Saturday 12:30
Saturday 16:47
Not too tough for a Saturday, and my time bears that out. And a theme, kinda. Locked letters are usually verboten without a good reason. This one is a little thin, but making all the black blocks singlets (the confetti shapes don't appear until you finish) makes sacrifices like this necessary, and they do all connect. Plus there are 6 grid-spanners across and down. There's some nonsense like 50-down, but not too much. Just a Z short of a pangram.
Sunday 22:23*
The time is asterisked because it's when I finished, but not to whatever the Times counts as done. This stuff has happened before in similar puzzles and it tends to break my streak. See, quite a few squares are rebuses, with either a card suit or rank, together making a Texas Hold 'Em Royal Flush (39-Down). However, they are suits going down, and ranks going across (the 1-Down and 8-Down answers are AV(CLUB) and IN(SPADE)S, but 22-Across is (QUEEN)ANNESL(ACE)).
I've tried refilling the puzzle with all ranks, but that hasn't worked to give me the done. All suits didn't either.
Monday 5:43
Saturday 18:19 (1 Google)
I haven't written about this yet, but my father died two years ago, one day before his 80th birthday.
A term for someone solely devoted to just one series seems limiting. What are you really into? Vampires and Werewolves? I think Buffy did it better, I think True Blood did it better. Want books? Bram Stoker did vamps the best, though there are legions of short stories about them, and Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf and Salem's Lot are pretty good too. But I'm not a snob about it. You like Twilight, that's fine, as long it's not your only thing. If you're into Philip Pullman, instant crush.
<aside> Similarly, but not really, "Bernie Bro" really bothered me as a term. Yes, I really like Bernie Sanders, and I supported him in 2016 and 2020. But the whole "Bernie or Bust" attitude was totally misguided. It was clear to me that he would have crushed Trump in the general election, and this seems supported by the fact that once Hillary Clinton won the nomination, a significant number of Bernie supporters switched to Trump. Like Trump, Bernie spoke about how disappointed he was in the country, and that resonated with a lot of people. Even though what they were defining as the problems were wildly divergent, people care less about specific policy proposals than someone with authenticity (Trump lied constantly, but was still considered "authentic"), not a focus group-driven plastic model like Hillary. I don't think she's a bad person, but she completely misidentified the electorate. Bernie and Trump both got it, and it's sad that it seemed as if merely being populist was enough to win, because they really are almost polar opposites.
<further aside> This sounds petty, but I think it's a microcosm of a larger problem with Hillary. When she moved to New York in 2000, she had to pick a team. She picked the Yankees, of course. I have no problem with that, and it makes political sense too, since they have more fans than the Mets, especially upstate. But when she was campaigning against Obama in New Hampshire, she donned a Red Sox cap. You cannot do that. How can you trust such blatant pandering? Baseball team fandom is about loyalty, where is yours? </further aside>
</aside>
I kinda have a thing for girls into YA fiction, even if I'm not a giant fan myself. So anyway, I was at a party a while back. There was a pretty cute girl there, and even though we didn't talk much, I could just tell she was into YA fiction. The party got into a game of "I've Never." I'm not easily eliminated in that game because while I've had an interesting life, it isn't quite as debouched that the way the game usually trends. So it got down to just me and this girl, and I came up with the perfect question. "I've never read a book in the Twilight series." She drank, a little sheepishly. I probably could have embarrassed her further, but I didn't want to be that guy.
But it shouldn't be embarrassing to be a 30/40-something person into that sort of thing, although I think variety is key. I like "grown up" books too, Jonathan Franzen, Stephen King, Don DeLillo, etc. They certainly inform me better on the world than Tolkien ever could, even via a metaphor that he himself denies (LotR is sometimes viewed as allegory, with the Ring representing the atomic bomb, but Tolkien, himself more familiar with first World War, wrote it before that (though it attained much its popularity (inside the US at least) mostly in the 50's), and he specifically refutes that interpretation).
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
—C.S. Lewis
My father never really learned this, which surprises me a bit, because he was, like me, a giant nerd. His childhood hobbies included coin and stamp collecting. But then he grew up and stopped. A wife and children can get in the way, of course, but I know plenty of gamers who manage to balance it all. I didn't need a father who shared all my passions (and we did have a few in common, like singing), I had a brother and a best friend, and eventually a whole subculture to be a part of, so I never really felt too isolated. Still, since he was once a collector, it always irked me that he never really understood my obsessions. Even though most of my Magic collection in the past few years has been digital (it's more the game, not the collection), collection (in my case, video games, Star Wars toys, baseball cards) is all about obsession, but whatever. I miss you, Dad.
