Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga” (Stan Again), Stan Newman constructing under one of the aliases he uses with easier Saturday Stumpers of his making. I found this puzzle not especially easy but not especially tricky.
Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:
7-D, eight letters, “Trans-Neptunian dwarf planets.” For sentimental reasons.
16-A, six letters, “Common typeface in upscale magazines.” Nice, and I can see it on the page, even if I can’t name a single magazine. In my experience, the only typeface that turns up in crosswords is Arial.
26-A, four letters, “Whaler who became a retailer (1850).” Uh, AHAB? No. This clue taught me something.
46-A, four letters, “Christie alternative.” So clear once you see it.
My favorite clue in today’s puzzle: 12-D, eight letters, “Holders of pointy diamonds.” Defamiliarization, as we used to call it in lit crit.
No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Bushes, rocks, puffs
[Nancy, August 11, 1950.]
“Some” of each. And everyone knows that you need more than “some trees” to make a forest.
I am calling those little clouds foot puffs. If you turn around quickly enough when you’re walking, you can see “some puffs” behind your own feet.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
[“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.]
Friday, May 15, 2020
Our own private “Molambo”
[“Molambo” (Jaime Florence–Augusto Mesquita).]
“Let’s keep that one,” Elaine said. I agreed.
Music = life.
TRUMP = DEATH
Yesterday’s madness — mockery of social distancing, skepticism about flu vaccines, the assertion that “If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases” — all makes me think that this equation is not too extreme:
See also a variation on this theme, preserving the Trump* asterisk.
[And death due not only to coronavirus. Inspired, of course, by the Silence=Death Project. This image is free for anyone’s non-commercial use with attribution, so I’ve omitted the asterisk that I now attach to Donald Trump*’s name (* = impeached, for always, with an added Kurt Vonnegut overtone).]
FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fifth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our fifth year we read twenty-one books and a book’s worth of uncollected short stories, and we climbed one mountain, Mount Musil. In non-chronological order:
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, The Professor
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders)
Eva Hoffman, How to Be Bored
Olivia Jaimes, Nancy’s Genius Plan
Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies
Guy de Maupassant, Afloat
Duncan Minshull, ed., Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters / Seymour: An Introduction, uncollected stories
Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Stefan Zweig, Journeys
Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Thirty-seven pencils
From a Donald Trump* interview with state television:
“We can — we can do things in our country. We can — you know, we used to make our own product. Would you believe it? Right? We used to make our own product. We don’t need thirty-seven pencils, we can buy two pencils — and they can be better. But you know, we went astray, with the whole thing, we went astray.”We did go astray. I, for one, have hundreds of pencils.
Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)
[Two pencils? It’s remotely possible that Trump* is making an oblique reference to General Pencil and Musgrave Pencil, two venerable companies that still manufacture pencils in the United States. But I doubt it. He speaks in the past tense: “we used to.” And he seems to be speaking about volume, not some number of manufacturers. Pencils, by the way, are also made in Germany and Japan, among other countries.]
Thursday, May 14, 2020
“A vision of syntax”
Senhor Soares feels “an almost physical loathing for secret things,” particularly for secret societies and occult sciences and “the pretension certain men have that, through their understandings with Gods or Masters or Demiurges, they and they alone know the great secrets on which the world is founded.”
Fernando Pessoa, from text 256, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).
Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)
EXchange name sightings
Exchange names have nice cameos in Framed (dir. Richard Wallace, 1947).
This note is for mining engineer Mike Lambert (Glenn Ford), from the barmaid who brought him back, drunk, to his hotel.
Later in the film, Lambert tries to locate a “Miss Woodworth.” Fortunately, it’s a small town. Did people rip pages from telephone books in life, as well as in the movies?
[Click either image for a larger view.]
More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
