Yesterday’s HCR

Heather Cox Richardson’s September 6 installament of Letters from an American is especially helpful if you weren’t following the news yesterday. In my case, it was because I had two wisdom teeth removed. Late in the game, yes.

College advice

From The Atlantic : Imani Perry offers “The College Advice People Don’t Offer Enough.”

See also my daughter Rachel’s tips for success in college, which end on a similar note. Perry: “Remember that mistakes are inevitable.” Rachel: “Do not fear failing; instead, embrace each mistake as a learning experience.”

Magna cum laude

Vicki Craig (Marla English), of the three sisters in Three Bad Sisters (dir. Gilbert Kay, 1956):

“I graduated magna cum laude from Embraceable U.”

Three Bad Sisters is one bad movie, but bad enough to be good.

A series of legal troubles?

Listening to NPR this long weekend, I heard, three or four times, that the defeated former president is facing “a series of legal troubles.” I began to wonder if series is the right word.

Merriam-Webster: “a number of things or events of the same class coming one after another in spatial or temporal succession.” M-W’s samples of usage: “the hall opened into a series of small rooms” (spatial succession), “a concert series” (temporal succession).

But the defeated former president’s legal troubles are all happening now. Imagine a concert series with all performances given simultaneously: that’s a contradiction in terms — though it might make for a great Ivesian effect if the doors to all concert rooms were to remain open.

I’d like to say a sea of legal troubles, but that would hardly be acceptable to NPR, and besides, I shudder at the thought of a metaphor that would point to taking up arms. A big fat mess of legal troubles? A diaperload of legal troubles? Perhaps just a number of legal troubles.

Labor Day Nancy

“An unbroken chain of nieces and aunts in the Ritz family whose antics have been preserved over millennia”: Olivia Jaimes takes the day off.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“Masses Of Women Workers.” Photograph by Edward Clark. Washington, D.C. 1956. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a much larger view.]

I have seen desks in such a massive array only in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Notice the fans and the Shelter signage (the Atomic Age). This photograph was taken in preparation for the Life feature “Women Hold Third of Jobs” (December 24, 1956). The setting is the FBI “identification building,” where the typists (450 working in two shifts) were at work on fingerprint information.

Church Ave. Poultry Co.

My mom once told me in passing that as a girl she would walk with her grandmother to Thirteenth Avenue (“the Avenue,” the shopping street) to buy a chicken. In other words, to pick out a chicken while it was still in possession of its life. I think I’ve found the spot.

[Church Ave. Poultry Co., 3823 13th Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Aside from this photograph, the most substantial evidence I can find of the Church Ave. Poultry Co. is the record of a case heard by the Supreme Court of the State of New York. The members of the family connected to this property seem to have been, at least sometimes, at one another’s throats.

I think of the Live Poultry sign as a low-key relation of the stark, oxymoronic Live Poultry Fresh Killed sign known to residents of Boston and Cambridge and to readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest everywhere. The sign was sold when the Mayflower Poultry Company decamped from East Cambridge to Boston last year.

Back to Boro Park: The 3823 address is today Mike’s Dinettes. (“Since 1963.”) The wide sidewalk next to 3823 was, I’m pretty sure, the spot for Whitey, the banana man, who sold bananas from a pushcart, even in the early years of Mike’s Dinettes.

Related reading
All OCA Boro Park posts (Pinboard) : More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–2022)

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary.

I can recommend Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005).

Related reading
Two posts about Bait and Switch

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor. The pseudonym is meant to signal an easier Stumper, but I found this one difficult. I missed by two squares, stumbling on 3-D, four letters, “Record-breaking 30th tropical storm of 2005”; 15-A, ten letters, “Florida’s ‘Inland Sea’”; and 19-A, five letters, “Dumbledore’s double agent.” Three proper names, all unknown to me. (I read exactly two pages of the first Harry Potter book before giving up on the prose.) If I had thought about 3-D for a few seconds, I would have figured out the answer, and that would have given me the other two. But no. I was adrift in an inland sea, beset by a double agent and a storm.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, ten letters, “Flamboyant stuff.” A wonderful way to begin the puzzle.

4-D and 37-D, five letters each, “One of the brothers in a garbage can on a Time cover (1932).” The possibilities are many but not infinite.

30-A, four letters, “Bitter ender.” Nice.

33-D, four letters, “Spot checkers.” Also nice.

45-A, six letters, “Nine-decade actor, ‘the best there has ever been’ per Olivier.” I was going with LIONEL until I realized that I needed, as per the clue, a last name. The answer took me by surprise.

54-D, five letters, “Many a seal.” Clever.

67-A, ten letters, “Poetic inspiration for Lolita.” I haven’t seen this association in a crossword clue before.

I have a quarrel with 27-D, ten letters, “Biannual celebrant with Taylor Swift as its ambassador for 2022.” That’s not what it’s called. I misread the clue. But there’s still a problem with the clue, which is why I misread it. There’s an explanation in the comments.

My favorite clue in this puzzle is 69-A, ten letters, “What mixers get a lot of.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Forty-three folders

[From the detailed inventory of things found at Mar-a-Lago.]

I am late to the game, having been bopping around all day, but I’d still like to note the sheer weirdness of seeing “43 Empty Folders” in the inventory of things found at Mar-a-Lago. As anyone who has read David Allen’s Getting Things Done knows, “forty-three folders” is a thing, an element in Allen’s practice of productivity: twelve folders for the months of the year, thirty-one folders for the days of the current month. Allen doesn’t say anything though about what to do with classified materials.

Merlin Mann’s long-dormant website 43 Folders was a key resource for fans of GTD, “inbox zero,” and the Hipster PDA (index cards held together with a binder clip).

Related reading
All OCA Getting Things Done posts (Pinboard)

[The inventory lists a total of forty-eight empty folders with “CLASSIFIED” banners. Full disclosure: I have never attempted to use forty-three folders to organize things. I need many more.]