Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is about as difficult, I’d say, as last Saturday’s puzzle. Two thirteen-letter answers and two fourteen-letter answers were surprisingly easy to work out with just a few letters’ worth of crosses.
Clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:
1-D, five letters, “Ill-fitting?” I was thinking about a word the other day and wondering, Wait — is that a word? It is. It is the answer to this clue.
10-A, four letters, “Drapery sample.” The clue improves an often-seen answer.
14-A, five letters, “Accordion cover material.” When was the last time you saw an accordion?
16-D, fourteen letters, “Uncouth, metaphorically.” A funny, dowdy expression. It make me think of what used to be called “bad table manners.”
21-A, five letters, “Well fixed.” Gentle misdirection.
27-A, thirteen letters, “Start taking things seriously.” Though I think of the answer in a different way.
46-D, six letters, “Tony Award, in part.” Clever.
56-A, nine letters, “One in a cast with a cause.” My first thought was of someone suing.
57-D, three letters, “Taking from a timetable.” Like 10-A, a familiar answer improved by its clue.
One complaint: 37-A, three letters, “Express.”Unless I’m missing something, this clue is just not 61-A, nine letters, “Convincing.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, January 8, 2022
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Friday, January 7, 2022
Sidney Poitier (1927–2022)
The New York Times has an obituary.
My checklist: No Way Out, Blackboard Jungle, Edge of the City, The Defiant Ones, Paris Blues, Lilies of the Field, A Patch of Blue, To Sir, with Love, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Stop / Stop
The difference between the iOS Timer and Alarm screens bugs me.
Shouldn’t Stop appear in the same spot on both screens? Imagine:
Must get up . . . not be late again . . . reach for phone . . . aha, orange button . . . zzz.
It’s poor design, I think, to make Snooze the more visible option. (Perhaps a developer’s joke to give everyone an easy excuse for being late?) Snoozing can be disabled for an alarm, but that might also be a risky choice. So I tinkered with a screenshot to fix things:
How did I finagle the system font (SF Pro) to make a replacement button? All SF fonts are available from Apple as free downloads.
*
As I just discovered, users have been noticing the Stop / Snooze inconsistency since 2017, at least.
[I found myself hitting Snooze not while sleeping but while cooking. I was knocked for a unexpected loop when my alarm sounded a second time.]
Thursday, January 6, 2022
On January 6
An idle question: do doctors and nurses still check on a patient’s mental state by asking who’s president? And if so, is more than one answer considered acceptable? And if more than one answer is considered acceptable, what does that say about where we are? In more than one country?
The crisis of American democracy is a crisis of fact.
On January 6
President Joe Biden, telling it like it is:
“My fellow Americans, in life there’s truth, and, tragically, there are lies, lies conceived and spread for profit and power. We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie. And here’s the truth: a former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest and America’s interest, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”And: “He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president.”
You can see the full remarks from Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at C-SPAN.
[My transcription.]
On January 6
Here’s an opinion piece by Capitol police officers Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell: “The government we defended last Jan. 6 has a duty to hold all the perpetrators accountable” (The Washington Post ).
On Tuesday night the two men appeared on the The PBS NewsHour, interviewed by Lisa Desjardins. The interview begins at the 23:08 mark. Here’s an excerpt:
Desjardins: Officer Dunn, do you think this danger is still here? Where are we right now, in terms of the threat to democracy, from your view?[My transcription.]
Dunn: You know, it’s scary to think about where we are. Sure, we succeeded as far as our mission that day. Democracy went on, late in the night, January 6th into January 7th. Democracy prevailed. But I think it’s very important for everybody now to realize how close and fragile democracy is, and that everybody, everybody, even anybody watching, anybody listening, has a job to do in protecting and defending democracy. That could be us police officers, we police; the legislators, the lawmakers, they need do their job and legislate; the judges judge; and the American people need to vote about who to put in those positions. We need accountability, and we need to make sure the right people are in office that want accountability also.
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
Lighted squares
A 1935 visit to New York lets us see Stefan Zweig as a spectator-tourist, visiting Radio City, the Savoy Ballroom, and “a self-service café” — no doubt the Automat. This passage’s description of “a geometric composition of lighted squares” made me think of the miniature cityscape in a 1947 film noir.
Elsewhere the diary entries veer from everyday details — letters, reviews, visits with friends and publishers — to an everpresent dread, as Zweig, the citizen of the world, watches the rise of totalitarianism: “I am sure there’s another coup brewing, and I think it will be successful.”
But I think of what our friend Eva Kor said: “Never give up.”
Related reading
All OCA Zweig posts (Pinboard)
[I’m glad that I got a copy of this book when I did: it has already disappeared from Amazon’s listings. Also available from Ediciones 98, in Spanish: Diarios (1931–1940) and Diarios (1912–1914).]
“Sepulveda”
Today’s Zippy is all about Los Angeles.
The Golden Mermaid? It’s in Santa Monica. My greatest named-apartment-building thrill in Los Angeles: spotting the Alto Nido. We drove back around the block so I could get a picture. Joe Gillis was just leaving.
As for “Sepulveda,” here’s a recent article about Los Angeles pronunciation.
Related reading
All OCA Los Angeles posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, January 4, 2022
Recognitions
I recognize that bus, which I saw in the Berkshires some years ago. It was surrounded by hippie-esque types and their children. And I recognize this bus too, which I saw a couple of years ago, parked at an orchard in downstate Illinois.
The buses belonged or still belong to a group now in the news. Their website was online last night and gone this morning. But it’s at the Internet Archive. And you can still read a Wikipedia article about the group.
I learned only last night that someone from our small town went off thirty years ago to join this group.
[Their website is back.]
Wordle
“Created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner”: The New York Times has the story behind Wordle. And here’s the game. Fortunately, it’s only one play a day.
I wondered about the name: wasn’t there a website for creating a cloud of words, a “wordle,” from a chunk of text? Like this? Or this? Yes, but it’s gone.
Thanks, Ben.
