Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is a tough one, half-hour territory for me. My spirit sagged at 1-A, five letters, “Norwegian flatbread.” (NJAAN?!) I found a better start at 14-A, five letters, “Ladderback chair elements.” 18-A, nine letters, “India, essentially” helped a lot, as did 39-A, eleven letters, “Overlong addresses.” That last answer is one of several unusual longish ones in this puzzle.

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, nine letters, “Guitar-and-castanets performances.” It took me a long time to see that the answer was not another nine-letter word.

15-A, five letters, “Part of a Moscow mule, perhaps.” And with a complicated history. No thanks.

21-D, eight letters, "What some game app developers work with." Not every pun deserves respect.

23-A, thirteen letters, “Xenomorph.” You see what I mean about unusual longish answers?

25-D, eight letters, “Insects that coevolved with tropical trees.” Also unusual medium-length answers.

27-D, four letters, “The Bard's ‘being next to Devil,’ per Coleridge.” Misparsing the clue makes the easy answer much more difficulty to see.

30-D, nine letters, “Mustard or cocoa.” Someone understands me.

37-D, eight letters, “The ’40s Motorette, e.g.” What?

My favorite in this puzzle: 29-A, eleven letters, “It may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

First word, first syllable

We were reminsicing over breakfast this morning about WILL-TV, our local PBS outlet, which turns 100 this year. For many years, late on weeknights, the station aired Silver Screen, something of a miniature version of TCM (pre-TCM), with a top-notch movie and a host, Thomas Guback, well-versed in film, providing an intro and outro.

I asked Elaine if she remembered what movie blew our minds when we first saw it on Silver Screen. We had tuned in when the movie had already started and had no context: even more reason for it to blow our minds.

Elaine was at a loss. Inspired by our recent reading of Robertson Davies, I pressed on:

Three words, first word, three syllables, first syllable.

[I held an imaginary steering wheel.]

First word, second syllable.

[I gave an indifferent sideways shake of the head.]

That was all it took. Can you identify the movie?

A solemn vow: this will be the only time I use an OCA post to play charades.

*

No one’s guessed. The title is now in the comments.

Thomas to Meadows

From the Washington Post story about text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows. Thomas to Meadows, November 5, 2020:

Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

The criminality and craziness in these messages is staggering. I can’t even can’t even.

Walking every street

From The New York Times, “One Cure for Pandemic Doldrums: Walking Every Street in Your City.” With Peoria, among others.

I am reminded of a story about the poet Charles Reznikoff, an inveterate walker. The story goes that when was asked why he had never traveled to Europe, he replied that he still hadn’t walked every street in New York City.

Ted Cruz’s afterglow

From The Independent : “Ted Cruz photographed checking his Twitter mentions after ‘performative tantrum’ at Supreme Court hearing”:

Senator Ted Cruz was caught checking his phone for Twitter mentions by a photo journalist after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.

The Texas Republican was accused by social media users of a “performative tantrum” at the hearing after he ignored repeated requests from senator Dick Durbin, the chair of Senate Judiciary Committee, to stop speaking after his allotted time.

That first sentence though could use improvement: “Twitter mentions by a photojournalist”? No. Asking who did what makes it easy to see how the sentence might be made clearer:

A photojournalist caught Senator Ted Cruz checking his phone for Twitter mentions after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.

If “his phone” leaves any ambiguity about whose phone, the sentence could go this way:

A photojournalist caught Senator Ted Cruz checking for Twitter mentions after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.

The sentences that follow make clear that the junior senator was using his (own) phone.

The article’s headline is a reminder that performative has become what Fowler’s Modern English Usage would call a “worsened word,” once neutral or commendatory but now pejorative.

[The Independent has used three spellings: photo-journalist, photojournalist, and most recently, photo journalist. I’ve used photojournalist, which is overwhelmingly more frequent in both British and American English.]

A Homeric ring

Reading a review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate made me think back to ring composition in Homer. Here’s an explanation, from Ralph Hexter’s A Guide to The Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1993):

Ring composition is a characteristic archaic Greek device that poets frequently employed to organize their material and that we presume helped singers and listeners to keep both details and the whole clearly in mind. In other words, it functions in part as a mnemonic device. A ring may involve words or phrases within one sentence, thoughts in a paragraph, or [. . .] narrative blocks. The classic form involves the treatment of elements a, b, and c, after which the poet takes them or variants of them and presents them in reverse order, c′, b′, a′, so that he or she concludes where he or she began.

There are many rings in Homer’s epics (for instance). My favorite is the one that structures the wanderings of Odysseus. I would ask students to memorize it and, in the spirit of oral tradition, recite it (for some number of 100s for quizzes). So I’d have students coming in before or after class or during office hours to recite. Many students thought the memorizing would be daunting. But I never had a student who was unable to do it. Along the way I heard some wonderful stories from students being helped and cheered on by roommates while practicing.

The following schema is from assignment pages that would go out with books 9–12 (Odysseus’s account of his wanderings):

[Click for a larger view.]

I just remembered: I once spoke to a high-school English class about the Odyssey, and an account of my visit appeared on the school’s page in the local newspaper. I was said to have given the students “inside information” on Homer’s poem. In other words, I showed them this ring.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[I’ve spelled proper names as found in Stanley Lombardo’s translation. Contra the review that prompted this post: ring composition is not a matter of digression.]

Eww

Our household’s representative in Congress, Mary Miller (Illinois-15), has been endorsed by Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas. Miller will be facing Rodney Davis in the Republican primary for a redrawn 15th district, so she won’t remain our representative for long. Not that she ever was our representative. She has allied herself with the worst of the worst — Biggs, Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Jordan, and Perry, among others — and has done nothing but stunt and cast appalling votes. She already has the endorsement of the defeated former president. And now Cruz. Eww.

From a 2021 post: “Every time I see Ted Cruz, I am glad that I am someone with more scruples. And a better beard.”

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts

[I won’t link to the source of the Cruz–Miller story. You can guess why. And yes, “junior senator” is deliberate. And yes, his performance yesterday was a disgrace.]

Ted and Suzy and Fluffy

In the 1950s, Ted Knight was a children’s television host, adept with puppets and ventriloquism. That work must have brought him to the attention of the producers of Lassie, where he appeared in a single episode as Mr. Ventrilo, a traveling entertainer and The World’s Greatest Ventriloquist. His dog-puppet is named Suzy. Lassie thinks she is real.

[Ted Knight as Mr. Ventrilo, with Suzy and Lassie. From the Lassie episode “The Puppet,” March 29, 1959. Click for a larger view.]

For a Lassie fan (like me, from childhood’s hour), the appearance of Mr. Ventrilo’s dog-puppet (now named Fluffy) on The Mary Tyler Moore Show is a wonderful moment of TV intertextuality.

[Ted Knight as Ted Baxter, with Fluffy and Mary Tyler Moore. From the Mary Tyler Moore Show episode “Murray Faces Life,” February 10, 1973.]

There’s no explanation of why Ted Baxter has a dog-puppet in his apartment. But why not? Ted says that it cheers up the stewardesses (sic ) in his apartment building when they’re feeling down.

You can find both episodes at YouTube: Lassie, TMTMS.

Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts : TMTMS posts (Pinboard)

[Almost every post now is a respite from current events.]

dic·tio·nary stuff

An especially good episode of the Merriam-Webster podcast Word Matters: “What Do the Dots Mean in a Definition?” Also starring the tilde, guide words, double hyphens, undefined run-ons, and nattering nabobs of negativism.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

[The alliteration story recounted in this episode is fun, but judging from a 1973 edition of Barron’s Vocabulary Builder, I think that a page could never run from nabob to nattering, or from pusillanimous to pussyfooter. Not enough words in between.]

Sheesh

[From the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.]

A couple of minutes ago, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) described Odysseus as having himself tied to the mast of his ship so that he would not be tempted by the call of the Sirens. Uh, no. If Odysseus did not want to be tempted, he could have stopped his ears, as his crew did at his (per Circe’s) direction. Odysseus’s ears are unstopped: he chooses to be both tempted and restrained. (He’s Mr. Reckless Curiosity, living on the edge.)

*

The senator made me the same mistake in the next day’s questioning. In his metaphor, Odysseus was a judge; the mast, the Constitution.

Related posts
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[This post had originally had an additional sheesh: a senatorial error in subject-verb agreement. But that was my mishearing of has for have. I checked: the v of have was barely there.]