Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. It’s a tough one, and after missing the last two Stumpers by a square, I am inordinately self-satisfied to have gotten all the squares of this puzzle. I began with 6-D, three letters, “Choice word”; 8-D, three letters, “Title from Turkish for ‘lord’; and 14-A, ten letters, “Storming.” The northwest fell quickly; other parts of the puzzle fell more slowly; and the southwest for a long time seemed impossible to crack. 32-D, nine letters, “Querulous quote from Christie.” Agatha? Anna? Chris? Brinkley? I got it, but I had to look it up to understand.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

12-D, nine letters, “Origamist’s purchase.” I learned somepin.

13-D, eight letters, “Pilot products.” A pretty arcane way to clue this answer. But I can think of more arcane.

15-D, eight letters, “Offering from GM’s Cruise.” Never heard of it.

17-A, ten letters, “Crimefighter who's really put together.” LTCOLUMBO comes up short.

26-D, seven letters, “Small fry.” Cute. And nothing to do with the Hoagy Carmichael–Frank Loesser song.

36-A, fifteen letters, “Study of capitalistic crises.” Whoa.

49-D, five letters, “It’s meant to be mixed up.” Only mildly confounding.

52-A, six letters, “Nautically named warehouse carts.” I still remember gondola from my housewares-department days.

54-A, six letters, “App store.” Stumper-y distortion — not a store to my mind.

62-A, ten letters, “Prudent antivirus setting.” Also prudent for security updates. But not prudent for system updates.

My favorite in this puzzle: 63-A, four letters, “Work (out).” I’ve loved the word ever since Betty Aberlin used it in a comment on an OCA post about a Mister Rogers opera. Lady Aberlin!

The answers are in the comments.

“Thank you for all,” &c.

I wrote an e-mail to my university’s president and board of trustees urging a fair offer to end the faculty strike. Contract negotiations ran for more than a year before the strike began. Negotiations resume today. I am sure my e-mail will be the tipping point.

In my message I made mention of a familiar bit of administrative language:

As a retired faculty member, I am long familiar with “Thank you for all you do.” Those words mean little or nothing to faculty who are underpaid.

This morning Google returns 2,360,000 results for thank you for all you do and thanks for all you do. The formulation is trite. It often functions as a hollow panacea: show ’em a little gratitude. In the real world, people express gratitude to particular persons, in specific circumstances. When I hear “Thank you for all you do,” I want to say “Oh yeah? Name one thing!”

A genuine way to express gratitude woukd be to pay people salaries commensurate with their ability and experience — or, at least, commensurate with the rate of inflation.

Another country

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson asks a pointed question:

The Supreme Court, Congress, and the Tennessee statehouse. What would you say if you saw today’s news coming from another country?

The dogcow

At 512 Pixels, Stephen Hackett presents the life and times of Clarus the dogcow.

[There is always more to the Mac than you know.]

Friends blogging, blogging friends

Fresca improved a paragraph by Adam Gopnik. Boy did she ever.

Slywy found an abandoned general store, and its history.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

I’m not sure if this one is easy or hard. If you recognize him, or think you do, leave the name in the comments.

*

The name is now in the comments.

More mystery actors
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“Dreamers all”

Morpheus, master of the underworld, entertains his guest Carl Hausman by identifying for him various figures of the Earthly Paradise, “a sweet place to lie down i’ the shade awhile”:

Steven Millhauser, From the Realm of Morpheus (1986).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

The Scream?

[Illustration by Edel Rodriguez. Time, April 24/May 1, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

As seen here. The artist has done previous orange-themed covers as well.

Related reading
Edel Rodriguez’s website

[If this illustration has a title, it’s not on the artist’s website. The Scream would be a good one.]

Making HTML links with Alfred workflows

I finally found a good use for ChatGPT: I had it write two workflows for the Mac app Alfred. It took the bot about a half dozen tries over several days to produce workflows that work. Thanks, AI.

URL+text creates an HTML link with selected text from the current tab in Safari. It’s simple: highlight text, press Command-C to copy, and press the hotkey. The link will be on the Clipboard. You can make the hotkey whatever you like. I like Control-Option-Command-T, a combination not likely to be confused with anything else.

URL+title creates an HTML link with the title of the current tab in Safari. It’s even simpler: press the hotkey and the link will be on the Clipboard. Here too you can change the hotkey to whatever you like. I like Control-Option-Command-L.

It’s baffling to me that the App Store offers no decent extension to accomplish such elementary tasks. (URL Linker for Safari does not work properly in Ventura, at least not on my Mac.) It’s also baffling to me that the Alfred forums appear to lack Workflows for these tasks. Granted, it’s ultra-easy to create links in Markdown, but not everyone uses Markdown.

I’ve placed both workflows in my Dropbox for downloading: URL+text, URL+title. Use at your own risk. But I don’t think there’s any real risk involved. Note: Alfred is a free app, but workflows require the not-free Alfred Powerpack.

If anyone knows how to have a workflow recognize highlighted text without the need for Command-C, I’d love to know.

[What about asking ChatGPT to write a working Quick Action in AppleScript? Unpossible! AppleScript seems to defy both artificial and human intelligence.]

Happy returns

Two progressive candidates won seats on our town’s school board yesterday, and a regressive current member was defeated. That makes me happy. One of the winning candidates won by just fourteen votes. That makes me remember why I vote in every election.

Farther from home, Janet Protasiewicz won decisively and will have a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That makes me happy too.

And faculty at my university go on strike tomorrow. I’m not happy about the strike, but I’m happy that the faculty are willing to stand up to an intransigent administration and insist on adequate salaries.