Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing as “Lester Ruff.” As with other LR puzzles, I didn’t find this one especially easy. But it was crunchy, flavorful, and full of fun. Toughest area: the upper left. But not especially tough.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, seven letters, “Montreal newspaper.” One of the clues that made the upper left difficult, at least for me. Quelle langue?

2-D, seven letters, “Public art.” GRAFITI? Another clue that made the upper left difficult.

13-A, six letters, “Most famous grandson of Josiah Wedgewood.” And one more. I had no idea.

17-A, eight letters, “News of interest.” Rather Stumper-y.

23-D, three letters, “Exclamation coined for Buck Rogers.” See? Full of fun.

30-A, six letters, “Combination plate?” More than more than a bit of a stretch.

36-A, eight letters, “Covered, as mysteries.” Tricky.

43-D, seven letters, “Union tune sung by Baez at Woodstock.” Remember the triple album?

54-D, four letters, “‘For ____’ (Contact dedication).” A vague memory, and it worked.

61-A, eight letters, “Film in which Dean Martin sings ‘My Rifle, My Pony, and Me.’” I don’t think Stan Newman expects anyone outside the Martin family to just know the answer. I take the clue as an amusing way to get the answer into the puzzle. Here’s the song, without a spoiler.

64-A, five letters, “Schopenhauer called him a ‘clumsy charlatan.’” Oof.

My favorite in this puzzle: 6-D, fifteen letters, “Idly.” Yep, just because.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

An editorial cartoon

[Anne Telnaes, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The Washington Post, October 25, 2024.]

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the newspaper’s motto, appearing on the masthead.

Before my subscription runs out, here’s a gift link to the cartoon.

No endorsements

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, nixed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

And now Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, has nixed that paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Shameful. And shameful.

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I unsubscribed from the Post after writing this post.

[But the real trick will be trying not to buy from Amazon.]

Duce redux, redux

From a post I wrote in October 2016:

I said in a letter to a friend today that Donald Trump has reinvented American presidential politics as neo-fascist entertainment.

I remembered that post today: Duce redux.

Related reading
All OCA fascism posts (Pinboard)

Extraterrestrial replaces Anderson Cooper?

[Anderson Cooper? As seen on CNN, October 23, 2024. An unaltered photograph, with my phone close to the TV.]

I passed up watching Kamala Harris’s town hall on Wednesday night, but I watched a few clips yesterday, including one in which Anderson Cooper pressed Harris again and again and again about her changed position on fracking. Yes, she changed her position. How remarkable. Get over yourself, Anderson Cooper.

But wait a minute — is that Anderson Cooper? I know it sounds fantastic (as they say in old movies), but I think he’s been replaced by an extraterrestrial of the sort that once haunted the pages of the Weekly World News. Those ETs, or “space aliens,” could not be reached for comment. But consider the fellow who took Bill Clinton on a ride in a UFO, as reported in the WWN in December 1992. The resemblance to Wednesday night’s “Anderson Cooper” is remarkable.

[I couldn’t make this resemblance into a “separated at birth” post, for an obvious reason.]

“I’m listening”

[Photograph by me.]

Related reading
All OCA pareidolia posts (Pinboard)

Donations by ZIP code

From The Washington Post (gift link), a ZIP-based guide to online donations to the Democratic and Republican candidates for president. In my little town: 312 donations to Harris ($60K), 55 to the other ($9K) 125 ($20K) to the other.

[The Post corrected its numbers.]

“The Department of Everything”

In “The Department of Everything,” Stephen Akey writes about working in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library:

“How do you people know all this stuff?” a caller once asked me. “What are you, some kind of scholars or wordsmiths or something?”

“No,” I replied. “Just us libarians.”

[Yes, that must be a joke.]

The Gospel of Thomas and John Lee Hooker

A saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, as given in Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels (1979):

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

John Lee Hooker, in “Boogie Chillen No. 2” (1970):

I was layin’ down one night
An’ I heard mama an’ papa talkin’
I heard papa tell mama
Let that boy boogie-woogie
It in him, and it got to come out

And so it did.

See also the 1948 original, “Boogie Chillen’.” I’ve quoted the Hooker and Canned Heat version of the tune because it’s one of my favorite recordings, from one of my favorite albums.

Note: This post is not meant as a joke. As Henry Rollins once told Rolling Stone,

Music is made by those whom music saves. Jimi Hendrix could not have done anything else with himself. John Lee Hooker, what else is he going to do? Work at McDonald’s?

How to remove Blogger comment justification

I’ve wanted to remove the ugly full justification that Blogger applies to embedded comments. So I asked about it in the Blogger Community Forum — and I got the answer. One small improvement in daily life. Thank you, Adam!

And now I’ve figured out that I can change the line height for comments in the same manner. All that remains: figuring out how to remove the massive left margin and change the line height for the short comment-moderation message. Dig we must.

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Dig we must — or not. I’ve switched back to the full-page format for comments. I just cannot change the embedded format enough to make it into something I like.

A related post
The Blogger comment form