Recently updated

Is there a Swiss peeler in the house? There’s much more to this tool than I imagined.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is by Brad Wilber. Though it’s still a Themeless Saturday, it felt to me like a Stumper, providing twenty-six minutes of difficulty. That’s a good thing. 1-A, seven letters, “Etsy merchant,” offered a deceptively easy start.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

3-D, fifteen letters, “Fat-free plan.” One of two fifteen-letter answers.

10-D, fifteen letters, “Card game oxymoron.” Not that difficult to figure out, but still difficult to figure out. I have no idea what the answer refers to — yet.

17-A, five letters, “Draft.” Just for the ambiguity. Noun? Verb? Beer? Winds? Writing?

21-A, three letters, “Upside-down rooster.” Could I be the only person to have imagined a broken weathervane?

28-A, six letters, “Chase-scene entertainment.” The clue improves the answer. You’d think first of something that happens in a chase scene, at least if you were me.

38-A, six letters, “Did due diligence at a dealer.” I like the alliteration.

41-A, five letters, “Unbroken.” Clever.

41-D, seven letters, “Put page numbers on.” The answer is likely to strike a solver as utterly ridiculous or ridiculously great. I say ridiculously great.

46-D, six letters, “Tin Woodman’s topper.” Easy, but I like it because it reminds me of one of my dad’s favorite trivia questions: what is Dorothy’s last name? And guess what: Tin’s name is indeed Woodman, not Woodsman. Who knew?

One clue I’d question: 37-D, eight letters, “Start of an Austen declaration.” I think of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: ITISATRU — and then run out of letters. Is the declaration this clue points to all that well known? It may be. I may not be Austenite enough to know that.

No spoilers; the answers (and some commentary) are in the comments.

The Rite of Spring Toy Orchestra

It’s the work of Chris Ott and his assistant Igor. Chris has a YouTube channel.

Rogers cardigans

“Every color of cardigan Mister Rogers wore on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1969–2001, presented in chronological order”: it’s a beautiful print, or a beautiful image to look at online.

[Found via Laura Olin’s newsletter.]

Is there a Swiss peeler in the house?

A kitchen drawer opened, and a peeler, still on its display card, shifted forward into view. It’s a SwissPro peeler, made in Switzerland. I bought a four-pack ($17.99) in 2009 after watching several videos of the then-recently departed Joe Ades, the charismatic peddler who sold similar peelers on the streets of Manhattan. I gave away two peelers and kept two. I forgot that we even had a spare.

The SwissPro peeler is built to last. Our in-use peeler is as sharp as ever. It needs nothing more than careful washing and an occasional wipe of the blade with cooking oil to remove any oxidation.

The SwissPro (“by Rosenhaüs”) now seems to be unavailable in the States. But comparable peelers abound. Look for something with a stainless-steel handle and a carbon-steel blade, like so. And it should, of course, be made in Switzerland.

Here’s a sample of Joe Ades at work, demonstrating that the Swiss peeler can be used for much more than peeling.

*

April 17: Gunther and Stephen have added helpful details in the comments. As Gunther notes, the original peeler is the REX, first made by the Swiss company Zena in 1947. The STAR peeler followed in 1970. As Stephen notes, the peelers are sold at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich. (Museum of Design, I think.) There’s also a poster, with the peeler in gold. Further evidence of the peeler’s celebrated status: as Gunther notes, there’s a Swiss stamp honors the peeler. The stamp makes me think of the Sachplakat, or object poster, an advertising poster depicting an object, a brand name, and little or nothing more.

The Zena website is worth your time. Knowing now that my peeler is a knock-off, I’m tempted to buy a REX, even though my knock-off has been working well since 2009. That’s the kind of guy I am.

“Merely contingent”

By the light of a dining-room lamp, a conversation takes place in which wisdom, “the wisdom, if not of nations at least of families,” seizes on some event and “places it under the magnifying glass of memory,” creating new perspectives, rearranging events in time and space.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, trans. Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[The Muse of history: Clio.]

Bye, Blogger e-mail subscriptions

Google is messing with making changes to its Feedburner service and will discontinue Blogger e-mail subscriptions in July. Google suggests that Blogger bloggers download their subscription lists to use with a new service — something like Mailchimp, I suppose, though Google offers no suggestions.

I’m going to pass, in part because I cannot imagine formatting blog posts to my satisfaction to send out in the form of daily e-mails. (I am just that persnickety.) But also because I think it’s rude to port e-mail addresses to a new service that nobody ever signed up for.

I’ve deleted the sidebar link for new e-mail subscriptions. Come July, I hope that anyone reading Orange Crate Art via e-mail likes what I’m doing enough to visit here or add an RSS subscription. There’s a link for that still in the sidebar.

More about H. Neil Matkin

The Chronicle of Higher Education has its most detailed report to date on the life and times of H. Neil Matkin, president of Texas’s Collin College, where students are customers, professors work without tenure, and the dangers of COVID-19 are deemed to be exaggerated: “That Man Makes Me Crazy.”

Related posts
Meet H. Neil Matkin : Once again : And once more

[You can read Chronicle articles that aren’t behind the paywall using Reader View or the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet.]

A letter from Oliver Sacks

No, not to me. To Austin Kleon. And it’s handwritten.

Bonuses: the note-taking effort that prompted the letter, and a tour of Sacks’s desk. Dixon Ticonderogas, a pencil sharpener, many chunks of metal, and a Mont Blanc fountain pen.

[If you’ve seen Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, you’ll have a better understanding of the chunks of metal.]

Recently updated

How to improve writing, no. 89 Now with more tedious discussion of the phrase a pair of twins.