Newsday’s Saturday Stumper

Several months ago I canceled my subscription to the New York Times crossword. It wasn’t the ludicrousness of 46-Down, “Cool jazz pioneer” that finally got to me: it was the increasingly forced cleverness of the puzzles. I know that the Times is the gold standard of crosswords. But Will Shortz’s sense of what’s amusing and fun is not exactly mine.

I now do the Times crossword in syndication for free, often though not daily. My new daily crossword, also free, is Stan Newman’s Newsday crossword. The Sunday through Friday puzzles are good ones, always with a theme, always with nice touches of wit in the clueing. Saturday’s puzzle, the Saturday Stumper, is a themeless killer, usually far more difficult than the Times Saturday puzzle. I’ve been able to complete just one Saturday Newsday without having to reveal one or more words. A sample clue, from today’s puzzle by Brad Wilber: 36-Down, eight letters, “What you might do for your own sake.” The answer, which I’m happy to have figured out: HOMEBREW. There’s a nice sense of proportion between clue and answer: the out-of-the-way answer justifies the clue’s wit. You’ll have to highlight to see the answer, which I won’t give away.

[Brad Wilber, the constructor of today’s Newsday puzzle, co-constructed the puzzle that made me a little crazy. I suspect though that “Cool jazz pioneer,” which seems to derive from a Times obit, was Shortz’s clue.]

µBlock for Safari

Raymond Hill’s ad-blocking extension µBlock is now available for Safari 8.

I much prefer µBlock to AdBlock Plus in Chrome. If µBlock works as well in Safari, it’ll be terrific.

National Handwriting Day

[“Hand with Pen Held Erect Opposite Eye of Beholder.” Illustration from Ward and Lock’s Self-Instruction; or, Every Man His Own Schoolmaster (London: 1883).]

With a little more than three hours to go, I realized that today is National Handwriting Day — truly a day marked not with a bang but a whimper. I wrote by hand today without even thinking about it, making some notes with a Pelikan pen, grading some stuff with a Ticonderoga pencil. How about you?

The image above is creepy, no? It’s the fingernails that make it so. With maybe a hint of Un Chien Andalou. And yet I cannot look away.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

Times, a-changin’

You know the times they are a-changin’ when the PBS NewsHour has a feature on Sleater-Kinney.

“What makes you so sure?”

Some questions:

What attracts you to one person, but not to another? Why do you have “down” days when there’s nothing really wrong? What mechanism enables you to change your mind? Is morality built into your psyche from birth — knowing right from wrong — or is it something you acquire? How do your feet tell your brain that they’re tired?

Has mental telepathy any basis in science? Astrology? Clairvoyance? How does your brain distinguish chocolate from vanilla? Where do your conscious thoughts go when you sleep? How does time work to heal grief? Are the colors you see the same colors that other people see? Yes? What makes you so sure?

[From a letter pitching the magazine Psychology Today, many years old. I clipped these two paragraphs and kept them in a folder. I found and still find them funny. They sound to me like a parody of God in the Book of Job.]

Booksmith bookmark

I like pulling down a book from a shelf and finding an old bookmark. How long had this one been keeping my place? Many years. Long enough for the top to have faded. The lower-right corner looks like a printing error.

As a student in Allston-Brighton-Brookline environs in the 1980s, I was a frequent visitor to Paperback Booksmith and Musicsmith. A bookstore and record store within easy walking distance and open late (look at those hours): it feels now like something from a dream life. My most vivid buying memories (and I don’t know why): LPs by The English Beat and The Specials.

Musicsmith is long gone, but Paperback Booksmith, now Brookline Booksmith, sails on. I’ve sung its praises in a previous post. Elaine and I have sometimes wondered whether, before we met, we were ever in the store at the same time. We are still customers whenever we visit Boston. And our son Ben now buys books at Booksmith. Who’da thunkit?

Here is an account of Booksmith and its founder Marshall Smith, with links providing more Booksmith history.

Now if I could only find one of the Gotham Book Mart’s Edward Gorey-designed bookmarks. Shelves, where are you hiding them?

Eric Schmidt and Warren Buffett

Eric Schmidt, speaking today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:

“There will be so many IP addresses . . . so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it,” he explained. “It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”

Warren Buffett, speaking to University of Washington students in 1998:

“I’m very suspect of the person who is very good at one business — it also could be a good athlete or a good entertainer — who starts thinking they should tell the world how to behave on everything. For us to think that just because we made a lot of money, we’re going to be better at giving advice on every subject — well, that’s just crazy.”

Not a perfect match: Schmidt here is more prophet than advice-giver, telling us not how to behave but how we will behave. But again: who is he to tell us how we are to live?

That phrasing — “with your permission and all of that” — suggests a rather casual attitude toward individual privacy and whatnot. And what is “the room”? It’s certainly not my living room.

See also Eric Schmidt on the future.

On subscription prices

If you plan to renew (or, I suppose, begin) a magazine subscription, it may be smart to do business over the phone. You may come out with a price significantly lower than those found in magazine inserts and mailed reminders. I speak from experience: anecdotal experience.

That concludes my advice for the day. YAEMV.

[Your anecdotal experience may vary.]

On paper clips

In academic life, paper clips are like pennies — always there. When I need a paper clip, I just look at my desk — there are always a few clips around. (Five as I’m writing.) I find clips in my shirt pockets and at the bottom of my Lands’ End bag. When I find them holding together pages several years old, they have often left on the paper a deposit of rust that cannot be removed. When clips do not rust, they leave their imprints, ghost clips made of shadow. I remember on at least one occasion in college getting back a paper that I was sure the professor hadn’t read — the paper clip was still in place, and there was no sign that anyone had turned the pages.

Taking paper clips seriously has made me look strange to people who should know better. At Bob Slate Stationers I asked a salesperson what kind of paper clip it is that doesn’t rust. (Stainless steel? Brass?) She referred me to someone else: “He says there’s a paper clip that doesn’t rust.” But lady, it’s true.

Taking paper clips seriously has also made me look strange to people who don’t know better.

When I hear “paper clip,” I think of something made of metal, though lately I have been using plastic-coated clips. They remind me of the wire I used in science-fair projects involving batteries and tiny light bulbs. Coated clips add interesting touches of color — pink or purple looks especially zany holding together pages of a critical essay or book review. These clips have a shorter life: after holding together a thick sheaf of paper, they are bent forever. They are the paper clips of the future, to be used once and discarded.

Paper clips are in some unprovable way more mature than staples: teachers staple exams for you, but they don’t provide paper clips.

A related post
Paper clips (A prose poem)

[Found in an old looseleaf notebook, from a writing course I taught in 1990-something. The assignment was to write about a small subject. I did the assignment along with the class. The other topics, all of the students’ invention: a chip clip, colors (black, blue, red), crayons, flowers, a fork, a full moon, the number 76, a paintbrush, paper, a Q-Tip, a ring, a toothpick. Remember the Lands’ End canvas briefcase? In 2015 it comes in only two colors, and reviews are mixed. I now suspect that coated clips are the only ones that do not rust.]

The libertine of the day

The word of the day from A.Word.A.Day is libertine . Which makes it a good time to revisit the story of I, Libertine .