Notes on the Saturday NYT crossword

Interviewer in some mock interviews (8)

added a few minutes later

In a moment of irrational exuberance, I scribbed in INCHONNORTHKOREA as the answer for

Hey—what else could it be? I had _NCHO as the first five letters. Yes, there is the little matter that my answer was one letter too long, but that didn't stop me, I just collapsed the two middle N's to one. I had to reink to ANCHORAGEALASKA.

Able to draw (11) FASCINATING doesn't quite work for me, and

Captain's charge (8) JETPLANE caused some grief, too.

Goal-oriented activity (6) SOCCER

Kudos to Victor Fleming!

Kearney High School wins state football championship

Back in Nebraska last night, my old high school won the state Class A football championship for the first time since World War II. They beat Omaha Westside 41-21.

They played the game in Memorial Stadium, in Lincoln:

Not quite a sell-out, but it must have been fun.

Did they dye their hair gold?

[Photo credit: Kearney Hub]

The War on THE BOOKS

I've decided all the books in my office are going to get kicked out and stored in various boxes at distant, somewhat inaccessible locations. I'm going to try "managing" them using the library thing. Each book is going to have to earn the right to come back into my office. I'm going to have to go get it.

Why?

1) Too many books—already they're scattered between my office, the house, the attic in the house, the San Francisco loft, and the Yosemite place, and I don't really know what I've got any more.

2) I really want a clean office, and it's only by kicking out all the books that I think I can achieve that.

[Aside: There's the little matter of notes, files, and papers. What to do with them? ]

3) I've always wanted to see a proper organization of the books in a "card catalog" format.

4) I've got to get this stuff out of my office anyway, if I want to have it repainted.

Anyway, I've already started throwing books into boxes, and archiving their identities in my LibraryThing account. It's a modest start, not even 100 books so far, but I'm going to press on.

Progress is slow, for all the usual reasons. There's hardly any book that I can pick up and say, "well, well, this is not an interesting book...I'll just put it down." No, no. Instead each and every book I own carries the implicit threat to seduce me for 1/2 hour or more, maybe even a full day. This is why I got the damn things in the first place, but it's also why they need to go.

Driving Lenny to physics class, he told me, "If it weren't for my wife, I suspect I might live in absolute squalor." I said I thought I was doing a good job in my office, already. He said he's sure his office is worse than mine. Maybe. I told him my plan to consign all books to boxes but he said, "But I like having lots of books around." "It's getting ridiculous for me, though," I said, "I can't even move...". And he's not going into his office, anyway, he said, he's writing more books...

A typical problem case, and next in the stack for my consideration: a 1983 book called On Nineteen Eighty-four, part of the (perhaps now defunct) "Portable Stanford" series, ISBN 0-91638-10-8, but unknown both to Amazon and the LOC (Library of Congress) LibraryThing interfaces. Just chuck it? No, no, no. Let's just open it, and darn it if I don't see an interesting looking essay by Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Newspeak: Could it really work?, with Orwell lead-in quotation:

Ha! Orwell had no idea.