Add some letters to your day

We don’t know who needs to hear this, but writing letters can improve your day. ✨

— U.S. Postal Service (@USPS) April 23, 2020

[Post title with apologies to the Beach Boys.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

In childhood, I would have called today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, “medium.” Not too difficult, not too easy. “How was the test, Michael?” “Medium.” But wait a sec — in childhood I wouldn’t have been venturing anyway near this crossword.

Today’s puzzle has a number of surprising answers. They go with these clues:

1-A, 8 letters, “Bring pressure to bear.” I can’t recall seeing the answer in a puzzle before.

1-D, five letters, “Biggest performing rights group.” I’m married to a member.

11-D, eleven letters, “Efficient clamps.” Yow!

12-D, four letters, “One in an Old Time Radio lineup.” Clever stuff.

21-D, six letters, “Period of petitioning.” Something to do with an election year? No. A really smart clue and an unusual answer.

24-D, eleven letters, “British dessert.” I was hoping for SPOTTEDDICK, which I know about from a Henry Threadgill tune.

41-A, ten letters, “Attired, as circus chimps.” Wonderfully weird.

45-A, eight letters, “Diligent.” This answer strikes me as a word one might see in a dowdy academic’s letter of recommendation.

65-A, six letters, What Every Mother Should Know author (1914). I guessed right.

And now back to words from my childhood.

“Medium” is not a synonym for Goldilocks’s “just right.” Indeed, there’s a crossing in this puzzle which seems to me ridiculous: 14-D, four letters, “Forest*A*__ (online woods management guide)” and 16-A, six letters, “Like tangerines.” The problem, as I see it: 14-D is painfully obscure. And because that’s the case, an apt answer for 16-A is not likely to look like a wrong answer. Indeed, that wrong answer, to my eyes, is a better answer, a cleverer answer, than the correct one. Caution: if you plan to do the puzzle, stop reading here.

To the left, the original. To the right, my suggested alterations:

G E C K O S     G E C K O S
O R A N G Y     O R A N G E
T E N O R S     T E N O R A
    I B E T         I T E R

I’ll grant that TENORA (clued perhaps as “Voice of Catalonia”) and ITER (“Brainy passage”) are a bit out of the way. But ORANGE, noun and adjective, is wittier than the variant spelling ORANGY, and as for Forest*A*SYST — jeepers.

No other spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Lysol and lightbulbs

Donald Trump*’s irresponsible, dangerous suggestion that disinfectants, used internally, might kill the coronavirus has prompted Reckitt Benckiser, maker of Lysol, to issue a disclaimer:

Due to recent speculation and social media activity, RB (the makers of Lysol and Dettol) has been asked whether internal administration of disinfectants may be appropriate for investigation or use as a treatment for coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).

As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion, or any other route). As with all products, our disinfectant and hygiene products should only be used as intended and in line with usage guidelines. Please read the label and safety information.

We have a responsibility in providing consumers with access to accurate, up-to-date information as advised by leading public health experts. For this and other myth-busting facts, please visit Covid-19facts.com.

Here, “recent speculation” is a euphemism for executive-level Dunning-Kruger freestyling imbecility, unfiltered.

As for Trump*’s suggestion that light might kill the virus in the body, I suggest one old-fashioned lightbulb (the kind Trump* likes) for his mouth, and one for — never mind. Treatment best administered while the patient watches television.

And please, no one, not even a nationally known cartoonist, can convince me that Trump* was talking about “far-UV light catheter technology.” Please.

Here are Reckitt Benckiser’s words as a link: Covid-19facts.com.

*

Trump* today is claiming that his suggestions were sarcasm directed at reporters. He’s lying of course, as the video record makes clear. Dr. Deborah Birx says today that Trump* was “still digesting” new information as he was speaking. Which I think might mean that he threw up.

[The relevant section of the briefing begins at 20:26. Notice that Trump*’s comments immediately followed William Bryan’s comments on light, disinfectants, and their use on surfaces. Notice too that Scott Adams’s evidence for his claim about “far-UV light catheter technology” is a YouTube video uploaded thirteen hours ago, to an account created yesterday, with this one video to its name. As of April 25, the video is gone: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”]

Nostalgia

Fernando Pessoa, from text 92, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

[Not make the past great again?]

Meta Zits

[Zits, April 23, 2020.]

Today’s Zits is nicely meta. Connie’s conclusion about her son’s words: “The thinnest of excuses.”

Not done yet

In today’s Family Circus, Billy explains punctuation: “That’s a hyphen. It means the word isn’t done yet.”

Science must trump politics

From The New York Times:

The doctor who led the federal agency involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine said on Wednesday that he was removed from his post after he pressed for a rigorous vetting of a coronavirus treatment embraced by President Trump. The doctor said that science, not “politics and cronyism” must lead the way.

From Dr. Rick Bright’s statement on his removal:

Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.

Here’s the full statement.

[How many hyrdoxychloroquine cronies can you name in ten seconds?]

Cuomo and Gibbon and others

I flipped on the television after an escape to Brontëland and saw Andrew Cuomo talking. Behind him, on a screen, a sentence attributed to Edward Gibbon:

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then [they] ceased to be free.

But it’s not from Edward Gibbon. It’s from Edith Hamilton, sort of, by way of Margaret Thatcher. Background here.

I know the idea from a different part of the political spectrum, as expressed by Julius Lester, who contrasts “freedom from” and “freedom to” in a discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The best way to use one’s freedom right now, if your life and work allow it, is to stay home. That’s the freedom of being responsible, to oneself and to others.

[The they in brackets (parentheses on the screen) takes the place of Athens.]

“Give yourself a coffee-break”

Michael Pollan’s review of Augustine Sedgewick’s Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug notes that the term coffee-break

entered the vernacular through a 1952 advertising campaign by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, a trade group organized by Central American growers. Their slogan: “Give yourself a coffee-break . . . and get what coffee gives to you.”

That sounded familiar. How? Why? Oh — I had looked it up for a blog post in 2014.

Here is one of the Life magazine advertisements that promoted the slogan:


[Did baseball players ever really drink coffee in the dugout? Some, yes. Life, August 4, 1952. Click for a much larger view.]

Bob Elliott was nearing the end of his playing career in 1952. Larry Jansen, in mid-career, was the winning pitcher in the famous 1951 Giants–Dodgers National League championship playoff game that the Giants won in the bottom of the ninth. My dad always remembered hearing that game on the radio. The Giants went on to lose the 1951 World Series to the New York Yankees.

“A cup of coffee,” as some readers will already know, is a baseball term for a short stint in the major leagues. Maybe that’s what the unidentified player on the right was having.

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

“The tedium of dangers”

Fernando Pessoa, from text 75, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)