Broadcasting today from the Berkshire Valley Inn, Hancock MA. Good morning Chatterheads!
It’s just a bit after 7, haven’t even had my coffee yet, but I’ve already learned something new – what a QUIPU is. Were you already ahead of me on this one? It was at 46D: “Record-keeping device made of strings and knots.” Seems along the lines of an abacus.
Okay! Since we took care of learning one thing new every day early, we can go back to spending the rest of day drunk and staring blankly into space.
One of our favorite spots up here is the Tunnel City coffee place in Williamstown, but I muffed our order yesterday. I asked for coffee and said, strongest or darkest roast please. The woman asked me: “Flavor or caffeine?” I thought she was asking if I wanted it flavored and separately if I wanted it decaf or caf (since it was relatively late in the day (1 pm). I certainly did not want it flavored, nor decaf, so I just said “caffeine.” Did you catch my error?
She was asking about my request for their “strongest” brew: did I want it strongest in the sense of taste (flavor), or strongest for the caffeine punch? Had I understood the question, I would have asked for “flavor.” We like a nice strong-tasting brew. So I blew it and we got a weak-tasting shitty cup that kept us up all night. (Just kidding — it tasted crappy but we slept well.)
She probably would have exchanged the cup if I explained my error, but I didn’t ask. She could have been clearer in posing her question (I do have two graduate degrees), but it was, at bottom, my error.
But never mind my bottom — you don’t care beans about this anyway, amirite? (My Aunt Ida (aleha hashalom) used to say: I thank you from the bottom of my heart. And my sister thanks you from her bottom as well.)
Do you guys play Wordle? If you do, you may not be interested to hear that today’s puzzle was constructed by Tracy Bennet, the editor of Wordle! And at 41A the clue was “Getting in one guess, as Wordle.” The answer was ACING. Rex took issue with it (voo den?). “ACING implies a demonstration of ability, whereas getting Wordle in 1 is just dumb luck.”
I enjoyed Rex’s nit-picking on TSKS. At 60A the clue was “Somewhat audible disparagements,” and the answer was TSKS. Rex wrote: “Not getting the ‘somewhat’ on this clue. Tsks are definitely audible, or else they don’t work. If a disparagement falls in the woods and nobody hears it … did you even disparage, bro?”
It opened the door for me to post: “If a man says something in the forest, and his wife is not there to hear him, is he still wrong?”
Bennett, the constructor, is also from Michigan. At 29A the clue was “Michigan’s _____ Marquette River (waterway named for a missionary), and the answer was PERE. (Sam! – you hear of this guy?) Pere means “Father.” His first name was Jacques. The river is in the western part of the state and runs into Lake Michigan.
By far, the weirdest part of the puzzle was at 22A: “Eerie phenomenon when a robot seems too lifelike.” The answer was UNCANNY VALLEY. It’s the psychological effect related to the creepiness you feel when a robot is just a little too lifelike. There’s a “make-up trend” on it too. Does this strike you as creepy? (If not, what the hell is wrong with you, mate?)
Rex took issue with the completeness of the clue, viz.,
I don’t think UNCANNY VALLEY is clued quite right (22A: Eerie phenomenon when a robot seems too lifelike). The point isn’t that it’s “too lifelike”—it’s that it’s both too lifelike and not lifelike enough. That’s the valley. The “eeriness” is when the robot crosses that threshold into “close but not there.” Lots of A.I.-created animation falls in this category for me. See also, famously, the animation in Polar Express (2004). Anyway, you can’t have the titular “valley” if you don’t have both the concept of “too lifelike” *and* the concept of “not lifelike enough.” See … the valley is not a mythical place, it’s a literal shape on a graph:
This is a character from Polar Express. Yup, I can see it.
The following poem by John Daniel is from the Writer’s Almanac today.
The Pelicans of San Felipe
do most of their fishing asleep on the sand,
great bills lowered to their breasts.
Overhead the gulls cry now, and now,
but the pelicans drowse in the plenty of time.
The sand is warm, the breeze enfolds them,
the steady waves rumble and slosh.
Two or three together through the afternoon,
they raise their monkish white heads
and lift from the beach, mute as in sleep,
winging their way above the green swells
to join the others now circling low,
and circling low, and each in its moment
with a quick tilt of wings falls hard,
gracelessly smacks the sea—
then bobbing up quickly, riding the swells,
wild gulls veering and screaming around them,
the pelicans lift their bills and swallow.
A very odd bird is the pelican.
Its beak holds more than its bellycan.
Ogden Gnash
Lovely group walk late morning, not far from Five Corners.
At 45A, “Like Brutalist architecture” was BLOCKY.
Commenter Jberg weighed in on the matter: Here is a picture of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, well-known as Brutalist. Not particularly BLOCKY. I think the puzzle is operating under the assumption that “brutalist” means “brutish.” It does not; the name comes from bruton, the French word for concrete; the architectural style takes advantage of the ability of concrete to take on many shapes, including curves, that are difficult to achieve with more traditional materials–sort of a precursor of Frank Gehry. Sometimes it is blocky, sometimes it is not.
I think that’s enough nonsense for us for the day. See you next time!
The Wellington Files 