Overheard

[The scene: a supermarket. A woman in at least her seventies speaks to a friend.]

“I’m just gonna go without toothpicks and drink.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Re: the trial

Michael Che, on Saturday Night Live just now: “What better way to start off Black History Month than to be failed by the justice system?”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, constructing as Lester Ruff. Les Ruff? I found today’s puzzle Justus Ruff as many another Saturday Stumper. I started with two giveaways: 1-D, six letters, “Luthier’s product” and 32-A, fifteen letters, “Fleeting classroom opportunity.” That second giveaway provided paths into all five of the puzzle’s territories.

Clue-and-answer pairs I especially admired:

13-D, eight letters, “Unravels.” You’d think yarn, no?

19-A, six letters, “Fifth     .” There are many suspects.

25-A, four letters, “Senior moment.” A nice bit of misdirection.

33-D, eight letters, “Convenient place for wall art.” ENTRYWAY? No.

35-D, eight letters, “Video sequel of the ’80s.” How many quarters in the pizzeria on Commonwealth Avenue?

36-A, three letters, “Toon with an uncle Lubry Kent.” I should have seen this answer immediately.

51-A, five letters, “City northwest of Toledo.” Uh, AKRON? My trace of acquired midwesterness showed in my first guess.

58-A, eight letters, “Big Apple’s Mr. Mayor.” As long as the answer applies to, say, Alfred E. Smith and not Rudolph Giuliani.

Two clues I’d quarrel with:

1-A, eight letters, “Only Big Four Sports boss ever named Angelo.” Okay, true, but he wasn’t known as Angelo — or Angie or Ange, for that matter. How do you spell “Ange” anyway? I think of this clue as a dubious way to complicate its answer.

50-D, four letters, “Her films have grossed 7+ billion worldwide.” Here’s what I’d call unhelpful-factoid-as-clue. Unlike 1-A, it’s straightforward. But it’s a bit of trivia that is unlikely, I think, to spark recognition for many solvers. Seven billion, and not six or eight? Who knows? Who cares?

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

“Books saved my life”

A building super (Taylor Schilling) and a tenant who’s a librarian (Emilio Estevez) are talking:

“So you’re really into books, huh?”

“Books saved my life.”

“Saved your life?”

“Books helped me get sober and helped me turn my life around. They were tangible and they were real, something I could get my hands and my head around. So yeah, they saved my life.”

That’s one of the better moments from The Public (dir. Emilio Estevez, 2018), a film that remains admirable even if it jumps a shark.

“Just words”

More experienced aides had learned that “best practices” for success with Donald Trump* meant coming in with one point: “ONE POINT. Just that one point.” But not everyone listened:

I saw a number of appointees as they dismissed the advice of wisened hands and went in to see President Trump, prepared for robust policy discussion on momentous national topics, and a peppery give-and-take. They invariably paid the price.

“What the fuck is this?” the president would shout, looking at a document one of them handed him. “These are just words. A bunch of words. It doesn’t mean anything.” Sometimes he would throw the papers back on the table. He definitely wouldn’t read them.

Anonymous, A Warning (New York: Twelve, 2019).

“Don’t be surprised, be angry”

Don't be surprised, be angry. Show all of these GOP Senators treating Trump like a king that American democracy still works by voting them out. Every last one of them.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) January 31, 2020

Autocratic solipsism

“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment”: Alan Dershowitz here advances a theory of what I’d call autocratic solipsism. The end justifies the means. And what justifies the end? A president’s estimate of his or her importance to the nation’s well-being. Dershowitz invites his audience to imagine a president who muses,

“I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. And if I’m not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.”

What follows from such thinking, Dershowitz says, “cannot be an impeachable offense.”

Notice that Dershowitz conflates the interests of president and nation — what’s good for me is good for the country. And notice that Dershowitz doesn’t stop to consider that what might be in a president’s interest or a nation’s interest might also be contrary to law. And notice that he doesn’t stop to consider the possibility of a candidate not yet elected engaging in this same specious thinking. Notice too that Dershowitz never stops to consider that a president with the conviction of being “the greatest president there ever was” would appear to be suffering from dangerous delusions of grandeur and perhaps be unfit for office. But we already know who Dershowitz is aiming to please.

Alan Dershowitz, I regret to say, is the Rudolph Giuliani of Stanley Fishes.

A Ravel Kaddish, arr. Fine

Yesterday, at the European Parliament in Brussels, the Karski Quartet and Naomi Couquet performed Elaine Fine’s arrangement of a Maurice Ravel setting of the Kaddish, originally for voice and piano. The performance marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27). Video available here. Elaine’s arrangement is available from the IMSPL. Click on the Arrangements tab.

In 2019 the Quatuor Girard and Clémence Poussin performed the same arrangement. Video available here.

What an honor for Elaine, aka Musical Assumptions, aka my spouse.

Distance learning

Herb Childress:

Good teaching and learning have always been labor–intensive processes. As one of my correspondents, a provost at an elite undergraduate college, said, “When the movement to MOOCs was at its rabid peak a couple of years ago and some members of our board were talking about starting to do more distance education, I regularly told them that at our school, distance education is the length of a table.”

The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Childress offers a frank, clear-eyed analysis of what’s wrong with American higher education. And he has recommendations for improvement.

Related posts
“A fully realized adult person” : Colleges and bakeries : The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else : Offline, real-presence education

[MOOC: massive open online course.]

Small pleasures

House Manager Adam Schiff (D, California-18) today spoke the word copasetic on the Senate floor. And he referenced some famous phrasing from Casablanca : “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” casting Burisma as Rick’s Café Américain.

[My spelling follows that used by the Copasetics.]