Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, hardly feels like Saturday. It’s easy as A-B-C, or pie. Or to switch from simile to metaphor, it’s a piece of cake. Or a walk in the park. Or a cakewalk. Or a breeze, felt while walking in the park, with or without cake.

Two fun clues: 20-Across, thirteen letters, “One extremely well-fixed.” And 51-Across, fourteen letters, “Interrogative endorsement.”

A slightly deceptive clue: 9-Down, six letters, “They typically sit near conductors at concerts.”

A clue that taught me something: 37-Across, five letters, “‘Me no __’ (punny pan of ‘I Am a Camera’).”

My least favorite clue: 45-Across, three letters, “National Caramel Mo.” Of course, right, National Caramel Mo.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[National Nougat Day: March 26.]

A message for Shorty

[Actual fortune from today’s lunch.]

An important email will be arriving shortly.

Or:

An important email will be arriving, Shorty.

Wait — who’re you calling Shorty?

Other cookies
Lucky numbers : “Order a takeout” : Speed vs. accuracy

[I’d prefer e-mail. Google’s Ngram Viewer has e-mail dropping slightly but still twice as common as email.]

“Steel Slats”

Our leader’s idiocy has put Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones in my head. Yes, “Black Slacks.” The lyrics are so easily repurposed:

Black slacks Steel slats
Mostly in the head
Black slacks Steel slats
Well, that’s what I said

“Mostly in the head” is right.

No news

[Zippy, December 21, 2018.]

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[You can read Zippy daily at Comics Kingdom.]

Or, or, or

“It can be ‘breath’ or ‘life-breath.’ It can mean ‘throat’ or ‘neck’ or ‘gullet.’ Sometimes it can suggest ‘blood.’ It can mean ‘person’ or even a ‘dead person,’ ‘corpse.’ Or it can be ‘appetite’ or something more general: ‘life’ or even ‘the essential self.’ But it’s not quite ‘soul’ ”: Robert Alter on translating the Bible.

[I twice used Alter’s translation of the Book of Job in undergrad classes. Highly recommended.]

Alliances

Two excerpts from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s letter of resignation:

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.

*

We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

Mattis then says that that on these and other matters, he is not “aligned” with Donald Trump.

“America First”? No, alliances. Not to be abandoned, not to be belittled, with partners not to be mistaken for adversaries — who themselves should never be mistaken for friends. (He likes me, I like him, we fell in love, &c.)

Mattis’s sign-off is telling: “I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.” He was serving his country and its military, not Donald Trump.

Work as play

“Being hard at work is really being hard at play for me”: Elaine Fine writes about the economics of music.

A poem with John Ashbery and Stanley Lombardo in it

In the latest New Yorker, a prose poem by Anne Carson: “Short Talk on Homer and John Ashbery.” And Stanley Lombardo is in there too.

I interviewed Lombardo in 2002. One of the happiest instances of my “research and creative activity.”

Related reading
All OCA Ashbery, Homer, and Lombardo posts (Pinboard)

[“Research and creative activity”: one of the three categories for evaluating tenure-track and tenured college faculty. The others: teaching and service.]

Yorick, soulful

Yorick visits Maria, a “disordered maid” whose story of lost love told in Tristam Shandy. When Yorick meets her, Maria has lost not only her lover but also her father and her goat. She has only a little dog for company. Maria weeps, and Yorick weeps with her. This sentence, a paragraph unto itself, is startling in its unambiguous sincerity.


Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Text from the 2001 Penguin edition, ed. Paul Goring.

Also from this novel
Letters for all occasions : Yorick, distracted : Yorick, translating

#MRRA

Listening to a president proclaim “We won,” I have to wonder if he’s been listening too long to John and Yoko: “War is over, if you want it.” Reality on demand.

I propose a hashtag to counter #MAGA: #MRRA. Make reality real again.