Greer Gilman's Blog, page 12

Fruit and flowers

Laws. A month behind on my puzzling journal.

This one (from Artifact's Hoefnagel Club) is Jacob van Hulsdonck's Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Pomegranate (ca. 1620-1640). Just my cup of tea: I love paintings of blue-and-white china heaped with fruit. He's caught the textures so beautifully, the lucencies of porcelain and pomegranate seeds, the waxiness of flowers, the roughness of rind. Spot the moth.



It's a tricky cut, all chains of hexes in odd lengths, like fragments of chromosomes. Some part of every piece could fit anywhere. Given the image (all those lemons! that black background!), parts of this were fiendish. And the fit is mostly contiguous rather than connected, like an unsecured mosaic. Very vulnerable to scattering when bumped.

The whimsies are pretty simplistic. I do like the pear made of orange (nice joke) and the jug, but what on earth is that car doing here?




Paired with the van Hulsdonck was Van Gogh's Almond Blossoms (1890).  An intricate, lovely image, and too utterly Nine-colored. Damn, did that guy know branches. I'm of two minds about the fancy edge. On the hand, it's delicious to solve; on the other, too delicious, treating a masterpiece as marzipan. But hey, all these puzzles make toys of art: if I'm going to complain about kitsch, I'd stop doing them.



When I'd finished and flipped over, I had a lovely surprise. Oh, the rainstorm!



Complete with a Morton Salt girl.




Sweet pastoral whimsies—but what the frog is that boy doing? Bouncing on a whoopee cushion is my politest guess.



Nine

Greenery-yallery

May I present my new William Morris winter masks?



They aren't as well cut as my wired summer ones, but O! such fabric, and as warm as quilts. I met an old bookseller acquaintance wearing Willow Boughs, and I had to have these. Zazzle.

I feel all George du Maurier.



Nine

Holy bleep!

The Crimesicle has tested positive for COVID-19!

Divine retribution!  Hoist by his own petard!  Karma just ran over his dogma!

Let there be sung "Non nobis" and "Te deum."

Nine

Post-Mousterian

Wow.  An upcoming article in Nature finds that "The major genetic risk for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals."

A recent genetic association study1 identified a gene cluster on chromosome 3 as a risk locus for respiratory failure upon SARS-CoV-2 infection. A new study2 comprising 3,199 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and controls finds that this is the major genetic risk factor for severe SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospitalization (COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative). Here, we show that the risk is conferred by a genomic segment of ~50 kb that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by ~50% of people in South Asia and ~16% of people in Europe today.
 I can't see immediate practical solutions coming out of this discovery (CRISPR?), but this is fascinating.

Nine
  

Oddments

One of the last Botticellis left in private hands is up for sale.





I'll take it.  Beauty and austerity.  Can anyone name that saint.?

Why can't we can have COVID-19 sniffer dogs?  Or rapid antigen tests?

I hope the Crimesicle has a meltdown on camera tonight.

Nine

"But westward, look, the land is bright"

Last night's sunset was a perfect bow.*

I've been thinking of Frodo, setting out toward Mount Doom.  I am hoping for a eucatastrophe this autumn.

Nine



*Those smudges, sadly, are inside the camera, just when I can't have it cleaned.

Silhouettes

Liberty has been introducing new puzzles, three by three. I breathlessly await. So far, the standout whimsies belong to an image of cowpokes.



Just look at that sheep's skull! And that sun! Not to mention the snake in the cowboy boot, the wolf, the scorpion, the armadillo, and the coffee pot. I just wish I loved the image. It's all right, but it doesn't sing to me.



This tribute to Jerry Garcia made me smile—but shouldn't there be cherries?



Nine

Just made Halifax yesterday...

Remember March? Way back then, as you recall, gaudior   and rushthatspeaks   kindly asked me to shelter with them, to stay safe and help take care of Fox, just for a few weeks, until the pandemic had blown over...

Hah.  It's been a long strange voyage, pumping like mad men all the way.

But Fox's blessed nursery school reopened today, as much outdoors as they can possibly be.

And on Sunday, gaudior  helped me move a stack of puzzle boxes higher than my head, two puzzle boards, books, papers, jars of pencils, two seasons of clothing, a great deal of assorted kitchenry, my elderly iMac, and heaven-knows-what back to my house.  Last night, rushthatspeaks   drove me home.

O my.

The silence!  The space full of Nine-stuff!  My library!

I miss my friends, but I've been a life-long solitary, and it's sweet to be alone and on my own time.  So far, I've drunk good tea from my own mug, ordered in a few groceries, unpacked a very little, puzzled a bit, mused on rearrangements of the library, taken naps, picked up a week's worth of Chinese, and walked over to the farmers market, where I got corn on the cob and the last of the berries from Quebec.

All I need now is a bowlful of Tosci's and a browse through Raven Books, but they open on Wednesdays and Thursdays, respectively.  Still there, thank heavens.

So am I.

Nine

The Moon braiding Mars in her hair

Nine

Cutting remarks

Oh dear. Just as I’d regained some respect for Wentworth puzzles, I went and embarked on John William Waterhouse’s Miranda. I am fond of that picture.



This? Not so much.



Great Sycorax, what a ghastly reproduction! Badly cropped, bleared, horribly off color. Every piece seems to be an awful purplish beige like an old bruise, and the image looks less like a seascape than city snow at the end of a long winter. Utterly deboshed.

Why did I persist? Because of a horrid suspicion that took hold of me. Those whimsies seemed awfully familiar. In fact, they are that set of draftsman’s tools that worked so well in 29 Avenue Rapp, and have nothing whatever to do with The Tempest. The compass has been slightly straightened, but that’s it.





And not only the whimsies: the entire cut is identical.





That is Not On. The whole point of artisan jigsaw puzzles is to suit the cut uniquely to the image. Give us Ariel and Caliban, a ship, a staff, a book!

What is truly weird: the Miranda puzzle is much older than the door-in-Paris one. (I can tell by the box.) This is a rare case of justified plagiarism: they took a design that didn’t fit the original image, thematically or artistically, and made it sing with a different picture.

Now I have Robert Burns running through my head. Nature, he sings, evolved as a artisan:

Her prentice han' she try'd on man,
An' then she made the lasses, O.

Nine