Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. For me, a twenty-five-minute pleasant challenge, with the finish line never feeling out of reach. At the center of the grid, three stepped eleven-letter answers. And everywhere in the puzzle, surprises and tricks a-plenty.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

22-D, ten letters, “You and me, essentially.” Yeesh.

32-D, four letters, “What often precedes the question.” Stumper Alert.

33-A, eleven letters, “ Dollar store ancestors.” I knew it right off.

33-A, eleven letters, “Its lexicon includes ‘banner’ and ‘standard.’” Even spelled correctly, the answer looks wrong.

36-D, eight letters, “Not done.” My first guess, VERYRARE, had me hung up for a bit.

38-D, six letters, “They have currency.” Nation-states?

40-D, six letters, “Set spot.” Vague until it’s not.

49-A, five letters, “Cans of Worcestershire.” Clever.

55-A, three letters, “___ wagon (vehicle that follows bike racers).” How did I know this?

60-A, four letters, “Worked with numbers.” I kept thinking the answer had to end in -ED. But how could it?

My favorite in this puzzle: 25-A, four letters, “Does as well as others.” Just nifty.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A chart, not especially helpful

The New York Times has created an ingenious scrolling chart (gift link) to sort out congressional Republican responses to the second indictment. The only problem: an ingenious scrolling chart is not especially helpful for anyone who wants to check on a particular member of Congress. There are no names, just small photographs of faces, greyed out until one scrolls to a relevant category of response and some faces turn full-color. Faces are arranged from less to more conservative, though it’s not clear what their arrangment into rows means.

I had no problem finding Illinois’s Mary Miller: I looked at the more conservative end of the spectrum and scrolled until her tiny head turned blonde. There she was, one of just thirty-three members who claim that the indictment signals the advent of autocracy (“BANANA REPUBLIC,” Miller wrote on Twitter), and one of just nineteen members who call the indictment “election interference.”

What would be a much more useful presentation: an alphabetical list of members, with categories of response to the right of their names. That would make it easy to find a given member and see how many categories of response apply to that member’s comments.

I’ll invoke my mantra about technology: Technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. That one can arrange tiny greyed-out faces into a chart doesn’t mean that one should.

Small Protest

“With Putin’s crackdown on protests of the Ukraine war, people have found ways to express their opposition through small displays of resistance”: “Decoding the Antiwar Messages of Miniature Protesters in Russia” (The New York Times, gift link).

Here is the Instagram page malenkiy_piket (Small Protest). A small protest is no small thing: as the Times article points out, it can mean arrest and imprisonment.

“Kraahraark!” (Bloomsday)

It’s June 16, 1904, and Leopold Bloom is, as he often is, inventing. From the “Hades” episode, after the graveside service for Paddy Dignam:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Mr. Bloom would no doubt be interested in AI efforts to ventriloquize the dead. And in hologram performances by the dead. And in gravestones with QR codes and recipes.

I think Joyce would have been amused by this story of an Irish voice out of the grave. But he’d have to go to YouTube to get the video that captured the moment.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ). “Wisdom Hely’s”: Charles Wisdom Hely, (1856–1929), Dublin printer and stationer. Another mourner in this episode recalls that Bloom as having been “in the stationery line.” “Yes,” says another, “in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper.” In other words, a salesman.]

Analog trends

The Washington Post reports on six analog trends: print books, film cameras, letters and postcards, pens and stationery, vinyl, and “collecting” (e.g., matchbooks).

[That’s a gift link.]

“Real pretty, real professional”

Steven Millhauser, “Three Young Men,” in Enchanted Night (1999).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Top of the muffin

I was setting up a next appointment for my mom when one staff person said to another that her Seinfeld friend had sent her a meme that morning: “Top of the muffin to you!” (Perhaps this one?)

I started laughing, really laughing. “I couldn’t help overhearing,” I said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” And we started talking about Seinfeld. It was a pleasant unexpected moment in the day.

Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023)

Robert Gottlieb, editor and writer, has died at the age of ninety-two. From the New York Times obituary (gift link):

“I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time,” he told the Times in 1980. “Mind you, that’s all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library.”

The relationship between an editor and a writer is the subject of the 2022 documentary film Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie Gottlieb. I recommend it highly.

A related post
Robert Gottlieb on editing

First!

From The New York Times (gift link): “To Fight Book Bans, Illinois Passes a Ban on Book Bans”:

Taking a new tack in the ideological battle over what books children should be able to read, Illinois will prohibit book bans in its public schools and libraries, with Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling the bill that he signed on Monday the first of its kind.

The law, which takes effect next year, was the Democratic-controlled state’s response to a sharp rise in book-banning efforts across the country, especially in Republican-led states, where lawmakers have made it easier to remove library books that political groups deemed objectionable.

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)

[“The Democratic-controlled state’s reponse”: How about “the Democratic-led legislature’s response”?]

Zippy as Percy

[“La-La Land Grab.” Zippy, June 14, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy is in Los Angeles, 1947, thinking about Edmond O’Brien, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lizabeth Scott. And Percy Helton, whose face and voice, if not name, should be familiar to any viewer of older movies.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)