In it and of it?

I was sitting at the kitchen table with an open bottle of Aurora Black, about to fill three fountain pens. I called up to Elaine:

“Do you have any pens that need filled?”

I was not trying to be cute. I was using the [need + past participle] construction with an utter absence of self-consciousness. It just came out. I may now be not only in east-central Illinois but of it.

Then again, filling German fountain pens with Italian ink isn’t exactly a regionalism.

Related reading
More [need + past participle] posts (Pinboard)

Block that metaphor

Of Donald Trump and Michael Cohen, from the prosecution’s closing argument:

“He cut him loose like a hot potato.”

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve gone with metaphor rather than simile because of “cut him loose.” The line as I have it is as MSNBC and The Guardian reported it. I’ve now also seen “The defendant cut him loose, dropped him like a hot potato” (CNN). It may be that there‘s no there here. But still, I‘d like to see a Glen Baxter illustration of someone cutting a hot potato loose.]

How I write certain of my blog posts

I’m always interested in seeing the materials of writing, so I thought it’d be interesting to show the materials that went into a post about Anne Curzan’s Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words. Why not?

If I’m writing a blog post of any length, particularly a review of a book or a recording, I always start by making notes on paper, more notes than I’ll ever use, but I know that’s the only way to figure out what I will want to use. A pencil or gel pen works best for me; I don’t want the frequent distraction of uncapping and capping a fountain pen (unless I really do). Here I ended up with four pages of notes in a large Moleskine squared notebook, accumulated over four or five days of reading.

[Click either image for a much larger view.]

I go through these notes to find things that I want to use and to figure out how they should go together. That’s where a blue pencil comes in. I then write a very rough draft, always with a fountain pen, always on a legal pad. I never make an outline — I think outlines sometimes produce only the illusion of coherence, but this rough draft functions as a good outline would. It goes idea by idea, with page numbers for things to pull in from the book. My rough drafts tend to trail off as they near their end. You can see that happening on page two. An ending usually doesn’t announce itself until I’m writing.

[Click either image for a much larger view.]

When it’s time to write a real draft, I use a text editor. For this post, which had only minimal details of HTML to attend to, I wrote in BBEdit, dropped the not-finished writing into Blogger, and began to tinker. I asked Elaine to read the draft in Preview, and she had several smart suggestions. I took them all, tinkered some more, tinkered some more, tinkered some more, and posted the review.

Later in the day, at a friend’s suggestion, I removed a comma that I had added when second-guessing myself about a sentence’s readability. No, the sentence was fine without one, just as I had thought. Over the weekend I deleted and restored one word. Better without? No, with. And without realizing it, I had moved (once again) through the roles that Betty Sue Flowers describes in the work of writing: madman, architect, carpenter, judge.

When I taught an undergraduate prose-writing course, I always brought in images of writers’ drafts, many of them far messier than mine. Students always found it instructive to see how much work goes into the work of writing. It rarely, if ever, flows.

[Post title with apologies to Raymond Roussel. The careful reader will notice that the last two words of the rough draft were considerably softened in the finished post.]

The tells

[Click for a larger view.]

I got this message yesterday and for a moment was out of my skin (after jumping). Then I took the time to read. How many tells can you tell?

CEFCU, whatever it is, is real, and has a page about phishing scams.

Wild strawberries

I think I have finally figured out what interests the deer who visit the back of our backyard: Fragaria vesca, or wild strawberries. They’re why the deer appear so choosy as they browse the ground.

No strawberries, as far as we know, for the tiny fawn, who is still nursing.

Memorial Day

[“Decorating a soldier's grave in one of the Negro sections on Memorial day.” Photograph by Esther Bubley. Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. May 1943. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Esther Bubley (1921–1998) was a photojournalist and documentary photographer.

Sunday in the park with geese

[After Seurat. Click for a larger view.]

I took the photo on Thursday, and that’s not a park. But those are geese.

I’ll post a tax photograph again next Sunday.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stella Zawistowski, exceedingly difficult, especially in the northeast and southwest. Persevere I did, and got it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, four letters, “Verb from the Latin for ‘hound.’ ” Uh, BARK? I never would have imagined the connection.

4-A, four letters, “To-day’s link.” From the northeast but obvious to me.

6-D, nine letters, “Impediment to a college education.” And to much else.

10-D, ten letters, “Whiskered UNICEF children’s ambassador.” In the northeast. I was desparate and looked up a list of UNICEF ambassadors but (fortunately) didn’t find an answer.

12-D, ten letters, “Where the stars come out.” OSCARNIGHT? No, that’s not a place.

16-A, four letters, “Darn it.” RATS? HOLE? From the northeast and far from obvious.

19-A, four letters, “Brand with a Lash Day sale in ’24.” Still in the northeast. I dislike brand-name trivia in crosswords.

20-A, eleven letters, “Got ready for rounds.” I thought must be about golf.

24-A, six letters, “Appeared in twice.” Back to the northeast. The idea of appearing here is foreign to me.

26-A, three letters, “‘Because I’m...’ ” A novel answer, clued smartly.

26-D, ten letters, “Evolutionary fitness enhancement.” From the southwest. I thought it had to be the name of a body part or function.

27-D, ten letters, “Kings’ residence.” Also in the southwest. Notice the apostrophe. I guessed the answer from its first and last letters.

29-A, three letters, “Post-retirement acronymn.” Clever.

51-A, eleven letters, “Converting leads into deals.” I had a hunch here.

My favorite in this puzzle: 45-A, three letters, “Grammy’s British equivalent.” The answer puzzled me, but I knew it had to be right. When I looked up british grammy equivalent after finishing the puzzle, I realized how thoroughly I’d been fooled.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

&udm=14

“If you want to give people easy access to an AI-free Google search, send them to this page”: &udm=14. And here, from CNET, is a page of instructions for making an AI-free Google search a default in various browsers.

In Safari, it’s not possible to create a custom search. But it’s easy to do so with Alfred or Launch Bar. In Alfred (which is what I know), you can create a custom web search that looks like this:

https://www.google.com/search?q='{query}'&udm=14

I named mine goo.

A font for jokes

From the Hacks episode “The Deborah Vance Christmas Spectacular,” which aired last night on Max. Larry Arbuckle (Christopher Lloyd) has shown his screenplay about his grandfather Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to Jimmy (Paul W. Downs):

“You like the font?”

“Yeah.”

“I put the jokes in Comic Sans so you know they’re supposed to be funny.”

And Jimmy, who has reason to like everything about this screenplay, says that sticking to one font is a missed opportunity. The Comic Sans, he says, makes things “voice-y.”