Today’s Saturday Stumper

The Newsday  Saturday Stumper seems to have settled into a permanent state of way-difficult. Today’s puzzle, by Steve Mossberg, is yet another killer. I give you 5-D, ten letters, “Bears fan.” And 7-D, four letters, “Bar food.” Wut, and wut. My last answer was 5-D, and I knew it had to be right, but it still looked strange enough to send me to the dictionary. Strange indeed.

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

4-D, eight letters, “Fellini’s first Oscar film.” It happens to be in our queue.

15-A, eight letters, “Storage facility.” “Facility” is mean misdirection, or merely a stretch.

20-A, seven letters, “Spaced out.” I was once told that I taught with a 20-A expression on my face. I was not, however, spaced out.

22-A, three letters, “Baby sitter?” Wonderfully clever.

28-D, ten letters, “Repurposing.” Always consider the part of speech, Michael.

30-D, nine letters, “Sphinxian.” Had to be.

36-D, eight letters, “Literally, ‘great queen.’” A little knowledge let me figure out the answer.

41-A, five letters, “Group in discussion.” Wildly misdirective. See 28-D.

42-D, five letters, “‘16 on 16’ competition.” A joke on, say, 3 on 3 in basketball? I don’t think the expression “16 on 16” has any currency in this form of competition.

46-A, three letters, “‘Quit clipping me!’” Another great clue for a three-letter answer.

My favorite in this puzzle: 54-A, eight letters, “Musician on the move.” Delightful.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

O, negative!

Tested this morning: negative!

[I leaked the news that Elaine and I had COVID in a comment on this post. She’s negative too now.]

A strange Apple spelling glitch

[Click for a larger view.]

Very strange: type snd in an app in macOS (14.3.1) or iOS (17.3.1), and the non-word isn’t flagged as a misspelling. Look up snd in iOS and you’ll be given stock market info, a link to an English musical duo, a link for the App Store, and a couple of acronyms. But look up snd in macOS, and you’ll get a dictionary entry for and, the word you probably meant to type in the first place.

[Yes, I submitted product feedback.]

“Snow!”

Italo Calvino, “The city lost in the snow.” In Marcovaldo, trans. William Weaver (New York: HarperCollins, 1983).

Marcovaldo is a book of twenty vignettes about an Italian warehouse worker (Marcovaldo) whose efforts always bring about unforeseen consequences. Strong resemblances to silent-film comedy at every turn.

Here, for instance, Marcovaldo dreams of getting lost in a different city as he walks, but his path leads straight to work, and he finds himself once again in the shipping department, “as if the change that had cancelled the outside world had spared only his firm.”

Steven Millhauser has named Marcovaldo as one of his favorite short-story collections: that’s how our household came to it.

For snow and silence, see also Pierre Reverdy’s prose poem “Souffle.”

Related reading
All OCA Italo Calvino posts (Pinboard)

[It is not snowing and it is not going to snow in east-central Illinois today.]

Domestic comedy

“Too bad we don’t have the Container Store.”

“Our town isn’t big enough to hold one.”

Related posts
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[But we know, too, that more things in which to store things is not a solution.]

The non-breaking hyphen

Every so often, or just often, I look at an old post and notice something wrong, a tpoy, an the extraneous word — see what I mean? I noticed something off in this post yesterday: Anthony Catalano, friend of Boro Park. So I called on a lesser-known hero of punctuation, the non-breaking hyphen: ‑.

Notice the difference:


Is it worth taking the time to fix an HTML glitch in a ten-year-old post? I think it is. And I think it’s worth sharing the news of the non-breaking hyphen, which should be better known, inside and outside Boro (no ‑ugh) Park.

A related post
A previous non-breaking hyphen to the rescue

[As I’m seeing this morning, the non-breaking hyphen displays differently in different browsers: longer in Safari in macOS, shorter in Safari in iOS, shorter in Brave (and, presumably, in other Chromium-based browsers).]

Sardines × 7

A Reader’s Digest investigative report: “I Ate Sardines Every Day for a Week — Here’s What Happened.”

Spoiler alert: there is no ick factor.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Sluggo, philosophe

[Nancy, February 22, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Nancy, Sluggo channels, kinda, sorta, Montaigne (I think).

A related post
From Eliot to Woolf to Montaigne

“She wasn’t fit to be seen”

From one of the bleakest stories I’ve ever read. It has, or should have, a place alongside James Joyce’s “Counterparts” and Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend.

Jean Stafford, ”Children Are Bored on Sunday” (1948), in Collected Stories (1969).

Related reading
All OCA Jean Stafford posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: cubeb

Recalling her lone experience of smoking, Emily Vanderpool thinks that she did a better job of it than the furtive, coughing grad students in the women’s smoking room of the college library. From Jean Stafford’s “A Reading Problem” (1956):

I could smoke better than that and I was only ten; I mean the one time I had smoked I did it better — a friend and I each smoked a cubeb she had pinched from her tubercular father.

Smoked a what? And why is someone with tuberculosis smoking anything? An explanation: “Wrapped in standard rice-paper, just like ordinary cigarettes, cubebs were stuffed with the dried, ground berries of a Southeast Asian relative of the pepper plant.” The cubeb was regarded as a treatment for catarrh. Wikipedia reports that cubeb cigarettes were also used to treat asthma, chronic pharyngitis, and hay fever.

[Requa’s Cubeb Cigarettes. Photograph by Joe Haupt (Flickr). Licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 License. Click for a larger view.]