Some Automats

[155 W. 33rd Street, 250 W. 42nd Street, 611 W. 181st Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much, much, much larger view.]

There are thirty-eight Horn and Hardart Automats in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory. This has been some of them.

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

[“There are thirty-eight”: I’m channeling The Naked City and Naked City. There were also eighteen Horn and Hardart retail outlets in Manhattan, one Automat and two retail outlets in Brooklyn, eight retail outlets in the Bronx, and “some” (three) retail outlets in Queens.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff (puzzle editor Stan Newman), and, yes, it is Less Rough. I started with 8-A, seven letters, “Shakespearean general” and 14-D, seven letters, “Why some risks are taken,” and then word after word fell into place. The one tricky spot: the southwest corner, where an unfamiliar answer, a tricky clue, and a piece of sports trivia had me stumped for a bit.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, seven letters, “Surname shared by different Best Actor Oscar winners.” I immediately thought HEPBURN. But no, the clue asks for Best Actor.

15-A, seven letters, “Step-by-step guide.” I was thinking too literally — of, say, IKEA instructions. (Shudder.)

28-D, five letters, “Word before clerk or company.” Been there, done that, at least the clerk part. And the non-clerk in me says there should be two pairs of italics or quotation marks in that clue.

38-A, eight letters, “Pulley with teeth.” Difficult for me to visualize, perhaps because I’ve never noticed one.

38-D, seven letters, “It’s handled in the kitchen.” The answer is unfamiliar to me, though I concede that the thing is handled in the kitchen.

39-D, seven letters, “Plain.” Tricky.

40-D, seven letters, “Big Ten team as of 2014.” There’s the sports trivia. (Could this puzzle be a rerun?)

53-A, four letters, “Feet, so to speak.” This answer needs to be brought back into everyday speech.

62-A, seven letters, “It puts the ‘high’ in highway.” All I could think of at first was an overpass.

64-A, seven letters, “Fit nicely.” A cozy answer.

My favorite in this puzzle: 59-D, three letters, “It’s about as old as the club.” (AXE?!)

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Current events

Orange Crate Art began as a way for me to collect items of interest for my teaching, as such items began to turn up online more often than in print. But early on, OCA became about whatever I wanted it to be about. Which often makes it difficult to know what to do with current events.

I am thinking of every post right now as a flight from current events. Those events are always on my mind. I am appalled by the killing of innocent people in Israel and Gaza. I am appalled by barbarism and terrorism, whatever the cause. I am appalled by religious hatred and xenophobia and the mindless chanting of slogans. I am appalled by the indiscriminate use of force, as Simone Weil defined it: “it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”

But I have no special insight into current events. Other people do, and it’s for them to speak and write about them.

Waiting for Bob Dylan

I was walking down the block of my childhood, 44th Street between New Utrecht and 12th, in Boro Park, Brooklyn. Such traffic: cars were backed up in the wrong direction all down the one-way street. They must have changed the traffic pattern since my childhood.

I saw the guy to whom Elaine and I had given a can of Fix-a-Flat the other day. He and his nephew had been in a university paking lot, trying to roll a car with a dead battery and flat tire onto a trailer. We helped push — no use — and invited the uncle to walk back to our house with us (a five-minute walk) so we could give him the can. Now he was waiting in this line of idling cars to meet and get an autograph from Bob Dylan.

I saw the uncle again, but now his car was further back, at the end of the block, as if the line in front of him had lengthened. I was in my car, parked alongside him. “When you move forward, I’ll pull in,” I said. And some time later, I was at the head of the line outside Bob Dylan’s hotel room.

The room was small and windowless, lit by a table lamp. Dylan was lying on a bed, head on a pillow, playing an acoustic guitar. Alongside him, at a 45-degree angle, in a long red robe, was a woman scatting an old standard, maybe “Indiana,” maybe “Pennies from Heaven,” maybe “Whispering.” Dylan was playing an astonishingly good accompaniment, with all sorts of complex substitute chords. I was, as I said to myself, “agape and aghast” and began recording on my phone. Then I decided I didn’t want any of this on my phone, so I stopped.

When the song was done, Dylan rose from the bed and walked out of the room and past the line of people. He was taking a break. “Hi Bob,” someone said. He didn’t acknowledge them. I realized that I had had a question to ask, but now I couldn’t remember it. And I had left in the car the album I was going to ask him to sign. I didn’t think there was time to walk back and get it.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[The Fix-a-Flat is from waking life. No idea where Dylan came from. “Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). Here is “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”]

Exceedingly strange

The Strangest Toy on Wish Lists This Year“” (The New York Times, gift link).

11 More Shopping Days

[From I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (dir. William Nigh, 1948). Click for a larger view.]

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes is a perfect B-noir. It’s streaming at the Criterion Channel.

[The shadows on the sign are made by the lettering on the window: “Norris Dept. Store.”]

Orange crate racer

[From C.J. Maginley, Make It and Ride It (1949). Click for a larger, more luxurious ride.]

You can find the book at archive.org. Instructions begin on page 52.

Thanks, Fresca, for sending these wheels my way.

Related posts
A Henry scooter : Roller-Scooter truck assemblies : Scooter construction

iA Writer is not AI

From an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “ChatGPT Has Changed Teaching. Our Readers Tell Us How,” quoting an instructor’s revised syllabus:

“Since writing, analytical, and critical-thinking skills are part of the learning outcomes of this course, all writing assignments should be prepared by the student,” it reads, in part. “Developing strong competencies in this area will prepare you for the competitive work force. Therefore, AI-generated submissions (using ChatGPT, IA Writer, Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) are not permitted and will be treated as plagiarism.”

Yikes: iA Writer is not an app for AI-generated prose. It is a writing app for humans who use macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Windows, and Android. The app should not be confused with AI-Writer, an online app for AI-generated prose.

The latest versions of IA Writer for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS offer an option to to mark copy-and-pasted AI-generated text so as to distinguish it from the writer’s own words. But that’s an option meant to keep a writer from passing off AI-generated text as their own.

I’m a happy user of iA Writer, and I’d hate to think of any professor mistakenly warning a student off it.

Related posts
iA Writer : iA Writer keyboard commands

[I don’t know anything about AI-Writer.]

“Triptych! Trilogy! Troika!”

[Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy, “Inside Baseball,” is all about some rocks.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

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