Service is selling greeting cards, in “a one-year experiment that may lead the nation's 34,000 postal outlets to eventually sell other goods and services, including banking, insurance and cellphones.” Says Robert F. Bernstock, president of U.S.P.S. mailing and shipping services, “If we can get some energy behind greeting cards, which are incredibly linked to the mail, what better place to sell them and merchandise them than at our post offices?”

That’s a big if. Someone dowdy enough to care about greeting cards is not likely to settle for the selection available in the post office (birthday and get-well cards only). Someone buying on the fly has more convenient options than a separate trip to the post office (going to a drugstore, say). And someone buying stamps or mailing a package is likely to want to get in line and not lose time browsing on impulse. Postal Service, I wish you well, you know I do, but this venture does not inspire confidence.

Pnin’s pencil sharpener

With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener — that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must. He had other, even more ambitious plans, such as an armchair and a tall lamp.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)

The pencil sharpener is part of Timofey Pnin’s effort to “Pninize” his office, “Office R.” As this tribute to the Dixon Ticonderoga suggests, Nabokov was a pencil man. And yes, I have a touch of Nabokov fever. The Original of Laura drops, as they say, on November 17.

Related posts
Is there a pencil in The House? (Dixon Ticonderogas in film)
Musical-comedy pencils (more Dixon Ticonderogas)
Pnin’s posy
Vladimir Nabokov’s index cards

Pnin’s posy

He worked very slowly, with a certain vagueness of manner that might have been taken for a mist of abstraction in a less methodical man. He gathered the wiped spoons into a posy, placed them in a pitcher which he had washed but not dried, and then took them out one by one and wiped them all over again.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)

These sentences have stuck with me for twenty-five years or so. I often think of Timofey Pnin’s posy (bouquet) when I’m gathering forks, knives, and spoons from the sink.

“A Woman in the House”

[The second of two posts on Father Knows Best.]

Real problems, for men, women, and children, are everywhere in Father Knows Best. Cheating, vandalism, sexual discrimination, rigid class distinctions, divorce, adoption, poverty, even child-abandonment and homelessness figure in the events of the show’s first two seasons. But the strangest problems of all come in what seems to me the strangest episode of those I’ve watched, “A Woman in the House.” Written by Roswell Rogers and directed by William D. Russell, it first aired on September 28, 1955. What happens:

Verg Carlson (Harry Hickox), an old friend of Jim’s, is relocating to Springfield. With him is his new wife, Jill (Mary Webster). For now, they’re staying in a hotel. Meet Jill.



Verg and Jill met at a fiesta in El Paso, when she fell from a tamale wagon into his arms. It’s his first marriage. Why it took him so long we don’t know (though it seems his mother might have had something to do with that). What we do know is that the age difference between Verg and Jill is great. Jill herself is the only character who acknowledges this difference: “You know, I think Verg has a daughter complex. That’s how he treats me most of the time, as if I were his daughter.” Then she giggles. Yes, this episode is not your father’s Father Knows Best.



The cultural differences between Jill and Verg, Jill and the Andersons, seem even greater than the age difference. Jill’s an intellectual, or an existentialist, or a beatnik, or something. Here’s some dialogue from the Anderson living room, as Jim and Margaret get acquainted with the Carlsons. Jill has picked up a book from the coffee table:

Jill: Silas Marner?

Margaret: Well, I think that one of the children is reading that for school. It’s, uh, well, it’s required reading.

Jill: No wonder they don’t learn anything. Oh, say, have you read Kafka?

Margaret: No, I don’t even know who wrote it.

Jill [Laughing wildly.] You’re priceless. Franz Kafka, he's one of my pets. Writes beautifully. You must read The Trial, you absolutely must. I think it compares with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.

Jim: That’s a book?

Jill: That’s a book. His first novel, and better than Baudelaire, I think. Of course you’ve read Baudelaire.

Margaret: No, I haven’t.

Jill: You haven’t?

Verg: Honey, everyone doesn’t have the time to read that you do.

Jill: Well, I don’t either, but I make time.

Verg: Jill loves to read. She reads things that I don’t even understand.

Jill: You don’t try. Verg is the kind who reads a story in the New Yorker and asks, “Where’s the ending?” [Laughs.] Oh, poor Verg, he wants everything spelled out for him in neon and in capital letters.



[“Silas Marner?”]

Verg and Jill have no children. Jill cannot cook. Shoes give her claustrophobia, she says. She speaks in nicknames: Jimmy, Marge. As Margaret confesses to Jim at the evening’s end, even Jill’s compliments leave her feeling humiliated: “My home cooking, my home sewing, my home stupidity — a sweet, prim, dumb, little provincial wife.”

Greater difficulties develop when Verg flies off to visit his ailing (and controlling) mother and Jill stays with the Andersons. She reads and smokes, smokes and reads. Margaret refuses to let Jill help in any way, resenting yet insisting upon playing the role of gracious host. When Margaret is alone with Jim, she goes to pieces: Jill’s presence is making her miserable. Margaret even fears that she’s becoming “a repressed neurotic.”

But all shall be well. When daughter Kathy (now "Kath") needs someone to help her wash her hair and no one else is around, Jill volunteers and ends up answering Kathy’s many questions by confessing her loneliness: her mother’s dead, she says, and she has just one friend in the world, “a wonderful one, and I’m married to him.”



Kathy volunteers to be Jill’s friend; Jill runs from the bathroom crying; Kathy shares what she's learned; Margaret softens. She realizes that she’s never given Jill a chance and quickly enlists her help in mashing potatoes. By the end of the episode, Jill has been brought into the zone of domesticity — that is, the kitchen. Here she helps Betty with the dishes and smiles as she recalls her fall from the tamale wagon.



If all the Anderson women were found in the kitchen at this episode’s end, the Stepford overtones would be unbearable. But Margaret is taking time off.



[On the age difference between Verg and Jill: Harry Hickox was born in 1910. The IMDB has no information for Mary Webster. In 1957, she had the lead in the film Eighteen and Anxious. Yes, two years after her appearance on Father Knows Best, Mary Webster was playing a teenager. However old she was in this episode, she looks remarkably young, perhaps twenty-two or so. And to my eyes, Verg looks older than Harry Hickox.]

*

January 30, 2017: The Hollywood Reporter reports that Mary Webster (b. 1935) has died at the age of eighty-one. Thanks to Scott Lahti for sharing the news in a comment.

*

July 2020: As I discovered with further viewing, racism and xenophobia come up in later seasons.

A related post
“Betty’s Graduation”

Soupy Sales (1926–2009)

How lucky to have been a kid in New York in the days of The Soupy Sales Show. Here’s a sample, with White Fang and Fess Parker, television’s Daniel Boone.

And here’s a complete show from 1965, in three parts.

Soupy Sales, Slapstick Comedian, Dies at 83 (New York Times)

Today’s Hi and Lois

[Hi and Lois, October 22, 2009.]

No door, no privacy, no surprise.

It is Ditto’s dream: “to be the skipper of the America’s Cup yacht."

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts