Mimestream out of beta

Mimestream, the great Gmail client for Mac, is out of beta and thus no longer available for free. I’ve been using Mimestream since November 2021. As I wrote back then, “I plan to pay for the app when it goes to market, even (so help me) if it’s available only by subscription.” It is now available by subscription only, and I have kept my word.

“The three-ring kind”

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

Pretzels turn up here and there in Steven Millhauser’s fiction: rods, sticks, and (elsewhere) three-ringers. I think of them as a marker of mid-century American life, like plaid thermoses and transistor radios. One of the books on Edwin Mullhouse’s bookshelf when he’s two and three: The Little Pretzel Who Had No Salt.

Here is the pretzel form that young Catherine is missing:

[Life, March 8, 1968. Click for a larger, saltier view.]

Raise your hand if you remember when pretzels came in waxed-paper bags enclosed in carboard boxes. Raise your hand if you remember when “salty” was a selling point.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Alembic, humph

[New York Times Spelling Bee, May 23, 2023.]

I thought that alembic would be one of today’s pangrams. “Not in word list,” says the Bee. Humph.

Merriam-Webster has it covered: “an apparatus used in distillation,” “something that refines or transmutes as if by distillation.” There’s even an illustration.

Sample sentence: “I thought that alembic would be one of today’s pangrams.”

“Reachable by rowboat”

The New Dressler is no ordinary hotel.

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).

If this description piques your interest, read the novel and discover the wonders of Martin Dressler’s next hotel, the Grand Cosmo.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

A word of a day: gamut

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day yesterday was gamut. Dig its origin:

The first note on the scale of Guido d’Arezzo, an 11th century musician and monk who had his own way of applying syllables to musical tones, was ut. D’Arezzo also called the first line of his bass staff gamma, which meant that gamma ut was the term for a note written on the first staff line. In time, gamma ut underwent a shortening to gamut, and later its meaning expanded first to cover all the notes of d’Arezzo’s scale, then to cover all the notes in the range of an instrument, and, eventually, to cover an entire range of any sort.

The American Heritage Dictionary entry for gamut provides a helpful gloss on ut :

first word in a Latin hymn to Saint John the Baptist, the initial syllables of successive lines of which were sung to the notes of an ascending scale CDEFGA: Ut queant laxis re sonare fibris Mi ra gestorum fa muli tuorum, Sol ve polluti la bii reatum, Sancte Iohannes.

A Wikipedia article about the hymn “Ut queant laxis” has much more, including the addition of the note si, later ti, a drink with jam and bread.

On a related note: here are Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, and Van Dyke Parks, performing Woody Guthrie’s Do Re Mi.

[Too late: after writing this post, I discovered that gamut was the subject of a less detailed 2005 OCA post. I’ve capitalized the name d’Arezzo in the second sentence of the passage from Merriam-Webster. From The Chicago Manual of Style, 8.5, “Names with particles”: “When the surname is used alone, the particle is usually (but not always) retained, capitalized or lowercased and spaced as in the full name (though always capitalized when beginning a sentence or a note).”]

Horse fail

In the aftermath of the Preakness Stakes, many references in the news to a horse failing a drug test. To my ear, that’s like saying that a car failed a sobriety test. It would make better sense to say that a horse was given or injected with a banned substance. It’s the owners or trainers who failed the horse.

Grim, grey, unaffordable

[829–849 39th Street, Sunset Park, Brooklyn. c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.]

The archives say 38th Street, but in fact it’s 39th, between 8th and 9th Avenues, not far from New Utrecht Avenue. I like this grim, grey assortment of buildings and think all four of these photographs belong in one post.

Can you spot the mysterious figure in one of the photographs? Gotta click through.

By 1943, Allied Builders Supply Corp. had run into difficulty with creditors. In the 1980s, its address, 829–833, was still home to a building supply business, whose tax photo is far too blurry to yield a name. Today, 829–833 houses a Holiday Inn Express and a condo development. No more auto wrecking at 839: Model Garage has been at that address since at least the 1980s.

And 849? It still stands as a funky residence, now valued at more than $1.5 million. You begin to understand why we gave up on the idea of retiring to Brooklyn. These photographs are much more affordable.

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

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Lester Ruff,” Stan Newman, the puzzle’e editor. It was an easier (less rough) Stumper, but that didn’t stop me from missing by one square, at the intersection of 34-D, four letters, “It means ‘little’” and 42-A, twelve letters, “Emma Watson’s Little Women sister.”

The problem (for me): there are two equally plausible possibilities for 34-D, and if you don’t know how to spell the name of Emma Watson’s Little Women sister — that is, the name of the actor who plays that sister — you might have already dropped in the wrong four-letter answer, as I saw I had when I checked the grid. I’m not sure if that intersection is a deliberately tricky spot or an oversight, but I’m going to offer (in the comments) what I think is a better (fairer) 34-D clue.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Earned C’s.” Clever, especially as the first six letters might leave you wondering what else to add. My favorite in this puzzle.

1-D, four letters, “Android ancestors.” I remember mine somewhat fondly.

5-D, three letters and 57-A, eight letters, “Spiritual leader’s resource.” I don’t get either answer.

6-D, seven letters, “Second shots.” Takes me back.

7-D, six letters, “Word from the Greek for ‘milk.’” I learned it from a friend not long ago.

15-A, eight letters, “Cleaner named for its ‘round-the-clock’ value.” Cleaner? Eww.

29-D, six letters, “Biblical commissioner.” Heh.

52-D, four letters, “Galileo’s ‘sunlight, held together by water.’” I took a (good) guess.

61-A, six letters, “Head rest in the Beatles’ ‘Octopus’s Garden.’” Whaddaya know? The word is indeed in the lyrics.

62-A, eight letters, “Request for inspirational assistance.” I thought this clue must be a pun about breathing.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Great Lives: Terry Hall

The BBC Radio 4 broadcast Great Lives looks at the life of Terry Hall, lead singer of the Specials.

I’ve been following Great Lives for more than three years. This episode is one of the best I’ve heard.

A related post
Terry Hall (1959–2022)

Turn on your hazard lights, &c.

What with people taking to the highways this time of year, I thought I’d repost some suggestions I wrote out in 2011:

If you’re driving on a highway and the traffic suddenly slows or stops, and the vehicles behind you are at some distance:

1. Turn on your hazard lights.

2. Leave significant space between you and the vehicle in front of you.

3. Keep checking your rear-view mirror.

4. After someone has come up behind you, turn your hazard lights off.

If someone coming up behind you is not paying full attention, your hazard lights might catch their eye and prompt them to slow down or stop in time. If not, the free space in front of your vehicle might lessen the severity of a collision.

I called the Illinois State Police to ask what they thought about using hazard lights in this way. A desk sergeant said it was the right thing to do and added the second and third suggestions. I've added the fourth for clarity. Please, pass them on.

[What prompted me to think about these things? Driving on interstates through rain and fog and using hazard lights when traffic suddenly slowed and I was the last in line. I also left significant space and checked my mirror, but I do those things without thinking and would not have thought to recommend them.]