Advice from my mom

For Mother’s Day 2018 I asked my mom if she had any advice she’d like to share with readers. She obliged. This year I asked her if she had any advice she’d like to share about being a mother. Her advice: Trust that your children are good enough to know what they’re doing and to do what’s right. And don’t be too bossy. She says that she wasn’t: “That’s for sure.” I think she’s right.

Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Richard Penniman (1932–2020)

Little Richard was an architect of a new American culture, still in the making. The New York Times has an obituary.

Unembeddable: “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti,” from Don’t Knock the Rock (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1956). And from Billboard, great moments and tributes.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski, whose name I’ve seen on just one other Stumper, constructed with Erik Agard. Zawistowski deals out cryptic-crossword clues on Twitter and keeps a crossword website, Tough As Nails — and yes, her puzzles are difficult. I like what she says about crosswords and cultural literacy:

I don’t mind having to know who Ralph KINER (a baseball player of the 1940s and ’50s) is, but you should have to know who LIZZO is, too.

Check, and check. But I remember Ralph Kiner as a Mets announcer on TV. He would do beer commercials — I think I remember this — in the broadcast booth, pouring a glass (Rheingold?) and letting it sit. You couldn’t show drinking in commercials.

But I digress.

Today’s Stumper was deeply satisfying — clever, surprising, but never out of range. I started with a giveway, 5-D, three letters, “Part of a Gretel goodbye” and followed it to a non-giveaway, 17-A ten letters, “It’s pitched low.” Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-A, ten letters, “Bails.” You don’t hear this word much outside the dowdy world.

1-D, four letters, “Marches, in lit.” The lit is telling.

11-A, four letters, “Woman wrapped in flannel.” I saw it, or her, immediately. I’m getting used to this stuff.

22-D, eleven letters, “Magnavox introduction of 1972.” News to me.

23-D, eight letters, “Flag.”

35-A, five letters, “She stands on her own two feet.” Noteworthy for the pronouns, I’d say.

39-D, seven letters, “AFI’s #5 male Screen Legend.”

Best of all: 48-A, nine letters, “It’s beside the point.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[I had to check: yes, Kiner poured, and it was Rheingold. Here’s another Mets announcer selling Rheingold.]

A mind at work

Donald Trump* yesterday, outing a previously unidentified member of Mike Pence’s staff:

“She tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of a sudden today she tested positive. She hasn’t come into contact with me. She’s spent some time with the vice president. It’s, I believe, the press person, right? It’s a press person. So she tested positive out of the blue. This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t [sic ] necessarily great. The tests are perfect, but something can happen between the test, where it’s good and then something happens and all of a sudden. She was tested very recently and tested negative and then today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.”

What I find remarkable is the president’s inability to acknowledge (or even understand?) the reality of cause and effect. Trump* sees a positive result is an inexplicable fluke, something “out of the blue”: “I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.” And he sees a positive result as evidence that “the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great” (although “the tests are perfect”). Add the awkward diction (“she tested very good”) and repetition (“she tested positive,” “she tested positive,” “she tested positive,” “the press person,” “a press person, ”“something can happen,” “something happens”), and it’s clear that we’re watching a failing mind at work.

Trump* went on to explain that Mike Pence was “on an airplane going to some faraway place.”

The staff member, identified by Trump as “Katie,” is Katie Miller, Pence’s press secretary and Stephen Miller’s wife.

[My transcription.]

Adage

“The sardine has to want to change.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

“A dangling, untied ribbon”

Sometimes Bernardo Soares in translation sounds to me like Frank O’Hara. And sometimes, like John Ashbery.


Fernando Pessoa, from text 243, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

Venting

The question has haunted me: Why the vents in cabinets under kitchen sinks? I found three likely answers.

Those vents are a hallmark of the dowdy world. Our kitchen cabinets (c. 1959) must have come a little too late: the one under the sink has faux vents — shallow grooves cut with a router, I guess. Puzzling, but beautiful. Beautiful, but puzzling.


[Our skeuomorphic vents.]

Walking protocol

Wave to everyone. Wave even to those who never wave back.

A daily walk

“One of the few options for escaping the drumbeat of bad news”: New York Times readers on the benefits of a daily walk.

*

10:00 a.m.: The latest bad news, as I’m about to go for a walk.

Woodruff’s Morison

[PBS NewsHour, May 6, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

That book on Judy Woodruff’s right, the one with the blue-gray cover, its spine often partly hidden behind the NewsHour logo — I’ve been wondering what it is. I could make out The Oxford. A dictionary? An ancient guide to usage? I finally realized that the way to an answer was a computer screen, not a television (or at least not my television).

Let us zoom in:

It’s Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People (1965). If you need something to read, it’s at the Internet Archive, all 1153 pages of it.

I once ID’d T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 on MSNBC’s Hardball. That was detective work.

[Sometimes I have to concentrate on the trivial to cope with the non-trivial.]