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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 7/22/2025: Cities [1]
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Date: 2025-07-22
Hjalmar Munsterhjelm: Moonlit Night (1883)
Good evening, Kibitzers!
We’re actually getting some pleasant summer weather here this week. Sadly, that won’t manage to last the week — by Friday, it’ll be pushing 100°F. I see the west coast is cool, so it’s our friends in the middle of the country, where they’re having much worse heat, that we need to worry about. Stay safe, everyone! Drink enough water!
So, a few weeks ago, The Atlantic made me aware that they have online games, and specifically, they wanted me to play their game “Bracket City”. It’s simple enough — each day’s solution is a historical event that happened on the day in question, and the game is, they replace some fragments of the text with clues in square brackets. BUT, nested inside the clues are other square brackets with other clues that reveal the rest of the clue they’re in. This goes on for a varying number of levels.
For instance, the answer for July 11 was “Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton duel”, but to get the “ron” in “Aaron”, you have to guess nine other things to work your way up to that level and arrive at the clue for “ron” (which was “Paul or Weasley”). If you need a hint, you can tap the clue and learn the first letter, and if you’re stuck, you can tap again and get that answer so you can move up to the next clue. That’s all the coaching they give you, and seemingly all you need. It’s a pretty uncomplicated game, doesn’t take long to play, is free, and at the end, you earn a title in the Bracket City government based on your score.
Except, I started noticing that, if I got them all right without asking for clues, I didn’t always get the same title. My preferred designation, obviously, is “You are a Bracket City Puppet Master: now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. But sometimes, I was making no mistakes but becoming “Kingmaker” rather than “Puppet Master”, and naturally, this was irking me, because you know how I get. (Please note that this is way stupider than even a First World problem.)
Upon further scrolling, I could see that the Kingmaker title was awarded when I’d had no wrong guesses and used no hints, but had used what they referred to as “excess keystrokes”. WTF did that mean?? All you do is type an answer in the box and press ENTER or click the button; it says right in the box “type any answer”. No “keystrokes” are involved...
You see this coming, of course: even though they don’t tell you this, they take points off for answering them out of order. If you wanna be a Puppet Master, you have to start with the first highlighted bracket and KEEP answering the first newly-highlighted bracket until you run out. Oh, and NO misspelling something and then backspacing! So now you know.
Anyway, all this focus on Bracket City brought some “city” songs to mind.
This is the one “Bracket City” gives me as an earworm; it scans the same.
Heartbeat City: The Cars (Live Aid, JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, July 1985) [5:07]
Summer in the City: The Lovin' Spoonful (TV show The Hollywood Palace, 1966) [2:38]
Paradise City: Guns n' Roses (The Ritz, New York City, May 1991) [7:38]
Suffragette City: David Bowie (1972. This is not Bowie doing the fastest costume changes ever! A fan has taken audio from a Santa Monica performance, and laboriously patched together available video clips from that and various other 1972 performances of the song to create video for the whole track. They did a nice job, too. Further discussion on the song’s YouTube page.) [3:24]
City of Blinding Lights: U2 (We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, January 18, 2009) This video starts with Pride in the Name of Love — I’ve cued it up to City of Blinding Lights, but if you want to hear Pride, by all means drag it back. [9:40, but 5:00 as cued]
x YouTube Video
Living for the City: Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles (TV special Ray Charles: 50 Years in Music, 1991) [5:04]
Fool for the City: Foghat (unspecified venue, 1975) [5:03]
You Belong to the City: Glen Frey and Joe Walsh (Riverbend Festival, Chattanooga TN, 1993) [5:51]
Hot in the City: Billy Idol (TV show Solid Gold, 1982) [3:40]
We Built This City: Starship (German TV show Na, sowas!, January 1986) [4:11]
It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (The Summit, Houston TX, December 1978) [4:36]
My City Was Gone: The Pretenders (US Festival, San Bernardino CA, 1983) [4:31]
Tuesday morning: This is not a “city” song — it’s Colbert and his friends raising their respective middle fingers. [7:55]
(For more on this, see Jon Stewart’s entire Daily Show segment, which covers a whole suite of unpleasant current events including the Late Show cancellation, and ends with a spirited musical number. [28:37])
As always, “city” songs I missed are welcome in the thread!
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