Rich Mintz

• I just ousted @amongmany as the mayor of Petite Abeille on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/7xZW5h #
• @kerrijack hhhahahahahahhahaaha in reply to kerrijack #
• @genekoo if you like that, you’ll love frosted mini-wheats and peanut butter in reply to genekoo #

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Yeah, they have a zillion engineers dedicating 150% of their time to inventing the next big thing… still, isn’t this going a little too far? From Google Reader:

I bet you didn’t know there was a Brooklyn ukelele craze, did you? Well, surprise — Brooklyn’s gone crazy for ukeleles!

It’s no surprise to me, having seen no fewer than two wild ukelele solos at the talent show during the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Here are the photos you’ve been waiting for. Enjoy!

Uh-oh. I just learned via Nancy Friedman that “curate” (v.t.) is a trendy word at the moment. I have to confess having heard myself using it a lot lately, and not just in my work with museums (in which it takes its literal sense), but in that metaphorical sense, to mean “carefully and thoughtfully tend” a reputation, a public image, or the like. I think I just used it yesterday! Am I going to have to stop?!

I want to put in a plug for Peter Gordon’s Fireball Crosswords, which are the successor series to the beloved New York Sun puzzles that Peter edited and (in large part) constructed. These weekly puzzles, typically themeless so far (although Peter may have other ideas in store), which arrive in your email, are on average difficult to very difficult: I’m currently working puzzle 4, which is at least as difficult as a Times Friday and is very, very slow going.

Subscription is $10 per year, or $70 if you want the right to provide an entry for 1-Across in a future puzzle. Very much worth the money. Please subscribe — we want Peter to be subsidized to keep this effort up!

I’ve just watched “Fresno: A City Reborn” all the way through. It’s a documentary commissioned (and “presented as a public service”) by the pioneering shopping mall architects/urban renewalists Victor Gruen Associates in 1968, and it’s at once fascinating and horrifying, given our 40 years of hindsight on these all-or-nothing redevelopment projects of the 1960s.

Fresno’s Fulton Mall pedestrianization project (which was originally planned to cover roughly a 20-square-block area) was the largest of its kind I’m aware of in any American city, and was hailed (in part by Gruen) as a transformative model. We all know what happened to those pedestrian malls, which were all the rage for about 10 years; their regravitation of their city centers was no match for the centrifugal force of suburbanization, and in any case (we know now) came too late. With very rare exceptions (like Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road and Santa Monica’s Third Street, both of which have been carefully curated and serve populations that include hundreds of thousands of strolling tourists), this kind of brutal pedestrianization has been a failure, at least on its own terms. (In contrast, more organic and porous pedestrianization and “auto diet” programs very often work well, like the new plazas along Broadway in Times and Herald Squares.) Only a force greater than urban renewal — namely, the organic reurbanization of America over the past fifteen or so years — has been able to start bringing the people back to places like these and reanimating them with some of the spirit they were originally intended to have.

This video is worth a watch if only to capture the sense of hopefulness in the narrator’s voice. There’s a wistfulness to the experience. Everyone was so sure this was going to solve everything! In Fresno, I can assure you (having stood on Fulton Mall myself roughly halfway through its current lifetime), it didn’t. Despite the blistering heat in the summer of 1986, I enjoyed my visit to Fresno, which had a sense of place and pride that was missing in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in; but it was in spite of, not because of, Fulton Mall. But oh, how I wanted to believe!

History and photos are on the excellent Downtown Association of Fresno Web site, which is also the source of the postcard photo you see above.

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Tonight I re-solved a clean copy of Brendan Emmett Quigley’s puzzle #5 from the tournament. (Note: No spoilers here.) I suspect I wouldn’t have had a clean solve even untimed — tonight I peeked at the answer grid with 3 squares unfilled, and one of them I probably never would have gotten (although now, 15 minutes later, I finally have understood the clueing for that last entry).

What made it hard, I think, is that the way the clues and the theme combine to create the theme entries is a little different than in other puzzles. This threw me (along with a couple hundred of my friends), such that the theme took me a long time to start puzzling out, and I didn’t get it until it was too late. In fact, I realize now that I understood the theme logic a little incorrectly in competition — it’s only now as I re-solve that I have it right.

If anyone has a lock of Brendan Quigley’s hair, or a fingernail clipping, or anything I can use for some protective white magic in advance of next year’s tournament, please send it my way. I was originally in a somewhat less generous mood and thinking voodoo, but white magic is so much more in the spirit of the event. Besides, with crossword construction powers like his, he’s probably immune to black magic anyway. Along with my white magic, I plan to do every puzzle on Brendan’s Web site between now and next year’s tournament. Best to be prepared.

A Small-Sized Mystery
by Jane Hirshfield

Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “excuse me.”
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.
Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
In this world where much is missing,
a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.
Yet your whole body turns toward it
again and again because it is there.

Reprinted without permission from The New Republic, February 18, 2010.

Jane Hirshfield on Wikipedia | Jane Hirshfield at the Poetry Foundation Web site

Sound recordings by Ben Tausig, crossword constructor, made in the lobby between puzzles. If you listen to these, you’ll get a feeling for the kind of shop talk that went on all weekend.