P Is for Pterodactyl

Good clean fun for the nerdish young: P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever, by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter, with illustrations by Maria Tina Beddia.

Thanks, Rachel.

[Pterodactyl: “genus of reptiles, from Greek pteron wing + daktylos finger.” And why is the dactyl a metrical foot? Because it resembles the structure of a finger, whose three bones suggest the three syllables: long, short, short. The Greek daktylos is itself a dactyl: — ᴗ ᴗ. In poetic meter in English, the dactyl is a matter of stress, not length. The word poetry is a dactyl. POetry: / x x.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough one, particularly in the center-west and south-west. 26-Down, ten letters, “Take your time” was the clue that finally (finally) let me work out six or seven other missing answers. And then there was 54-Across, three letters, “Application placeholder.” What? I got that one on a first guess and had to look it up to understand what I had typed.

My favorite clues in today’s puzzle: 5-Down, twelve letters, “I asked for so little!” and 25-Down, four letters, “Theatregoer, quite possibly.” Fiendish, that clue. No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

I’m not sure what’s happening to the Newsday crossword. A paywall now rules the site, with a digital subscription costing $3.49 a week, but an adblocker should make the puzzle playable for non-subscribers. The puzzle is also available at BrainsOnly. I hope that Newsday, like The New York Times, will offer a crossword-only subscription. That’d be appropriate for solvers with no particular ties to Long Island.

“Why not ghosts”

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977).

I like this element of meta-commentary as Milkman tries to think things through: one element of the fantastic in this novel makes another plausible.

A related post
“Hi” vs. “hello”

[Yes, Pilate Dead, Milkman’s aunt, was born without a navel. And yes, some people are born without one. But we’re not meant to think of a medical explanation when reading Song of Solomon.]

“Hi” vs. “hello”

Milkman Dead is paying a rare visit to Pilate Dead, his aunt. His friend Guitar Bains is with him. Pilate is peeling an orange.


Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977).

Pilate then instructs the young men: “You say ‘Hi’ to pigs and sheep when you want ’em to move. When you tell a human being ‘Hi,’ he ought to get up and knock you down.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines hi as “an exclamation used to call attention.” Nothing about animals, but there is this citation from 1847: “‘Hi!’ cried the brigand, giving the mule a bang with the butt-end of his musket. ‘Hi!’”

Recently updated

Elevator trouble in academia New developments.

Faux daughter

[Life, October 15, 1951.]

My fambly agrees: the homemaker here looks like Rachel, if Rachel were a 1951 homemaker. The only problem: the original eyes are brown. “Can you get contacts?” I asked Rachel. “Just edit the image,” said Elaine. I did the best I could.

A related post
“The most useful of all foods”

[I used Mac’s Preview app: I lassoed the eyes, cut and pasted them into new files, tinkered with color settings, and returned the eyes to the face.]

“The most useful of all foods”

[Life, October 15, 1951. Click for a larger advertisement.]

Zippy (November 13, 2018): “Th’ soup can on this Andy Warhol refrigerator magnet speaks to me!” Me too, Zippy. When the weather turns cold, I think of the soups of my childhood, Campbell’s Tomato and Lipton Noodle. Granted, they’re little more than sodium delivery systems, but I like them. With Campbell’s I have half a can; with Lipton I drain most of the broth. My nostalgia is okay with less sodium.

I’ll leave most of the text of this advertisement to speak for itself. The one detail I’ll highlight: the tip to “take it [the soup] just as comes from the can, season to taste, and pour over hamburgers, fish and leftovers.” Makes me think of something David Sedaris might write. Be careful not to drop any ashes as you’re pouring.

I think Zippy would find this advertisement a trove of over and overs: “Golden creamery butter! Golden creamery butter!”

-da

“I’m not going to dwell on it”: who am I kidding? I kept tinkering and found a fix for my Blogger-and-MarsEdit paragraph-break trouble. I turned off MarsEdit’s option to Convert Line Breaks and tried one small change, adding a line to my Blogger template to reduce the space allotted to a post title:

.post h3 {
margin:.25em 0 0;
padding:0 0 4px;
margin-bottom: -3px;

The last line — margin-bottom: -3px; — is the fix. So now I can write posts in MarsEdit and have what for me is proper spacing between title and text. Ta-da. I’m not sure how this added line is related to the values for padding. Tinkering is suspended for now.

If you think that focusing on such minutiae might be a temporary escape from the madness of current events — yes, it is.

Related posts
MarsEdit : Ta

Ta

I almost found a fix for my Blogger-and-MarsEdit paragraph-break trouble. Richard Abbott’s comment on this post prompted me to look at my Blogger template — which I hardly understand but am willing to snoop around in. I tried various settings related to post format — margins, padding, line height — and almost got things to look right by changing values in the bits of code for .post and .post h3. But my tinkering always left something off: a smaller gap between post title and text meant smaller spaces between paragraphs. I could find no way to push a post title down, so to speak, closer to the first line of text, without side effects.

This post’s title has at least two meanings. I did not find a fix: there is no -da, only a ta. And I’ve decided to say “Ta” to my Blogger-and-MarsEdit paragraph-break trouble. I still mind the gap. But I’m not going to dwell on it. I’ll just delete <p> and </p> tags and be on my way.

Reader, if you decide to tinker with a Blogger template, save a copy first. Preview your changes. Keep track of what you’re changing. And proceed at your own risk. Then again, you may not be inordinately particular about paragraph breaks to begin with.

*

A fix! So now there’s a -da.

Domestic comedy

“Look — another person with a light on their head.”

[Then in unison, spontaneously.]

“It must be a thing.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)