Tiny Diner

[803 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“Good Food for Good Health”? If you say so.

If you squint, you can see the HOTCAKES sign (neon!) in the window. And in the window of the dry cleaners and laundry, SPREADS WASHED FLUFFED DRIED. Today this stretch of Bedford Avenue is all apartment buildings.

Thanks, Brian, for finding this photograph.

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Harry’s Wagon : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

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Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado Now with a photograph of a BAR sign, salvaged by Fordham students after the El D’s destruction.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, gave me half an hour’s worth of struggle. It’s a great puzzle, with many unusual (and educational!) answers, and real Stumping satisfaction. Even as I typed in my final answer, for 24-A, three letters, “Needle point,” I couldn’t see how things were going to turn out right. But they did. Two hours after I finished the puzzle, the point of 24-A poked me in the head — ah, got it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “Paint-sprayer reservoir.” See? Unusual.

13-D, four letters:“Former name of the Royal Crown Company.” I learned something.

A trio: 20-A, nine letters, “Concision catchphrase, part 1”; 38-A, three letters, “Concision catchphrase, part 2”; 48-A, nine letters, “Concision catchphrase, part 3.” I kept thinking that there had to be more to the extended answer than met the eye. Perhaps there's a joke in the three-letter-long middle.

21-D, four letters, “Brit remembered for his circles.” A Brit? I learned something.

33-D, five letters, “Rounds of belts.” Is there an arcane term for the holes in a belt? Because that was my first thought.

39-A, five letters, “Two-stroke symbol.” I thought Golf?

41-A, ten letters, “‘Ultra-warm’ apparel.” Okay, but why quotation marks? If there’s a joke here, I’m missing it.

41-D, four letters, “Response to a request to speak.” Aww.

44-D, six letters, “Medicated disc.” I learned something. And there’s a surprising link to a word I already knew.

45-A, six letters, “Close ones.” Again I learned something.

46-A, three letters, “Moving away.” The clue adds value to the answer.

48-D, four letters, “New sister, often.” I was thinking of a novitiate, which does, after all, kinda fit.

53-A, five letters, “Retouch before advancement.” Nice misdirection, at least if the word advancement makes you think of careers and résumés.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Composition of place

George Bodmer pointed me to a beautiful piece of short fiction in The New Yorker, Arthur Krystal’s “What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?” It’s a story of moments remembered in COVID times:

By August, 2020, his sense of time had gone kablooey. Events thirty years in the distance now knocked at the door, while things he’d done five weeks earlier seemed impossibly remote.

I wrote back to George:

I find myself these days recalling not so much moments as spaces. The layout of my grandparents’ house, my other grandparents’ apartment, libraries from childhood in Brooklyn and adolescence in NJ, college buildings. It must be that so much time spent in one place is making me travel in my head to others.

And now I realize that I’m engaging in a secular version of a spiritual exercise from Ignatius of Loyola: composition of place. I’ve also been traveling to the candy stores of my Brooklyn childhood via the New York City Municipal Archives.

I wonder if readers have found themselves doing such traveling in COVID times. Anyone?

[Just what was behind that locked door at the end of the second-floor hallway in the Fordham library? I’ll never know.]

Pencil vs. pencil vs. pencil vs. pen

Which lasts longer: a cheap pencil, a better pencil, a mechanical pencil, or a ballpoint pen? It’s the work of a fellow with time on his hands.

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“Do I really need a toilet?”

What it can be like to rent in Manhattan.

Nico & Nor

From WGBH, preschool STEM learning with Nico & Nor games (iPadOS 12.0 or later): Berry Garden, Coconut Canyon, Farmers Market, Puppy Park, Shadow Cave. The games teach basic science ideas to pre-readers, in English or Spanish. Berry Garden and Puppy Park are the most challenging. Shadow Cave is the most Platonic.

Our son Ben helped create these games and wrote and played the music for them. Go Ben!

You can find all WGBH apps for iOS and iPadOS in the App Store.

Word of the day: bazooka

My friend Stefan Hagemann clued me in to the origin of bazooka, which was the name of a musical instrument of sorts before it became the name of a weapon. Bob Burns, who created the instrument in the early 1900s, explains in this WWII-era short film.

As for Bazooka Joe, he and his gang postdate the war. (The weirdest comics ever.)

Thanks, Stefan!

Holding his head

Stephen Breyer’s retirement announcement made me remember this description from an NPR story:

At oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's best questioners, sometimes takes a different approach [from that of Justice Sonia Sotomayor]. She just shuts down, rather than alienate her colleagues. Still, her anger is often palpable, the color literally draining from her face. And Justice Stephen Breyer on occasion just holds his head.

That description makes me think that he stuck it out as long as he could in an increasingly alienating workplace.

Ectoplasm

It’s late. Solly Bridgetower is walking and talking with Griselda Webster.

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (1951).

Tempest-Tost is the first novel of Davies’s Salterton Trilogy. A group of provincial amateurs are preparing to stage The Tempest.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)