The puzzle word of the day, for me, is REBUTTED. It was part of the puzzle’s “trick.” The clue was “Sunset shade (MT),” with MT being Montana’s postal abbreviation. What we had to do was remove a city located in Montana from the word to get the answer. So if you take out BUTTE from RE[BUTTE]D, you’re left with RED — a sunset shade.

But I prefer a reading of rebutted offered by Rex poster LMS who said she couldn’t help but think about implants when seeing “rebutted.” A good clue for it might be “Had plastic surgery you didn’t take sitting down.”

Similarly, if you take PROVO (UT) out of [PROVO]LONE, you’re left with LONE (clued as “Sole”). And may I remind you — Man cannot live by provolone!

Carl told me he and his wife Andrea were planning to sign up for a pickleball tournament, but Andrea half-soured on the idea. (He said he would spear me the rest of his puns.)

There is a place near me called The Morris County School of Glass. It offers courses in glass-blowing –you can see the glowing ovens from the road. Years ago I told Carl I took a course there on PANE MANAGEMENT, but the professor wasn’t very good — you could see right through him. Within ten seconds, Carl wrote back asking if they serve glazed donuts.

LMS also pointed out a subtlety in the grid. There was a clue “Going both ways,” for which the answer was RECIPROCAL. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) And the central R was crossed by RADAR — a palindrome — a word you can read backwards and forwards (“both ways”). Wow.

Our beloved OWLS were in the puzzle today, creepily clued by “Birds whose eyes don’t move.” Crossed by (“lumpy citrus”) UGLI — Ouch! Right next to SNIT — and who could blame them?

In all birds, the eyes within their sockets are so large that movement is severely restricted. Wih owls, in particular, the eyes are virtually attached, preventing movement. This according to a Rex commenter who did a little digging. (That is certainly the case with my beloved stuffed owls, Welly and Wilma.)

I saw in the NYT recently, and the New Yorker of 10/17, that there is a brouhaha in the chess world over suspected cheating. Nineteen-year-old Hans Niemann was accused of somehow getting signals during a game giving him illegal assistance — the Houston Astros Gambit, we might call it. Niemann admitted cheating in the past, when he was 12 and again when he was 16, but insisted he wasn’t cheating anymore. Where could he have hidden a device?, the New Yorker speculated. His shoes, his tuchas? Niemann offered to play nude, giving a whole new meaning to the term exhibition match.

A friend of mine was the captain of his chess team in high school and, after an important win, he was invited to have lunch with a Russian grandmaster visiting the U.S. at the time — a great honor. A few days later, I asked him how lunch with the Russian chess genius went. He said “It was fine, but it took him ten minutes to pass the salt.”