“Here’s your problem”

[Daily cartoon, by Pia Guerra, The New Yorker, June 29, 2018.]

[I’ve reformatted the cartoon to remove a large gap between picture and caption.]

From the Saturday Stumper

A pair of clues from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff:

22-Across, five letters: “They often run about an hour.”

35-Across, four letters: “They run more than three hours for seniors.”

I especially like 22-Across. Even after getting the answer (the crosses let me know that it must be right), I was baffled. The dictionary was no help. I had to look at the answer again to understand.

Today’s puzzle — solvable! No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

George Cameron (1947–2018)

George Cameron, singer, drummer, and original member of the Left Banke, died earlier this week at the age of seventy.

When it comes to the Left Banke, I am very late to the show. I started listening to the group just a few months ago, after seeing Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and hearing the Four Tops version of “Walk Away Renée,” which made me remember the Rickie Lee Jones version, which made me think: I should really look into the Left Banke. I bought the group’s available LPs (two, reissued as CDs), downloaded a compilation (the two LPs and two singles, from iTunes), and discovered an extensive website about the group at archive.org.

Suffice to say that the Left Banke, though shortlived, was fairly brilliant: Beatlesque harmonies, psychedelic touches, and great (“baroque”) pop songs. Like the Beach Boys, the group had a musical mastermind at its center, the songwriter and keyboardist Michael Brown (d. 2015). And like Brian Wilson, Michael Brown had a musical father who brought considerable misery to his son’s life. The Beach Boys, in one form or another, have gone on and on. The Left Banke fell apart in the late 1960s — with brief reunion appearances in recent years, and with plans earlier this year for a reunion with Steve Martin Caro, the group’s long-absent lead singer.

Here’s George Cameron, who usually sang harmony, taking a rare lead: “Goodbye Holly” (Tom Feher), from The Left Banke Too (Smash, 1968).

[In the small-world department: our friend Seymour Barab played cello on the Left Banke’s second hit, “Pretty Ballerina.” I wish I could have asked him about that.]

“The donor class”

“I think that a lot of Democratic politics has been about trying to find the least offensive cause to the donor class to rally people around while stepping on the fewest toes”: Jeff Beals, Democratic candidate in a New York congressional primary race, as quoted in the most recent episode of This American Life, “It’s My Party and I’ll Try If I Want To.”

[See also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.]

I’m not sure there’s even an A.Word.A.Day word for this one

The New York Times examines the close relationship between our president and the son of a retiring Supreme Court justice:

“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”

Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.

During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.

I have no evens to can’t.

A related post
Words from politics

Words from politics

This week from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, words from politics: malfeasance, nepotism, emolument, collusion, impeach. Yep. They all fit.

Lucy’s whom

[Peanuts, July 2, 1971.]

Lucy has asked Charlie Brown, “Which is correct, ‘Who are we kidding?’ or ‘Whom are we kidding?’” Charlie Brown: “Well, I suppose ‘whom’ is correct although most people would say ‘who.’” (He’s right.) And what does he think are the team’s chances of winning today? “Oh, I’d say about fifty-fifty.” Thus this panel.

Google hits for “who are we kidding”: 650,000. For “whom are we kidding”: 27,000. The informal kidding works strongly in favor of who. But not for Lucy.

*

11:36 a.m.: Comments on today’s strip claim expertise: “Lucy is WRONG… Whom is only correct when preceded by a preposition… One of those words with which you should not end a sentence!!” Um, no.

“‘Who (Nominative case, the case of the subject of the sentence) are we kidding?’ is correct.” Um, no. The subject of the sentence is we: we are kidding whom?

[Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.]

Another

Another mass shooting, this time at a Maryland newspaper. And the president who calls journalists “the enemy of the people” has offered his “thoughts and prayers” in a tweet. To paraphrase Stephen Dedalus: current events are a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

College radio

“College radio can still be heard in the cacophony”: The Economist reports on college radio in the age of streaming.

Some years ago, I wrote an obituary for my university’s radio station. The station remains on the air, but in 2004 the programming changed. No more classical music, jazz, indie rock, “world music,” country, folk, bluegrass, blues, or hip-hop. No more (highly coveted) free-form shows on Saturday nights. Everything disappeared, along with the station’s deep record library, replaced by a bland, commercially oriented Hit Mix. (There’s also a rhyming name for the Hit Mix.)

Here are playlists from two of my free-form shows, made of my records and the station’s records, as preserved on cassettes. (Late 1980s?)

Jackie Wilson, “Reet Petite” : Clifton Chenier, “I’m the Zydeco Man” : Taj Mahal, “Texas Woman Blues” : Rickie Lee Jones, “Easy Money” : Canned Heat, “Skat” : Little Richard, “Get Rich Quick” : The Rolling Stones, “Time Is on My Side” : The Isley Brothers, “Shout” : The Gun Club, “Preaching the Blues” : X, “The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss” : Joni Mitchell, “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” : Elvis Costello, “My Funny Valentine”

Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, “Elvis Is Everywhere” : Tom Waits, “Hang On St. Christopher” : George Clinton, “R & B Skeletons in the Closet” : James Brown, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (Parts One and Two) : Johnny Burnette, “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” : Elvis Presley, “Don’t Be Cruel” : Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Africa ’70, “Shuffering and Shmiling” : Talking Heads, “I Zimbra” : Augustus Pablo, “Pablo in Dub” : Ladysmith Black Mambazo, “Hello My Baby” : The Specials, “Monkey Man”

Talk about another lifetime! What was I, an assistant professor wanting to make good, doing on the radio? I did draw some lines: when a caller requested Lou Reed’s “Heroin” — with a dedication, no less — I politely declined.

[Stefan, did you call and request Elvis Costello?]

Reason to hope

Michael Bechloss, historian of the American presidency, has thoughts that give me some reason to hope:

If you look at presidential power in terms of checks and balances, Donald Trump may feel as if he is riding high. If he manages to get his first choice confirmed, he could soon enjoy a strong conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and he dominates his party in Congress in a way we have rarely seen in modern times.

Polls show him with high standing among Republican voters. But history suggests that this may not last forever. Trump is under the growing shadow of the Mueller probe and other investigations. If those inquiries or failure of any of his key policies should undermine his popularity and standing, he may find that Republican senators and members of Congress are no longer so obedient.

As for the Supreme Court majority, history is full of examples in which justices have not turned out to consistently vote as expected. And how often in history has a President been opposed by a majority of the voters with the intensity of the current national opposition to Trump?"

[Axios gives no source for these observations. They appear to be a Twitter thread, but I find no trace of one. I’ve redone the paragraphs to make a less choppy line of thought.]