Closing the Book.

It's hard to think of things to do artistically when people are bombing you.

—Royd Climenhaga

That's the inscription in the book I have in front of me. It's a note I took during a class while I was attending the National High School Institute for Theatre. I'm not sure what the class was—Performance Theory sounds about right—but the point is that I had that book in front of me in the summer of 1995. In fact, I believe I bought it just before flying to Chicago.

The book is Random House Cryptic Crosswords: Volume 2. And today, over thirteen years later, I filled in the last clue.

To be fair, I didn't work on it consistently for those thirteen years; most of the time it was lost under a pile of other books and papers. But every once in a while, I'd find it, yank it out, and keep working on it. The last time I noticed it, I flipped through that there were only a few incomplete puzzles, so I began working on them. I also went to the books to fill in lingering clues on almost-finished puzzles (which were generally words I did not know). Today, I burned through the puzzle that had been the most daunting puzzle New Word Order, by Harth, where the words of the clue were haphazardly scrambled.

I'm generally more likely to misplace a puzzle book than to complete it, so this is a pretty big deal for me. It's given me a lot of good solving in the past decade plus, but I'm glad to know it's finished.

FriNYTX: 22; FriLATX: 11:30.

Re Ashley Todd

I should be going to bed right now, but my mellow has been harshed.

If you don't know the Ashley Todd story, here's the AP article on yahoo.

And now, I hand it over to Melissa McEwan:

This thread will not be used for making disparaging remarks about the young woman, who is quite evidently extremely troubled and in need of help. Nor will it be used to try to cast her as emblematic of women, the rightwing, or young Republicans. That's not to say she did not do something very seriously wrong; it was criminal, and it was racist, and it was dangerous for a whole fuckload of reasons. Let's just be careful in our commenting that we bear in mind she is clearly in psychological distress and doesn't "prove" anything about any group.

As for the people who tried to use this story to score political points, whether it was the rightwingers who were howling about evil Obama supporters on the presumption it was true, leftwingers who were (and are) howling about McCain supporters on the presumption it was false, men who were (and are) howling about women on the presumption it was concocted, or women who were howling about physical attacks on women being the inevitable result of Obama's nomination on the presumption of its veracity—a shameful display all around, really.

And I'm going to add, since I've seen it happen twice on my friends page, that using a picture of a woman with a bruised, swollen face to score the same political points multiplies the reprehensibility.

Bed now. Don't make the thread explode please.