When I saw the credit for today’s Newsday Saturday crossword — Stella Zawistowki — I knew I was in for a difficult time. Stella! It was only when I got 1-A, ten letters, “It’ll let you in,” late in the game, that I felt confident that I’d finish this puzzle. It let me in.
Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:
9-D, four letters, “Reason for a dryer discount.” Why a dryer? The alliteration is pleasant.
12-D, ten letters, “Move all around.” Lovely.
15-A, ten letters, “Practice delayed infuriation.” A great (risqué?) way to clue the answer.
22-D, eleven letters, “Destination of some Scandinavian ferries.” Five letters of this answer took me forever. What? What?
41-A, six letters, “Big name in the oil business.” Okay, but which kind?
45-A, five letters, “Helps with fencing.” A good clue for a common answer.
51-D, three letters, “Macaroni, as in ‘Yankee Doodle.’” The answer makes me think of a scene in a film.
53-A, four letters, “Zoom, perhaps.” Of our time.
56-A, ten letters, “Recycled paper from long ago.” A good example of a clue that defamiliarizes its answer. You’re thinking of something in a green bin maybe?
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, June 5, 2021
Today’s Newsday Saturday
Friday, June 4, 2021
A John Wayne movie
I was showing a movie in class, something I never liked to do. I preferred to show movies outside of class, all at once, the way they’re almost always meant to be shown. This movie was a documentary about wages and employment. Of the two computers in my office for movie projection, I picked the older one, heavy white plastic, with two switches, like light switches, sticking up from the keyboard.
After starting the movie, I took a seat in a back corner of the classroom. And who came in and sat next to me? One of my worst students. He had appeared on a reality-TV show and had been mocked on social media for his Dunning–Kruger witlessness. In class he liked to lean forward and glare at me.
And then in came John Wayne, wearing an enormous corduroy cap. He took the first seat in my row of desks, blocking the view of the two or three of us behind him. The bad student began talking to Wayne about hunting. Then bad student stood up, walked up to Wayne’s desk, and continued to talk as the movie ran. I told bad student that if he didn’t stop talking and sit down, I’d have to ask him to leave. He kept talking, I asked him to leave, and he did.
Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)
[My (pre-streaming) strategy with movies: get one or two time slots when nearly everyone was free, and reserve a classroom. I would cancel one class in exchange for students’ willingness to show up, and I would lend the videotape (!) or DVD to the one or two students who had to miss. There was always something strange and wonderful about watching a movie at night in a nearly empty building. The bad student in this dream is real. John Wayne, too, is real, but he was never in one of my classes. This is the twenty-second teaching-related dream I’ve had since I retired. In all but one, something has gone wrong.]
Domestic comedy
“Joe Flynn from McHale’s Navy is in this episode of That Girl.”
“Win win!”
“How do you punctuate ‘win win’?”
“I don’t know — I wasn’t talking with punctuation.”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, June 3, 2021
“Delicious Chewing Gum”
[National 4-H Club News, April 1941. Click for a larger, stickier view.]
To every thing there is a reason, not to mention a time and a place. I was looking for an advertisement that touted gum as an aid to concentration. I found this one.
“Try it yourself around the house, when reading, studying, driving or doing any number of other things”: what a pleasantly lackluster pitch.
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Bye, pseudo-blogger
Like so many blogs, Donald Trump**’s blog is defunct. The Washington Post reports that mockery and a small readership are the reasons for the shutdown. Sheesh, if Trump** was bothered by the idea of a small readership, he shouldn’t have started a blog.
[Pseudo, because it’s unlikely that he wrote much of it himself.]
For those who fuss over spacing
I had hoped that the non-breaking thin space would change everything.
Here’s an italicized word in parentheses: (test).
Ugly, no?
Here’s the same text with the addition of a thin space —   — before the closing parenthesis: (test ).
Better, yes?
But the thin space functions like an ordinary space. With the insertion of a thin space, characters that should stay together can end up split across two lines, like so: (test
).
That’s a faked example. But it does happen. You can guess how I know that.
Enter the non-breaking thin space —   or  . It’s slightly wider than a thin space, and it’s supposed to be, as its name suggests, unbreakable. But it breaks. You can guess how I know that too. Here’s what I saw as a Preview while working on an earlier post:
[That’s what I get for making a silly plural.]
I think that   and   are interchangeable, but I could be wrong. What I know is that they both break in Safari. So I’m still looking for a non-breaking thin space that does not break. And I’d like to know why the allegedly non-breaking thin space displays differently in macOS and iOS. On iOS devices, it’s indistinguishable from no-space.
[For collectors only: the ordinary non-breaking space is . And if anyone wants to asks, “Who cares?” — I do.]
Blue canard
From an Open Culture post about Robert Johnson and Keith Richards:
Figuring out what Johnson did still consumes his biggest fans. Since his recordings were intentionally sped up, interpreters of his music must make their best guesses about his tunings.No, there’s no evidence that Robert Johnson’s recordings were intentionally speeded up. I left a comment on the Open Culture post saying just that, with links to relevant commentary by Elijah Wald and me. That was early yesterday morning. My comment hasn’t yet appeared, and I’m guessing that it won’t be appearing.
It’s crazy-making to me that what began as a “theory” about Johnson’s recordings seems to be acquiring the status of a fact. But it’s only a blue canard.
Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)
[I opt for speeded up. Garner’s Modern English Usage: “The best past tense and past-participial form is sped, not *speeded. It has been so since the 17th century. But there’s one exception: the phrasal verb speed up (= to accelerate) <she speeded up to 80 m.p.h.>”]
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
Domestic comedy
“It’s a ‘known fact,’ as you would say.”
“Don’t turn my words against me!”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Nobody and Somebody
Ginevra Fanshawe, Miss Thing herself, wants to know, “Who are you, Miss Snowe?”
And a little later:
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).
A rising character indeed. Lucy Snowe is a protagonist in a novel.
I would like to imagine that these passages from Villette stand behind Emily Dickinson’s 260 (1862):
260, from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
Noting that Dickinson read “competitively,” seeking to outdo other poets, Richard B. Sewall points to a different inspiration for 260: “Little Nobody,” a trite poem by Charles Mackay that appeared in the Springfield Republican (1858). The closing lines of its two stanzas: “I’m but little Nobody — Nobody am I,” “Who would be a Somebody? — Nobody am I.” Okay. But I’d rather think of Dickinson finding inspiration in Brontë’s protagonist, whose life of aloneness, walking by herself in empty classrooms, stealing away to an attic to read a letter, must have made compelling reading for the poet.
There were two copies of Villette in the Dickinson family library: one from 1853, one from 1859. In neither are the passages I’ve quoted marked. Then again, in all of Jane Eyre there are just two passages that Dickinson marked.
”Who are you, Miss Dickinson?”
“I am a rising character — Vesuvius at home.”
Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts and Dickinson posts (Pinboard)
[Miss Fanshawe doesn’t speak the word “somebody”: the contrast between “nobody” and “somebody” is Lucy’s. Sewall writes about Mackay’s poem in The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974). Sewall doesn’t mention Villette in relation to 260. “Vesuvius at home”: from Dickinson’s 1691, which ends, “A Crater I may contemplate / Vesuvius at home.” The phrase became the title of Adrienne Rich’s 1976 essay “Vesuvius at Home.”]
