Will Shortz, enemy of free verse

Will Shortz, doing the Sunday Puzzle this morning on NPR, asked what an Olympic swimming pool and a poem have in common. The answer: meter. Shortz: “A poem usually has meter.”

Uh, no.

Will Shortz’s blend of smarty-pants certitude and cluelessness (no pun intended) irks me whenever it surfaces. As it did this morning.

See also “Cool jazz pioneer”, nepenthe, and NOLIKEY.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Matthew Sewell, is themeless, but it verges on Stumper territory, or turf, or Sturf. Sturf’s up! Not as difficult as last week’s puzzle, but still plenty difficult, with many clues that lead in no one direction. Take 15-A, eleven letters, “Prepared to make contributions.” RAISEDAHAND? VOLUNTEERED? No. Or 20-A, eight letters, “Treatment in oils.” PORTRAIT? Uh-uh. It wasn’t until I hit 56-A, eleven letters, “Early workplace for Gershwin,” that I was able to get a section of the puzzle more or less done.

Some entries I especially liked:

1-A, eleven letters, “Latter-day quackery.” The reality-based community says “Thank you.”

6-D, three letters, “Setting for the Winnipeg Folk Festival.” One of several wonderful clues for very short answers.

9-D, five letters, “Actor whom Obama called ‘big-eared and level-headed.’” A nicely self-deprecating touch.

26-A, three letters, “Spreads threads.” See 6-D. An inspired clue.

36-D, five letters, “Rugged or ragged.” I just like the alliteration.

44-A, three letters, “Elf (per se or a prefix).” Huh? I thought this must have been a cryptic clue. I learned something.

54-D, four letters, “Changes visible wavelengths.” Defamiliarization at work.

62-A, eleven letters, “Walks, for example.” Where to? A highly indirect clue.

One clue I take issue with: 38-D, four letters, “‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ scheme.” No, that’s not the scheme. I will offer a minor spoiler: the scheme in question is a rhyme scheme. For “Twinkle, Twinkle,” it’s not AABB; it’s AABBAA. To say it’s AABB is like saying that the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet is ABABCDCD. A better clue for AABB might be “Couplets.” Or perhaps “Rhyme lines.”

Thinking about the incomplete rhyme scheme makes me remember Ralph Kramden’s Social Security number: 105-36-22.

No other spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

*

An afterthought: for AABB and a children’s song, how about “‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ scheme”?

“Fully Vaccinated”

[Randall Munroe, xkcd, April 23, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

I like the aberrant literalism of today’s xkcd.

I also like being able to say that Elaine and I will be two weeks past our second dose of the Moderna vaccine in two weeks. Moderna: aka the Bodyslammer, the Sledge. The second shot has knocked me for several loops. I’d ask Elaine how she’s doing, but she’s asleep — see? After the vaccine’s side effects wear off, we should have ample time to practice our basic conversational skills before putting ourselves back into circulation.

Thanks to science and medicine and all those working therein, without which — I don’t want to think about it.

Related reading
All OCA xkcd posts (Pinboard)

[The mouseover text: “You still can’t walk into someone’s house without being invited!” “What? Oh, I see your confusion. No, this vaccine is for a bat VIRUS. I’m fine with doorways and garlic and stuff.” The alternative Moderna names are my coinages. They fit.]

Sardine-O-Rama

~ A recipe for sardine butter (The Berkshire Eagle).

~ Why everyone needs sardines in their larder (The Irish Times). With a recipe for sardinesca. Sardinesca sounds like a good reason to have sardines on hand — and to get yourself a larder. Our kitchen has only cabinets.

~ Popping Tops, a newsletter about tinned seafood, by Tim Marchman, seafood enthusiast. The first installment is about Bela-Olhão sardines. Now I know what I’m having for lunch today. I think Bela sardines are terrific.

Thanks to Matt Thomas for alerting me to Popping Tops. Matt’s newsletter is the Sunday New York Times Digest, “bringing the articles everyone’s talking about as well as hidden gems from America’s ‘paper of record’ to your inbox.” He always finds something I didn’t.

Small pleasures

In Two Weeks in Another Town (dir. Vincent Minnelli, 1962), a plane is ready to take off. John Andrus (Kirk Douglas) is lingering. A flight attendant calls from the airplane door: “Mr. Andrus, we must take off, or we’ll lose our clearance.”

And right then the message comes on the screen, as it very rarely does:

Buffering . . .

Leaving enough time for a last kiss.

[No. 9 in a series.]

Advice from Raymond Chandler

I like these sentences, from Raymond Chandler’s “Advice to a Secretary,” newly published in The Strand:

It is never stupid to ask questions. It is only stupid to guess at the answers and take a chance on being wrong.

Good advice for all.

A Star Tribune article has more about, and from, “Advice to a Secretary.”

Pocket notebook sighting

What’s this? The screenwriter is asleep in his bungalow? With nothing much by his typewriter? Well, maybe he’s got something in his notebook. Take a look, Mr. Producer. And please, start at the back for dramatic effect.

[Kirk Douglas as Jonathan Shields, Dick Powell as James Lee Bartlow, in The Bad and the Beautiful (dir. Vincent Minnelli, 1952). Click any image for a larger view.]

There are different guesses about who’s based on whom. The playwright Paul Eliot Green has been suggested as a model for the Southern academic and novelist James Lee Bartlow. But Green did most of his Hollywood work in the early 1930s. I think William Faulkner, who worked on and off in Hollywood from the early ’30s to the late ’50s, is a more recognizable choice.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

I am not that guy

Another e-mail arrived for a man of medicine who bears my name. As I wrote in a previous post about “Dr. Michael Leddy,” I’ve received everything from booking information to receipts for garden equipment, all meant for him. Another such e-mail arrived yesterday. I began reading:

You don’t know me, but I work with [name] on [street address]. I’ve been working with him to help bring in more erectile dysfunction and vasectomy patients to his practice.

I wrote back:

I frequently get e-mails for some guy with my name. But I am not that guy. And believe me, no one in his right mind would want me to perform a vasectomy on him, even if I work cheap. And I can’t do a thing for ED. Please remove my name from your mailings.

And then I realized I hadn’t read far enough:

I did some research into your practice and identified a few opportunities to drive in more patients for shoulder replacement to the practice.

Oh. So I wrote back again:

Nix to the shoulders too.

Related posts
Dr. Leddy, practicing : On the honorific “Doctor”

[I too am “Dr. Michael Leddy,” possessor of a doctorate. But as I always told my students, I preferred “Mr. Leddy” — good enough for my dad, good enough for me.]

“Grammar-Nerd Heaven”

Mary Norris writes about Taming the Tongue in the Heyday of English Grammar (1713-1851), an exhibition of grammars from Bryan Garner’s collection. “To enter the exhibit,” Norris writes, “is to climb aboard the Grammarama ride at Disneyland for Nerds.”

I have to point out: Norris, who says that it’s difficult not to mythologize Garner, does some mythologizing herself. As a fourth-grader, Garner did not bring a Webster’s Third to school to settle a question with a teacher. He availed himself of the Webster’s Third in the classroom. The question was whether shan’t is a word. Garner tells the story in an essay about shall.

Here’s an OCA earlier post about the exhibit.

Grammar or logic

The Baron de Charlus:

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

It’s one of the moments — there are many — in which M. Charlus’s confident lunacy makes me fast-forward to Ignatius J. Reilly.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)