The shadows

[2516 Hughes Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Residential blocks are seldom the most compelling viewing in the WPA tax photographs. But then a building shows up with people looking out from windows and doorways, watching the photographers, and a block has interest. Or there’s a kid stuck minding the baby carriage, and lots of long shadows in the foreground. And one mysteriously long, long shadow. How? Why? The shadows know.

Today the corner where this residence and others stood is home to the Avicenna Surgery Center.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

What I’d like to see in Succession

The fourth and final season of Succession begins tomorrow. What I’d like to see: a far greater exploration of the family past. The opening credits are entirely about the childhood world of the Roy offspring, but we’ve learned about that world only in dribs and drabs. Or maybe just dribs. What, for instance, became of Connor’s mother? We have no idea. And further back: what happened to Logan Roy’s sister Rose? I’d like to learn something that might make the Roys appear more than merely hateful, scheming, and inane. Or if they are to remain merely hateful, scheming, and inane, I’d like at least to learn something that would do more to account for the family dynamic.

I’m thinking especially about an enigmatic moment in the opening credits: a glimpse of a woman reclining on a chaise longue, looking across a lawn. Then again, it may not be meant as enigmatic: it may be just one more surface detail of privilege.

And I’d like to learn what Tom Wambsgans is really all about.

[I think my general problem with Succession is that I keep expecting it to be more than it is.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg. It’s tough, knotty, difficult, formidable. (And I just accounted for all its answers — of one, two, three, and four syllables.) I missed by one square: having come up with a wholly plausible answer for 1-A, four letters, “Dough additive,” an answer that I never thought to second-guess, I assumed that the resulting answer for 1-D, four letters, “Plotter's preparations” was strained and Stumpery. But it was just wrong.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

8-D, thirteen letters, “Stay out all night.” Nice.

9-A, three letters, “Entryway adorned with a butterfly.” Pretty strained.

10-D, five letters, “Cliffside debris.” I like this word.

16-A, ten letters, “Publishing bottleneck.” A novel answer, no pun intended.

23-A, eight letters, “Dander-free pets.” Elaine approved of this clue when I ran it by her, but as she also points out, apples are a gluten-free food. And I am writing at a dander-free desk, on a fragrance-free MacBook Air. There’s something odd about calling these critters dander-free.

26-D, ten letters, “Multi-milk Mexican dessert.” A giveaway, I think, but I’ll take it.

38-A, eleven letters, “Small corner gatherings.” Clever.

43-A, eight letters, “Person paid to wave.” I think the Saturday Stumper is a bit obsessed with this line of work, or clueing.

45-A, eight letters, “Third quarters.” Stumpery.

My favorite in this puzzle, because it broke things open and because I got the answer from nothing more than its last three letters: 17-D, thirteen letters, “Contemporary office trend.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“You’re sitting in a tree, Cath”

Catherine is troubled. She and Peter Schiller went down the hill together, on one sled, he on top of her. He said “Love you” or “I love you” in her ear.

Steven Millhauser, “The Sledding Party,” in In the Penny Arcade (1986).

A Salingeresque moment, I’d say.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Ducks?

[“Sole Music.” Zippy, March 25, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy made me wonder: are they still called duck boots?

A DuckDuckGo search (heh) for l l bean duck boots turns up L.L. Bean pages with duck in the title: e.g., “The Original Duck Boot”. But go the page, and there’s no duck. Look at the page source (which I don’t really know how to make sense of), and duck is in there. Search the Bean site for duck boots, and boots show up, minus duck. Search the Bean site for duck alone, and nothing shows up. But: “We did find results for ‘duskiness.’”

My guess is that associations with guns and hunting make it simpler for L.L. Bean to keep the duck part quiet.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[The label on my newish Bean Boot Gumshoes says “Bean Boots.” My old ones wore out after thirty years or so.]

“God, you’re prejudiced”

Eleanor Schumann, a chronic absentee, a high-school Annabel Lee (though she hates Poe), keeper of her own Childhood Museum (accessed via a door in the back wall of a closet), has changed. Arthur Grumm, who visits Eleanor in her bedroom after school, doesn’t like it.

Steven Millhauser, Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

That’s the last passage I’m posting from Portrait of a Romantic, It’s a terrific novel, exploring several varieties of adolescent experience, as recounted by a former adolescent — twenty-nine-year-old Grumm, one who made it out, at least sort of.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Perimeter oscillations

Wow:

The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. This new identity manifests itself in an authentic geometry that is to become proprietary to the Pepsi culture.

I’m not sure how I came to notice this document, a 2008 working proposal for a redesign of the Pepsi logo by “brand guru” Peter Arnell. Newsweek deemed it real. If it’s not real, it’s at least real gone.

[Speaking of branding: Pepsi-Cola became Pepsi in 1961. Who knew?]

Menuwhere

Menuwhere is a tiny app from Many Tricks that opens a Mac app’s menu wherever you are on the screen. This page offers a complete explanation. I like the developers’ sense of humor: “Menuwhere isn’t available on the Mac App Store due to the store’s restrictions on newly-released utilities that actually do useful things.” Only $3. Fun to play with while waiting for news of an indictment.

Willis Reed (1942–2023)

The New York Knicks center has died at the age of eighty. The New York Times has an obituary, with a video feature about game seven of the 1970 NBA championship series.

[I don’t pay attention to sports now, but I was a big Knicks fan back in the day.]

Aldi and Garfunkel

[Click for a much larger view and look closely.]

I know from a friend that this arrangement is not found in every Aldi. I hope someone at our Aldi meant for it to be noticed.