Helen Keller on lines

Helen Keller writes that what she calls beauty is “largely derived from the flow of curved and straight lines which is over all things”:

Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1908).

The book is in the public domain, available in print form from Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, and in audio and Braille from the Library of Congress. Our household has it in its New York Review Books edition.

A free 2024 calendar

One last PSA: I’ve made a free calendar for the new year, three months per 8 1/2 × 11 page, highly readable across a crowded room or a smoke-filled film-noir soundstage. In black and dark red Gills Sans. With minimal holiday markings: New Year’s Day, MLK Day, Juneteenth, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas.

As the print-center worker who printed this year’s copies for me said, “It looks like an old-fashioned calendar.” Exactly. Made in the new old-fashioned way, on a Mac, with Pages and tables.

You can download the PDF from this Dropbox link.

[I’ve been making calendars since late 2009, when the cost of outfitting my house with Field Notes calendars began to feel unjustifiable.]

Ringo as broccoli

“I’m 99 percent broccoli,” Ringo Starr tells AARP.

There’s a sentence I never could have imagined writing.

Bookstores, reading, data

“Sadly, reading has declined sharply across the entire age spectrum in recent years. But there’s one notable, hopeful exception": from the Department of Data at The Washington Post, bad news and some good news about bookstores and reading (gift link).

Christmas 1923

[“Dr. Guthrie Finds Yule All Pagan. St. Mark’s Rector Says Gift Custom Was Roman, Mistletoe Celtic and Tree Teutonic. Roots of Christmas Gone. In New York an Exotic Plant, He Declares, and Celebrated with Heavy Drinking.” The New York Times, December 26, 1923. Click for a larger view.]

I think it must have been a confusing Christmas at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie in 1923.

In 2023, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

[Wikipedia explains the Christmas pudding.]

Yamandu Costa plays

Here’s one minute and eighteen seconds of guitar music. I think you’ll recognize the melody.

SUITS PRESSED

[1441 Broadway, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The white arrow (barely visible) on the address sign points to the large building, the Bricken Textile Building. The New York Times noted its January 20, 1930 opening. The building still stands. What I like in this photograph though is the small stuff: those clashing planes of signage. I can decipher almost everything in front of LIQUOR:

[SUITS PRESSED / while you wait / FRENCH DRY CLEANING / SKILLFUL TAILORING / We guarantee to / (?) CLOTHES / (?) SPECIAL PROCESS / CURTAINS & DRAPES / for home office (?) / QUALITY DRY CLEANED / BERGER SERVICE / 151. Click for a larger view.]

Aha: Berger Service Cleaning & Dyeing Corp. has listings and advertisements for Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens locations in the 1940 telephone directories. And there’s 151, at 151 West 41st Street. “E. of Broadway,” says an advertisement that runs across the tops of three columns in the Manhattan directory.

[Click for a larger view.]

[Click for a larger view.]

Alas, there is no tax photograph for 151, at least not that I can find, and no tax photographs of adjacent addresses. So this glimpse of the sign is the only glimpse I’ve got.

Yelp lists one address for Berger Service Cleaning & Dye Corporation — 4 W. 63rd Street — with three reviews, the most recent from 2018. Google Maps has the same address, with the most recent review from last month. In other words, there’s still a Berger in Manhattan, apparently in an apartment building.

As for other details in the photograph:

The light-colored car says RADIO — it must be a cab, no doubt yellow. The van alongside it: METROPOLITAN NEWS CO., a distribution service for newspapers and magazines. Robert B. Cohen acquired the company in 1985. Cohen also ran the Hudson County News Company, precursor of the now-ubiquitous Hudson News outlets. Which brings us back to the present.

*

December 26: A reader suggests that the words below “CURTAINS & DRAPES” might be “for home office.” Thanks, reader. And then there’s a third word. What? Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Hudson County: a county in northern New Jersey. My dad grew up there, which brings us back to the past.]

The Times investigates Hallmark and Lifetime movies

Stuff like this makes me want to just ditch my subscription and read for free through my university’s site license: “Just How Formulaic Are Hallmark and Lifetime Holiday Movies? We (Over)analyzed 424 of Them.”

One writer, seven people researching.

The short answer, per our household: pretty derivative.

[Our one Hallmark movie this year: Friends & Family Christmas. It’s a lesbian love story, with fake dating, painfully intrusive parents, a Brooklyn art lab, and “travel grants for innovative thinkers.” We watch one Hallmark movie a year.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, constructing as himself. So the puzzle is not Lester Ruff, nor is it Ova Lee Ruff. Yes, Ova is a girl’s name. The puzzle looks daunting, with stacks top and bottom, fourteen–fourteen–fifteen, fifteen–fourteen–fourteen. But the daunt is less than I imagined. No, daunt is not really a noun.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, fourteen letters, “Late fourth-quarter flora.” My first thought was “something ending in PLANT.” What do I know?

7-D, seven letters, “Mental bloc.” Heh.

15-A, fourteen letters, “What ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ begins.” I love it.

16-A, fiften letters, “Common interview settings.” At least it’s not HOTELROOMS, the at least semi-creepy settings for MLA interviews of yore.

18-A, seven letters, “Cause to ride on the wrong carousel.” A quietly clever clue. Film noirs made me imagine someone saying “Sorry, pal, I’m getting off this merry-go-round.”

22-A, five letters, “What fills some dumplings.” See 44-D.

28-A, eight letters, “They raise sunken objects.” So that’s what they do?

30-A, three letters, “‘He who slings ___ loses ground’: Adlai Stevenson.” Would it were so.

32-D, eight letters, “Current event.” Maybe a familiar clue for the answer, but new to me.

35-D, six letters, “Oil source for thousands of years.” No drilling allowed.

44-D, five letters, “Source of tones shaped like 22 Across.” Another quietly clever clue.

46-A, four letters, “Andy Griffith played one on his sitcom.” The middle letters make this one tricky.

52-D, three letters, “Two-time connector.” Pretty Stumpery.

A quibble: 11-D, three letters, “Where an applause meter starts.” No, I say.

A quarrel: 12-D, six letters, “Topper back in style circa 2007.” Back? It’s never gone out of style. Ask Elaine.

An enigma: 29-D, three letters, “Private property.” I have no idea what the answer means.

My favorite in this puzzle: 51-A, fifteen letters, “What ‘My Girl’ is sung with.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Some novelty among the stars”

In the city of Andria “every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars.” The city’s daily doings correspond to that day’s sky, “and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky relect each other.” And yet — the city is always changing, older structures being removed, new ones being built.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: HarperCollins, 1974).

Related reading
All OCA Italo Calvino posts (Pinboard)