Orange Crate Art

Saturday, February 18, 2023

How to improve writing (no. 107)

From a New York Times obituary for William Greenberg Jr., baker:

Mr. Greenberg, an affable redhead at 6 feet 4 inches tall who was raised in the Five Towns area of Long Island, opened his first bakery in Manhattan in 1946, in a narrow storefront on East 95th Street, near Second Avenue, with $3,000 — poker winnings from games he played in the Army. It turned out that Mr. Greenberg was as skilled with cards as he was with a piping gun.

The logic of chronology is off here. To fix it:

It turned out that Mr. Greenberg was as skilled with a piping gun as he was with cards.

That’s the kind of thing that the Times once employed lots of copy editors to fix.

I think there are far too many facts crammed into the first sentence — an unfortunate tendency in obituary writing. (See How to improve writing (no. 45).) Is mentioning Mr. Greenberg’s red hair and his height meant to entice the reader to keep going? Puh-leeze.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 107 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Steve Mossberg, is a tough one. 16-A, four letters, “Done quickly?” No, not at all, in large part because of 16-A. (No spoilers: I explain in the comments.)

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, three letters, “Elvis played it between tour stops.”Suprising, not surprising.

13-D, nine letters, “Question before the cameras.” Fun.

17-A, ten letters, “Going over everything.” I kept thinking the answer must be a participle.

19-A, four letters, “Bug out.” I didn’t know it, so I hereby deem it arcane.

26-D, ten letters, “Comparatively slick.” C'mon man. This is pretty ridic.

33-A, fifteen letters, “Star Trek intro claim to fame.” My starting point. A giveaway, I think.

39-A, seven letters, “Party central of a sort.” Ugh.

52-D, three letters, “Some PJs.” Seems ridiculously arbitrary. “Some almost anything” would work as well.

55-A, ten letters, “Rolls in it.” I wanted LUXURIATES.

My favorite in this puzzle: 30-A, four letters, “Slimmed-down food department.” Now that’s one clever clue.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments. But if you know what Elvis played, you might agree that everyone should play.

Friday, February 17, 2023

Prisons

“Holding onto anger would really just be trading one prison for another”: Lamar Johnson, wrongfully convicted of murder, just released from prison after twenty-eight years, speaking on the PBS NewsHour tonight.

“Who’s Afraid of Black History?”

In The New York Times, Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes about Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Ron DeSantis, and the teaching (or policing) of history:

Is it fair to see Governor DeSantis’s attempts to police the contents of the College Board’s AP curriculum in African American studies in classrooms in Florida solely as little more than a contemporary version of Mildred Rutherford’s Lost Cause textbook campaign? No. But the governor would do well to consider the company that he is keeping. And let’s just say that he, no expert in African American history, seems to be gleefully embarked on an effort to censor scholarship about the complexities of the Black past with a determination reminiscent of Rutherford’s. While most certainly not embracing her cause, Mr. DeSantis is complicitous in perpetuating her agenda.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Addressing these “ravages,” and finding solutions to them — a process that can and should begin in the classroom — can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum, a process in which Black thinkers themselves have been engaged since the earliest years of our Republic.

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Games and books

No classes today, so the university’s digital-whatever division is inviting students to spend the three-day weekend playing esports, the activities formerly known as video games. Because really, what else would a college student have to do with their time?

But at least we’ve yet to dismantle our library.