OUZO in the morning

A clue in this past Saturday’s Newsday crossword, “Spirit in Cyprus,” made me remember a moment from my grad-student days. I went to Jimmy the barber for a haircut one spring morning. During my haircut Jimmy took out a bottle of ouzo and poured cups for all assembled. I had never tasted ouzo. Sure, why not? When in Rome, &c. I remember calling Elaine afterwards (she was at work in downtown Boston) and laughing my way through the story of my haircut. I was at least slightly smashed.

It was only after seeing Saturday’s clue that I looked into ouzo more closely. Wikipedia: “The final ABV is usually between 37.5 and 50 percent; the minimum allowed is 37.5 percent.” In other words, ouzo runs between 75 and 100 proof. No wonder I was laughing.

[Why the all-caps OUZO? Because it was a crossword answer. “When in Rome”: or Greece. Jimmy was from Greece. And by the way, it was a good haircut.]

The small museum

Its modesty permits an intimacy of acquaintance that a big-shot museum makes far more difficult. And whatever the works on display might be, they cannot be seen anywhere else. That J. Francis Murphy painting? Those T.C. Steele paintings? They’re here, and here only. The big-shot cannot help.

That paragraph is prompted by a visit Elaine and I made to Terre Haute’s Swope Art Museum. The highlight for us: Gil Wilson: The Art of Letters, an exhibition devoted to the correspondence of Gilbert Brown Wilson, Terre Haute-born artist and writer. One small room, with minimal explanation on museum cards. But reading the letters, to and from, made it possible to put together a story of a life.

Rounder

“Sharing cultures, sharing musics, makes the world rounder”: Flaco Jiménez, musician, in This Ain’t No Mouse Music! (dir. Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, 2014), a documentary about Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, might be the easiest Stumper I’ve seen. I can imagine Stan Newman taking stock of the world and thinking, “Aww, heck, I’ll go easy on ’em.” Consider, for instance, 3-D, ten letters, “Hardbody’s pride.” Or 15-A, ten letters, “Highway advisory.”

Three four-letter-answer clues I especially liked: 29-D, “Spirit in Cyprus.” 32-D, “Plant with legs.” 57-A, “Daily household announcement.” My favorite clue: 11-D, eight letters, “Show of hands.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

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Today’s puzzle made me recall a youthful encounter with 29-D.

The Bob Rosses

The New York Times asks: “Where Are All the Bob Ross Paintings?” And there’s an answer.

NYRB sale

New York Review Books is having a twentieth-anniversary sale: two books, 20% off; three books, 30% off; four books, 40% off. Not quite “magnificent Nature Guides” for $1, but still a great buy.

NYRB has opened up worlds of reading to me. You too?

[Use semicolons to separate items in a series when one or more commas appear within those items.]

“Magnificent Nature Guides”

[Life, September 29, 1952. Click for a much larger view.]

“How can these magnificent Nature Guides be sold at only $1 each?” The advertisement provides the answer:

With a normal first edition of 10,000 copies, these books would retail at from $3 to $5 a copy. But the 75,000–100,000 printing of each book lowered the unit cost to a point at which the publishers were able to employ the highest standards and yet produce these books for as little as $1.

A shorter supplemental answer: Because it’s 1952.

I love Golden Nature Guides, or the idea of Golden Nature Guides. I have the Rocks and Minerals: A Guide to Minerals, Gems, and Rocks (1957) and Trees: A Guide to Familiar American Trees (1987). And from the Golden Science series, Weather: A Guide to Phenomena and Forecasts (1965). From the back covers of the older books:

These 160 page books overflow with accurate full color illustrations and concise, double-checked information which makes identification and understanding the subject easy and enjoyable.

The back cover of Weather might have also mentioned Harry McNaught’s beautifully melancholy illustrations of “phenomena”: rain, more rain, and snow.

Telegraph operators and weather

From Hannah Fry’s review of Andrew Blum’s The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast :

By 1848, more than two thousand miles of telegraph lines had been laid across the United States. They were a technological marvel, but they were prone to problems when it rained. Every morning, telegraph operators checked with their colleagues in the surrounding cities to see what the weather was like. “If I learned from Cincinnati that the wires to St. Louis were interrupted by rain,” one operator was recorded as saying, “I was tolerably sure a ‘northeast’ storm was approaching.”

The effect was to change people’s perception of time and space. Being able to communicate through the telegraph might have made the world seem smaller, but those weather reports also made the world bigger, creating distance between places on a map.

I told my mom — who watches the weather with intense interest — about the role of the telegraph in forecasting. Who knew? Neither of us.

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Our son Ben is hosting WGBH’s online series The Rewind, an exploration of the WGBH archives. First two episodes: “Tchaikovsky Waits for No Man” and “Tailgating with Table Linens.” Go Ben!

Genius at work

I quote:

Could you imagine having Sleepy Joe Biden, or @AlfredENeuman99,..

...or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1000/24th), as your President, rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius! Sorry to say that even Social Media would be driven out of business along with, and finally, the Fake News Media!

The “true Stable Genius” tagged a retired teacher and coach whose tweets are decidedly not in favor of the president.

But the Genius has replaced the above tweets with new ones, with the tag omitted and with “Neuman” now misspelled as “Newman.”