Today’s Saturday Stumper

I don’t track a “best time” for doing the Newsday  Saturday Stumper. All I care about is whether I can do the puzzle. But I know that whatever my best time might be, it wasn’t for this Greg Johnson puzzle, one of the most difficult Stumpers I’ve done. Fifty minutes’ worth of difficult. Holy moly.

I had to travel all the way to the bottom right corner to find a way in, with 58-A, three letters, “Pilot’s paperwork,” and 59-D, three letters, “’50s USAF coinage.” Those two gave me 61-A, seven letters, “‘Pictures deface walls ___ than they decorate them’”: Frank Lloyd Wright.” That Frank Lloyd Wright. Sheesh, what a grouch.

I looked again at 11-D, three letters, “Letters often near ‘fax,’” and took a guess at 14-D, nine letters, “Sub-Saharan menace.” And that answer gave me 38-A, four letters, “Year-end number.” Ah, that answer again, which shows up more often in crosswords than in life. I’ll take it. I had a hunch at 35-A, four letters, “Spanish surname related to ‘Roderick.’” And things continued, hit and miss.

My final answer: 1-D, five letters, “Oxens’ humped cousins.” What?

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

4-D, six letters, “Glue-bound product.” The answer more often refers to something else these days.

8-A, seven letters, “Ready to crush the curve.” Nerdy me, I was thinking of someone all set for a final exam.

12-D, nine letters, “‘Colorful’ Federal Reserve report.” Never heard of it.

30-D, nine letters, “Lights used in navigation.” HIGHBEAMS? No.

53-A, four letters, “Name on many posters with McDormand and Buscemi.” I insist that this clue is an instance of misdirection, not a gimme.

60-A, seven letters, “Swell place.” I like the dowdy swell, as in “Gee, you’re swell,” even if it tricked me.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Sidebar revision

For anyone reading via RSS: The “I” in my sidebar now wears a mask and is socially distanced. Elaine took the photograph on November 6.

Words of the year

From the Australian National Dictionary Centre, iso : “I think iso will be one way that we will talk about this period for a long time.”

From the Cambridge Dictionary, quarantine: “Our editors . . . were interested to find a new meaning emerging: ‘a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease.’”

From the Collins Dictionary, lockdown : “a unifying experience for billions of people across the world, who have had, collectively, to play their part in combating the spread of COVID-19.”

From Dictionary.com, pandemic : “The pandemic defined 2020, and it will define the years to come. It is a consequential word for a consequential year.”

Also from Dictionary.com, the People’s Word of the Year, unprecedented : “Overfamiliarity, if not overuse, has prompted the popular sentiment that we should send the word into retirement. But in 2020, unprecedented is the word that just won’t go away.”

From Macmillan Dictionary’s crowdsourced Open Dictionary, lockdown : “a word that came to us from American English but in 2020 has acquired a new meaning that will surely resonate with those who experienced it for the rest of their lives.”

From Macquarie Dictionary, doomscrolling : “a very salient marker of 2020, with its barrage of troubling news, from the bushfires to the US elections and, of course, coronavirus.”

From Merriam-Webster, pandemic : “This has been a year unlike any other (the word unprecedented also had a significant spike in March), and pandemic is the word that has connected the worldwide medical emergency to the political response and to our personal experience of it all.”

From Oxford Languages, many words: “Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.”

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive.

Nail-biter and others

Nail-biter and others: Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster looks at words of the 2020 election.

And yes, people have been looking up interregnum.

“Himes nailed it”

Seth Jacobs, historian:

“The highest compliment that I can pay to a Jesuit education is that I really, really wish I had received one. Father Michael Himes nailed it when he said, ‘The purpose of an undergraduate education, particularly a Jesuit education, is a rigorous and sustained conversation about the most important questions relating to the human condition with the widest possible circle of the best possible conversation partners.’ And as he points out, many of those conversation partners aren’t breathing anymore, which is why we have libraries and teachers.”

Items in a series

Mara Gay, speaking on The 11th Hour a few minutes ago, suggested that it’s necessary to now marginalize Donald Trump* and bring people back to “reality, science, kindness, and democracy.” Yes.

“5:00 p.m.”?

[Catching up on podcasts.]

From This American Life, “Late Registration,” a story about Kanye West, Wisconsin, and the true meaning of “5:00 p.m.”

Barack Obama, writing by hand

Barack Obama, in “an adapted and updated excerpt” from A Promised Land, his forthcoming memoir:

I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness.

His tools of choice: a pen and a legal pad.

One great mistake in college comp classes: equating writing with word processing.

Related reading
Obama revisions : OCA posts about writing by hand

“Big with significance for someone”

From the second novel of The Cornish Trilogy, a moment in the growth of the artist’s mind.

Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone (1985).

That final sentence makes me think of Willa Cather.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

COVID follies

In Illinois’s Region 6, things are bad. And yet.

Today Elaine saw a Facebook ad for a nearby restaurant’s Thanksgiving buffet. An indoor buffet, $25 per person, $12.50 per “kid,” $62.99 for a family of four. If ever there could be a buffet worth risking one’s life for, it wouldn’t be this one: ham, turkey, fried chicken (choose one), mashed potatoes, noodles, gravy, green beans, dressing, rolls, pumpkin pie. What, no cranberry sauce?

The mitigation measures for our region of the state include no indoor dining at restaurants. Outdoor tables must be at least six feet apart. So how can this restaurant be offering an indoor buffet? Because we have county sheriffs who have proudly announced that they will not enforce COVID restrictions. These sheriffs see themselves as standing up to J.B. Pritzker, our (Democratic) governor, who cannot be allowed to take away our freedoms, &c.

Comments on the Facebook ad run mostly along those lines. I’ll reproduce a couple as typed:

I hope you’re going to be open for thanksgiving it’s a virus or the government don’t shut you down

just please dont close or go to carry out only! We need to have strong businesses! Not cowl down to the govt!! You guys stand strong and stay open!

One comment describes calling the restaurant and being told that employees don’t wear masks and that there’s no social distancing. And they’re planning a buffet? It’s a recipe (sorry) for disaster.

On terse comment caught Elaine’s eye: “On my bucket list.”

Elaine’s reply, surprisingly, stands, at least for now:

Isn’t the bucket list a list of things you want to do before you die? An unmasked Thanksgiving COVID hotspot might do the trick for a lot of people. Take-out food tastes just as good as in-restaurant food.

The best way to support a restaurant in the COVID era: order takeout directly from the restaurant. Pay in cash and tip generously. We’ve been doing just that with our favorite restaurant since mid-March. But we’ll be making our own Thanksgiving dinner, which will be a safer and tastier choice than that buffet. And we’ll have cranberry sauce. Also sweet potatoes.

[About those sheriffs: Yes, Illinois is a blue state. But move away from a handful of metropolitan areas, and it’s a sea of red.]