Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing as “Anna Stiga.” Like “Lester Ruff,” that’s a pseudonym that signals an easier Stumper. Easy indeed: writing this post will probably take longer than solving.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

7-D, fifteen letters, “Appliance store offering.” Like most of the puzzle, pretty straightforward.

8-A, six letters, “Literally, ‘already seen.’” My starting point.

13-D, six letters, “Free of obstruction.” Trickier than it looks.

14-A, eight letters, “It’s Amsterdam north of 59th St.” My mental map isn’t good enough to know it cold.

23-A, seven letters, “Take a turn for the verse.” Groan.

28-A, nine letters, “Fancy word for ‘#.’” It pays to know your typographical symbols.

33-A, fifteen letters, “‘Thanks for telling me.’” In the American idiom.

42-A, nine letters, “Circular bakeware.” BUNDTPANS?

61-A, eight letters, “They’re baked on 42-Across.” Making 42-A a little tricky, or a bit debatable.

My favorite in this puzzle: 44-D, six letters, “Pole vaults have them.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[The post took a minute longer than the puzzle.]

“Leftist broadcasters” (Project 2025)

Here’s another excerpt from the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, from Chapter Eight, concerning media agencies. The document calls for ending taxpayer fundng for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And what then?

Stripping public funding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting. They should no longer, for example, be qualified as noncommercial education stations (NCE stations), which they clearly no longer are. NPR, Pacifica, and the other radio ventures have zero claim on an educational function (the original purpose for which they were created by President Johnson), and the percentage of on-air programming that PBS devotes to educational endeavors such as “Sesame Street” (programs that are themselves biased to the Left) is small.

Being an NCE comes with benefits. The Federal Communications Commission, for example, reserves the 20 stations at the lower end of the radio frequency (between 88 and 108 MHz on the FM band) for NCEs. The FCC says that “only noncommercial educational radio stations are licensed in the 88–92 MHz ‘reserved’ band,” while both commercial and noncommercial educational stations may operate in the “non-reserved” band. This confers advantages, as lower-frequency stations can be heard farther away and are easier to find as they lie on the left end of the radio dial (figuratively as well as ideologically).

The FCC also exempts NCE stations from licensing fees. It says that “Noncommercial educational (NCE) FM station licensees and full service NCE television broadcast station licensees are exempt from paying regulatory fees, provided that these stations operate solely on an NCE basis.” NPR and PBS stations are in reality no longer noncommercial, as they run ads in everything but name for their sponsors. They are also noneducational. The next President should instruct the FCC to exclude the stations affiliated with PBS and NPR from the NCE denomination and the privileges that come with it.

Ads, yes. (And why? To bring in revenue as federal support diminishes.) But noneducational? All Things Considered? American Masters? Finding Your Roots? Fresh Air? And even if you’ve already restricted “educational” to programming for the very young, it’s extraordinarily dishonest to assert that the percentage of programming is small: PBS runs several hours of kids’ shows every day, and there’s a separate channel, PBS Kids, all kids, all the time.

And what about this claim that Sesame Street (italics, please) is biased to “the Left”? Because it shows urbanites in all their human variety?

Fred Rogers, we need you. That link goes to his 1969 testimony before a Senate subcommittee considering a large cut to Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding. Mister Rogers, by the way, was a registered Republican.

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Names in school

Positive anymore on the screen

Tick Roby (Danielle Panabaker) is hoping that her father Miles Roby (Ed Harris) is up for a drive. From Empire Falls (dir. Fred Schepisi, 2005):

“Any chance we could go to Boston this weekend? The Picasso exhibit’s opening.”

“I’m gonna be pretty busy here. I’d like to get some of this worked out.”

“Well, anymore you’re always busy.”

This exchange marks the first time I’ve heard positive anymore outside of real life.

Related reading
All OCA positive anymore posts

“Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead”

A lengthy piece from the New York Times editorial board (gift link): “Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead.” Read. Share. Vote.

Names in school (Project 2025)

Here’s another passage from the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, from Chapter Eleven, concerning the Department of Education — which, this chapter says, should be eliminated. So much is left unaddressed in this chapter. Just one example: despite graphs showing declines in reading and mathematics, there are no suggestions to improve those outcomes. Let the states figure it out, I guess.

But this document is clear on several points. For instance, in all K–12 schools under federal jurisdiction:

No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate, without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.

No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.

No public institution may require an education employee or contractor to use a pronoun that does not match a person’s biological sex if contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.

As always, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary kid called, again and again, a name or pronoun not of your choosing. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary teacher or staff member referred to, again and again, with the wrong pronouns. Imagine too the dilemma the first of these prohibitions would create for a sympathetic teacher who wants to honor a student’s choice of name. And notice too: even if a student has written permission regarding their name and pronouns, a teacher or other employee cannot be required to honor that request. Again, cruelty abounding, and I have to wonder what kind of “moral convictions” would prompt a person to be so unabashedly cruel. The deeply sinister message here is that individual identity is not one’s own to decide.

Practicalities: if such a policy were ever to be implemented, every Ash, Barb, Cal, Dee, &c., &c., had better bring a note from home.

Teachers, incidentally, are identified in this document as a special-interest group in the world of education.

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

You and *I, you and me

I was driving when I said it: “people like you and I.” And I couldn’t believe that I had said it.

Such is life when you hear it the wrong way again and again, and when you read writers telling you there’s nothing wrong with it.

I just kept driving — I didn’t slam on the brakes and pull over — but I immediately corrected myself. That’ll never happen no more, as the song says. I hope.

Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles

It is to laugh: Melania Trump just hosted a fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group devoted to LGBTQ+ rights. “This Republican Party is one for ALL Americans,” the group proclaimed.

Perhaps the Log Cabin Republicans should have a look at the Project 2025 Policy Agenda. Chapter Fourteen, devoted to the Department of Health and Human Services, leaves no doubt that these aspiring makers of policy view marriage as a heterosexual union. Here’s a passage from the plan for the HHS Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education for Adults initiative:

Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.

For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.

Look at the details:

~ The federal government is to maintain a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family. But while marriage can be a religious institution, it is, in the United States, also and always a civil institution. And “biblically based” has an uncertain meaning. I trust that the Project 2025 idea of a biblical model does not allow for polygamy, concubinage, and death by stoning for disobedient children.

~ There’s no acknowledgement of the woeful life consequences that may befall children raised in dysfunctional heterosexual households.

~ If the average length of same-sex marriages is indeed half that of heterosexual marriages, that might have something to do the fact that same-sex marriage became legal in every state only in 2015. Many same-sex marriages can now be, at most, just under nine years old.

~ This document leaves little doubt that the only form of marriage it deems legitimate is marriage between a man and a woman (unrelated!). Marriage, the document says, is between “not just any two adults,” as if the partners in a same-sex relationship are just randomly paired people.

~ The roles assigned mothers and fathers are curiously retrograde: a mother provides “love and nurturing”; a father provides “play and protection.” Cannot any parent, male, female, or otherwise, provide all those possibilities?

The broad outlines of Project 2025 are frightening enough. Reading the details makes it all look much worse. Log Cabin Republicans, you’re kidding yourselves.

The document is available here.

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

Windows Notepad advances

Daring Fireball notes that Windows Notepad is getting spellcheck and autocorrect: “Better late than never, but it’s kind of wild that Notepad is 41 years old and only getting these features now.”

Which reminds me of my pre-Mac adventures in “Amish computing” — writing in the Windows app Notepad2 and using a spellchecking script.

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

You know, perhaps, that ever since I have been ill, I have been working on a long book, which I call a novel because it isn’t as fortuitous as memoirs (it is fortuitous only to the degree that life itself is), and the composition is very severe although difficult to appraise because of its complexity; I don’t know how to describe the genre. Certain parts take place in the country, some in one kind of society, others in another kind; some have to do with family life and much of it is terribly indecent.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Louis de Robert, between October 7 and 15, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Louis de Robert (1871–1937), novelist and Dreyfussard. Proust listened to his nightly accounts of the trial.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Eleven suggestions from Robert Reich

Robert Reich offers eleven suggestions “to prevent America and the world from falling into fascism.”