A small win

When we went to a CVS today to get COVID boosters and flu shots, the pharmacist made what she swore was an honest mistake: she had brought out the box with the regular-strength flu shots. No, we needed (and got) the over-65 version. She thought, really, that we were both under-. Remember, she swore.

[Thanks to the anonymous reader who caught a typo.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing as Lester Ruff. I had an easy (Les Ruff) start, getting roughly a third of the puzzle in five minutes. And then I spent half an hour getting the rest.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

4-D, four letters, “Snowless flurries.” I put my Stumper hat on and made the right guess.

12-D, ten letters, “’65 Oscar score song played by a balalaika band.” My starting point — as a solver of this crossword, not as a musician.

15-A, ten letters, “That’s a surprise!” I guessed correctly, erased, guessed again, erased, and went back to my first guess.

22-A, six letters, “All Nancy Drew book authors.” Funny.

24-D, ten letters, “Juno star, per Wikipedia.” “Per Wikipedia” seems to introduce an unnecessary complication with perhaps unintended overtones.

26-D, three letters, “She’s absorbed by extravagance.” Yes, it’s Saturday.

38-A, seven letters, “Cabbage + onions = jalapeños ...” I’d never heard of it.

41-A, six letters, “‘Softest-soft and Whitest-white’ sloganeer.” Fiendish.

54-A, four letters, “Chariot racer in the 67 Olympics.” Clever.

55-D, ten letters, “All I Did Was Ask memoirist/
broadcaster.” One of least favorite broadcasters. Painful listening.

My favorite in this puzzle: 51-A, ten letters, “Singer name-checked in Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife.’”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

HCR on this past week

Today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is extremely helpful in its assessment of the week in news.

Also helpful: this explanation and this conversation. HCR cites this source but omits links.

Writing and AI

On Dan Heath’s podcast What It’s Like to Be ... , Stephen Krupin, speechwriter (for President Barack Obama, among others), commented on how he sees AI and the work of speechwriting:

“What problem are you trying to solve? I think if you think of writing as something to knock off your to-do list, then I see the value in getting a passable draft out the door. If you are trying to connect a person to other people, like a speaker to an audience, in an authentic way, that actually moves them or makes them think differently about something or changes their minds or changes their behavior, I don’t think it is yet an efficient tool for that. I think if you think of writing as a burden, then I get the desire for shortcuts. If you think of writing as an opportunity, as a valuable process that clarifies what you think, that helps you discover new connections and connect different dots and challenge your assumptions and force you to be precise in how you articulate your ideas, why would you want to skip that step?”

Dan Heath said that he was going to print out those sentences and put them on his computer. I’m putting them here.

And if I were not retired from teaching, I’d be sharing these sentences with my students. Also these sentences about bringing a forklift into the weight room.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

Whither Nancy ?

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy is now running Ernie Bushmiller strips. What’s wit dat? — as Sluggo might ask.

Here’s an explanation, and in the comments, a suggestion as to who’s behind the Olivia Jaimes pseudonym.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Some reactions to macOS Tahoe 26

Reading what people with Mac expertise have to say, I know that I will not be updating to macOS Tahoe 26 this coming Monday — or anytime soon. Consider this screenshot and commentary from John Siracusa. An excerpt:

Even after using Tahoe for months, I’m still regularly struck by something on my screen that I instinctively interpret as some kind of graphical glitch only to realize that it’s “working as intended” and that someone thought this design was a good idea.

For more responses, see Michael Tsai’s compilation.

A related post
Apple’s see-through aesthetic (Tahoe, with what look like bruises on the screen)

Tot, a Mac app

From The Iconfactory: “Tot is a simple app. It lets you collect & edit text on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.”

I’ve long used SwiftText, a Mac app that, as I just discovered, is no longer available. Tot’s most significant differences: it syncs across devices, and it offers seven color-coded documents in one window. So I can collect info for a blog post in one, jot down bits for a letter in another, and so on, and have everything available on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Here’s a detailed review.

Tot is not cheap: $19.99 for the Mac app, another $19.99 for Tot Pocket (iOS/iPadOS), and $1.99 for Tot Mini (Apple Watch). The Mac app may be had for free with five documents and some of the bells and whistles silenced. I tried Tot for just a day or two before deciding to buy both it and Tot Pocket. My only watch is a Timex.

[When the news of the world is too much, I sometimes think about apps.]

Costs

Yes, Charlie Kirk said it, in April 2023. Snopes has it:

“I think it's worth [it] to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”

The problem with Kirk’s way of thinking is that it never considers who bears the cost of gun violence. I’ll repeat something that I wrote in a 2021 post: no one lives life in the aggregate. The cost of gun violence is not borne equally by all members of a community. And who among us would be willing to think of the loss of a family member to gun violence as a cost worth paying, as part of a prudent deal?

Kirk’s family was beset by sudden horrific sorrow yesterday. I doubt that they believe it’s a cost worth paying.

“Violence is not politics”

“Violence is not politics”: Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC a few minutes ago.

[Context: the political activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University today.]

Dictatorship and ruthlessness

[From Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin, text by Andrew S. Weiss, art by Brian “Box” Brown. New York: First Second, 2022.]

That’s Gene Sharp (1928–2018), political scientist and theorist of nonviolent action, speaking. Weiss describes Sharp’s work as “all about figuring out ways to topple dictators.” The words in the first panel are often attributed to Sharp. I can’t find a specific source for panels two and three.

I have to wonder if what we’re now seeing in the United States is an authoritarian regime on the rise or an authoritarian regime that already realizes it’s on borrowed time. We’ll know in two weeks, right?

Related reading
Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action (A free PDF from the Digital Library of Nonviolent Resistance)