S _ _

It can tricky to get a crossword right from Across words alone. Three letters, “Place for a mud bath”: STY, obviously. Oops, no, SPA.

“He himself?”

Stephen Dedalus is staying with Buck Mulligan, friend and medical student, and Haines, an Englishman studying Irish folklore. From the opening episode, “Telemachus”:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Stephen will expound his theory about Hamlet in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of the novel. I won’t attempt to rehearse his theory here. All I’ll say is that Haines’s final question startled me anew when I read it for the first time in many years.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

Copyediting the crossword

Today’s Atlantic crossword is a good one. But the clue for 66-A, “Amount of Blinde Mäuse, in a nursery rhyme” should refer to the number of Mäuse. A count noun takes number.

G. & S.

In Boro Park, Brooklyn, in the 1960s, we knew this store as G. & S. Or, “the dry goods store.” Merriam-Webster has two definitions of dry goods :

1 : grocery items (such as tobacco, sugar, flour, and coffee) that do not contain liquid

2 : textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and notions as distinguished especially from hardware and groceries

I think it’s no. 2 that fits G. & S.

The earliest reference to the store that I can find at Brooklyn Newsstand is a listing in an ad for Congoleum dealers:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 2, 1928.]

Two years later, there’s an ad with a handy location marker:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 7, 1930.]

What I remember of this store (which spanned several storefronts): no shelves, just merchandise in cardboard boxes, with prices written on packages with a grease pencil or Magic Marker. (Let’s be real: it must have been a grease pencil.) I remember things like dish towels and white tee-shirts and household chemicals. Lysol, maybe. Maybe Eveready batteries? I don’t know — because I was a kid, not someone taking notes for a blog post.

[G. & S. Department Store, 4806–14 New Utrecht Avenue, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a larger view. And notice the “Floor Covering Dept.” signage in the second photograph.]

My brother Brian says that G. & S. stood for “Gary and Son.” I think I remember our dad once imparting that bit of Brooklyn fact. (He was just the kind of guy who’d be willing to ask a store clerk.) At some point the store became G. & Sons. That name appears in this 1963 advertisement:

[Kings Courier, June 15, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

You can see a G. & Sons sign in this c. 1983–1988 tax photo. The storefront later housed a National Wholesale Liquidators outlet, followed by Albert & Sons. Google Maps shows that Albert was gone by 2017. A 2021 Google Maps photograph shows this office building still under construction, with an Amazing Savings store on the ground floor. Notice that the illustration is careful to obscure the presence of the El overhead.

Thanks, Brian.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[If you’d like to go down the Congoluem rabbit-hole: you’ve been warned.]

Miller White Life?

Miller: President Trump… I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday pic.twitter.com/RqxmbT8jx5

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 26, 2022

A charitable explanation would be that Mary Miller (R, IL-15) flubbed her script. Anyone can make a mistake, and the speaker here is dumber than a box of rocks. Given the tenor of her remarks about the city of Chicago, “white life” might be a Freudian slip (the quiet part out loud). Whatever. It would be a shame if this glaring moment were to go unnoticed. It hasn’t.

Mary Miller is a disgrace to her district, her state, her party, her country, and the universe. Here’s a Chicago Tribune article that recounts various Miller missteps, beginning with “Hitler was right on one thing” and ending with “white life.”

*

The official explanation, from a campaign spokesman (because Miller never takes questions from the press): “a mix-up of words.” And: “Her campaign noted that she is the grandmother of several nonwhite grandchildren, including one with Down syndrome.” White being, for Miller and company, the default setting.

Miller also referred in her remarks to “global elites.” And we know what that coded language signals.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

[Post title with apologies to a venerable name in beer.]

Feeding kids

Alexandra Petri has a satiric piece in The Washington Post: “We must protect life from conception until the moment of birth!”

It’s no surprise to me to learn that Mary Miller (R, IL-15) is one of just forty-two members of the House of Representatives who voted on Thursday against the Keep Kids Fed Act of 2022, created to help fund meal programs throughout the year. Miller is zealous about prohibiting abortion and allowing unlimited access to weapons. Not so zealous about feeding children.

One detail: the bill is meant to

extend flexibilities for summer meals in 2022. This will make it easier to feed all students during the summer months, particularly those in rural areas, through flexible options like meal delivery and grab-and-go. [My emphasis.]

Rodney Davis, Miller’s opponent in the Republican primary, voted for this bill. Friends who tell me that there’s no difference between Davis and Miller, that it’s a mistake to cross over to vote in the Republican primary: you’re wrong.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

[Miller holds a super-spreader event — I mean a campaign rally with a defeated former president today.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I’ve read Ben Zimmer’s prose many times, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a crossword puzzle by him before today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper. It’s a good puzzle, relatively easy with toughies here and there. I began with 13-D, eight letters, “Groups inspired by pop-punk” and 20-A, five letters, “Rome’s ____-Shelley Memorial House,” and never had to look back.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “Non-stretchy attire rarely worn on Zoom calls.” A delightful start. But rarely ? Really? I learned this amusing term only recently and am grateful to know what I have been wearing on and off Zoom calls.

1-D, six letters, “Scouts, often.” Noun? Verb? This clue gave me more trouble than it was probably meant to.

8-D, seven letters, “Mega-selling action figures of the ’90s.” Oh, yes, I remember them.

15-A, nine letters, “Settled.” This ambigious clue had me stuck for a bit.

17-A, nine letters, “Emotional fulfillment guide written long, long ago.” Pretty decorous.

35-D, eight letters, “Ticket stubs, menus, etc.” I love such stuff.

39-D, seven letters, “Trademark for wearable Teflon.” Somehow “wearable Teflon” doesn’t sound nearly as cool.

43-D, six letters, “Originally, to adjust a musical instrument.” Huh.

49-D, four letters, “Metaphorical concession.” Pleasantly defamiliarizing.

55-A, nine letters, “‘That’ll never happen again.’” Colloquial clue, colloquial answer.

60-A, nine letters, “Orthodontist's palatal appliances.” BITEPLATES won’t fit. Need more room!

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Excerpts from a dissent

Excerpts from the dissent filed by Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization :

For half a century, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 853; Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U. S. 124, 171–172 (2007) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions.

*

As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.

*

The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. Ante, at 32. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” Ante, at 15. So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

*

In 1868, the first wave of American feminists were explicitly told — of course by men — that it was not their time to seek constitutional protections. (Women would not get even the vote for another half-century.) To be sure, most women in 1868 also had a foreshortened view of their rights: If most men could not then imagine giving women control over their bodies, most women could not imagine having that kind of autonomy. But that takes away nothing from the core point. Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.

*

The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry each other. To the contrary, contemporaneous practice deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion. Yet the Court in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967), read the Fourteenth Amendment to embrace the Lovings’ union. If, Obergefell explained, “rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification” — even when they conflict with “liberty” and “equality” as later and more broadly understood. 576 U. S., at 671. The Constitution does not freeze for all time the original view of what those rights guarantee, or how they apply.

*

As a matter of constitutional substance, the majority’s opinion has all the flaws its method would suggest. Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today. Because those laws prevented women from charting the course of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same again. Because in 1868, the government could tell a pregnant woman — even in the first days of her pregnancy — that she could do nothing but bear a child, it can once more impose that command. Today’s decision strips women of agency over what even the majority agrees is a contested and contestable moral issue. It forces her to carry out the State’s will, whatever the circumstances and whatever the harm it will wreak on her and her family. In the Fourteenth Amendment’s terms, it takes away her liberty.

*

After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had. The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away. The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.

*

With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent.

The full decision is here.

Back to 1868

From the New York Times’s annotated text of today’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade:

The crux of Justice Alito’s legal rationale is that the 14th Amendment’s protections of freedoms that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution must be limited to those rights that were understood to exist deep in the country’s history — especially around 1868, when that amendment was ratified. This is an example of “originalism,” in contrast to the more liberal interpretative method that views the Constitution as a living document whose meaning can evolve with society.

And yes, “Thomas’s concurring opinion raises questions about what rights might be next.”

Today is a dark day for freedom and dignity.

Two more posts on Alito’s thinking
“Indefensible” : Rights and wrongs, old and new

“Once upon a time”

One of the great beginnings.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, is about to engage in some heavy lifting: Ulysses begins today.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Geen : not a typo. The song is “Lilly Dale,” by H.S. Thompson. Here are the lyrics. And here are two recordings. Whoever sings to young Stephen Dedalus changes grave to place.]