This is one reason why people in my department are leery about taking vacation.
[Redacted]:
Hope you’re having a good vacation!
There’s a homeless guy named Curtis living in your cubicle now. He’s usually in the kitchenette pawing through the recycling bin or down in Battery Park drinking 40s with Gregg.
But when he’s here, he’s drying his socks on your monitor and napping under your desk. He’s so lazy. John assigned him the next two cover designs for Forum but all we’ve seen are some rough sketches he made on the bottom of an empty pizza box. Michael thinks he has promise and has taken to calling him “Curtains.”
We all miss you, except for Curtains, who hopes a terrible accident befalls you so he can clear off your desk and turn your cubicle into a fort.
When I play Quordy (and Boggle, but it’s been a while), I enjoy taking my time to spot long words for big points. I also value the strategy of finding many short words quickly. The shortest playable word has three letters, so I thought it’d be handy to compile a list of three-letter words that are also words when spelled backwards. Put more simply(?), I wanted a list combining palindromes with other “reversible words.”
I found a list that appeared satisfactory. But compared to the small handwritten one I’d been keeping, it missed some obvious words (HAY, NAW, MAY) and some not-as-obvious ones (AHS, TEW). So I developed my own master list, based on my research and that of others. It has156 words, which I’ve alphabetized and listed below.
The reference for these words, by the way, is the second edition of the Official Word List, used for North American tournament Scrabble. (Quordy’s dictionary is “based on” this list, according to the game’s instructions.) You can download the list as a nearly 2MB text file from the Internet Scrabble Club’s “Lists of Words” page.
ABA
AGA
AHA
AHS
AIR
ALA
AMA
ANA
ARB
ARE
ATE
AVA
AVO
AWA
BAD
BAG
BAL
BAN
BAS
BED
BEN
BIB
BIG
BIN
BIS
BOB
BOG
BOS
BOY
BUB
BUD
BUN
BUR
BUS
BUT
CAP
CIS
COD
COR
DAD
DAG
DAL
DAM
DAP
DEL
DEW
DID
DIG
DIM
DOG
DON
DOR
DOS
DOT
DUD
DUO
EAT
EEL
EKE
EME
ERE
EVE
EWE
EYE
FER
FIR
GAG
GAL
GAM
GAN
GAS
GAT
GEL
GET
GIG
GIP
GOT
GUM
GUT
GUV
HAH
HAY
HEH
HEP
HEY
HOP
HUH
KAY
LAP
LAS
LET
LIN
LIT
MAN
MAT
MAY
MEM
MHO
MIM
MIR
MIS
MOM
MON
MOP
MOR
MOT
MUM
MUS
NAP
NAW
NET
NEW
NIT
NOS
NOT
NOW
NUN
NUS
OHO
OOT
OXO
PAP
PAY
PEP
PER
PIP
PIS
PIT
POP
POT
PUP
PUS
PUT
RAT
RAY
ROT
SAT
SAW
SIS
SIT
SIX
SOS
SOW
TAT
TAV
TET
TEW
TIT
TOT
TOW
TUT
ULU
VAV
WAW
WOW
YAY
I’ve been drinking cardamom coffee lately. Why, I’m drinking some now. The stuff at Hampton Chutney on Prince Street in Manhattan is great but homemade can be as good.
For a first attempt, I bought a small bag of whole green cardamom pods from a cash-and-carry among the strip of Indian stores lining Oak Tree Road in Iselin, New Jersey. (Try buying cardamom at your local grocer and you’ll find it’s among the most expensive spices on the rack, right up there with saffron. Seek out an Indian specialty store for massive cost savings; Kalustyan’s is my go-to spot in New York City.)
I poured the hot coffee over the pods in a mug and it was O.K. But after a second attempt, I found what works best is simply adding a tablespoon of cardamom seeds to the coffee grounds then brewing per usual.
Use a dark-roast coffee; I favor Café Bustelo because it’s cheap and readily available. For the true Hampton Chutney experience, stir in a glob of sweetened condensed milk. That’s some good cardamom coffee.
Before heading out for a whiskey last night, I submitted a last-minute low bid on eBay to win a vintage Woolrich field jacket for $20, plus $10.77 for shipping. Judging by the design of the label, it might be from the ’70s or ’80s. It has a classic exterior of heavy wool in red-and-black plaid and a tan flannel interior. Pockets include hand-warmers in front and storage in the lower-back for game. Originally, hunters bought these jackets but I bought mine because I wanted cheap and casual cold-weather coverage and because I like red, wool and things that remind me of the Midwest.
No one else bid on the coat and I wondered what could be wrong with it. It’s in good shape and comes from a non-smoking household. My research online showed used Woolrich jackets going for twice what I paid, with new models retailing for $189. If I don’t like the fit or something’s amiss, well, I didn’t spend much and the homeless need winter coats.
When I arrived home tonight from work and paged through my new New York magazine, I learned that bearded Brooklyn hipsters favor a woodsman look. Nearby are articles on a man who sells axes in Tribeca and the rise in popularity of homemade beef jerky. For those interested in dressing like the men depicted, the article reveals their clothing brand names but Woolrich isn’t among them. I’m thinking: I’m on the cutting edge of an urban clothing trend or this isn’t a trend at all or I’m picking up on something already in the ether, like the guy who claimed to be wearing x before y popularized it. Mainly, I hope the coat fits and makes me look sharp.
After working late last night, I exited the building on Cedar Street, turned west and saw with startling clarity the lit buildings of the World Financial Center against the blue-black sky. Stark—there’s no better way to describe them there, drawing the eye past the cranes and girders of the World Trade Center site, as if someone had activated a real-world sharpen filter. Is one’s sight clearer in winter? It was harder than I guessed to Google quickly but I found a bad MSNBC article that answers the question:
One reason for the clarity of a winter’s night is that cold air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air can. Hence, on many nights in the summer, the warm moisture-laden atmosphere causes the sky to appear hazier. By day it is a milky, washed-out blue, which in winter becomes a richer, deeper and darker shade of blue. For us in northern climes, this only adds more luster to that part of the sky containing the beautiful wintertime constellations.
Bill Withers, a pop star? Unlikely. A stuttering, asthmatic child in a West Virginia coal-mining town ranks low on prospects. As an adult, he nearly became a lifer in the Navy. For a while, he worked on an assembly line, making toilets for 747s.
Suddenly, in his 30s, he wrote (or co-wrote) and sang a string of hits: “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” He collected a Grammy for each. When you’ve become famous, he jokes, you start hearing yourself described in words you haven’t heard before, like “handsome.”
And then, just as meteorically, he returned to the ordinary. Today, in that L.A. way of retired entertainers, he lounges dressed in a tracksuit and spotless puffy sneakers, in a large but simple home, collecting checks from the songs he’s written. In the documentary Still Bill, we see him visit his hometown, walk the railroad tracks with its de facto mayor and look for family graves in a blacks-only cemetery overgrown with trees and weeds. They recall color lines but laugh that everyone’s black in a mining town. Bill travels, accepting honorariums and attending concerts during which other people sing his songs. He’s gracious, whip-smart and funny; I laughed a lot at his jokes, only a few of which were grandpa-like.
Although he hasn’t performed live since 1988, he putters around his home recording studio, where he claims to not even know how to operate the boards (his daughter, Kori, helps out; she sings, too, and her dad is her toughest critic). He builds songs on snatches of doggerel or poetry he writes down and springboards from (“Your love is like a chunk of gold/Hard to gain and hard to hold”). He doesn’t take himself seriously; he contributed two tracks to a Jimmy Buffet album and the documentary shows him in his studio flirting with reggaeton-style music, lyrics in Spanish, no less. Will those home recordings see release? The answer seems to be “not now,” perhaps not ever.
The documentary doesn’t pinpoint a moment that explains why the public hasn’t heard from Bill after all this time. Seeing him joke and chat with everyone from Cornell West to his old Navy buddies suggests he’s a capital-lettered Nice Guy, modest, self-deprecating, smart and real enough to have left the music business before it could inflate his ego or corrode his soul. (The movie avoids any direct coverage of the legal tussles Withers became involved with at each of the two labels he recorded for.)
He’s 71 now and retained that voice, like warm butterscotch. He stutters still, but only occasionally. The film’s most touching moment has him delivering a speech to a support group of kids who stutter. The “you can make it if you try” message, cliché by default, flows from him genuinely; the camera catches him crying.
He’s asked what he wants as his legacy. He’s silent for a long time and the movie leaves the question unanswered. I thought, he’s just that guy, you know? He wrote and sang a few songs most people have heard but his name isn’t household. And Bill would be cool with that.