Exams in the mail in the news

A professor of business law is suing her university after administrators changed the grade she gave a student.

A practical suggestion to that professor: If you’re going to ask students to mail in their final examinations, set a date by which exams must be postmarked, not a date by which they must be received. You might save yourself a great deal of trouble.

That this professor used nothing more than a final examination to determine course grades reminds me that people approach the work of teaching in many ways.

Squirrels?

[Beetle Bailey, August 3, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Beetle Bailey: “Normally, I don’t mind guard duty.”

If there’s any doubt that the hand(s) behind this strip are phoning it in, consider those “squirrels.”

Related reading
All OCA Beetle Bailey posts (Pinboard)

“qX3;nE7%sX9*zL4, e.g.”

The clue for 19-A in today’s New Yorker crossword: “qX3;nE7%sX9*zL4, e.g.”

The answer: STRONGPASSWORD.

Well, yes. I checked with several password checkers, one of which estimates that it would take four hundred billion years to crack qX3;nE7%sX9*zL4.

But that password might take just as long to memorize. I’m reminded of an xkcd strip: “Password Strength.”

[As for xkcd’s correcthorsebatterystaple: that memorable password would take 100 quadrillion years to crack.]

Rewriting

The New York Times reports on Republican efforts to rewrite the events of January 6: “The message is clear: Adherence to facts cannot overcome adherence to the party line.”

Cf. George Orwell: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

[The long strange URL? I’m using the new NYT option for subscribers to share ten articles a month. Shared articles don’t count toward the ten free articles a month available to non-subscribers. Details here.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, August 1, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

SPISH? Really?

Two panels later, Ditto’s cannonball makes a SPLASH. All in today’s Hi and Lois.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Brad Wilber, seemed easy at first. I started in the northeast corner with 10-A, four letters, “Magician’s accessory.” The clue for 12-D, seven letters, “Admired oneself,” helped me decide which accessory. That corner went quickly. Then to the middle of the puzzle, and then to clues and answers here and there. And all along, 2-D, seven letters, “Simple life,” and 13-A, four letters, “Tahiti sweetie,” had me thinking I’d never get this puzzle right. When I finally saw what had to be (and was) the answer for 2-D, I was happy about solving and impressed (once more) by Brad Wilber’s smarts.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

10-D, six letters, “Shortcuts that take years to complete.” Paradox.

13-D, seven letters, “W-2 addressees.” A helpful reminder to read clues carefully: addressees, not addresses.

17-A, fifteen letters, “Keep-in-touch request.” It felt like a giveaway, and I took it.

22-A, six letters, “Order manager.” I was thinking of shipping and receiving.

46-D, six letters, “Candidates for 10 Down.” Really clever.

55-A, four letters, “It’s in garlic’s genus.” I like it, or them.

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 51-A, eight letters, “How stalactites form.” Dang: do they form on cave ceilings, or on cave floors? Is there a mnemonic for remembering which is which? Is there a mnemonic for remembering the mnemonic? It’s a witty clue, because the difference between stalactites and stalagmites makes no difference to the answer.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Chuck E. Weiss (1945–2021)

His first name and his middle initial are part of American music. The Los Angeles Times has an obituary and a remembrance by Rickie Lee Jones.

If you’re not old enough to remember, or even if you are, here’s the song.

Saying and believing

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen”: it’s the same tactic Donald Trump** used re: Ukraine. Just say there’s an investigation of Hunter Biden. Just say that the election was corrupt.

See also “You provide the prose-poems, I’ll provide the war.”

Gilgamesh to Iraq

A looted tablet with a crucial part of the Gilgamesh story, once displayed at Hobby Lobby’s Museum of the Bible, is returning to Iraq. Here is a Christie’s brochure about the tablet, with photographs and a translation — and a false provenance. More about the tablet’s history here.

Related reading
All OCA Gilgamesh posts (Pinboard)

Welty and Hurston and a pear tree

Another passage that made me think about Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God :

Eudora Welty, “Moon Lake,” in Thirteen Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965).

There it is, thought I, Janie Crawford’s pear tree again. But in One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty recalls this rhyme as appearing in a book from her childhood. Here’s one possible source:

From Our Boys: Containing Over Two Hundred Pages of Entertaining Stories, Hymns, etc., Told in Simple Language by Popular Authors (Akron, Ohio: Saalfield Publishing, 1914).

And now, when Janie Crawford lies beneath a pear tree, wondering where the bee for her blossom might be, I wonder whether Hurston, too, might have known and repurposed this rhyme.

A related post
Trees: chinaberry, peach, pomegranate, pear

[Other likely sources for the pear-tree scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God: the birds and the bees, and blues metaphors. See Memphis Minnie and Bertha Lee.]