Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Erik Agard, is the most difficult Saturday Stumper I’ve seen. 32-A, fifteen letters, “Unsettling?” Yes, indeed.

If I finish this puzzle, it’s going to be much later today. Because there’s a lawn to mow. And jerk chicken to eat. Things to do, and eat. Lots of things.

*

5:42 p.m.: Yes, there were lots of things to do. But finishing this puzzle was not one of them. I managed to figure out only a handful of clues. Looking at the solution makes me figuratively scratch my head. 1-D, four letters, “Gaynor, Garland, Streisand,       .” CHER? DION? I have no idea why the answer is what it is and not some other name. 18-A, seven letters, “One writing pointedly.” It’s a bit of a stretch to say that that seven-letter answer is a thing. Most baffling to me: 20-D, nine letters, “Dueling venues.” Maybe I need to spend more time in them to understand.

I was happy to get 14-D, four letters, “IDs often 56% hidden.” A novelty clue for a bit of crosswordese.

Next Saturday is another day.

An Alabama song

WTF’s chief meteorologist: “Alabama was going to be hit very hard, along with Georgia.”

So I thought of a song, Charley Patton’s (unembeddable) “Going to Move to Alabama.” Here is a transcription by Dick Spottswood, from Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds Of Charley Patton (Revenant Records, 2001).

I’m gon’ move to Alabama, I’m gon’ move to Alabama
I’m gon’ move t’ Alabama, to make Georgia be your home

Ah, she long and tall
[The way you like to treat me] makes a pan(t)her squall
I have to move to Alabama, have to move to Alabama
I have to move to Alabama, to make Georgia be your home

I’m gon show you common women, how I feel
Gon’ get me ’nother woman ’fore I leave
You’ll ever move to Alabama, then I will move to Alabama
Then I will move to Alabama, make Georgia be your home

Says, mama got the washboard, my sis got the tub
My brother got the whiskey, an’ mama got the jug
Gon’ move to Alabama, I’m gon’ move to Alabama
I’m gon’ move t’ Alabama, n’ make Georgia be your home

Well, these evil women sho’ make me tired
Got a handful of gimme, mouthful much obliged
You musta been to Alabama, you musta been to Alabama
You musta been to Alabama, to make Georgia be your
    home

Aw, I got a woman, she long and tall
But when she wiggles, she makes this man bawl
She gon’ move to Alabama, have you been to Alabama?
Have you been to Alabama, to make Georgia be your
    home?

Say, mama an’ papa both went to walk
Lef’ my sister standing at the waterin’ trough
You haven’ been (to) Lou’siana, have you been to
    Alabama?
Have you been to Alabama, to make Georgia be your
    home?

My mama told me
Never love a woman like she can’t love you
You, have you been to Alabama, have you been to
    Alabama?
Have you been to Alabama, to make Georgia be your
    home?

I got up this mornin’, my hat in my han’
Didn’ have (nowhere to roam, had nowhere, man)
I (done been to) to Alabama, have you been to Alabama?
Have you been to Alabama, to make Georgia be your
    home?

Charley Patton, guitar and vocal. Henry Sims, violin.
Paramount 13014-B, recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin, October 1929.

The inspiration for this and other tunes: Jim Jackson’s 1927 “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues.” Hurricane Dorian moved to neither Alabama nor Kansas City.

Elaine has posted four versions of another Alabama song.

[Brackets: almost certainly wrong. Parentheses: parts of words, implied words, educated guesses. The brackets and parentheses appear in Spottswood’s transcription.]

Word of the day: loiter

Elaine and I ran into a friend in the library. What brought us there? I kept a straight face and said that we were loitering. Meaning what, exactly?

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that loiter first meant “to idle, waste one's time in idleness.” The word later came to have a more specific meaning: “to linger indolently on the way when sent on an errand or when making a journey; to linger idly about a place; to waste time when engaged in some particular task, to dawdle.” The dictionary notes that the word frequently appears in the legal phrase to loiter with intent, the intent, that is, to commit a felony.

Our only intent was to browse for books and movies. And there was no dawdling or indolent lingering involved. Okay, we weren’t really loitering.

But whence the verb loiter? The OED traces the word to the Middle Dutch loteren, “to wag about (like a loose tooth)” or “to shiver” (like a sail) or “to dawdle, loiter over one’s work.”

And now I wondered: could loiter be related to litter? Those who loiter may be likely to litter, tossing about candy wrappers and cigarette butts, but there’s no connection between the words. The verb litter derives from the noun litter, which the OED traces from the Anglo-Norman litere all the way back to the Latin lectus, meaning “bed.” And the noun’s meanings go from “bed” (the earliest) to the stuff of bedding (“straw, rushes, or the like”) to bedding for animals (with “the straw and dung together”) to straw and other materials used in plaster or thatch to “odds and ends, fragments and leavings lying about, rubbish; a state of confusion or untidiness; a disorderly accumulation of things lying about.” The verb’s earliest meaning: “To furnish (a horse, etc.) with litter or straw for his bed.” The definition of the verb that comes closest to our usual use: “to cover as with litter, to strew with objects scattered in disorder.”

The OED lacks a definition for what we usually talk about when we talk about the verb litter: the discarding of small scraps of packaging or other matter in public places. I thought that might be because the dictionary’s entries for the noun and verb (“first published 1903”) have not been fully updated. (The most recent citation for the verb: 1896.) But Merriam-Webster, too, has no definition for litter that speaks of small scraps discarded in public places. The OED does have a relevant definition for littering: “the action of throwing or dropping litter,” with the earliest citation from 1960.

What are the limits of litter? To leave, say, a television or a piece of furniture on the sidewalk is not to litter. To flick ashes on the sidewalk is not to litter. But to drop something that belongs in a wastebasket — say, a losing lottery ticket — is.

I will now disappear before someone suspects me of loitering.

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest episode of WGBH’s The Rewind, “Ted Kennedy and the Busing Crisis,” hosted by our son Ben.

“The jokes of the Tartars and the salads of the Inca”

Introducing James Wilde, naturalist and explorer. Long sentence, short sentence, to great effect.


Esi Edugyan, Washington Black (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).

Also from this novel
Beginning to draw

[I know that this description doesn’t fit Sir Ian McKellen. But I still think he’d make a good James Wilde.]

Helping the Bahamas

The New York Times has a list of organizations accepting donations.

More maps

In his ongoing effort to insist that Hurricane Dorian was forecast to hit Alabama, Donald Trump tweeted a grainy image of another hurricane map. This map appears to be what’s called a spaghetti plot, perhaps with additional lines made with ballpoint pens. It’s impossible to tell.

The important point is that one has to know how to read such a map for the map to be meaningful. The Weather Channel has this to say about spaghetti plots: “spaghetti plots do not show where impacts will occur.” And:

Although most models show possible impacts, to present many models succinctly on a single chart, meteorologists generally produce spaghetti plots that usually only show the “where” and a loose representation of “when” for tropical systems.

And:

These plots do not speak to whether a storm will bring rainfall, hurricane-force winds, surge, or other data; they just contain information about the center of a storm’s future track.

I don’t know how to read spaghetti plots, but I know that I don’t know how, and I know that there are people who do.

The Alabama loop

As reported by Axios and Gizmodo: Donald Trump displayed a doctored map to support his false claim that Alabama is in the path of Hurricane Dorian. A black (Sharpie-made?) loop reaching into Alabama has been added to the legitimate map. In the spirit of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Hurricane Dorian has always been at war with Alabama.”

*

September 5: Here’s the pre-Sharpie map.

Beginning to draw

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).

Our son Ben recommended this novel to us. (Thank you, Ben!) Washington Black draws upon slave narratives, the Bildungsroman, magical realism, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison to create a story of self-discovery, of scientific discovery, of friendship and the limits of friendship. George Washington Black, Wash, the novel’s narrator, begins life as an enslaved child on a plantation in Barbados. Christopher Wilde, Titch, inventor and naturalist, is the plantation owner’s brother.

For me, the novel’s one weakness is its reliance upon figures of speech that seem out of place in a nineteenth-century narrative: “like a thread of music,” “like thread on the landscape,” “like a thread of poison poured into a well,” And so on. Those figures will just disappear when Washington Black is adapted for television.

It is, by the way, great fun to read a novel, say it should become a movie, and then learn that it will. Get me Sir Ian McKellen’s agent on the phone. I see McKellen as Titch’s father James.

*

11:05 a.m.: Elaine mentioned “orange.” How did I forget “orange”? “The weak orange light,” “the orange light of the lantern,” “a low orange glow,” “a smoky orange warmth.” And so on. Here’s where an editor could point out that such repetitions might weaken the prose by distracting the reader.

Long-distance access codes

My mom was puzzled: she usually uses a cellphone, and when she tried to call us on her landline she heard a recorded message telling her that she needed a long-distance access code. Strange, especially because she can use her landline to call other numbers that require an area code, but not our number.

Explanation: the other numbers are neither local nor long-distance. They’re “regional.”

But what’s a long-distance access code? The Internets, too, have asked this question. I searched the phone company’s website — no answer.

So I volunteered to call the phone company in search of an access code. The person I spoke with had no idea what I was asking about. But while on hold I found a useful page: Long-distance carrier identification code search. It turns out that long-distance access codes are seven digits long and begin with “101.” You can search by company for an appropriate code.

An unlimited long-distance calling plan for a landline makes no economic sense, so it’s good to know that it’s still possible, when necessary, to make a one-off landline call with an access code. And it’s telling, I think, that this much-sought-after information is missing from the phone company’s website. Just sign up for the unlimited plan, right?

[“The phone company”: yes, straight out of the dowdy world.]