Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, begins with a gimme, sort of: 1-Across, seven letters, “Short-notice helipad user.” But wait: how is that answer spelled? Either way, its last letter gave me 7-Down, nine letters, “Nation nearly entirely on renewable electricity.” And a letter in that answer let me guess with confidence at 32-Across, fifteen letters, “Professorial privilege.” Yeah, I’m all about the privilege. But everything else took a lot longer.

Some challenging and rewarding clues: 10-Down, four letters, “Okay request.” 11-Down, four letters, “What bagels are made without.” 25-Down, five letters, “Many minute hands.” And one that made me laugh: 60-Across, seven letters, “West Wing resignee of 2017.” There were so many!

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Four years

[Brendan Loper, “Cartoon of the Day.” The New Yorker, March 8, 2019.]

Minutes seem like hours. Hours seem like days. Really the blues.

“Walton”

From a prison cell, the view across Lake Wolbana:


Kenneth Fearing, Clark Gifford’s Body. 1942. (New York: New York Review Books, 2007).

Sam Walton managed his first variety store in 1945. He opened the first Walton’s in 1950. Not exactly a buttonhook magnate, but eerily close.

Also from Fearing
“The niece of a department store” : “Me? Dangerous?” : “Nearly everyone was” : “The slightly confidential friend” : “Rivalries and antagonisms”

The Mental Load

I can’t remember where I learned about this comic: Fallait demander, or The Mental Load. Every human male should read it. The artist and writer is known as Emma — just Emma.

Everybody’s folding

[Zits, March 8, 2019.]

“Each piece of your clothing should be carefully folded”: Connie Duncan (Mom) just binge-watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. But in the strip it’s just called Tidying Up. To make things tidier? To not infringe on the Marie Kondo brand? Anyway, Mom has too many rules.

Hipster look-alikes

An amusing item from The Washington Post: “Hipsters all look the same, man inadvertently confirms.”

I recall my eight-grade science teacher Mr. Fox going off on a tangent one afternoon about conformity: about how no hippie would leave the house without his love beads arranged just so. The hippies too, he said, were conforming. Mr. Fox was onto something. He was rumored to be a former FBI agent.

[Love beads: I swear. I’ve always remembered that detail.]

“Rivalries and antagonisms”

A general speaks:


Kenneth Fearing, Clark Gifford’s Body. 1942. (New York: New York Review Books, 2007).

Clark Gifford’s Body tells the story of an insurrection in an imaginary country of diminished freedoms and perpetual war. The insurrection begins with the seizing of radio stations. The novel ranges backward and forward in time, assembling the accounts of participants and eyewitnesses, court documents, and news reports. NYRB describes the novel as “a pseudo-documentary of a world given over to pseudo-politics and pseudo-events, a prophetic glimpse of the future as a poisonous fog.” Made for these times.

Also from Fearing
“The niece of a department store” : “Me? Dangerous?” : “Nearly everyone was” : “The slightly confidential friend”

Playing to lose

The guitarist and singer Buddy Guy, quoted in David Remnick’s New Yorker profile “Holding the Note” (March 11, 2019):

“Funny thing about the blues — you play ’em cause you got ’em. But, when you play ’em, you lose ’em.”

Related reading
All OCA blues posts (Pinboard)

Mooch, hypercorrecting

[Mutts, March 7, 2019. Click for a larger view.]

Sorry, Mooch: who is correct. (Who told you that?) Whom for who, like between you and I, is a hypercorrection. Garner’s Modern English Usage explains:

Sometimes people [or cats] strive to abide by the strictest etiquette, but in the process behave inappropriately. The very motivations that result in this irony can play havoc with the language: a person [or cat] will strive for a correct linguistic form but instead fall into error. Linguists call this phenomenon “hypercorrection” — a common shortcoming.

Mooch’s gotcha “Ha!” and smug look in the third panel tell me that Patrick McDonnell, the strip’s creator, understands the difference between who and whom.

“Sub-parts”

Watch Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen avoid acknowledging that Customs and Border Protection keeps children in cages:

“Sir, they’re not cages.” What are they then? “As the children are processed through, they are in sub-parts of these facilities.” But not in cages. Children are in “areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed.” But not in cages.

Related reading
All OCA Orwell posts (Pinboard)

[Axios has it as “some parts,” but if you listen carefully, it’s “sub-parts.”]