Yesterday, 35 down was SOS, you know, the “send help” signal.  It prompted this comment:  “Not only is it a palindrome [reads the same backwards and forwards] it’s also an ambigram — being readable upside down as well as right side up. Handy when seeking help from that lone airplane flying over the deserted island.”

And this funny response:  “Your suggestion about SOS being handy because it reads the same upside down has a ring of plausibility to it. Before SOS was adopted, search pilots would often come back to base saying things like, ‘No sign of the lost boy. The only unusual thing I saw was a stick formation in the snow that spelled bLEH.’”

Raise your hand if you read yesterday’s post but were too lazy to click on the link to the Bangor video.  Seriously?  It’s three f**king minutes long.  Guaranteed to bring a smile.  Go back there and click!!  What the hell else are you going to do with your time?

Today’s puzzle was special for me — it contained both of my granddaughters, albeit misspelled.  LIANA at 44A was short an N, and ZOE at 62A was shy a Y.  Hi Girls!

The theme was cute:  OLD MACDONALD plus EIEIO, set the tone, and then it had three animals in long answers:  DON’T HAVE A COW; SHEEPSHEAD; and WHITEHORSE, with the appropriate animal sounds right underneath them:  MUU MUU, BABA, and NAE NAE.  Very nicely done!

Sheepshead was a little weird.  It was clued with “Game fish whose face resembles that of a herd animal.”  Here’s what they look like:  Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn is named after them.

Singer Gibson or Harry was the clue for DEBBIE.  The former was a teenage heart-throb of mine.  Can you blame me?

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The comedian Gallagher passed away this week.  He was 76.  You may recall him as the long-haired, mustachioed fellow in a cap or beret, who gleefully smashed watermelons on stage with a sledgehammer.  He called it the Sledge-O-Matic as a takeoff on the food-processing Veg-O-Matic.  As he explained, “If you want it to be in little pieces, why not just hit it with a hammer?”  

He played more than 100 concert dates a year for more than 30 years, obliterating more than 15,000 melons. He traveled with 15 footlockers of props, among them a “handgun” that fired plastic hands.

As a student at U. of South Florida (English major), he orchestrated a protest against cafeteria food. He parked a trailer with a dozen pigs by the cafeteria’s entrance and urged students to feed the pigs their leftover food. When officials told him that the food must be washed before being fed to the pigs, he said his point was made.

In ’03, when Gov. Gray Davis of CA was recalled, Gallagher was among the 135 people who sought to replace him.  His platform included a demand that that the state send big helicopters to lift vehicles from accident sites.  He finished 16th.

I have long believed in the curative powers of bad jokes, but I never thought I’d find the science to back it up.  Get this —  In 1987, UPI reported that researchers at Loma Linda University  studying laughter, took blood samples from 10 medical students while they watched Gallagher perform. Not only did they laugh uproariously; their white blood cells increased. The comedian, the scientists said, appeared to have boosted the subjects’ immune systems.

The NYT obit finished with this:  He couldn’t help himself. On a sightseeing visit to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 2003, he found a piece of watermelon in a fruit salad. He promptly smashed it on the head of a floor broker.

Rest in peace, Gallagher.  Thanks for the laughs.

As you know, I’m quite an expert on romance.  What’s my secret?  Well, for one thing, I read the Modern Love column in the Sunday NYT whenever I remember that I like it.  Last Sunday there was a story by a guy who was either kicked out by his wife or left his wife six times over their 32 years of marriage.  So you might not think he’s all that brilliant a source on the topic.  Here’s some of what he says:

“I have always thought of Deb wherever I am.  Whomever I am with.  Whenever I experience something good.  I want her to experience the same thing.  I can’t stand to watch a movie without her.  I’ll walk out after half an hour if I can’t turn to her in the dark and whisper, ‘Isn’t this great?’ I can’t ride my motorcycle into the Rocky Mountains.  I can’t enter a diner with worn pine floorboards and an antique, curve-glass pie case with slices of banana cream inside.  I can’t take a flight without wishing she were occupying the seat beside me.

“I think we have the wrong idea about marriage.  It’s not like running a business, where there are recordable credits and debits.  It’s more like learning, after a thousand hangovers, to stop drinking so much.  Or learning, after often being false, to be true just once, in the hope that you can continue to be true.  Or learning, after habitually hating yourself, to love yourself just once, in the hope that you can continue to love yourself.  And then learning, through loving yourself, to love someone else.

“I moved back in with Deb.  Soon enough now, I’ll be alone on the edge of sleep.  Just as I am alone on the edge of all things.  It’s how I am.  It may be how we all are.  And still in love.”