Father’s Day

My dad stopped by in advance of this Father’s Day. It was the night of June 3, or it might have been the morning of June 4. I wasn’t looking at the clock. He was working at his desk, figuring something out with pencil on paper. I leaned down and kissed him on his head.

The more time that passes, the more I (a non-believer) agree with words attributed to John Chrysostom: “Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were before. They are now wherever we are.”

Happy Father’s Day to all.

Five-and-ten, five-and-dime

Re: 33-A in today’s Saturday Stumper and a question in a comment:

A 1958 note in American Speech investigates usage: “Five-and-Ten, Five-and-Dime.” The unidentified writer, who grew up in New York City, recalls the five-and-ten-cent store, the five-and-ten, and the ten-cent store as the terms in use in his youth. He thinks that ‑dime forms are latecomers, with their fortunes on the rise. But is he happy about that?

To my ear, the expressions dime store and five-and-dime (store ) have an air of affectation. Several other native New Yorkers to whom I have put the question feel that the dime-expressions have pretensions.

That’s as far down that rabbit hole as I’m gonna go.

There’s also variety store. Did that term catch on when prices made five and ten and dime implausible?

[The article is available from JSTOR. Anyone without library access can create a free account to read a limited number of articles each month. I can’t type that sentence without thinking about the short, tragic life of Aaron Swartz.]

“Ghost Town” on Soul Music

“In the interests of balance, I think you should play ‘Ghost Town’ every night after ‘God Save the King’ — how about that?” Jerry Dammers, in a Soul Music episode about his song (BBC Radio 4).

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.