“A Dance to Shpring”

Patrick McDonnell channels Jules Feiffer.

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Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Matthew Sewell, is not an exceptionally difficult puzzle, but I have to remind myself: it’s a Themeless Saturday, not a Saturday Stumper. The puzzle was a pleasure to solve, with lively fill and a few tricky spots, particularly in the southwest corner, where I was sure I must have had something wrong. But I didn’t. It’s strange fun to get the puzzle right without knowing why. I think of it as the crossword equivalent of “Bank error in your favor.” Okay, if you say so.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

2-D, nine letters, “Breaking the host’s bowl, for example.” Takes me back, or forward, to the world of hosts and guests.

6-D, seven letters, “Hard seltzer category.” It’s only hard seltzer, but the answer sounds so lowdown to me. The reason is in the comments.

7-D, seven letters, “White pet cited by Aristotle.” I think mentioned might be more accurate. I’m not sure what it might have said in Greek.

16-A, ten letters, “Scrooge, to Dewey or Louie.” So that’s what he is.

22-A, four letters, “Dollywood group.” I heard it from a customer-service person on the phone the other day and loved it.

44-A, twelve letters, “Real dilemma.” Simultaneously lively and dowdy.

56-A, four letters, “Not a long range.” The answer made me think I must have made a mistake.

58-D, three letters, “Nickname for a Genesis patriarch namesake.” Nicely unexpected.

My favorite clue in this puzzle:

46-A, five letters, “It depends on oral interpretation.” So clever. And even after filling in an answer, which I thought couldn’t be right, I didn’t get the point, not right away.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“One rancid corn dog”

[“Herb Caen Was My Co-Pilot!” Zippy, March 19, 2021. Click for a more nostalgic view.]

That’s a Doggie Diner dog head, dreaming of 1970s San Francisco. The head is a familiar element in Zippy, as is M. Proust. In 2007, Zippy visited Proust’s grave in Père Lachaise.

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Acorn 7

Acorn, an image editor for macOS, just received a major update. For a limited time, Acorn is available for $19.99, half the regular price. I just updated, and the new Acorn 7 looks great. One big improvement: the floating palettes that popped up all over the screen are gone, replaced by a single window with a toolbar. But a choosy user can have it the old way too.

My only connection to Acorn is that of a happy and enthusiastic user. I like the free app Seashore too, but for some tasks, it has to be Acorn.

Recently updated

#Sedition3PTruck Chris Miller has been censured by the Illinois House.

Insurrection

A chilling episode of the podcast Criminal : “If it ever happens, run,” an account of an 1898 coup in Wilmington, North Carolina. Draw your own parallels.

Proustian music

“Two new compact disks, both of them more or less perfect and charming, evoke the ambience of the Proustian musicale”: in The New Yorker, Alex Ross reviews recordings by Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih, and Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Tanguy de Williencourt.

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[But disk, New Yorker ? Really?]

Instant Hallmark

Turn mealtime into a Hallmark movie. For instance, while eating a blueberry muffin:

“Cancel the Blueberry Festival?! Berry Hollow wouldn’t be Berry Hollow without the Festival!”

Work and fame

One piece of advice:

“Work, achieve renown,” he said to me.

That’s Charles Morel, violinist, speaking to the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, who’s said that he finally wants to get to the work of writing. “Who’s that from?” the narrator asks. “From Fontanes, to Chateaubriand.”

Another piece of advice:

Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.

That’s from “Experiments,” a list of writing practices compiled by Bernadette Mayer and members of a St. Mark’s Church Poetry Workshop.

Sources: Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005). Bernadette Mayer et al., “Experiments,” in In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986).

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[Translator’s note: “‘Work, work, my dear friend, achieve renown.’ Chateaubriand cites the words as having been written to him in 1798, by the Marquis Louis de Fontanes (1757–1821), a mediocre writer with whom he had become friendly during his exile in England.”]

Sardines in film

[John Kellogg as Dan Monroe, newspaper reporter. From Tomorrow Is Another Day (dir. Felix E. Feist, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

Some reporter. He’s eyeing an ex-con and missing the big story: a sardine sandwich, only 25¢. There’s a tiny “¢” next to “25.”

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