From the Saturday Stumper

A nice clue from the Newsday Saturday Stumper, 40-Across, eight letters: “Unwritten constitution.” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle is by Lester Ruff, whose name sounds like an anagram (Re: Truffles), but who knows? Finishing a Saturday Stumper is always cause for minor self-congratulation.

Pottery Barn Kids [sic]

My daughter Rachel has alerted me to the existence of Pottery Barn Kids merchandise: Le Creuset toy cookware and Williams Sonoma toy food, costing much more than many people can afford to spend on real cookware and real food. You can guess what we think about this stuff.

In our household the crucial culinary toy was a 1980s Little Tikes Kitchen, a topic of conversation in a piece of fambly videotape. “Vintage” Little Tikes Kitchens are now even more expensive than Pottery Barn toys.

Barack Obama talks about social media

Barack Obama told an audience in New Delhi that he uses spellcheck and punctuation:

“Which my daughters think is odd. They were explaining to us how if you put a period at the end of a sentence it sounds harsh. I said, ‘No, that’s English. That’s how you know the thought is finished.’”

He said he sees people getting in trouble for their tweets, and says they should follow the old advice of thinking before you speak: “Think before you tweet,” Obama said. “Same principle.”

He said social media is a powerful tool, for both good and ill. “And look, I’ve got 100 million Twitter followers. I actually have more than other people who use it more often.”

Who’s tweeting?

WNYC reports on Dan Scavino, Donald Trump’s social-media guy. An observation from a Huffington Post reporter, Ashley Feinberg:

“The time of day is usually a good indicator [to decipher Trump’s tweets]. In the morning, Dan’s not at work yet, and Trump is sitting on his couch watching Fox News and tweeting himself, so those are usually him — when it’s before 10:00 AM or so. Late at night, too, the 10:30 tweets are usually Trump. But during the day, it’s more up for grabs.”

The eccentric capitalization of ordinary words— “The Failing @nytimes has totally gone against the Social Media Guidelines” — seems to be a good sign that it‘s Trump. Lots of words in all caps — RESTORE AMERICAN PROSPERITY — I think that’s more a Scavino tic.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger, perhaps more recognizable view.]

I think this one is tough, but when I think they’re tough, other people find them easy — and vice versa. At any rate, the actor is appearing in his first credited film role. Do you recognize him? Leave your best guess as a comment, and enter as often as you like. I’ll drop a hint if necessary.

*

11:00 a.m.: Here’s a hint: medicine.

11:26 a.m.: Another: water.

12:56 p.m.: This post has had many, many visits but no more guesses. I could add another hint: think boat. But I’ll reveal: it’s Bernie Kopell, best known as Dr. Adam Bricker, “Doc,” from The Love Boat. Here he plays an assistant to the Guru Brahmin (notice the photo, lower left) in The Loved One (dir. Tony Richardson, 1965).

That was tough.

More mystery actors
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“More than his usual state of instability”

From a letter to The New York Times by Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine:

We are currently witnessing more than his usual state of instability — in fact, a pattern of decompensation: increasing loss of touch with reality, marked signs of volatility and unpredictable behavior, and an attraction to violence as a means of coping. These characteristics place our country and the world at extreme risk of danger.

Ordinarily, we carry out a routine process for treating people who are dangerous: containment, removal from access to weapons and an urgent evaluation. We have been unable to do so because of Mr. Trump’s status as president. But the power of the presidency and the type of arsenal he has access to should raise greater alarm, not less.

We urge the public and the lawmakers of this country to push for an urgent evaluation of the president, for which we are in the process of developing a separate but independent expert panel, capable of meeting and carrying out all medical standards of care.

Lee is the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (2017). She points out in her letter that she and the contributors to that book represent mental health professionals who “now number in the thousands.”

Madness, or method?

In The Washington Post, Ruth Ben-Ghiat responds to yesterday’s Daily News editorial:

Many have sought to diagnose President Trump’s mental health from afar, depicting him as delusional, narcissistic or a madman. Such an approach is understandable, since many of us struggle to make sense of his destructive behavior and attachment to falsehoods that are often of his own making. Yet it’s the history of authoritarianism that provides the best framework for understanding Trump’s words and actions. From Benito Mussolini onward, strongmen have ruled through a combination of seduction and threat, building up protective cults of personality and relentlessly pushing their own versions of reality until they’re in a position to make them state policy.

Far from being lunatics, leaders such as Trump are opportunists and skilled manipulators who may change their ideas on specific policy issues without ever deviating from their main goal: the accumulation and steady expansion of their own power.

Word of the day: sledgehammer

Walking through the hardware store, I wondered: why sledgehammer? Does it have something to do with sledding? A mighty hammer used to free a sled stuck in ice?

The Oxford English Dictionary traces sledge to the Old English slecg, equivalent to the Middle Dutch and Dutch slegge and related to similar words in Old Norse and other languages. The surprise comes at the end of the etymology: “The stem *slagj- is derived from that of slay.” So a sledgehammer is a killing hammer? No, not really: the obsolete slay in question means “to smite, strike, or beat,” and sledgehammer or sledge, as the dictionary points out, refers “especially” to a blacksmith’s hammer.

Sledge, as I vaguely remembered, does also mean “sled” or “sleigh.” But that sledge derives from the Middle Dutch sleedse — no smiting there, just a sled. And sleigh comes from the Dutch slee, a contracted form of slede. No smiting there either.

The word hammer comes from the Old English hamor, hamer, hǫmer, equivalent to similar words in a number of Germanic languages. Says the OED, “The Norse sense ‘crag’, and possible relationship to Slavic kamy, Russian kameni stone, have suggested that the word originally meant ‘stone weapon.’” Primitive, man, primitive.

[Whatever we were looking for in the hardware store, it wasn’t a sledgehammer. I think it was microfiber cloths.]

“Only appearance”

A complete story:


Franz Kafka, “The Trees,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

“Mad”

A Daily News editorial is saying it plainly:

The President of the United States is profoundly unstable. He is mad. He is, by any honest layman’s definition, mentally unwell and viciously lashing out.

[What prompted this editorial: what the paper calls Donald Trump’s “Wednesday Twitter spasm.”]