Letters, now

“This beautiful paper was for a rainy day. That day was now”: in the time of the coronavirus, Lynell George suggests writing letters (Los Angeles Times).

Related reading
All OCA letter posts (Pinboard)

Jimmy Cobb (1929–2020)

The drummer and last surviving musician from Miles Davis’s 1959 recording Kind of Blue. NPR has an obituary.

[If you don’t own a copy of Kind of Blue: what are you waiting for?]

Memorial Day

[“Gloucester, Massachusetts. Memorial Day, 1943.” Photograph by Gordon Parks. From the Library of Congress. Click for a much larger view.]

John Pavlovitz on how to grieve

Just in case someone hasn’t yet read it. From John Pavlovitz, “How Do You Grieve 100,000 Lives?“:

You wear a mask at the damn grocery store and you wash your hands and you keep your distance and you show kindness to cashiers — and you follow the simple rules put in place to keep people healthy and alive because that’s what decent human beings do.

What the news has been showing this weekend — people shoulder to shoulder, no masks, on beaches and at parties — is what happens when freedom is reduced to freedom from responsibility. I’ll invoke Julius Lester’s words, which could have been written about those crowds:

They persist in believing that freedom from restraint and responsibility represents paradise. The eternal paradox is that this is a mockery of freedom, a void. We express the deepest caring for this world and ourselves only by taking responsibility for ourselves and whatever portion of this world we make ours.

A memorial day

“An incalculable loss”: the front page of today’s New York Times. And an interactive feature.

[Trump* equals death.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. It’s a delightfully challenging puzzle, full and balanced with smoldering peat throughout, as fruit fades into oak spice and back to fruit again for a long and — no, wait, that’s a Scotch. I started solving with 27-D, ten letters, “Three-movement work for three instruments.” Yay that I know something, or some things, thought I knew something about classical music. (See the comments for an explanation.)

Clue-and-answer pairs that I especially liked:

6-D, six letters, “It’s drawn to scale.” A little forced, but I like the riddling quality.

16-A, four letters, “Quick takeaway.” A food? A précis? No.

17-A, ten letters, “Frequent TV Guide advertiser of old.” The dowdy world. That publication was known as “the Guide” in my grandparents’ households.

19-A, three letters, “Bits in some pits.” I like this clue’s economy.

21-A, seven letters, “Made to order.” A little strained, but I forgive that.

36-D, four letters, “‘The highest form of literature,’ per Hitchcock.” Spoiler: he really said it, perhaps in jest.

39-A, five letters, “Heliophilic jazz alias.” I like the timing, as May 22, 1914 was this musician’s Earth Arrival Day. But I think said musician would have disputed alias.

41-D, six letters, “One taking gut courses?” Groan.

54-D, three letters, “Stop posting.” Here too I like the clue’s economy.

One clue whose answer baffles still puzzles me: 14-D, four letters, “Carded one?” I saw it right after typing. But I still don’t quite get the answer. Now I get it, I think.

And now I will stop posting. No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[Binny’s Beverage Depot describes Ardbeg Wee Beastie Single Malt Scotch thusly: “On the nose smoked meat on baked apples, seaweed, caramel sauce, vanilla cream, iodine, and black peppercorn. Sweetness drifts in on the palate as butterscotch and apple meet with waves of earthy and smoky peat and freshly crushed black pepper. The finish is full and balanced with smoldering peat throughout, as fruit fades into oak spice and back to fruit again for a long and lingering experience. Refreshing and beastly at the same time.”]

Shakespeare as Dickinson

Or is it Dickinson as Shakespeare? I thought of this effort and found it — still there! — on the hard drive. It’s William Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 in the manner of Emily Dickinson, something I wrote in 2003 for a poetry class I was teaching.

And now I’m somehow thinking of this sonnet in the manner of early Tom Waits: “It’s a cold November, winter coming on, the trees are all bare, the birds are all gone,” or something like that.

Recently updated

Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado Now with photographs of a Bronx bar and its owner.

A “lethal aversion to reading”

“It's not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved”: in The Week, Windsor Mann writes about Donald Trump*’s “lethal aversion to reading.”

Again, Trump* equals death.

JEffrey or LEgal

From The Hidden Eye (dir. Richard Whorf, 1945). Duncan “Mac” Maclain (Edward Arnold), a blind detective, stands outside the door to the Neptone Hair Tonic Co., listens carefully as someone dials a telephone, and later works out the details with his sidekick Marty Corbett (William “Bill” Phillips):

“Now let’s see what we’ve got. Our first two numbers are five and three.”

“Right.”

“Well, five on the dial represents the letters J, K, and L. Number three represents the letters D, E, and F. That means there can only be nine combinations in that sequence. Now what is our first possibility? JD.”

“There’s no exchange startin’ with JD.”

“No, but there’s an LE — LEgal. And since there’s no LF, the prefix I heard dialed on that phone was JEffrey or LEgal.”

“The rest was, uh, uh, three, one, four, five, two.”

“Why, of course. Our man either called JEffrey 3-1452 or LEgal 3-1452. I don’t know what Jeffrey is, but LEgal 3-1452 is —”

And there’s the answer, which I won’t reveal here.