Tomorrow’s Saturday Stumper

Tomorrow’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Greg Johnson. By Stumper standards, it’s an easy puzzle. I had to guess for the last letter, a cross of 49-A, six letters, “Laurel Weaver, in Men in Black ” and 50-D, five letters, “Start to go.” I guessed right, and saw the logic of 50-D as soon as I typed the missing letter. Aha.

Some clues I especially liked:

2-D, eight letters, “Treat shaped like toes.” I think I know the answer only from living in the midwest.

15-A, nine letters, “Rescuers in whodunits.” You were thinking people?

35-A, six letters, “Big name in Haitian rap.” Oh, that must be — yes, it is.

38-D, eight letters, “Diamond former.” Baseball? OLDTIMER? No.

40-A, seven letters, “It might go with a miniskirt.” The first few letters of the answer are a bit of misdirection — I think.

54-A, three letters, “You might have a ball with it.” Especially in the dowdy world.

My favorite clue: 28-D, six letters, “Screen icon since the ’80s.” Here the first few letters of the answer must be meant as misdirection.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

#UNFIT

Streaming now and through the weekend: #UNFIT: The Psychology of Donald Trump, directed by Dan Partland. Excellent film, $6 to access.

Metaphor of the day

“He is fat Elvis”: Nicole Wallace's characterization of Donald Trump*, just now on MSNBC.

SPA day

Me, in the supermarket earlier today:

“This person’s COMING THE WRONG WAY. Let’s back out and go down two aisles.”

“Here’s ANOTHER PERSON NOT WEARING A MASK.”

“Let’s go the other way. THIS PERSON DOESN’T HAVE A MASK ON.”

“Could you keep your distance? ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TO WEAR A MASK.”

I would estimate that half the customers in the supermarket this morning wore no masks and paid no attention to one-way aisles or social distancing.

SPA is my newly invented acronym: Sparring Passive-Aggressively. My other new acronym: SITEEMO. Shop In The Early, Early Morning Only. Today we were too late.

Our tube

John Amos, Ernest Borgnine, LeVar Burton, Jerry Orbach, Adam West, all in the Murder, She Wrote episode “Death Takes a Dive” (February 22, 1987). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television.

Domestic comedy

“It looks absurd — it’s like a Love Boat toupee!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Reluctant professors

“Thousands of instructors at American colleges and universities have told administrators in recent days that they are unwilling to resume in-person classes because of the pandemic”: The New York Times reports on reluctant professors.

The University of Illinois faculty and staff petition for an open forum on re-opening, mentioned in the article, is worth reading.

A related post
College, anyone?

“The time just before”

Every so often I’ve tried to track down a passage I read years ago — something to the effect that the time we’re most curious about or enamored of or nostalgic for is the time just before our own. I thought I might have finally found the passage:

The time just before our own entrance into the world is bound to be peculiarly fascinating to us: if we could understand it, we might be able to explain our parents, and hence come closer to persuading ourselves that we know why we are here.

The only problem: this passage appears in “The World in a Very Small Space,” a review by Robert B. Shaw of The Stories of John Cheever, published in the December 23, 1978 issue of The Nation. Was I reading The Nation in 1978? No. Would I somehow have found my way to a 1978 issue years later? That’s doubtful, though I did subscribe to The Nation in the late 1980s. Did I have an interest in John Cheever’s work that would have brought me to this review? Nope. So the search must go on.

This review has a wonderful passage from Cheever’s preface to the collection:

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like “the Cleveland Chicken,” sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.

There are ample reasons not to miss that long-lost world. But it’s hard to beat the Benny Goodman quartet — or trio. Maybe I should read some John Cheever.

The sentences that made me give up on Shirley

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

“Ah!” said I, shaking my head, and heaving a deep sigh. Life’s too short. And Shirley hadn’t even shown up yet.

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky” : Small things : Some trees

Simile of the day

[Watching the news, thinking about those who chose to support him.]

"It’s like they hitched their wagon to a time bomb.”