Whenever I see Stella Zawistowski’s name on a Newsday Saturday Stumper, I wonder what I’m in for. SZ makes a mean puzzle. This Stumper though was relatively easy — a nineteen-minute-er for me. I started with two gimmes that crossed: 33-D, three letters, “Where Washington U. is” and 41-A, five letters, “Key with six black keys.” And then a whole chunk of the puzzle began falling into place.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:
6-D, five letters, “Units of volume.” Strained, but I appreciate the pun.
7-D, four letters, “Block buster.” See 6-D.
15-A, five letters, “Places for addresses.” I don’t like this plural, but I’m glad I know it.
17-A, ten letters, “Routines without resolution.” Really? I think of the answer as a label for what one doesn’t like.
20-A, ten letters, “The Buick stops here.” At Harry Truman’s house?
32-A, nine letters, “Banes of hosts.” I haven’t thought of the answer since the days of “theory.”
34-D, seven letters, “Pedestrian observer.” I thought of someone uttering banalities.
35-D, seven letters, “Name from the Greek for ‘foreign.’” Yes, it’s so.
36-D, seven letters, “One delivering mail.” By the time I got to this clue, I could see right through it.
46-D, give letters, “Argentine avenue.” I just like the word.
48-A, nine letters, “Liquid refreshment.” Yes, please.
52-D, three letters, “Saw around.” See 36-D.
My favorite in this puzzle: 45-A, three letters, “Nursing degree.” So clever.
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, October 21, 2023
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Friday, October 20, 2023
“Molly, you in danger, girl”
On the PBS NewsHour tonight, Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart about Kenneth Chesbro‘s and Sidney Powell‘s plea bargains:
“What do you think this means for Donald Trump, Jonathan?”Here’s the clip from the movie.
[Laughs.] “There’s a great scene in the movie Ghost where Whoopi Goldberg says to Demi Moore, ‘Molly, you in danger, girl.’ And, you know, if I were to see Doanld Trump, I would say exactly that to him.”
“Not playing, but banging”
The grown-ups are going to have a party, with music. Sun is a little boy.
Katherine Mansfield, “Sun and Moon” (1920).
Also from Katherine Mansfield
“Tortoiseshell cats and champagne” : A hair-tidy and pencil rays : “But he never wore a collar”
[Moon is Sun’s sister.]
Thursday, October 19, 2023
No free will?
Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky says that there’s no such thing as free will:
“The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,” Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”Well, he had to say that, right?
But seriously: if Sapolsky is right, then my agreeing or disagreeing with him is beyond my control. Which, I think, makes it impossible for his assertion to lay any claim to be true. Because if I agreed with him, then I, too, had to say that.
*
Another thought: Imagine that someone makes a statment x because of an electrical impulse sent through a wire attached to their body. And imagine that other people then say x or not-x because of wires attached to their bodies. If x and the responses to it are beyond our control, what does that do to the idea of truth?
[I have long leaned toward the idea of truth as contingent — contingent and real. That has something to do with my response to Sapolsky.]
“But he never wore a collar”
Here’s the man who’s helping to move the family.
Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” (1918).
I can imagine these sentences in one of the early stories of Joyce’s Dubliners. It’s the plainness, and the free indirect discourse, presenting this man as seen by a child. The alogical but really does the trick.
Also from Katherine Mansfield
“Tortoiseshell cats and champagne” : A hair-tidy and pencil rays
In the funnies today
At Mutts : “Throwback Thursday.” I like it when comics assume a reader’s knowledge of comics.
At Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy : a to-do list. In the true Bushmiller spirit, I’d say.
A mother looks at “balanced literacy”
“RIP Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. You helped turn learning to read into a rich family’s game”: Kendra Hurley, the mother of two reading-challenged students, writes about the rise and fall of “balanced literacy” (Slate ).
Hurley makes an especially interesting suggestion about why those on the hard right are so enaamored of phonics — because they seek any opportunity to undermine faith in public schools. There is of course nothing inherently conservative about teaching the sounds that letters make, no more so than there is about teaching the alphabet itself.
Just one related post
To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell (My take on “balanced literacy”)
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
Carla Bley (1936–2023)
The composer and pianist Carla Bley has died at the age of eighty-seven. From The New York Times obituary:
She was branded an avant-gardist early in her career, but that term applied more to her slyly subversive attitude than to the formal character of her music, which always maintained a place for tonal harmony and standard rhythm.Ever heard of? Never heard of? Try her composition “Lawns.” Here is a 2018 trio performance, with Bley, Andy Sheppard, tenor; and Steve Swallow, electric bass.
