Density and amenities

[2456 Jerome Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like urban density. The southwest corner of the intersection of East Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue was full of it. And look at all the amenities: a mailbox, telephone booths, and public transportation. You can see just a bit of the IRT Jerome Avenue Line to the right. Notice too all the paper bags, held by people shopping on foot, buying what they can carry.

As a commuting college student, I drove through this intersection many times, long after the heyday of United Cigars. An Optimo Cigars sign was on the corner store when I was a student. Today that corner is a drugstore. No phone booths, no doubt. And no mailbox outside. The IRT still runs above.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives : Urban density on 14th Street

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” or Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle editor, using the pseudonym that signifies an easier Stumper. What else might signify easier Stumper ? Teresa Umpires? I think Stan’s pseudonym is better.

This Stumper was easier, though not too easy. Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, twelve letters, “One paid to talk since the 1920s.” The decade should have helped, but for me this clue seems to have a deliberate obliqueness.

6-D, seven letters, “Show stoppers.” BIGHITS? No. So simple once you see it, if you see it.

12-D, six letters, “Melt down or hand down.” Really clever.

18-A, seven letters, “Not as sensible.” I typed this word yesterday, probably for the first time, and checked to make sure it’s a real word.

29-A, four letters, “Painter’s canvas.” Nice.

48-A, five letters, “Sweet sandwich.” Five letters — no OREO here.

56-D, four letters, “Very soon after.” The most modest words can slightly baffle.

62-A, twelve letters, “Hardly in a sorry state.” I would’ve liked FITASAFIDDLE.

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 59-A, fifteen letters, “Supermarket checkout staple.” Definitely not an IMPULSEPURCHASE for me.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Dots and forms

[Click for a dottier view.]

It’s oddly reassuring to see that our trash pickup still bills with a dot-matrix printer and tractor-feed forms. But this year: no side perforations on the forms. Times, changing.

Luddite Club

“We’re not expecting everyone to have a flip phone. We just see a problem with mental health and screen use”: in Brooklyn, teenagers have formed a Luddite Club. They meet to draw, paint, read, talk. Their mascot: Arthur from PBS.

[A great premise for a Wes Anderson film?]

NYT Spelling Bee fail

From today’s New York Times Spelling Bee:

 

Note to the Times: there is always an aporia.

[After Yeats, on the work of the poet: “He never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria.”]

Me, reading

The perspicacious Michael Leddy of Charleston, Illinois, was on my Panel of Critical Readers for this book. I’m told that he has been in this position for hours, with rapt (not *wrapt) attention. He brings relentless perspicacity to the reading. #GMEU5 pic.twitter.com/ywlPoDSrIB

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) December 15, 2022

Bryan Garner asked panel members to send photographs of themselves reading entries they commented on for the now-published fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage. So here, or there, I am. The photograph is by Elaine Fine.

Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard) : A critical reader

Word of the day: niche

In Crime and Punishment (trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky), Svidrigailov asks, “Où va-t-elle la vertu se nicher?” In other words, “Where is virtue going to build her nest?” A note for this sentence reads, “The playwright Molière (1622–73) is said to have asked this of a beggar who thought he had made a mistake in giving him a gold piece.”

I wondered: is the English word niche related to nicher ? Maybe, possibly, maybe, perhaps.

I recall the mantra that the local Chamber of Commerce repeated in weekly newspaper columns aimed at area merchants: Find your niche. Find your niche. I think that many a merchant must have closed up and skipped town to look for theirs.

Free COVID tests (again)

Once again, every United States household can order four free COVID-19 tests: here.

Words and money and adjunctdom

In The Washington Post Helaine Owen asks, “How progressive can a college be when instructors make poverty wages?” Before a recent strike and settlement, adjunct faculty at New York City’s The New School (87% of all New School faculty) were paid as little as $4000 a course, “while the university hired pricey management consultants and offered its president the opportunity to live in a multimillion-dollar New York City townhouse”:

This apparent unfairness sat uneasily with the principles of equality that have become so important on college campuses, particularly left-leaning ones like the New School. Like most colleges, the school regularly announces DEI — that’s diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives. And the school’s president, Dwight McBride, tweets such things as “liberation is intersectional.” It’s not surprising that many less-than-well-compensated staffers eventually asked, “What about me?”

“Words like ‘equity,’ ‘inclusion’ or ‘care’ should be used with consideration for what they really mean,” says Matthew Spiegelman, who teaches photography at the New School’s Parsons School of Design. “The more they get used in conversation and not acted on, the less they mean anything.”

Jean who?

“The phenomenon of A Christmas Story leaves those of us familiar with Shepherd as a writer wondering just how many of the multitude of viewers ever read, or even know of, the original short stories, which both inform and interestingly differ from the film”: Samuel G. Freedman writes about Jean Shepherd (The Washington Post).

I listened to Jean Shepherd through much of high school — transistor radio and earphone. One man talking, on WOR, night after night. Excelsior!