Today’s Saturday Stumper

What’s up with the Newsday crossword? The puzzle still won’t load from the Newsday website, at least not on my Mac. I’ve tried three different browsers, turned off content blockers, turned off iCloud Private Relay, and still no puzzle.

Brains Only and The Washington Post have the puzzle for online solving, but only on the day of publication. Newsday has slways made the puzzle available at 10:00 Eastern the night before, which makes Friday night Stumper Eve.

Last night I found a printable puzzle at creators.com. I started at 9:00 and was done at 10:00. Today’s puzzle, by Matthew Sewell, might be the most difficult Stumper I’ve ever completed.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, ten letters, “What Martha Stewart bakes with turkey ragu.” I’m not sure how one should clue this answer, but I’m not crazy about this kind of factoid trivia.

9-A, five letters, “Hunger (for).” This clue gives a good idea of the puzzle’s difficulty. It’s a fair clue, but the answer is surprising, at least to me.

10-D, fifteen letters, “Screenplay overhauls.” So that’s what it means.

18-A, ten letters, “Scrooge McDuck, by birth.” It’s a bit of luck that I’d just seen a movie that put the answer in my head. (Not a cartoon.)

20-A, five letters, “Kid-lit pachyderm, aptly enough.” New to me. My first guess was BABAR — because it sounds a bit like babytalk.

26-A, seven letters, “Perrier ingredient?” Très Stumper-y.

28-D, three letters, “Bingo alternative.” GIN? UNO? No, make it Stumper-y.

33-A, eight letters, “Aghast outburst.” I like the clue’s near-rhyme and the answer’s colloquialism. It just occurred to me that the word colloquialism is not at all colloquial, just as big is not big, but David Foster Wallace figured that out some time ago.

35-A, five letters, “Capacity.” See 9-A.

36-D, three letters, “Sports booster.” If you say so.

42-A, seven letters, “Fall break?” Yay!

43-D, six letters, “Met set.” Just a great clue.

46-D, four letters, “What films have to be.”

56-A, four letters, “Rodin’s thinker.” Tricky.

My favorite in this puzzle: 4-D, fifteen letters, “Corresponding request.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Gothamist hears from Lucy Calkins

WNYC’s Gothamist reports on the dissolution of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. And Lucy Calkins responds:

“I stand by what I have said often: In every corner of the city, some of the highest achieving schools are those using the Units of Study and have been partnering with the Reading and Writing Project,” she said.

Indeed, high-achieving schools are using the Calkins curriculum. Those schools represent the world that the Calkins curriculum was designed for, where kids have grown up reading the monograms on their bath towels. What Calkins fails to mention is that low-achieving schools use that same curriculum.

From the Gothamist report:

[New York City Schools Chancellor David] Banks often invokes city students’ poor reading test scores as proof that the previous approach was not working. Citywide, he says, just over half of students are not reading at grade level, including 64% of Black students and 63% of Latino students.

“Our teachers have been criticized … but I think we gave them the wrong playbook for how to teach children to read,” Banks said.

Calkins warns that the city is about to implement what she calls “a one-size-fits-all basal reading program.” But if phonics is one-size-fits-all, then so is the alphabet. And so what?

Basal sounds as if it too is meant as an insult. But there’s nothing wrong with laying a foundation.

A related post
TCRWP LC? LLC! (Close-reading the Teachers College statement about the dissolution of TCRWP)

Recently updated

The case of the odious odor Now with the real source of the smell.

Fani Willis to Jim Jordan

“Chairman Jordan, I tell people often ‘deal with reality or reality will deal with you.’ It is time that you deal with some basic realities”: if you haven’t read Fani Willis’s response to Jim Jordan, here it is. It’s a wow.

Salad years

A city day: we dropped into a Trader Joe’s to pick up some items. Potato salad? Nope. Macaroni salad? “Nobody’s asked for that in” — and then the employee stopped herself. No, they didn’t have that. Just pasta salad.

From childhood’s hour, I’ve thought of cold cuts and potato salad as a gold standard for “lunch.” And various breads, Gulden’s mustard, and dill spears, please. And I’d settle for macaroni salad.

[The Trader Joe’s website shows packaged potato salad and several recipes. No sign of macaroni salad though. No one’s asked for that in years.]

Caravaggesque

[Barbara Britton and Vladimir Sokoloff in Till We Meet Again (dir. Frank Borzage, 1944). Click for a larger view.]

In a four-sentence review of this movie, I wrote that Theodor Sparkuhl’s camerawork has moments that are Caravaggesque. Here’s one.

[I’d love to see this movie in a superior print. And I’d prefer Caravaggio-like, but Caravaggesque is more common.]

The case of the odious odor

A godawful chemical smell was coming from the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Did a plastic bottle of cleaning product leak? Did a container of cleanser tip over?

We checked every bottle and container. Nothing wrong. What the deuce?

And then we realized: we had bought a roll of scented trash bags by mistake. The roll is now close to its end, or center. The smell apparently gets much stronger as the roll dwindles down.

*

September 8: Paul Drake dropped in and figured out the real source of the smell: not the now-dwindling roll of trash bags we’ve been using but a new box of bags, yet to be opened. “The smell is coming from inside the box!” Paul exclaimed. “And the box isn’t even open yet,” Perry Mason added.

The box goes back to the store this afternoon, wrapped in a trash bag to keep the smell from stinking up the car.

A handful of pencils

[Lee J. Cobb, Douglas Kennedy, and a handful of pencils. From Miami Exposé (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1956). Click for a larger view.]

One of the stranger exchanges in a movie full of strange ones. Stevie is Bart’s girlfriend’s son:

Dan (Kennedy), handing over some pencils: “Stevie said he wanted some pencils.”

Bart (Cobb): “For a five-year-old, this kid sure uses up a lot of pencils.”

And it’s a good thing: as MarketWatch reported last month, pencils continue to sell well because kids use them.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Oops

“If me and my co-counsel”: a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, in a televised hearing from a Fulton County courthouse just now.

[Someone else will have to catch further errors. I‘m watching for just a few minutes.]

How to improve writing (no. 113)

Here’s the start of an obituary in today’s New York Times. Try reading aloud:

Gloria Coates, an adventurous composer who wrote symphonies — she was one of the few women to do so — as well as other works, pieces that were seldom performed in her home country, the United States, but found audiences in Europe, where she lived much of her professional life, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89.

That’s not the first time a Times obituary has opened with a sentence that tries to say too much. Here’s a 2013 OCA post that looks at another opening sentence with a parenthetical sprawl between subject and verb.

I have to invokes E.B. White’s advice again:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

A possible revision:

Gloria Coates, one of the few female composers to write symphonies, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89. Though her works were seldom performed in the United States, they found audiences in Europe, where the Wisconsin-born composer lived much of her professional life.

Elaine, who knows hella lot more about music than the obituary writer does, takes issue with the “one of the few.” Better still:

Gloria Coates, a composer best known for her symphonies, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89. Though her works were seldom performed in the United States, they found audiences in Europe, where the Wisconsin-born composer lived much of her professional life.

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

[This post is no. 113 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. The passage from E.B. White appears in The Elements of Style, in “An Approach to Style,” the chapter White added when revising William Strunk Jr.’s book. Searching the Institute for Composer Diversity shows 1021 female composers of orchestral music and 233 female composers of works with symphony in their titles.]