Today’s Saturday Stumper

The last Newsday  Saturday Stumper I was unable to finish (June 4) was by Steve Mossberg. Today’s killer Stumper is by Steve Mossberg. Uh-oh.

It took me an hour, and I flailed for a “Long stretch” (49-A, four letters) in the northeast corner. I’d estimate that my solving time was lengthened by the challenge of concentrating amid the ever-shifting colors and shapes of the ads that fill the GameLabs window. Ugh. Newsday, please, bring back free access to the Stumper or charge a reasonable price for a crossword-only subscription.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “H’s horizontal.” Well, that was easy.

11-D, nine letters, “‘American Oxonian,’ e.g.” I struggled to see this one. The sixth letter of the answer was partly responsible. The quotation marks didn’t help.

12-D, nine letters, “Newspaper puzzle challenge.” I’ll have to take your word for it.

13-A, nine letters, “Inculpatory adage ender.” That was not easy.

16-A, nine letters, “Concert-to-go.” LIVESTREA — no.

24-D, six letters, “Terms of service.” Nicely deceptive.

26-A, twelve letters, “Pre-grilling advice.” Hah.

30-D, eight letters, “Breakfast buffet offering.” Mean!

31-D, nine letters, “Flavor enhancers.” I don’t recall seeing the answer in a puzzle before.

38-A, six letters, “Not keeping well.” I’ve seen this clue before, and it’s still a little forced for my taste.

48-D, five letters, “1953 debut as Froffles.” Easy once you see it. I was thinking maybe an animal friend from the movies or TV.

60-A, nine letters, “Do business.” I was reaching for a verb.

62-A, nine letters, “Go Bananas and Mango Madness.” I’m supposed to know this?

My favorite in this puzzle: 32-D, nine letters, “Electronic stop.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Another Mary Miller vote

Mary Miller (R, IL-15), who smiles as she poses with veterans, voted against S. 3373, the Honoring our PACT Act of 2022, described as “a bill to improve the Iraq and Afghanistan Service Grant and the Children of Fallen Heroes Grant.” She was one of eighty-eight House members, all Republicans, who voted against the bill. The bill was then killed in the Senate by Republican votes, twenty-five of them from senators who had previously voted for the bill.

Miller’s Democratic opponent in November, Paul Lange, finally has a website and Twitter account. You’d never know from his website who he’s running against. You’d never know from his Twitter account about Miller’s vote on S. 3373 or many of her other votes. Not that it matters, because IL-15 was designed as a deep-red, non-competitive district.

*

Is it just me, or is it genuinely difficult to find Congressional votes in a timely way? GovTrack.us still doesn’t have the final Senate vote on S. 3373. Congress.gov has the latest Senate vote yet shows the bill as going to the president.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

“I Like my Sleep!”

[Dig the spats. Life, October 14, 1940. Click for a much larger view.]

I found this advertisement while looking, as usual, for something else. I have a soft spot for Al Smith. As a college freshman in an American history course, I wrote a term paper on his 1928 presidential campaign.

Have you ever heard Smith speak? Listen to the governor’s comments upon being presented with the first post-Prohibition case of beer in New York State. Priceless.

This post, with a Pullman car in it, is for my friend Diane.

[I’m not sure how Al Smith was able to underscore an exclamation point when speaking, but so be it.]

“As said before”

Dinnertime for Leopold Bloom. The scene is the dining room of the Ormond Hotel. Pat is the waiter. Richie Goulding is Stephen Dedalus’s uncle and Bloom’s casual acquaintance and impromptu dinner companion. Goulding is a costdrawer (cost accountant) in the legal firm of Collis and Ward. From the “Sirens” episode:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Joyce is rather playful here. The “Calypso” episode introduces Bloom thusly:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

“It’s for an invalid”

From the “Wandering Rocks” episode. Blazes Boylan is supervising the preparation of a gift basket to be delivered to Molly Bloom, whom he will visit that afternoon.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

A few notes:

~ Thornton’s: fruiterer and florist, “a very fashionable shop” (Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated).

~ “Fat pears,” “ripe shamefaced peaches”: Boylan would have no trouble understanding the language of emoji. In the “Ithaca” espiode we find a description of the remains of this gift: “an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co’s white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper.”

~ What’s in the jar? Apparently it’s Plumtree’s Potted Meat, flakes of which are found in the Blooms’ bed.

~ The OCA reader will have seen H.E.L.Y’s in a passage from “Lestrygonians.”

~ The “darkbacked figure”: Leopold Bloom.

~ “Invalid port”: a fortified wine. “Es un excelente reconstituyente,” says a webpage I found somewhere. Molly is of course not an invalid.

We last see Boylan in his small section of this episode with a red carnation between his smiling teeth. He takes it from a stem glass and asks the shopgirl if it’s for him.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

“Before Air-Conditioning”

Arthur Miller, writing in The New Yorker in 1998 about life in 1927 or ’28:

Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass; Harlem began above 116th Street then.

Tony Dow (1945–2022)

He played Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. The New York Times has an obituary.

Ulp

From Bryan Garner’s LawProse Lesson #382, “Law graduates who can write”:

No memo or brief or letter is better than what’s in it. No amount of style and form, attention to punctuation and phrasing, can make good writing out of unreliable information and bad judgments. A good piece of writing is much more than phrasing, commas, and semicolons.

On the other hand, no amount of solid research and brilliant analysis will be useful until it’s communicated effectively to others. If your work requires writing, then your work is no better than your writing.

That last sentence should be useful to anyone who teaches writing. I can imagine it instantly instilling greater seriousness in a student.

[If you want to subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day and LawProse Lessons (both free): here. If you want to subscribe to LawProse Lessons only: here.]

Changes in ASL

From The New York Times: “How Sign Language Evolves As Our World Does.” Begins with the influence of small screens on ASL but moves to matters of culture.

Another Mary Miller vote

I don’t follow them all. But this one stands out: Miller (R, IL-15) was one of just twenty “no” votes, all Republican, against H.R. 6552, the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 2022. As is often the case, Miller voted with the worst of the worst: Biggs, Boebert, Brooks, Gaetz (no surprise there), Gosar, Greene, &c.

Who runs against Miller in November? Paul Lange.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)