Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Brad Wilber, and it’s an especially good puzzle, with many clues that look impossible until a cross suggests an answer. For instance, 15-A, eight letters, “Go too far with your scheme.” Or 42-D, seven letters, “Frenzied but entertaining.” And I’m lost.

I started solving with 58-A, four letters, “Overly inventive one,” which gave me 53-D, five letters, “Make merry.” And that gave me 61-A, eight letters, “MGM Roman blockbuster.” As I filled in the bottom right corner, things got much easier. But aside from 58-A, I needed a cross for nearly every answer in this puzzle, which made the solving feel weirdly methodical. That’s me. In the words of 65-A, six letters, “See what you think.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked (with a slight hint or two but no genuine spoilers):

7-D, seven letters, “‘Why, oh why, can’t I?’ lyricist.” It’s a nice touch to use the perhaps less familiar closing line (and not “Why then, oh why can’t I?”). I was thinking Harold Arlen and — who? And I remembered, thought it took a cross. But here’s a name that should not need a cross to be remembered.

9-D, four letters, “Katy Perry visited their Stockholm museum.” Their ? Hmm.

17-A, eight letters, “Either half of a bonded pair.” I was thinking about atoms and stuff.

22-A, three letters, “Parisian’s ‘Rats!’” I would think first of a five-letter word. I wonder what Charlie Brown says in translation.

24-D, five letters, “High-calorie, as some crusts.” Extra credit for a hilarious adjective that looks like a misspelling.

32-A, four letters, “’60s What’s My Line? regular, pre-TV stardom.” But wait: how would someone get to be a regular on a game show before becoming a TV star? Ah, it’s a little tricky. And surprising to me.

66-A, eight letters, “Oral exams of a sort.” Well, yes.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Misreading the cookie

The cookie said

An enjoyable vacation is awaiting
       you near the mountains.

I read vaccination.

Mountains or no, anyplace is fine.

NYRB sale

New York Review Books is having a sale on all books.

Orange Crate Art is a NYRB-friendly site.

Dunning Kruger & Associates

Opacity? Come see us!

[Context here.]

Horns

A wonderful sentence.

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

What’s Bred in the Bone is the second novel of The Cornish Trilogy.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[Reading Robertson Davies prompted us to look up some details of clerical garb.]

“You know where you can buy those?”

“In a surplice store.”

Elaine knew I’d have the punchline.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Meltdown

A wonderful headline from The Washington Post: “Rudy Giuliani’s post-election meltdown starts to become literal.”

“Tick-tack-toe on your apple”

Frank Cornish and Art.

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

I’ve known of teachers like that, the kind who can never allow a student to exceed their own knowledge or ability. Miss McGladdery doesn’t even know that she doesn’t know the terms hatching and crosshatching. Hatch, from the Middle French hacher, “to chop, slice up, incise with fine lines.”

Hatching and crosshatching make me think right away of R. Crumb and Bill Griffith. See, for instance, today’s Zippy.

Griffith’s graphic memoir Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist (2015) includes this excerpt from Lawrence Lariar’s Cartooning for Everybody  (1941):

Cross-hatching is rapidly disappearing from the comic business. There is a small demand for the cross-hatch system in certain comic strips, but the more modern comic artists forgot about the cross-hatch long ago.

Not To which Crumb and Griffith say “Oh yeah?”

What’s Bred in the Bone is the second novel of The Cornish Trilogy. Academia, art, astrology, family secrets, fortune-telling, Gnosticism, hatching and cross-hatching, E.T.A. Hoffman, intelligence gathering, King Arthur, murder, opera, Romanticism, stringed-instrument repair, theology: it’s fiction with something for everyone. Totally great. And I still have several hundred pages to go.

Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard) : A review of Invisible Ink

Cal Newport on Getting Things Done

A long and not especially satisfying New Yorker piece by Cal Newport: “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” Newport says that approaches to productivity such as the one described in David Allen’s Getting Things Done

don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects.

His conclusion: we must

acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to get things done.

That’s an odd conclusion, as it follows Newport’s own suggestions toward a better way — virtual task boards and daily morning meetings to “confront” those boards, so that everyone knows who’s doing what. More meetings!

Until a better way comes along, I’d say that GTD can be immensely useful to anyone contending with the insidiously haphazard demands of work — not to mention the insidiously haphazard demands of life. I speak from experience.

Related reading
All OCA GTD posts (Pinboard)

Time passes

How strange and sad, thought I, that the Go-Go’s song “We Got the Beat” is now the stuff of a television commercial for a prescription drug that treats heart disease and high triglycerides. What?

But wait a sec — that song is now more than forty years old, released in 1980 and then in a slightly longer version in 1982. So anyone who dug the song back then is now of an age to perhaps be thinking about things like heart di —

Forty years! Well, that’s enough posting for one day.