Grecian Shoemaker
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Category Archives: News
Wordle Hurdle
Yesterday, workers in the New York Times Guild asked you to break your Wordle streak. On Wednesday, Times union members announced a 24-hour digital picket line for Thursday and asked readers not to cross it while they are on their one-day walkout. 1,100 Times employees walked out after unsuccessfully negotiating with Times management for over a year. Chief among their demands is a corporate minimum wage of $65K. While, this may sound like a lot of money, New York last month was named the most expensive city in the world. I know this, because my son, moved to NYC, because LA just was not expensive enough.
News of this job action was not very well disseminated. I first learned of this digital picket line on Thursday morning from Twitter, after I had already perused the paper. I informed Anne when she got up and she shared the news with her sisters. Jay was already halfway through Wordle when she stopped, and Jane had already completed the puzzle before she first heard of the work stoppage. Later, I did miss using my subscription, when I was fixing dinner and could not access the NYT food app. I think that dinner suffered because of this.
Proceeding now, guilt free usage of the Times has returned. This morning, I again read the Times and Anne again played Wordle and the myriad of other Times games that she likes. My somewhat limited hiatus was no great hardship, Anne, and all her fellow Wordle nerds will see lasting consequences. Their Wordle streaks will be reset to zero, which is a real sacrifice, to hear all the wailing and gnashing of teeth going-on about this via Twitter. I think though that the reset Wordle score will become a badge of honor and a sign of solidarity. Going forward, Wordle streaks that exceed this interruption will be viewed askance and become subject to scorn. A few years ago, who could have conceived of these events?
Canadian Milkvetch
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The Clan
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Turkish Pavilion
Friday, we returned to Tower Grove Park. It had been quite a while since last we walked there. Plus, it had been a while since we had seen the sun, making our walk doubly enjoyable. I brought along the drone, while Anne looked for birds. I love being able to photograph again all of the sights around town from a new angle. Several of the pavilions were hosting costume parties, where people kind of, sort of maintained a social distance. With no wind to speak of and the temperature in the mid-fifties, it made for a very pleasant day.
Today, Halloween, the weather is expect to be even finer and we plan on getting out to a park again to enjoy it. This year, we have elected not to participate in today’s pagan holiday. Instead, we’ll draw the shades and hunker down. Today’s word for the day, latibulate, tells it all. It means to hide in a corner in an attempt to escape reality. That is not to say that a few little goblins won’t ring our bell in an attempt to exorcise us from any devilish candy. I’ll miss seeing the little ones all decked out, their corny jokes or their stage fright when they try to utter those magic words, “Trick or Treat!” These are scary times that we are living in now.
With a year like this one, you don’t need stories of some fanciful and frightening dystopian future to entertain yourself with. 2020 has all of that covered. Just, read the news. That will make your hair stand up. You may have goblins and ghosts, Freddy and Jason, but none of those old tropes scare me, because I’ve got politics and plague and if they don’t scare the bejesus out of you, I don’t know what will. I hope and pray that we make it through this year and to the next, because even with a full moon tonight, things are looking pretty dark out.
Pulitzer Prize Photographs
Kiss of Life, Rocco Morabito, Jacksonville Journal, 1967
Kosovo Refugees, Carol Guzy, Washington Post, 2000
Six in ’46, Unknown Photographer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1946
Shovel Ready, Robert Cohen, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2018
It was a busy day today. I ran errands all day long. I won’t bore you though with any recitations. At the end of the day I found myself cruising by Forest Park and decided to duck in, to see what was new at the history museum. One of the two main halls is closed as they stage the next new show, but the other one was open, with actually two new exhibits. The first photographic show is entitled Pulitzer Prize Photographs and was produced by the Newseum, of Washington, DC. The other is locally produced and called, In Focus: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Photographs. The Post was the flagship of the Pulitzer newspaper empire.
I’ve sampled two photos from each show, which I feel is fair use. I don’t usually photograph photos. I think that doing so is too meta, but this is an exceptional collection of pictures. There are eighty pictures on display, out of a portfolio that numbers over a thousand. Many of the photographs are iconic: Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, Ruby Shoots Oswald, Babe Ruth’s Final Farewell, to name a few.
Many of the displayed pictures are disturbing. There are ample warning signs at the exhibit’s entrance. Don’t worry though, because I decided to choose only photos of a lighthearted or uplifting subject matter. The following paragraphs gives a synopsis of the exhibits description for each of the above photos:
- It was a hot and muggy day. The photographer heard a women scream and looked up to see a lineman dangling lifelessly above him. A second line- man climbed up to him and gave the first mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a while, the second lineman called down to the gathered crowd that the first was breathing again. He suffered extensive burns, but survived.
- Kosovo was Europe’s worse refugee crisis since World War II. This picture was shot outside a refugee camp in Albania. The infant is being passed back-and-forth between relatives who are already in the camp and newly arrived relatives, who are waiting to get into the camp.
- Whitey Kurowski, Enos Slaughter, Marty Marion and Stan Musial helped the Cardinals to their sixth World Championship in 1946.
- “All I really need to accomplish are two lanes for my car”, said Richard Burst of Webster Groves. I remember seeing this photo in the paper, but of course that was only last winter.