No TV news, then and now

I just rediscovered a post that I wrote on December 13, 2016: No TV news. At that point our household had gone thirty-five days with no TV news, save for one PBS NewsHour episode that paid tribute to Gewn Ifill. Now it’s been ten days with no TV news, save for one episode of the NBC Nightly News, when the whale-cutter’s nomination drew me back. Did I learn anything more from that “half-hour” than I already knew from reading words? No.

[Minus the commercials, I think it’s about twenty-two minutes. I’m watching The Late Show for comic relief, but I don’t consider that show to be “news.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, constructing as Lester Ruff. A very satisfying Stumper, and even if less rough, it still took me half an hour. Starting point: 9-D, three letters, “Coleridge’s ‘Poor little foal of an oppressed race.’” For me, a giveaway. The toughest part of the puzzle: the upper left corner.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Bowling center facility.” I’m amused by center — where I come from it was alley. And I’m amused by the answer, which I hadn’t thought of or heard, in any context, in a long time. It takes me back to my life as a part-time housewares-department employee during college.

2-D, five letters, “Middle of anything.” Weird but dictionarily accurate. And speaking of weird, I’ve decided to regard dictionarily as a word, even if the OED doesn’t.

4-D, four letters, “Schedule fillers.” ETAS? TBAS?

13-D, nine letters, “Brady-era image.” For me, a novel answer.

24-A, seven letters, “Goddess on the Medal of Honor.” Huh.

31-A, seven letters, “’What makes human progress possible,’ per FDR.” I like that, though reading The Power Broker makes me more disappointed in FDR than I would have expected.

33-D, nine letters, “In which krucvorto is ‘crossword.’” That word looks so unlikely — I thought it had to be what it turned out to be.

44-A, eight letters, “Pair of bumblers.” Silly.

47-A, seven letters, “They buy nasal dilators.” And sometimes even use them.

54-D, four letters, “What Meet the Beatles could be bought in.” Yes!

55-A, six letters, “Male name with two male name anagrams.” Just strange.

58-A, eight letters, “Poker variety named for its sinuous card shifting.” No idea yet what this means.

60-D, three letters, “Beverage or bus alternative.” I’m getting used to this kind of thing.

My favorite in this puzzle: 7-D, seven letters, “DMV, somewhat controversially.” It’s been years since I last entered a bowling center, but this clue is right up my alley.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Burton Fine (1930–2024)

Elaine’s father Burton Fine died last night in Newton, Massachusetts. She wrote about him this morning.

“Turning Off the News”

From The Borowitz Report, “Turning Off the News”:

I’m not a neuroscientist like George Santos, but in my experience, turning off the news is good for your mental health. And you’ll have more time for things you actually enjoy. Read a novel. See a friend. Walk your dog. Which is what I’m going to do right now.

I don’t have a dog. But I’m still going to go for a walk. Now.

Andy Borowitz recommends news via BBC Sounds.

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Kansas City Confidential (dir. Phil Karlson, 1952). Click any image for a larger view, and notice the ghost letters.]

Look: he’s Mr. Big (Preston Foster), criminal mastermind, schemer of a surefire thing, and he can use that address book however he wants, see? He can write last names beginning with H, R, and K all on the tabbed A page, and he can write them out of alphabetical order if he wants. Who cares about tabs and alphabets? He can even erase the first of those names if he don’t like the way it came out, and then he can write it again — in block capitals. He’s Mr. Big, and what you call an address book — that’s just a notebook in his hands.

*

As a reader points out, there’s also an EXchange name. I should have called attention to it. Thanks, Joe.

Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings : EXchange name sightings (Pinboard)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

"Think good thoughts"

[Mutts, November 15, 2024.]

Thank you, Earl.

Today’s Mutts goes well with these words from Ana Marie Cox:

The work of the anti-Trump coalition now is to expand our ability to take in data — especially data that’s uncomfortable — and to broaden our emotional range beyond pain, sorrow, regret, and fear. If we don’t seek out pleasure, comfort, companionship, and laughter, numbness becomes our only protection. And fascism thrives when we are dead inside.

And like Earl, Cox suggests that we think.

Spinning

From the news: “another head-turning personnel pick.”

No. Make that “another head-spinning personnel pick.”

That would be RFK Jr. He got me back to televised news, which I hadn’t watched since election night.

A related post
Curb your introductions

The (Lucy Calkins) empire strikes back

From The Atlantic : “How Lucy Calkins Became the Face of America’s Reading Crisis,” in which Helen Lewis wonders how Calkins can reclaim her good name. A recent e-mail from the magazine refers to Calkins as “the scapegoat” for the reading crisis.

I see so much self-mystification and evasion of fact in Calkins’s response to her fall from favor. Just one example: Emily Hanford, who produced the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, noted a passage in Calkins’s The Art of Teaching Writing (1994) that assumes a world of privilege:

They [student writers] will ask about the monogram letters on their bath towels and the words on their sweatshirts.

Now Lewis reports that Calkins had a “financially comfortable but psychologically tough” childhood:

That is why, Calkins told me, “nothing that Emily Hanford has said grates on me more than the damn monogrammed towels.” But she knows that the charge of being privileged and out of touch has stuck.

Privileged? Well, yes. Affluence and parental cruelty can of course go together. (Lewis notes that Calkins’s parents were both doctors.) And who was it who mentioned monogrammed towels to begin with? Not Emily Hanford.

If you’d like to read more of my thoughts about the crisis in reading, this post would be the one to read: To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell, with the text of an e-mail that I wrote to Calkins and two other prominient promulgators of “balanced literacy” and guessing at words — I mean “hypothesizing.”

Helen Lewis’s article makes really strange reading coming after a recent Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”

Related posts
All OCA Lucy Calkins posts and Sold a Story posts

On the 166

We walked down the hill to wait for the 166 bus to the Port Authority, but the bus stop had been removed, so we had to walk several blocks down the avenue to another stop. The bus showed up and we asked for two round-trip tickets to New York.

That’s standard procedure, or used to be: you would get a long printed receipt, give the first half to the driver at the end of the ride, and give the other half to the driver when you boarded a bus back to New Jersey. But this driver looked at us as if we were making an unusual request.

The bus had very few seats — it looked as if many had been removed. Some of the remaining seats were single seats facing the center aisle; others were facing front in twos, with so little space to sit that trying to get into a seat would be like trying to squeeze into a chair that’s pushed in under a table.

I thought this dream was about the passing of time: you can’t go home again, as everything has changed. Elaine thinks I’m already dreaming about deportations.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).

Domestic comedy

“Matt Gaetz is going to be the attorney general!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard) posts

[He may not become attorney general. Still, reality is trumping satire daily.]