In baseball news, it looks like there may be no stopping Houston this year. With LA, ATL, and the Mets conking out early, and the Yankees struggling with holes in their lineup and bullpen issues, who can effectively take them on? Yuck. Surprise me, Baseball Gods!

Thursday is cute trick day for the puzzle, and today’s was a good one! The theme was BLACK SHEEP, and in three places a black square had to be replaced by LAMB, RAM, and EWE, respectively– with those letters worked into both the across and down answers. So, e.g., an across clue was “Ethical gray area,” and the answer was MORA [LAMB] IGUITY across, with the LAMB placed in a black square so it was a “black sheep.” The same LAMB figured in the down clue “Italian auto with a bull in its logo,” — [LAMB] ORGHINI. The other pairs were ASH[RAM] and EXT[RAM]AYO (for “Sandwich order specification”), and, my favorite pair: HAV[EWE]MET (for “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”) and CHEES[EWE]DGE (for “Slice of brie, e.g.”).

The term “black sheep” gets its negative connotation from the fact that the wool of a black sheep is worth less because it will not dye. White fleece is caused by a common dominant gene that cuts off color production. The gene for black fleece is recessive so black sheep are rare. In 18th and 19th century England, the black fleece was considered a mark of the devil. The devil denies having anything to do with it. The idiom exists in many languages, but in Russian and Persian the concept is embodied in a white crow. In psychology, the Black Sheep Effect describes the fact that people show a negative bias towards individuals who are not members of their own group. For example, my Uncle Morris used to divide all drivers into two distinct groups. One group was comprised of completely wild idiotic maniacs, and the other group was just him.

The Black Swan is something completely different. A black swan is a single very surpising event of great magnitude that alters your beliefs, and which you retroactively use to adjust your beliefs. Here’s a nice passage from Wikipedia: The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.

When the metaphor was first developed, it was believed there was no such thing as a black swan. But they do exist.

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A nice word in the grid today was SORORAL, clued simply as “Sisterly.” It’s the female equivalent of fraternal. One commenter noted that he had a friend who had twin daughters. When asked if the twins were “fraternal,” he would answer “No, they’re sororal.”

There were two wonderful visitors to the puzzle today — Mark TWAIN and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), along with the lovely Eva Mendez, and musical guests ETTA James and Rita ORA — both very popular in Crossworld for obvious reasons. Here’s a Mark Twain quote: The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

I bet you didn’t know that Etta James’s real name was Jamesetta. Jamesetta Hawkins. She was born on Jan. 25, 1938 to Dorothy Hawkins, who was 14 at the time. (Yikes!) It was never established who her dad was, but James herself speculated that it might have been Rudolf Wanderone, aka Minnesota Fats — well-known professional pool player. In any event, she is #22 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s Greatest Singers Of All Time list, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. She died ten years ago when she was 73.

Now I need to brace myself for the Friday and Saturday puzzles. So long.