Wild strawberries

I think I have finally figured out what interests the deer who visit the back of our backyard: Fragaria vesca, or wild strawberries. They’re why the deer appear so choosy as they browse the ground.

No strawberries, as far as we know, for the tiny fawn, who is still nursing.

Memorial Day

[“Decorating a soldier's grave in one of the Negro sections on Memorial day.” Photograph by Esther Bubley. Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. May 1943. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Esther Bubley (1921–1998) was a photojournalist and documentary photographer.

Sunday in the park with geese

[After Seurat. Click for a larger view.]

I took the photo on Thursday, and that’s not a park. But those are geese.

I’ll post a tax photograph again next Sunday.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stella Zawistowski, exceedingly difficult, especially in the northeast and southwest. Persevere I did, and got it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, four letters, “Verb from the Latin for ‘hound.’ ” Uh, BARK? I never would have imagined the connection.

4-A, four letters, “To-day’s link.” From the northeast but obvious to me.

6-D, nine letters, “Impediment to a college education.” And to much else.

10-D, ten letters, “Whiskered UNICEF children’s ambassador.” In the northeast. I was desparate and looked up a list of UNICEF ambassadors but (fortunately) didn’t find an answer.

12-D, ten letters, “Where the stars come out.” OSCARNIGHT? No, that’s not a place.

16-A, four letters, “Darn it.” RATS? HOLE? From the northeast and far from obvious.

19-A, four letters, “Brand with a Lash Day sale in ’24.” Still in the northeast. I dislike brand-name trivia in crosswords.

20-A, eleven letters, “Got ready for rounds.” I thought must be about golf.

24-A, six letters, “Appeared in twice.” Back to the northeast. The idea of appearing here is foreign to me.

26-A, three letters, “‘Because I’m...’ ” A novel answer, clued smartly.

26-D, ten letters, “Evolutionary fitness enhancement.” From the southwest. I thought it had to be the name of a body part or function.

27-D, ten letters, “Kings’ residence.” Also in the southwest. Notice the apostrophe. I guessed the answer from its first and last letters.

29-A, three letters, “Post-retirement acronymn.” Clever.

51-A, eleven letters, “Converting leads into deals.” I had a hunch here.

My favorite in this puzzle: 45-A, three letters, “Grammy’s British equivalent.” The answer puzzled me, but I knew it had to be right. When I looked up british grammy equivalent after finishing the puzzle, I realized how thoroughly I’d been fooled.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

&udm=14

“If you want to give people easy access to an AI-free Google search, send them to this page”: &udm=14. And here, from CNET, is a page of instructions for making an AI-free Google search a default in various browsers.

In Safari, it’s not possible to create a custom search. But it’s easy to do so with Alfred or Launch Bar. In Alfred (which is what I know), you can create a custom web search that looks like this:

https://www.google.com/search?q='{query}'&udm=14

I named mine goo.

A font for jokes

From the Hacks episode “The Deborah Vance Christmas Spectacular,” which aired last night on Max. Larry Arbuckle (Christopher Lloyd) has shown his screenplay about his grandfather Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to Jimmy (Paul W. Downs):

“You like the font?”

“Yeah.”

“I put the jokes in Comic Sans so you know they’re supposed to be funny.”

And Jimmy, who has reason to like everything about this screenplay, says that sticking to one font is a missed opportunity. The Comic Sans, he says, makes things “voice-y.”

Recently updated

“Happy Reunion,” four times Tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves again, in a 1971 performance. Great closeups of Duke Ellington and Gonsalves at work.

From Sonny Rollins’s notebooks

From The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, ed. Sam V.H. Reese (New York Review Books, 2024). Four separate entries, widely separated in time:

Persevere I shall.

“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
— a wise man on living life.

One day in the future people will be saying, “Yes, I once saw Sonny Rollins.”

No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.

Related reading
All OCA Sonny Rollins posts (Pinboard)

[This volume might be of limited interest to a non-saxophonist: many, many entries are devoted to practice routines, scales, breathing, fingerings, and embouchure. If nothing else, those entries give a non-saxophonist an idea of how much work goes into producing a sound. Yet another example of why “close enough for jazz” is uninformed nonsense.]

Revised cosmology

It’s cicadas all the way down.

Another Alito flag

From The New York Times (gift link), “Another Provocative Flag Was Flown at Another Alito Home”:

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

It is time for him to go. Thomas too.