Who wore it better?

[Jonathan Capehart (MSNOW) and Matthew Continetti (Wall Street Journal columnist) on the PBS NewsHour last night. Click for a larger view.]

I thought this kind of thing only happened in TV shows.

Wait — this is a TV show. But it’s not, say, I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners. The synced apparel went unremarked on the NewsHour. In an I Love Lucy or Honeymooners episode, it would have been a plot point. (Lucy got there first.)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is one satisfying puzzle. A handful of gimmes, a few tricks, a reasonable number of opaque clues, and an astonishing (at least to me) fifteen-letter answer. I started with 10-D, 4 letters, “Name on the cover of Breathing Lessons” and 53-A, six letters, “Nicaraguan nana,” two gimmes, and went from there.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

6-D, nine letters, “Undoing of many Bard protagonists.” I just wish they’d call him Shakespeare. Or, in the manner of Lord Buckley, Willie the Shake. Why? Because he shook everybody.

12-D, ten letters, “Trend scout.” I need to get out more. No, wait, I don’t.

13-D, ten letters, “Starting order.” It’s odd how often crosswords have me programmed to think about appetizers.

22-A, three letters, “Party      .” It took me a long time to see it.

26-D, ten letters, “Baker’s butter substitute.” Yes, I remember that.

28-D, three letters, “OED initialism since 2011.” IMO, a lousy way to clue this answer. Does anyone remember the year a given initialism made it into a dictionary?

34-A, fifteen letters, “Reason for diminished returns.” Whoa. Or woah.

37-A, six letters, “Far beyond patched.” I thought RAGGED. This clue though works in a different way.

38-A, four letters, “‘        it pretty to think so?’ (The Sun Also Rises ender).” One of the great last sentences. Another gimme, but maybe it’ll prompt someone to pick up the novel.

44-A, three letters, “What a larva may become.” This clue is wildly arbitrary. My first thought was the crossword favorite EFT. Or is it ANT? BEE? It’s like “Color you might paint a wall.”

52-D, four letters, “Possible cause for a time-out.” A great example of misdirection.

My favorite in this puzzle: 31-D, four letters, “Undo a body modification, perhaps.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Recently updated

Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing: She’s out.

Sold a Story returns

“Our team at APM Reports dug up a whole new story about teaching and learning — and what happens when deeply held beliefs clash with evidence”: there’s now a second season of Emily Hanford’s podcast Sold a Story that focuses on teaching itself and investigates Direct Instruction, an approach to teaching created by Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann. (I know: who?)

Natalie Wexler has had access to the first four episodes and suggests that what’s missing from Engelmann’s approach is an emphasis on knowledge, or what E.D. Hirsch calls cultural literacy:

Both Engelmann and Hirsch had keen insights about what has been missing from American education, with Engelmann focusing on how to teach and Hirsch on what to teach. Neither model is complete, but if applied judiciously in tandem, the two approaches could be hugely powerful.

Related reading
Some OCA Sold a Story posts

Tenuously related reading
Fluke life (How I got on the tenure track, with an appearance by E.D. Hirsch)

Block that metaphor

From an NPR story:

So if you’ve got 20 minutes this week, think about a strength that you’d like to invite into your life and take a baby step to lean into it.

And all fall down?

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Fancy groceries, anyone?

A second curious term in the signage at Sam’s Dairy: fancy groceries . Like table luxuries , the term is missing from the OED and from Merriam-Webster’s Second and Third. My casual browsing suggests that the term was typically paired with staple groceries . Here’s an explanation of the fancy from Proceedings of The Second Pan American Scientific Congress (1917):

The fancy grocery. — To solve the problem of the downtown store two means have been tried — one, to secure larger margins; the other, to seek greater volume. The former has given rise to the fancy store. In nearly every community there are some exceptional people who will pay an extra price for the best, and there are many people who will buy extra-priced articles for exceptional occasions. This trade, like the shopping trade of the textile lines, tends to concentrate, but unlike the shopping lines, the goods are bought without comparison of value, hence there is nothing to prevent a single store securing a monopoly and frequently a single grocer does secure a marked leadership if not a positive monopoly of fancy lines. The chief difficulty with these stores is to secure sufficient volume and to supplement the rather limited trade in fancy groceries. In many large cities the fancy grocers have added wines and liquors.

Though the term has long since fallen out of use, specialty shops, with high-end items in tins and jars and bottles, carry on in the spirit of the fancy grocery.

Here’s a sampling of fancy groceries, in an extraordinary Macy’s advertisement from 1927:

[The New York Times, February 10, 1927. Click for a larger view.]

Do click for a larger view: the oh so precious text is worth reading. Then reach for the bicarb.

A related post
Table luxuries, anyone?

Zippy and Proust

[“Quote Slam, Cont’d.” Zippy , October 15, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Zippy is spending a second day visiting the Père Lachaise. Yesterday he was trading remarks with Edith Piaf.

The words from Proust appear in Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way ] (1920). Dr. du Boulbon is speaking to the narrator’s grandmother:

«Supportez d’être appelée une nerveuse. Vous appartenez à cette famille magnifique et lamentable qui est le sel de la terre. Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d’autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d’oeuvre.»

In Mark Treharne’s translation (Penguin, 2002):

“Feel comfortable to be called a neurotic. You belong to the splendid, pitiable family that is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art.”

Strange: when I opened my copy of The Guermantes Way and began to thumb pages, I landed almost immediately on page 299 and this passage.

Venn reading
All OCA Proust posts : Proust and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

One more MacGuffin

I missed this one. From Hitchcock/Truffaut (1985):

My best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd, is the one we used in North by Northwest. The picture is about espionage, and the only question that’s raised in the story is to find out what the spies are after. Well, during the scene at the Chicago airport, the Central Intelligence man explains the whole situation to Cary Grant, and Grant, referring to the James Mason character, asks, “What does he do?”

The counterintelligence man replies, “Let’s just say that he’s an importer and exporter.”

“But what does he sell?”

“Oh, just government secrets!” is the answer.

Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!

I must note: Phillip Vandamm, James Mason’s character, was not an importer or exporter of table luxuries.

Related reading
Egg MacGuffin : All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

Mike Love on stage

My daughter Rachel warned me that it’s painful to watch. It is.

Musicians, like boxers, need to know when to stop.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Table luxuries, anyone? Now with a familial connection, albeit a tenuous one.