PAYPHONE

A pangram from the dowdy world, in yesterday’s New York Times Spelling Bee. And from June 6, 2021. Is the Spelling Bee in reruns?

A handful of pay phone posts
A Blue Dahlia pay phone : A Henry pay phone : A Naked City pay phone : A subway pay phone, 1932 : Chicago pay phones : “If your coin was not returned”

[Pay phone is dowdier than payphone.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

[Caution: there’s one spoiler, for 49-D.]

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, has nifty clue-and-answer pairs to begin and end the Acrosses: 1-A, five letters, “Rulers from either end” and 61-A, five letters, “Holds from either end.” Can across be plural?

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

9-D, five letters, “Homeric hound.” A faithful companion, though I’d like to see the “desperate, womanizing pretty boy” PARIS as an answer.

10-D, four letters, “Kind of mouthpiece.” For a zany moment, I thought OPED?

14-A, eleven letters, “Spring roll filling.” I was torn between thinking food and thinking sod.

19-A, six letters, “Calliope close kin.” I was not fooled.

25-A, five letters, “Great start.” Groan.

25-D, four letters, “Multifunction metaphor.” Though I’m not sure that it applies to things that function.

27-D, ten letters, “Pixar furniture merch.” Novelty itself.

38-A, six letters, “Potable Poe wrote about.” Yes, sort of.

42-A, three letters, “Pen name derived from Moses ‘with a head cold.’” I had no idea.

44-D, six letters, “Manufactured mouse manipulator.” Is it the mouse that’s manufactured, or the manipulator?

49-D, four letters, “They’re ‘made to make debt,’ per Pound.” Ezra Pound did say this, at least three times, in his wartime radio speeches from fascist Italy. An example:

Will you folks back in America NEVER realize that you are fightin’ this war IN ORDER to get into debt? I mean just that, you have been dumped into the war IN ORDER to get into debt. To get in further, to get in up to the chin, the throat. To get into the morass up to your eyebrows and no man living can see WHEN you will get out of it.

Wars are made to make DEBT.

“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978).

You can see all three statements at the Internet Archive.

Given Pound’s anti-Semitism (prominent in another of these declarations) and general crackpottery, I’d have found another way — almost any other way — to clue the answer. For instance, ”They can be civil.“ I think this clue illustrates the problem of taking something from a list of quotations without looking at the words in context.

My favorite in this puzzle: 58-A, letters, “Country discovered by Bart Simpson on Lisa’s globe.”

No more spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Trump Bible in Oklahoma

The Oklahoma Department of Education is looking to purchase 55,000 Bibles for classroom use:

According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.

A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters.

But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement.

Mardel doesn’t carry the God Bless the U.S.A. Bible or another Bible that could meet the specifications, the We The People Bible, which was also endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. It sells for $90.

As they say in Brooklyn, Jesus Mary and Joseph.

Fourteen lines? tl;dr

“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”: from an Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”

Related reading
All OCA reading in college posts (Pinboard)

Paul Giamatti’s Closet Picks

From the Criterion Collection: Paul Giamatti’s Closet Picks. His first pick: Carnival of Souls (dir. Herk Harvey, 1962) [add exclamation points to taste]

“Tell Me Why You Like Kamala”

At harvest.ink, a song lyric after “Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt”: “Tell Me Why You Like Kamala.”

The Brontës get their ë

Better late than never: “An 85-year injustice has been rectified at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey with the corrected spelling of one of the greatest of all literary names” (The Guardian ).

Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts (Pinboard)

Silk cap improved

Do you drink Silk Soymilk? If so, you may have noticed — how could you not? — that the cap is extremely difficult to remove on first use. I’ve sometimes used pliers.

The cap has now been improved. It’s larger and turns easily on first use. And the sharp, narrowly spaced ridges have been replaced by larger rounded ridges. The cap is now less like a half-inch-thick coin, more like a knob.

[The Silk website says soymilk, but the carton says soy. I suspect that’s a defensive move given legislative efforts to restrict the use of the word milk to dairy products.]

Quaker Oatmeal Squares have returned

As you may have noticed, Quaker Oatmeal Squares disappeared from supermarket shelves earlier this year, along with many other Quaker products. The reason: salmonella.

Quaker Oatmeal Squares have now returned. They are a sentimental favorite in our fambly (a food of a certain person’s childhood), so we’re glad to have them back.

I suppose that other Quaker products have also returned. But I care only about the sentimental favorite.

Choice bits from Jack Smith’s filing

I find some of the details of Mike Pence’s efforts to persuade Donald Trump to accept an election loss bizarre and illuminating. These moments make me think of a parent trying to soothe an angry, tantrum-prone toddler:

A call between the defendant and Pence on November 7, the day that media organizations began to project Biden as the winner of the election. Pence “tried to encourage” the defendant “as a friend,” reminding him, “you took a dying political party and gave it a new lease on life.”

*

A private lunch on November 12 in which Pence reiterated a face-saving option for the defendant: “don’t concede but recognize process is over.”

*

A private lunch on November 16 in which Pence tried to encourage the defendant to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024, to which the defendant responded, “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off.”

*

A December 21 private lunch in which Pence “encouraged” the defendant “not to look at the election ‘as a loss — just an intermission.’” This was followed later in the day by a private discussion in the Oval Office in which the defendant asked Pence, “what do you think we should do?” Pence said, “after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, [the defendant] should ‘take a bow.’”

And on January 6, when Mike Pence’s life was endangered:

Upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Pence had been taken to a secure location, [Person 15] rushed to the dining room to inform the defendant in hopes that the defendant would take action to ensure Pence’s safety. Instead, after [Person 15] delivered the news, the defendant looked at him and said only, “So what?”

You can read and search the document via The Washington Post.