Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

It might be fine, or it might be a clusterfuck.

This blog will pay for itself.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

Good luck with your asparagus.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

We still have time to mess this up!

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

They are all Michael Cohen now.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

An almost top 10,000 blog!

The willow is too close to the house.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Women: they get shit done

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

What fresh hell is this?

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Saturday Evening Open Thread: Good News, Probably

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As I understand it, there’s already a paywalled version, Politico Pro, for the ‘policy pros’ who can write off the real deep-dive insider legislative phart-sniffing as a business expense. I’m just not sure there’s a viable market space for another subscription-driven competitor to the New York Times and the Washington Post — especially since those two offer recipes and crosswords to go with the political commentary.

In my ideal world, Axel Springer would take the advice of their current employees (Tara Palmieri, looking at you) and hire all the most flagrant media mean girls and professional trolls (Annie Linsky, Ken Vogel, etc.) before flaming out and leaving the whole crew abandoned on a desert island…

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Dr. Daniel Price – Cryptic Crosswords!

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Our featured writer today is Dr. Daniel Price!   Let’s give him a warm welcome. If you would like your talent featured in the Artists in Our Midst series, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  This is the final Artists post in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Dr. Daniel Price – Cryptic Crosswords! 1 Cryptic crosswords are common in the UK, appearing daily in multiple newspapers and regularly in other periodicals.  Publications in Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand feature daily or weekly cryptics, with a few US newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times) occasionally printing cryptic crosswords.

The popularity of cryptic crosswords  (sometimes called ‘British-style crosswords’ in the United States) is attributed to the challenge in deciphering each clue.  Traditional US crosswords rely on pure definitions to indicate the words or phrases to be entered, with many of those definitions recycled within and across publications (e.g. “Guido’s high note” is ridiculously common as a clue for ‘ELA’). 
 
By contrast, “[c]ryptic crosswords comprise a compendium of different types of brain teaser, so you get a lot of variety within each puzzle – anagram clues, acronym, puns and riddles,” as described by Dr. Kathryn Friedlander, a researcher in psychology at the University of Buckingham, in a 2021 BBC.com article (‘Cryptic crosswords:  A puzzling British obsession’).  A solver will not achieve success by memorizing definitions and the associated words; although the clues of cryptic crosswords must include a definition of the word or phrase to be entered, said definition will not be obvious. Dr. Daniel Price – Cryptic Crosswords!
Cryptic clues are, by definition, designed to mislead, but also to indicate their solution.  Apart from uncommon literal (‘&lit’) clues and punning ‘cryptic definitions’, clues must consist of the word or phrase’s definition and wordplay that encodes that word or phrase.  The primary (denotative) definition can appear before or after—never within— the subsidiary definition (wordplay), and while linking words may be included, superfluous verbiage included merely to mislead are considered unfair to the solver:  the primary and subsidiary definitions must be separate and sequential within the clue.
 

Acceptable clues are written in the form of sentences or headlines; most often, the clue’s ‘surface’ (apparent meaning) is unrelated to the word to be entered, adding another layer of misdirecting challenge.  The human brain’s attempts to create meaning allows the solver to be fooled by the clue’s surface and requires them to ignore what is plainly visible in order to identify the word that is meant.  “Detainee repatriated, hangs around every bash  (6)” calls to mind a former captive being observed at all of the best parties.  The six-letter word—its length indicated by the numeral in parentheses—thus described is ‘WALLOP’, a synonym of ‘bash’; the rest of the clue is the wordplay that forms ‘WALLOP’, namely “Detainee” (POW) “repatriated” (sent back, or reversed), “hangs around” (surrounds) “every” (= ALL). 

In shorter terms, the reversed letters of POW, a sort of detainee, surround ALL, a synonym of ‘every’, and the result is ‘WALLOP’, synonymous with ‘bash’.  [“Hangs around” may be considered to be an unsound indicator of ‘surrounding’ but it can be argued that the reversed letters of ‘POW’ are indeed suspended about the letters of ‘ALL.’] The goal of the ‘setter’—the cryptic crossword’s constructor—is to create clues that are fair but challenging:  Dr. Friedlander states that “[s]olvers experience a powerful insight moment when they [realize] how the clue should actually be interpreted.  It’s a highly pleasurable kick which rewards the solver.” 

Musical composer Stephen Sondheim attempted to popularize cryptic crosswords in the United States (you can determine whether his efforts have been successful), writing in a 1968 New York magazine article that “[a] good clue can give you all the pleasures of being duped that a mystery story can.  It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.”  Famed British setter Jonathan Crowther, under the pen name of Azed, summarizes the rules succinctly:

A good cryptic clue contains three elements:
 
  1. a precise definition
  2. a fair subsidiary indication
  3. nothing else
 
Standard crossword grids also tend to feature ‘crosswordese’—words found only in crosswords, often because the crossword’s constructor cannot complete the grid without including ‘STLO’, ‘ASTA’, ‘ERSE’, and the aforementioned ‘ELA’.  Cryptic crosswords will include some rare words, but a vast vocabulary is unnecessary, as the wordplay can lead to the solution where the definition does not.  ‘RHOMB’ is an uncommon term and may not spring to mind when one uses ‘diamond (shape)’ as its definition, but it can be identified from “Facets of rare, heavy, oval, magnificent blue diamond  (5)”:  the “facets”, or ‘faces’, of “rare heavy oval magnificent blue” spell out the word to be entered.
 
… I began composing cryptics in 2015 after many years as a consumer.  With no hope of being hired as a full-time setter, the quest was either to be a vanity project—wherein I would share the few compositions with a few interested acquaintances—or to result in larger sets of cryptics to be published as print-on-demand collections.  In addition to having no prior experience writing single clues, let alone entire puzzles, I decided to complicate the process further by creating only themed cryptics, viewing unthemed cryptics as a mere exercise in clue-writing.  
 
In a themed puzzle, multiple entries are related; examples from my own creations reference include ‘one-word album titles released by a particular musical group’, ‘words that exist with a particular letter of the alphabet and also exist, as different words, without that letter’, and especially silly contrivances (intersections of BULLS with CAPES).  [I hope that the themes are incorporated more elegantly than the descriptions provided above would suggest.] Some of the published puzzles are also ‘variety puzzles’, in which words—once identified from their clues—must be modified before entry according to rules stated in the puzzles’ introductions. 
 
As an example, otherwise innocuous words that contain letter sequences that are viewed as ‘naughty words’ must be bowdlerized by replacing the offending letter sequence with an asterisk.  Each member of the Price family has a dedicated cryptic that (with one exception) is related to a feature of her or his name. The Excruciverbiage® series currently consists of four volumes of original cryptics, along with three compilations.  Links to books, a sample cryptic, and a guide to identifying and solving cryptic clues, can be found at excruciverbiage.com.  Should my works ever be published in magazines or newspapers, I would, in keeping with tradition, adopt a pseudonym (those of Spanish Inquisitors are popular); for now, I compose under my given name.  
 

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Open Thread: When People Show You Who They Are…

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Believe them!

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Friday / Saturday, Oct. 15-16

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show full post on front page

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Balloon Juice Pages Automatically Refreshing For No Reason?

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Over the past few days, I have seen a comment or two on Balloon Juice saying something about being prompted to reload the page.  I inquired whether there was some sort of message saying they needed to reload or refresh the page, or whether it was just happening without your participation, but I never saw an answer.

Today the note below arrived using the site feedback form.  I think this may be what was being reported in the occasional comment, but I can’t be sure.

Using an apple iPad, as I scroll through the page it refreshes about every 2 minutes. This has only started happening in the past couple of weeks.

I had to restart this feedback notice because I couldn’t complete it before it was refreshed away. My browser refreshes About every 2 minutes. I am only able to complete this feedback by copying and pasting several times now. I can’t watch a 2:50 embedded video.

Anyway, I need to understand the problem and find out whether it is:

  • prompting you to reload the page? or the page just reloads itself?
  • happening to a handful of people?   to a lot of people?  to everyone?
  • happening only on certain kinds of devices – tablets, phones, computers?
  • happening only certain specific devices – like an iPad or a Kindle?
  • happening only on older devices – like it happens on your new iPad but not your old one?
  • happening only with certain browsers – Safari?  Firefox?  Chrome?
  • happening only on certain combinations of devices and browsers – say it only happens on an iPad in Safari but not on an iPad using Chrome
  • happening only one one particular device you use for BJ?  or for all of them?
  • happening consistently or sporadically?
  • happening only on certain posts?
  • happening only at a certain time of day?  fine in the morning but always happens in the evening?
  • happening only when you are reading from the front page?  or does it happen within individual posts?
  • are you running an ad blocker?  if so, which one?

Can you guys help me out and let me know whether this is happening to you, or not?

If you have experienced this, please include the kinds of information I inquired about above.  

Thank you!

Update at 3:45 pm:

Does anyone who uses Brave on their phone or tablet have this reloading issue?  Does anyone running an adblocker on their phone or table have this reloading issue?

 

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