Today’s Saturday Stumper

The work of “Garrett Estrada” and “Ernesto G. Prada” made me wonder if this week’s Newsday Saturday Stumper would reach some greater height of difficulty. No soap. Today’s puzzle, by Lester Ruff, was pretty simple stuff.

A few clues that I thought novel: 15-Across, nine letters, “Climbed all over.” 20-Across, six letters, “With integrity lost.” 41-Across, four letters, “An aerophone.” 38-Down, eight letters, “Trying inductions.” 50-Down, six letters, “Clears for the road.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Hard copies

Peter Funt:

For more than a century, baseball fans in Chicago have saved ticket stubs to preserve memories, both fond and frustrating, of their beloved Cubbies. . . .

That’s over. This season the Cubs have joined more than a dozen other Major League teams in eliminating paper tickets in favor of digital versions, downloaded to apps and displayed on phones.

And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories. It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?

Of course it is.

I’m down to one ticket stub, Brian Wilson performing SMiLE, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, October 2, 2004. I have the dates from other stubs in a text file. But I keep every letter.

[Peter Funt: son of Allen.]

No ticket to happiness

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek will engage in a public debate about whether capitalism or Marxism leads to happiness. Two remaining tickets, $1500 each. Neither one a ticket to happiness.

Or 1937?

[Click for a larger view.]

We took the car in for a software update and took a walk while we waited. Things began to feel fairly old and industrial. Before long it was 1951. Or 1937? I don’t know. I’m fairly certain though that this building is no longer in use.

Dunning-Kruger Montaigne

From Montaigne, “Of Presumption” (1580):

It is commonly said that good sense is the gift Nature has distributed most fairly among us, for there is no one who is unsatisfied with the share he has been allowed — and isn’t that reasonable enough? For whoever saw beyond this would be beyond his sight. I think my opinions are good and sound, but who does not think the same of his own?

Quoted in Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual (Boston: David R. Godine, 2018). Adapted from an unidentified public-domain translation.

Farnsworth’s gloss: “Our limited capacities prevent us from perceiving our limited capacities.”

Related reading
All OCA Dunning-Kruger posts (Pinboard)

“Mr. X and Mr. B”

Sam likes business college:


Alice Munro, “The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink.” In The Progress of Love (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

Also from Alice Munro
“Rusted seams” : “That is what happens” : “Henry Ford?” : “A private queer feeling” : “A radiance behind it” : Opinions : At the Manor : “Noisy and shiny” : “The evening lunch”

“The evening lunch”

Life in a boarding house:


Alice Munro, “The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink.” In The Progress of Love (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

Also from Alice Munro
“Rusted seams” : “That is what happens” : “Henry Ford?” : “A private queer feeling” : “A radiance behind it” : Opinions : At the Manor : “Noisy and shiny”

“Like, for sure!”

The New Yorker (February 4) has a short piece about Valley Girl Redefined, an art exhibition then at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, California. I like this passage:

Erin Stone, who curated the exhibition, said, “The idea of the Valley girl has expanded past this geographic area, to the point where people know about her, but they don’t know where she actually comes from.” The show was inspired, in part, by a trip that Stone took to Kathmandu. When she told a Nepali man where she was from, he responded, “Like, for sure!”

[Getting through a stack of New Yorker s takes time.]

Hyphens in the news

Or disappearing from the news. In The New Yorker, Mary Norris writes about the 2019 American Copy Editors Society Conference. New directions in hyphenation for the AP Stylebook: No hyphen in terms such as “African American.” No hyphen in “third grade teacher” and “chocolate chip cookie.” And:

The hyphen has been removed from double-“E” combinations, such as “preeclampsia,” “preelection,” “preeminent,” “preempt,” “reenter,” etc. If you find these difficult to read, The New Yorker has a solution: next year, consider the diaeresis.

Reëducation, I guess.

[I for one will always hyphenate “third-grade teacher.” And “high-school student.”]

Misheard

“Saint Mary of Klobuchar.”

What I think Douglas Brinkley really said: “Same area as Klobuchar.” But I like my version better.

Related reading
All OCA misheard posts (Pinboard)

[Brinkley was speaking on MSNBC. It’s easy to quit watching cable news. You can finish the joke.]