When crosswords try to do jazz

I saw the answer coming Caleb Madison’s Atlantic crossword, but I couldn’t believe it: 8-D, eleven letters, “Basie handle.” Answer: KINGOFSWING.

Count Basie was was known as the Kid from Red Bank. But it was Benny Goodman who was known as the King of Swing.

See also the Los Angeles Times crossword and Duke Ellington, the New Yorker crossword and Jelly Roll Morton, and the New York Times crossword and Mel Tormé.

Empire of signs

[8 Columbus Circle, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Can you spot the wingback chair?

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

[Post title borrowed from Roland Barthes’s book about Japan. La Marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir) was released in 1938. I don’t know when it arrived in the States. Swanee River (dir. Sidney Lanfield) was released on December 30, 1939.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman. Its distinctive feature: five (count ’em, five) fifteen-letter answers. Yow!

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note, including those five:

2-D, fifteen letters, “Graze, say.” Hilarious, at least to me.

3-D, five letters, “King’s claim to musical fame.” I like that.

6-D, three letters, “Tall character in Son of Godzilla.” Quite a stretch.

11-D, fifteen letters, “‘Finally...’” I imagine a meeting going on and on. And on.

12-D, six letters, “Becomes a waiter, with ‘up.’” Didn’t fool me.

16-A, fifteen letters, “Kicks back, as boxes.” The first two words misdirect nicely.

21-A, four letters, “Capital consonants resembling two vowels.” I got it, but I need an explanation.

22-A, five letters, “Where rock bands hang out.” See 12-D.

26-A, five letters, “Multination org. named for its first five members (its ’23 summit included da Silva, Lavrov, Modi, Xi, and the ANC leader).” I suspect that the prolix clue is an acknowledgement that most solvers will have no idea what the answer is.

31-A, fifteen letters, “PVC product.” I didn’t see this answer coming.

34-D, eight letters, “Candide’s mentor.” I hadn’t thought of him in years.

49-A, fifteen letters, “‘Old Ironsides’ is the Army’s oldest.” Note: Army.

My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, five letters, “Possible response to ‘Don’t know.’” Coming after 26-A, it’s appropriate.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bacon, wind

[The Guardian, August 30, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

This headline alone makes me think that I should be supporting The Guardian.

University library or storage room?

The firing of librarians at Western Illinois University has drawn the attention of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles:

I hate to break it to the bean counters, but a university library without academic librarians is called a storage room.

A related post
Firing the librarians

NYT, sheesh

[The New York Times, August 30, 2024.]

From an article in today’s paper. Elaine saw it via someone else who’d seen it. Thanks, Elaine.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Smells

From a novel in the form of a college application essay: “Characterize, in essay form, your high school experience. You may use additional sheets of paper as needed.”

Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

Young Nifkin is applying to St. Leon’s College, Parnassus on Hudson, New York. Get it? That’s a pseudonym for the college Pinkwater attended.

This passage brings back to me the smell of my elementary school’s basement, a smell still there when I visited the school in 1987 and 1998. As I wrote in a 2018 post, “I always thought of the smell as years of spilled soup.”

I am the only person to have borrowed The Education of Robert Nifkin from my university library — twice in seventeen years. Sigh.

Other Pinkwater posts
“Nice, heavy notebooks” : “Pineapples don’t have sleeves” : The Snark Theater

[The college? Think Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson. President since 1975: Leon Botstein.]

Bushmiller pareidolia

[Nancy, September 12, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

The simplest things bring Sluggo joy: “The city has installed new parking meters — let’s go see them.” And he and Nancy run.

For Bushmiller pareidolia, see also this school.

Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

MSNBC, sheesh

Earlier this afternoon, a reporter spoke:

“He can also pretty regularly say things that drive a wedge between he and their support.”

Maybe someday a news organization will add a director of grammar and usage to the staff.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: trig

As found in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877):

Kate had evidently written to me in an excited state of mind, for her note was not so trig-looking as usual.

I think this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary explains this instance of trig: “Trim or tight in person, shape, or appearance; of a place, Neat, tidy, in good order. Chiefly Scottish and dialect.” Or perhaps this one: “Prim, precise, exact.”

I can hear a hundred compliments: “Your handwriting ... it’s so trig.”