Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Rafael Musa, is relatively easy. Also delightful: clever, tricky, oblique, nearly factoid-free.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, three letters, “Woman in Arabian Nights.” Somehow this kind of clue seems to sport an ID tag.

23-D, eleven letters, “Satisfies.” I would like to know how far back the answer goes. Now I do.

26-D, eight letters, “‘Steep, strain, serve’ product.” My first thought was LOOSETEA.

27-A, eight letters, “Dressing option.” Yes, please.

35-D, three letters, “Sound from a shaker.” For a moment I thought of the doo-wop syllable SHA.

46-A, six letters, “Introductory explanation.” I know the answer in a different way, and I was never happy about it.

51-A, four letters, “Reporter to take among the earliest flash photos (1880s).” Having read his writing and looked at his photographs, I don’t mind this factoid.

54-A, ten letters, “Child’s catchphrase.” Brilliant. A more typical answer might be AMNOT or ARETOO.

59-A, ten letters, “Having caught bugs.” SICKINBED doesn’t fit. SICKASADOG does but doesn’t.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, seven letters, “Specimen, for example.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Proustian Zippy

[“Catty Remarks.” Zippy, July 17, 2026.]

In today’s strip, Zippy and Zerbina attempt to refresh their marital memories. Clam juice = madeleine.

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

A man of common sense

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Cheerful, kindhearted, gloriously eccentric (he carries around an enormous kite on which he is writing, or attempting to write, a “Memorial,” its words going up into the sky): Mr Dick must be a distant relative of Tristam Shandy’s my uncle Toby.

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[As in Laurence Sterne’s novel, it’s “my uncle Toby,” not “uncle Toby.”]

A sidewalk compliment

“Beautiful couple! Beautiful couple!”

For some reason we hear this kind of thing only when we’re walking in a city. Thank you, fellow pedestrian.

Picturing

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

I love how David’s development into a novelist is something that he says so little about. “I pictured to myself” is an early sign of an imagination at play. By chapter forty-six, David is, in the words of another character, “beginning to be famous,” yet he’s said hardly anything about his writing. In chapter forty-eight, he tells us that “It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions.”

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Self-Erasure

From Geo-B: Self-Erasure.

That’s gotta hurt.

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T and X

A sentence from The Guardian :

The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal conditions in a video posted to X.

I shudder to think what kind of performance will be required of these, uh, service members. Moving the words “in a video posted to X” to the front of the sentence makes for a less startling though still loony-tunes statement. Perhaps someone at The Guardian slipped in a deliberate touch of the loony.

As The Guardian notes, “[Pete} Hegseth’s announcement did not address the more than 231,000 women who serve as active duty service members in the US military.”

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[This post is no. 135 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose. The New York Times reports that women in the military will also be tested.]

Tin Can calling

It’s a telephone for kids: the Tin Can, a wi-fi-enabled landline (whatever that means) with all appropriate protections.

We have been talking daily with granddaughters, the two of us on one or another iPhone, the two of them on a Tin Can. The device helps foster the skills of person-to-person conversation: listening, responding, asking questions, taking turns, all the stuff that vexes so many young adults both on and off their phones.

And how is your day going?

A joke in the traditional manner

Where do bakers sleep?

No spoilers; the punchline and a bonus punchline are in the comments.

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Raising the bar

UC Berkeley Law School: no AI. UT Austin School of Law: engage students so that they’re not distracted by their devices. U Chicago Law School: no phones, laptops, or tablets in the classroom for first-year students. Read more: “To AI-Proof Lawyers, Some Law Schools Restrict Technology” (Inside Higher Ed ).

Note to UT Austin: the simplest way to keep students from being distracted by their devices is to remove the devices: Occam’s Razor with things.

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