Friday 5 for July 4:

(I hope the graphics in the title don’t wreak havoc with the database.)

Happy Friday! Today is July 4th, the USA’s 249th birthday. It’s in great shape if you have no compassion for others. If you care at all about other people, it can use a lot of work.

Today’s Friday 5 is themed around the New York Times (NYT) daily puzzles. It’s very timely. Jamelle Bouie, a FANTASTIC and super-smart writer, writes for the NYT. He recently criticized a story the NYT published and subsequently took down his Bluesky posts because they violated NYT social media policy¹. People on the right AND the left are very anti-NYT and this incident has once again reignited calls from the Very Online Left (I am very liberal, but not to these people) to cancel all NYT subscriptions, including the NYT puzzle subscription.

I have a NYT news subscription and a puzzle subscription, and I’m not cancelling either. Why? Because I know that no news source is completely down the middle. There are publishers, editors, and writers with agendas EVERYWHERE — from the NYT down to the Courier-Post from 1999-2012*² and and it’s up to us to be able to see and realize that. And the op-ed sections are always going to have opinions you’re going to disagree with. The entire point of that section is to feature everyone’s opinions even if they are shitty. It’s by design. Does the NYT publish shitty takes? Yes! It also publishes good takes AND employs good people like the aforementioned Jamelle Bouie.

If I cancel my yearly NYT puzzle subscription, the end result is going to be a world where I give up a little ritual I’ve enjoyed every day for at least eight years. Meanwhile, the New York Times will still exist and still publish some shitty takes.

I’ll write that again: If I cancel my yearly NYT puzzle subscription, the end result is going to be a world where I give up a little ritual I’ve enjoyed every day for at least eight years. Meanwhile, the New York Times will still exist and still publish some shitty takes.

“But Kim, your money is going toward a bad company.” Yeah. And my tax money funds a lot of terrible things, too. I can’t opt-out of that. I am not a perfect human being. I do not score 100% on any of the purity tests the leftists concoct.

(These blog posts automatically post to Bluesky, so I’ll probably lose some followers.)

All of that aside, I’m off today. We went to breakfast, and then I made the terrible mistake of going to Walmart (another terrible company that I patronize) on July 4th for groceries and I think I need therapy. Instead, I baked Smitten Kitchen’s legendary Strawberry Summer Cake. I should mow the lawn, but I’ll push that to tomorrow.

Here’s the Friday 5! My favorite NYT games are the Crossword, Wordle, Connections, and Strands. I can complete the easy Sudoku puzzles, but not the medium ones. My brother, who never reads my blog, plays Worldle.

If you’re looking for non-NYT puzzles, I suggest Gisnep and Order Up.

1. What connections did you make this week?
   No new ones, but I’ve been driving WM to PT and saw my therapist from last year. She remembered me! I always think I’m a very unmemorable person so it’s shocking when that happens. I adore the NYT Connections puzzle, even if some of the themes are a stretch or poorly written.
   
2. How would you do in a spelling bee for adults where the other contestants are your average people at the bookstore?
   I wouldn’t win, but I’d come in the top 15%. It’s not as well as I would have done ten years ago because I’ve been using spellcheck as a crutch forever. I don’t play NYT Spelling Bee because it’s frustrating.
   
3. When did you most recently keep a cross word to yourself?
   At Walmart today. It was chaos and people were just parking their carts in the middle of aisles and walking off. My current NYT Crossword puzzle streak is at 196 days. My longest streak was 428 days.
   
4. What word’ll best describe your expectations for the coming weekend?
   (Word’ll = Wordle! Cute!) Let’s go with love. Tomorrow is our 13th wedding anniversary. I’m getting bored with Wordle to be honest.
   
5. If you could read the strands of your own DNA, what would you most like to know?
   Am I naturally clumsy or have was I just never formally taught to be graceful/athletic? Strands is a fun game, I’ve been playing it since beta.

And that’s it! WM wants to grill up some burgers and we skipped lunch so I think we’re going to do that early, and have that delicious strawberry cake this evening. I hope you all have a happy and safe July 4th.

1. A long time before TNP, I was told to take down a blog post where I was snarky about a manager who would take her niece and nephew to work and parade them around as if they were her own children. I took it down, but I still think it was an annoying thing to do. ↩︎
2. That was my tenure there. I did not work in the newsroom but our Publishers were always rich dudes who didn’t want to piss off advertisers or subscribers. Our Circulation Managers were always very well-off dudes who didn’t want to piss off subscribers or advertisers. Our Ad Directors were always very well-off dudes who didn’t want to piss off advertisers. They all had political leanings. ↩︎