Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, made me think I WNF (would not finish). But the puzzle began to open up when I guessed at 25-Down, six letters, “Top-selling aircraft brand of the 1970s.” Then I got 28-Down, six letters, “Grasping,” and 34-Down, five letters, “Some Southwestern ceramics,” and I was (slowly) on my way. Thank you, top-selling aircraft brand of the 1970s. And thank you, Frank Longo, for a challenging puzzle.

The clues that yielded my favorite answers: 1-Across, ten letters, “‘Busted!’” 17-Across, ten letters, “Girls’ new goal, as of 2019.” 51-Across, three letters, “High grade for a vineyard” — whose answer I know from a certain Van Dyke Parks song. 8-Down, fifteen letters, “Haunts.”

And 23-Down, six letters, “Legendary ‘Grail Maiden.’”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

From John Dingell’s last words

From John Dingell’s last words for his country, dictated yesterday, the day of his death, to Debbie Dingell, his wife, who holds the seat her husband held in the House of Representatives:

My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.

Think about it:

Impoverishment of the elderly because of medical expenses was a common and often accepted occurrence. Opponents of the Medicare program that saved the elderly from that cruel fate called it “socialized medicine.” Remember that slander if there’s a sustained revival of silly red-baiting today.

Not five decades ago, much of the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth — our own Great Lakes — were closed to swimming and fishing and other recreational pursuits because of chemical and bacteriological contamination from untreated industrial and wastewater disposal. Today the Great Lakes are so hospitable to marine life that one of our biggest challenges is controlling the invasive species that have made them their new home.

We regularly used and consumed foods, drugs, chemicals and other things (cigarettes) that were legal, promoted and actively harmful. Hazardous wastes were dumped on empty plots in the dead of night. There were few if any restrictions on industrial emissions. We had only the barest scientific knowledge of the long-term consequences of any of this.

And there was a great stain on America, in the form of our legacy of racial discrimination. There were good people of all colors who banded together, risking and even losing their lives to erase the legal and other barriers that held Americans down. In their time they were often demonized and targeted, much like other vulnerable men and women today.

Please note: All of these challenges were addressed by Congress. Maybe not as fast as we wanted, or as perfectly as hoped. The work is certainly not finished. But we’ve made progress — and in every case, from the passage of Medicare through the passage of civil rights, we did it with the support of Democrats and Republicans who considered themselves first and foremost to be Americans.

And:

In my life and career I have often heard it said that so-and-so has real power — as in, “the powerful Wile E. Coyote, chairman of the Capture the Road Runner Committee.”

It’s an expression that has always grated on me. In democratic government, elected officials do not have power. They hold power — in trust for the people who elected them. If they misuse or abuse that public trust, it is quite properly revoked (the quicker the better).

The quicker the better.

Ace Gummed Reinforcements

[“No 2. Size.” 2¼″ × 1½″. Click for a larger view.]

We took some items to a Habitat for Humanity ReStore. And there I found these reinforcements — mysterious, shadowy. What were they doing there? And what did they want from me? They wanted me to ask how much they cost: 75¢, but I paid a dollar.

I have vague memories of retro packaging from my youth, so my guess was that the box dates from the 1970s, with a design to make a dowdy school supply seem cool. (I thought too of a Tot Stapler ad featuring Stevie Staple-Freak.) The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies has a similar box, dated to the 1930s. Turn the box over and it does look like we’re further back in time.



Several eBay sellers offer Ace reinforcements made by Dennison. Did Dennison buy Ace? Was Ace always a Dennison name? The mystery deepens.

This post is the twenty-first in a very occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. The vignette effect in the photographs is by the Mac app Acorn.

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
C. & E.I. pencil : Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Dr. Scat : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Esterbrook erasers : Faber-Castell Type Cleaner : Fineline erasers : Harvest Refill Leads : Illinois Central Railroad Pencil : A Mad Men sort of man, sort of : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Moore Metalhed Tacks : A mystery supply : National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint : Pedigree Pencil : Pentel Quicker Clicker : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule

Letterheads

Letterheads dig letterheads. Letterhead Steven Heller offers his confessions — with samples.

Related posts
Eberhard Faber letterhead : Kurt Vonnegut letterhead

[Thanks to Ian Bagger for the link.]

Books about notebooks

The start of a sentence in a Washington Post piece by Josephine Wolff about notebooks: “The half-dozen books I’ve read about how to keep a notebook.”

The promises that books about notebooks make are appealing: follow this system to greater autonomy, creativity, and peace of mind. But I balk at the idea of reading a book to learn how to keep a notebook. One book that Wolff cites, by the creator of the Bullet Journal method, runs 320 pages.

Sanford Sylvan (1953–2019)

The singer Sanford Sylvan died last week in Manhattan at the age of sixty-five. The New York Times has an obituary.

Elaine has written a post about Sanford Sylvan, or Sandy, with links to other memorial posts about him. Elaine knew him when she was a teenager, and heard him sing many times. The two of us heard him in a Boston Shakespeare Company production of Mother Courage, directed by Peter Sellars. It was our third date, January 24, 1984. Linda Hunt played Mother Courage. I’ll never forget it.

The music for that production was by Van Dyke Parks. How could we have known that years later that Van Dyke would be our friend?

More kids ’n’ coffee

The term “kid’s coffee” in today’s xkcd made me remember this bit of dialogue. From River of No Return (dir. Otto Preminger, 1954), an exchange between father Matt Calder (Robert Mitchum) and son Mark (Tommy Rettig):

“Well, there it is: that’s Council City. What do you want when we get there?”

“A cup of coffee. A whole cup of coffee for myself!”

“You’ve got it!”

Related posts
coffee (A repurposed Ovaltine ad) : Kids ’n’ coffee (Nancy and Sluggo)

“Regional Terms for Carbonated Beverages”

[xkcd, February 7, 2019. Click for a larger view. Original here.]

The mouseover text reads “There’s one person in Missouri who says ‘carbo bev’ who the entire rest of the country HATES.”

Today’s xkcd makes me think of my son Ben’s childhood soda-language: “co-Coke” (cold Coke), “kid-Coke” (caffeine-free Coke), and “man-Coke” (the Real Thing itself). See also Things my children no longer say.

[Ichor!]

How to speed up podcasts in iTunes on a Mac

It’s not possible to speed up podcasts in iTunes on a Mac. But you can speed up podcasts by going outside iTunes, and without relying on a dedicated app. Here’s how:

In iTunes, right-click on the podcast episode you want to hear.

Choose “Show in Finder.” If you have several episodes of a podcast in your iTunes Library, the Finder will show them all. The file with the episode you’ve chosen will be highlighted.

In the Finder, right-click on the file. Open it with QuickTime (it’s on every Mac), and click on the arrows to the right of QuickTime’s Play icon to speed up playback, 2x or, much more improbably, 5x or 10x as fast.

Better: use the great free app VLC instead and adjust the playback speed from the menu bar. VLC offers much more control over playback speed (going up to 4x as fast). I find that 1.6x or so is a comfortable speed for most podcasts.

ButlisteningtoIraGlassonThisAmericanLifeisanotherstory.

[Happy to have finally figured this out.]

Izzy Young (1928–2019)

The folk-music advocate and entrepreneur Izzy Young has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary. Here are two paragraphs from an installment of Young’s Sing Out! magazine column “Frets and Frails” (February/March 1967):

Write to Steve Ditlea, WKCR-FM (89.9), Columbia University, NYC, 10025, for full listings of folkmusic shows that include tapings from the Bitter End, the Gaslight, the Feenjon, the Folklore Center and the Washington Square. The most popular show is on Sat. from 7:30 to 9:00 pm. . . . Send your name to Broadside, 215 W. 98th St., NYC, 10025, to aid their petition to bring back Pete Seeger’s “The Rainbow Quest” to TV. . . . Arlo Guthrie’s rendition of his “Alice’s Restaurant” was the high point of the Philadelphia Folk Festival. It sensibly combined elements of his father’s style of talking blues, contemporary notions of the absurdity of human life and protest of the draft in rolling comedy that never lost its sharpness or magical weave.

Belafonte has updated his calypso songs with brass on his latest LP. . . . Capitol has formed a new label, Folk World, to capture part of the “definite folk market, fat and solid”. . . . Now that the Spike Drivers of Detroit are beginning to make it their lead singers have lost weight to improve their image and their girl singer has taken to wearing bras. . . . Why are the Beatles the only group that smiles on publicity shots? Everyone else in Datebook and Teenset feels they have to look dour and hard to be hip. . . . The Loving Spoonful are one of the few groups that are growing up as they become more popular. In fact it’s easier to talk to them now than ever before and their music is not afraid to be happy.

I wasn’t subscribing to Sing Out! in 1967 — I was a kid, with several years to go before becoming a subversive teenager. I bought this issue several years after its publication for a cover story on Mississippi John Hurt. “Frets and Frails” disappeared not long after I began my subscription.

[The Spike Drivers? You can find them in Wikipedia. YouTube has a compilation album and two lip-synced songs — one, two — from a TV appearance. The group took its name from Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues.”]