After a storm

[No filter. Click for a larger view.]

Our backyard is looking rather painterly tonight. One storm down, one to go.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, constructing under the name he used for easier Saturday Stumpers of his making. Today’s puzzle is a Themeless Saturday, not a Stumper, but it solves like a medium-ish Stumper, with triple stacks of ten-letter answers and triple columns of nine. I was struck by the abudance of proper names as answers — people, places, things — twenty in all. But I can’t complain: one of them, 34-D, five letters, “Boxing great from Panama,” broke the puzzle open for me. No idea how I managed to pull up that name.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

4-D, six letters, “Slot feature.” Not LEMONS.

5-D, twelve letters, “Get on with it.” Yes!

29-A, six letters, “She’s up.” A good reminder that he cannot be considered a default setting. Which reminds me: notice how clues for ADMAN and ADMEN have changed.

30-A, three letters, “Play date.” Clever.

32-D, nine letters, “Doubly misnamed edible.” A main staple, but I still didn’t see it at first.

49-D, five letters, “Part of the Elvis persona.” Here the proper name is in the clue.

54-A, four letters, “Dismiss, with ‘out.’” I wanted RULE.

56-A, ten letters, “Like the French motto.” Just a crazy clue.

59-A, ten letters, “‘The King of Latin Music.’” A giveaway, but I’ll take it.

61-A, ten letters, “Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient of ’93.” Not a giveaway.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

ΠΙΚΣ

From Greek Reporter:

Many Greeks were angered by the apparent misspelling of the name of the Greek goddess Nike on the newly launched sneakers by the American multinational of the same name.

Nike, meaning “victory” in Greek, celebrated the goddess by releasing a new pair of footwear called “The Winged Goddess Of Victory” with the Air Force 1 Low.

Greek-speakers were quick to spot, however, that at the heel of the left sneaker, an inscription in Greek which was apparently supposed to read ΝΙΚΗ Air, i.e. “NΙΚΕ Air”, was misspelled. The way it looks now, it would be more like “PIKS Air.”

Many were left wondering what exactly “ΠΙΚΣ” means. Is it a colossal mistake, some unknown initials, or a made-up word that just looks Greek for marketing purposes?

Colossal mistake, surely, even if it was a deliberate effort to make something more recognizable. Nike’s name in Greek: Νίκη. Or, in all caps, NIKH, as the article has it.

Answers

A pastrami Reuben. An L. L. Bean Timberline shirt, at least thirty-five years old, every edge frayed, good as an overshirt around the house in cold weather. Shark! Apples. Elly Ameling, John Ashbery, Fito de la Parra, Richard Goode, Milt Hinton, Stanley Lombardo, Trevor Pinnock, Larry Taylor, Clark Terry. Many things I’ll miss out on. Coffee brewing. Garbanzos cooking. Yes. Flat. Safari. “Lush Life.” 47. Reading, writing, walking, loving, caring.

*

I forgot one: My Dinner with André.

[Watching A Late Show last night prompted me to devise my own answers to the Colbert Questionert. Why not? I was startled when Seth Rogen answered “47,” because that’s our fambly number, for reasons that will remain in the fambly.]

For avocado fans only

[Amuseable Avocado, by Jellycat. In three sizes, each larger than an edible avocado. Amuseable is the company’s spelling.]

National Archives

Our vibrant American culture:

A museum in Rochester, N.Y., announced on Wednesday that it would serve as the home of a first-of-its-kind National Archives of Game Show History to preserve artifacts and footage from programs like Jeopardy! [,] The Price Is Right [,] and The $25,000 Pyramid.

The archives will be housed at the Strong National Museum of Play, which is undergoing an expansion that will add 90,000 square feet to its space and that it expects to be completed by 2023.

Curators at the museum already have some ideas about what types of artifacts would make an ideal centerpiece and are asking for items from collectors.

“The wheel from Wheel of Fortune would be iconic,” Chris Bensch, the museum’s vice president for collections, said in an interview on Wednesday. The museum, he said, would gladly accept the letter board, along with a dress from the show’s famous letter-turner, Vanna White.

That’s from The New York Times, but it reads like a short section of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The only thing missing is the moon-like mark that prefaces each section of the novel.

❍

A museum in Rochester, N.Y., announced on Wednesday that it would serve as the home of a first-of-its-kind National Archives of Game Show History to preserve artifacts and footage from programs like Jeopardy!, The Price Is Right, and The $25,000 Pyramid.

And so on. Even the name Strong National Museum of Play has an Infinite Jest sound to it.

[Those missing commas: yikes. My guess is that someone wasn’t sure what to do about a comma after “Jeopardy!” — the Times styles titles with quotation marks — and left it for later. The Chicago Manual of Style says to put the comma inside the quotation mark. The Associated Press? I have no idea. Thanks to the reader who pointed out a missing word.]

“Life apart”

One last post from Villette. Lucy Snowe insists on her selfhood.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

78s

I was in a hotel suite, having just bought a rare 78, and I was disguising my find, switching its sleeve, which bore a sticker with a high price, with a sleeve from a 78 whose sticker showed a much lower price. And a voice said, “Michael, stop.”

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Sources, I think: travel thoughts, an online presentation of rare Duke Ellington recordings, and Party Girl (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1958), in which Robert Taylor and Sam McDaniel look at 78s to determine the proper music for Taylor’s impending assignation with Cyd Charisse. In waking life I own no 78s, rare or common.]

Robert Hollander (1933-2021)

Dante scholar, and translator, with Jean Hollander, of The Divine Comedy. From an introductory note on translation in Inferno (New York: Anchor Books, 2002):

We could go on improving this effort as long as we live. We hope that as much as we have accomplished will find an understanding ear and heart among those who know the real thing. Every translation begins and ends in failure. To the degree that we have been able to preserve some of the beauty and power of the original, we have failed the less.

The New York Times has an obituary.

[I tried four Dantes in my teaching. The Hollanders’ was my favorite.]

Rewards

Beer. Donuts. Guns. Any teacher of teachers who needs to illustrate the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards now has unbeatable examples courtesy of the efforts to persuade United States residents to get vaccinated.

[Whatever it takes, says I. But the shadow of Homer Simpson looms large, at least over the beer and the donuts.]