Home remodeling

I’ve tinkered with the template for Orange Crate Art, widening the main column and the sidebar and embiggening the text. I just got tired of hitting ⌘‑+ to make things look right to me.

Reader, if anything looks off to you, please let me know.

Morissette, Clarkson, and Webster

Kelly Clarkson bought her first dictionary because of Alanis Morissette. From Billboard :

Clarkson remarked that Morissette’s ability to bring “Webster Dictionary words” to her music fascinates the Idol alum. “I bought my first dictionary because of you,” Clarkson shared. “I was very young, and I was like, ‘What are these words? They mean something and I just need to look them up!’ Literally you are the reason why I owned a dictionary for the very first time.”

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

[Wikipedia: “Webster's Dictionary is any of the English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by Noah Webster (1758–1843), an American lexicographer, as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster’s name in his honor. “Webster’s” has since become a genericized trademark in the United States for English dictionaries, and is widely used in dictionary titles. Merriam-Webster is the corporate heir to Noah Webster’s original works, which are in the public domain.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

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.

“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?”

[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.”

Here’s the clip from the movie.

“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.]

At a party

“Oh, thank God! Here comes a Border collie!”

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”)