Theory of dairy farming

Darya Aleksandrov Oblonsky and Konstantin Dimitrievich Levin are talking about cows. Levin would like the keep the conversation from straying to the subject of Darya’s sister Katerina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

Casual speculation: I wonder if this passage is the inspiration for the famous quip “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems,” often attributed to Paul Erdős. Erdős, however, credited Alfred Rényi.

Also from this novel
“The turning point of summer”

Positive anymore at the pump

I heard someone on the other side of the gas pump:

“Lot of rigmarole just to get fuel anymore.”

I don’t know if he was complaining (about the ATM-like keypad) to himself or to someone on a phone. What I do know is that I was hearing an instance of positive anymore.

[I was slightly surprised to hear the standard form rigmarole and not rigamarole, which is the way I’ve known the word since childhood.]

A Ted Berrigan event

A Ted Berrigan Celebration: a Zoom event, September 15, 7:00 p.m. Central, at Magic City Books, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here’s one of Ted’s sons, Edmund Berrigan, also a poet, talking about his father with KTUL.

The occasion for this event: the publication of Get the Money!: Collected Prose (1961-1983) (City Lights Books).

Related reading
All OCA Ted Berrigan posts (Pinboard)

Defeated former president in D.C.

The defeated former president flew into Washington, D.C., wearing a brown jacket, white polo shirt, and what appear to be golf shoes. Oh — and pants. This news was all over Twitter last night, but it’s still largely unreported by the press. What’s it mean? A medical emergency? An impending indictment?

*

The dfp says on his faux-Twitter that he is “working" at his D.C. golf club.

Urban density

[C. 58 East 14th Street, New York, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I went browsing in the Village and found this lovely moment of urban density. I tried counting the words: close to ninety, I think. This stretch of East 14th Street is now — what else? — a Duane Reade. Three words. Duane. Reade. Pharmacy.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

9/11

Twenty-one years after the fact, and I can’t see a cloudless sky without thinking of September 11, 2001. I remember that day and those that followed as having intensely blue and cloudless skies.

Marsha Hunt (1917–2022)

She had a fine comic turn as Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1940). But our household knows her better as a familiar face in film noir. The New York Times has an obituary.

The documentary Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity (dir. Roger C. Memos, 2015) is worth seeking out. I suspect TCM will air it again soon.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. I’d say it’s half as tough as his last Stumper — for me, that meant fifteen minutes instead of thirty.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “One making service calls.” I thought of plumbers and tennis umpires.

1-D, four letters, “Key missing ON & O.” Kinda obvious, but deeply defamiliarizing, at least for me. When I see key, my first thought is music.

26-D, ten letters, “Alchemist’s ‘little person’ statue.” I can’t recall when I last saw this answer. Long, long ago.

36-D, nine letters, “Highly hoppy refreshment.” I have enjoyed hoppy refreshment, but I had no idea there is such a thing. It seems to me to be a marketing gimmick.

40-A, eight letters, “Ultra-extreme.” Nicely colloquial, though it makes me think of political nutjobs.

41-A, six letters, “What you must provide for a kid’s cable car kit.” I got the answer and thought What?  It turns out that you can make a cable car from a kit. But I think you’d be providing something else, even if 41-A is in the name of said kit.

52-D, “Body language?” A bit of a stretch. More than a bit. A great big stretch in the interest of Stumpery.

58-D, three letters, “Audible crack.” Ha.

My favorite clues in this puzzle, both exceptionally clever:

12-D, ten letters, “One in a recital trio.”

28-A, four letters, “What may precede a Q & A.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Food for thought

Media priorities: ABC, CBS, and NBC are covering King Charles speech live today; none of them carried President Biden’s primetime address on threats to our democracy.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) September 9, 2022

日本の電報

“Old friends send them for funerals. Politicians deliver them to constituents. And businesses use them to commemorate the retirement of valued employees”: telegrams in Japan (The New York Times).

Other telegram posts
DOWDY WORLD MOURNS END OF ERA STOP : The Retro-Gram : URGENT EXCLAMATION POINT : What is a straight wire?

[日本の電報: Nihon no denpō, Japanese telegrams, or telegrams in Japan. Via Google Translate, but it appears to be correct.]