“Asperger”

A post earlier today mentioned that the maker of threats against Merriam-Webster and others is reported to have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. “Asperger’s syndrome” is a fraught term, as an episode of the podcast The Allusionist explains: “Asperger.”

Threatening the dictionary

A California man has been charged for making threats to commit violence against various companies and individuals, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, Disney, Hasbro (maker of Potato Head toys), Land O’Lakes, USA Today, academics, politicians, school-board members, and a college president. Most startling, to me: the threatmaker made threats against Merriam-Webster over the M-W definitions of female and girl. The top lookup at M-W right now: female.

The affidavit in support of a criminal complaint describes the threatmaker as having been diagnosed with “Asperger’s syndrome, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression” and as taking “several psychiatric medications.” It doesn’t say anything though about where he might have gotten ideas about how to pick his targets.

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September 16: “Man who threatened Merriam-Webster with anti-LGBTQ violence pleads guilty” (The Washington Post).

Today’s Saturday Stumper

The byline says Lester Ruff, but I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper not especially easy. Where to start? 13-D, four letters, “Conversation starter.” And look: 16-A, three letters, “‘Special’ projects.” But then it was all the way down to 47-D, four letters, “Do laps, perhaps,” followed by hops, skips, and jumps from one region of the puzzle to another. But I got it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, four letters, “On-screen collection.” I think I understand the answer correctly.

11-A, three letters, “One’s luck.” Thank you, Thomas Hardy.

12-D, ten letters, “It’s used for pie preparation piercing.” We just talked about buying one, couldn’t find one in the store, and decided to stay with the implements already on hand.

17-A, five letters, “Pocket Fisherman purveyor.” Remembrance of things past.

26-A, fifteen letters, “What’s made for Jeopardy! contestants.” And Batman? Such an unusual answer.

27-A, seven letters, “What Groucho called himself, re his timidity.” Groan.

28-D, ten letters, “Food storage device.” My guess is that the term is disappearing along with the device so named.

37-D, eight letters, “Travel guide eponym.” I think of modernism.

40-D, seven letters, “Devalued, these days.” Yeah, but it’s made a comeback.

42-A, fifteen letters, “What’s made for Wheel contestants.” As with 26-A, an unusual answer. If there’s a theme that joins more than 26-A and 42-A, I’ve misseed it.

48-D, four letters, “Billionaire Barbadian, to her fans.” Wait — she’s a billionaire?!

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 14-A, five letters, “It fell from a horse long ago.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[“Lester Ruff”: pen name of Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, used with easier Stumpers of his making.]

Potlatch, anyone?

Ian Frazier, writing in The New Yorker about cabin fever, recalls a time, forty years ago, when he lived in the rural isolation of northwest Montana:

A big excursion for me was to drive to the town of Kalispell, some twenty miles away. I was writing on a brand of paper called Potlatch. Such an interesting name for copy paper — Potlatch. I ran out of my first ream of it, and when I was buying more at an office-supply store in Kalispell I told the salesperson about potlatch — how it was a Native American word that meant a kind of party in which a chief or even just an ordinary person gave away stuff to other members of the tribe. “Giveaway” is a rough translation of the word into English, I told the salesperson. The potlatch was a system for showing status and spreading the wealth downward, I said. As I looked at the reaction on the salesperson’s face, it sank in that I was not in a normal frame of mind.

Jeez, that sounds like me on an ordinary day. It’s just the sharing of useful information. But I can hear my kids in the background — “Dad! Stop!”

Mingus centennial

Charles Mingus, bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, was born on April 22, 1922.

I cringed last night hearing an NPR tribute characterize Mingus — straight off — as “the angry man of jazz.” I find it difficult to imagine NPR referring to anyone as the angry man of chamber music, dance, film, painting, &c. Sigh.

Mingus could be angry indeed, particularly about the indignities of the music business. And his music can be angry, yes — also ecstatic, romantic, sardonic, tender, tumultuous, urbane, and witty. It is, always, music of extraordinary imagination and beauty.

WKCR is playing Mingus round the clock through Saturday. To see Mingus in performance, these 1964 performances are a good place to start.

Related reading
All OCA Mingus posts (Pinboard)

Our tube

Seen while flipping channels: Tom Fitzsimmons and George Petrie, as doctors, young and old, in the One Day at a Time episode “Julie’s Operation” (February 8, 1977). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television. See also these arrangements.

If the names don’t ring bells: Tom Fitzsimmons played “Ford,” Franklin Ford III, through all four seasons of The Paper Chase. George Petrie had countless film and television roles, but I know him from The Honeymooners, where he played a bankrobber, a janitor, a magazine editor, a psychiatrist, a fellow Raccoon, and busdriver Freddie Muller.

Lassie and Ted

TV intertextuality: Ted Knight appeared as Mr. Ventrilo, a traveling entertainer, in a 1959 episode of Lassie. Mr. Ventrilo’s puppet dog reappeared on the hand of a ventriloquizing Ted Baxter in a 1973 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

But wait, there’s more. From the MTM episode “The Ted and Georgette Show” (January 22, 1977). Georgette has some bad news to tell:

Ted: “Nothing you could say to me could affect my performance out there.”

Georgette: “That’s not true. Remember the time Murray told you, just before the news, that Lassie was three different dogs? And you had to have ice pressed against the back of your neck before you could go out?”

In Mr. Ventrilo’s time, Lassie was indeed three dogs. From The New York Times:

There was the main Lassie, of course. But there was also the stand-in used in rehearsals, and a stunt double and the fighter dog (the dog who rough-housed with the main Lassie when the script called for a fight scene).

One more Lassie–MTM connection: Cloris Leachman, who played Phyllis Lindstrom, was the original Ruth Martin. Jon Provost, who played Timmy Martin: “Cloris did not feel particularly challenged by the role.”

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

[An Oxford comma would make it clearer that the Times sentence is about four dogs, one of them not Lassie.]

From the Poetry Project

The Library of Congress has made available 420 recordings of poetry readings at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. And that’s just what the Library calls “the first round.”

Learn how it happened: “Rare Book and Special Collections Division Digitizes 40 Years of Poetry Project Sound Recordings” (Poetry & Literature at the Library of Congress).

Masks

From The New York Times: “Does My Mask Protect Me if Nobody Else Is Wearing One?” The short answer: Yes, but make it a KF94, KN95, or N95.

The link uses the Times “gift” option. You can share the link with anyone, whether or not they have a Times subscription, whether or not they’ve hit the monthly limit for free reading. And yes, the Times lowercases if in headlines.

Banned books, free

For a limited time, the New York Public Library is making four often-banned books available to borrow in digital form anywhere in the United States: Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies, Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Details here.