Today’s Newsday Saturday crossword, by S. N., Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, is a real challenge, a great crossword, a Saturday Stumper in everything but name. I ended up stuck in the northeast corner last night and put the puzzle aside for another episode of Mare of Easttown. And while I was watching, an answer I needed to sort that corner out — for 19-A, five letters, “Some stocks or colleges” — popped into my head, and not because of anything happening in Easttown. Episode over, I went back to the puzzle and got the rest. Three episodes to go.
Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:
1-A, seven letters, “1990 coinage in PC Magazine.” The puzzle begins on an educational note. I didn’t know the word went back so far.
5-D, four letters, “What onion rings lack.” SKIN? The answer was not obvious to me.
8-D, three letters, “It’s good for Nazarenes.” A tough one from the northeast. But then so simple.
10-D, four letters, “Arm elevator.” O northeast corner. I thought I knew it, then thought too hard. REST?
15-D, six letters, “Francis is the first pope to be one.” My education is showing.
22-D, three letters, “It often flew FDR during WWII.” Surprising.
29-A, four letters, “Sticking point.” A nice way to clue this answer.
31-A, six letters, “Pop star since the ’50s.” I am happy to know this performer is still with us.
38-A, three letters, “What tops certain faces.” Defamiliarization at work.
50-D, six letters, “Second-shot target, often.” More defamiliarization.
57-A, four letters, “Early-year beef.” An inventive way to improve the answer.
My favorite: 14-A, fourteen letters, “Indy, more formally.” Aha! But even after you see most of it, the final letters are perhaps not obvious.
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, July 17, 2021
Today’s Newsday Saturday
Friday, July 16, 2021
“Nothing has ever happened”
Emmanuel Bove. My Friends. 1924. Trans. from the French by Janet Louth. (New York: New York Review Books, 2019).
Deadpan comedy of alienation and poverty. At times I imagine the narrator as a Chaplinesque tramp, at others as a Vladimir or Estragon. Samuel Beckett admired Bove’s prose.
Fritzi’s “No”
[Nancy, July 16, 2021. Click for greater negativity.]
Aunt Fritzi: “Nancy skims everything she reads, so you have to position your argument carefully.” Thus this card, which recalls (for me anyway) Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams and what has been called “the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn.”
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, July 15, 2021
“Do”
Only Donald Trump** would speak of a coup as something to “do.” Jeez.
But read that statement in its entirety. His increasingly convoluted and implausible explanations of his actions are signs of desperation and decline.
[** = twice impeached. Kurt Vonnegut gave the asterisk an additional meaning.]
“The most delicate of mirrors”
Anyone who wants to learn about description might benefit from reading Adalbert Stifter. Clarity, density, and a sparing use of metaphor and simile.
Adalbert Stifter, The Bachelors. 1850. Trans. from the German by David Bryer (London: Pushkin Press, 2019).
When I first read The Bachelors, this translation, first published in 2008, was out of print. I’m happy that it’s back and that I now have a copy of my own.
Related reading
All OCA Stifter posts (Pinboard)
The walking brain
From The New York Times :
Exercise can freshen and renovate the white matter in our brains, potentially improving our ability to think and remember as we age, according to a new study of walking, dancing and brain health. It shows that white matter, which connects and supports the cells in our brains, remodels itself when people become more physically active. In those who remain sedentary, on the other hand, white matter tends to fray and shrink.The researchers had expected that dancing would produce greater cognitive improvement. But walking beat dancing.
The findings underscore the dynamism of our brains and how they constantly transform themselves — for better and worse — in response to how we live and move.
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
“Deeper matters”
V. quotes liberally from The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, Mr. Goodman’s biography of V.’s half-brother:
Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941).
Goodman represents of course the kind of critical writing that Nabokov despised. One of the no-nos from Nabokov’s quiz about requirements for a good reader: “The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.” Nabokov’s requirements: “imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”
Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)
[Nabokov’s quiz appears in Lectures on Literature (1980).]
Sinatra’s spoken-word album
I found it browsing in a record store: Frank Sinatra’s The Outfit, a spoken-word album about wine. Elaine assured me that the album was real.
Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)
[In waking life, “The Outfit” is something else.]
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
Dr. Jerome Adams makes a metaphor
On CNN, Wolf Blitzer just interviewed Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as Surgeon General under the previous President. Blitzer tried hard to put appropriate words in Adams’s mouth: You’d like for the former president to come out strongly in favor of vaccines, wouldn’t you? Yeah, sure. But Adams said that what he would really like is for Democrats to stop politicizing vaccines.
(What?)
But here’s the metaphor, roughly paraphrased: God gave us a miracle (the vaccine). But salvation is only available to those who accept it.
So he’s — what? — theologizing the vaccine? Holy — never mind.
How to delete an inaccessible note (Mac Stickies)
I found myself with a mysterious problem on my Mac: a note in the Stickies app was inaccessible. The note showed up when I right-clicked on the app icon in the Dock but was nowhere to be found on the Desktop. Thus it was impossible to delete. Quitting Stickies and restarting the Mac did nothing. Searching the Internets turned up nothing. Here is a solution:
In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Stickies/Data/My Mac problems tend to be odd, trivial, and deeply annoying. This has been one of them.
Library/Stickies
(The tilde signifies your user name. You can get to Library by pressing the Option key after opening the Go menu from the Finder. You can get to the needed folder by going to the Library and searching the Library for stickies.)
Open the Stickies folder, examine its contents, and find the .rtfd file with the text of the inaccessible note. Copy the text to make a new note if you want, and then delete the file.
