According to The Writer’s Almanac, it’s poet John Milton’s birthday today (1608). Hands up if, like me, you forgot to send a card. After attending Christ’s College in Cambridge, he underwent six years of intensive independent study, reading literature, mathematics, and languages. But how hard could the math have been — it was 1630, they were only counting up to around 25 by then, right?
Milton was 34 when he married 17-year-old Mary Powell. He proved to be too strict, though and she went back home after a month. They later divorced and Milton kept all the appliances. He wrote Paradise Lost when he was blind, impoverished, and living in seclusion. I guess he bought into that lemons/lemonade thing. Happy Birthday, JM!
Harvard envy. Near the basement entrance to Hunter, there’s a chalkboard that has imprinted on it over and over: Before I die I want to:__________________. Today I noticed someone filled in “graduate from Harvard.” It reminded me I saw a Hunter student once wearing a sweatshirt that said HARVARD on it in large letters, and beneath it, smaller, it said “(not really).”
One complaint some folks had about today’s puzzle was that it had “UP” as part of answers too many times: BUYING UP, UPON, DON’T GET UP, and POP UP SHOP. It didn’t bother me. In fact, I liked how DON’T GET UP crossed SIT STILL. And it reminded me of the following which I shared with the commentariat via a Rex post:
Victor Borge used to tell of a relative of his who was a chemist but dreamed of being an inventor. He came up with a formula for a new soft drink and sank all of his savings into it. He called it “4 Up,” but it failed and he lost everything. He spent years improving the formula and saving up cash and tried again, this time calling it “5 Up.” Again, it failed and he was ruined. Undaunted, he spent years revising the formula once more, went into debt, and produced it under the name “6 Up.” This time when it failed he grew depressed. He died several years later, embittered, never realizing how close he had come.
The clue for MAGPIE was “Bird that can recognize itself in a mirror,” and Wikipedia confirms that the Eurasian magpie is one of the most intelligent creatures in the world.
On the other hand, the term “pica” for the human disorder involving a compulsive desire to eat items that are not food is borrowed from the Latin name of the magpie (Pica pica), for its reputed tendency to feed on miscellaneous things.
You can refer to a group of magpies as a “mischief” of magpies, or a “charm” of magpies, among other less adorable terms. The first syllable “mag” was added to its name from the woman’s name Margaret, or Meg, which was considered to be the name of a talkative female chatterbox (the bird chirps a lot). Here’s what this smarty-pants chatterbox looks like:
It’s about time! — The electric Taylor Swift was in the puzzle today at last — we were asked for “the nickname of singer Swift.” It’s TAY-TAY. It’s appropriately crossed by SUPERNOVA, cutely clued as “Huge pop star?”
Years ago, I was corresponding with an old professor of mine (Barney Schwalberg), who famously in class once mentioned Sophia Loren when he needed an example of a beautiful woman. But he called her “Sophie,” and when a kid in the back exclaimed “Sophie?,” Schwalberg said, “Well, to her friends.” There was a New Yorker article out at the time on how each generation has its cultural points of reference, and I cited it and noted that if I had to use a beautiful woman in an example in one of my classes, I wouldn’t be able to use Sophie Loren — I’d use Taylor Swift. And he wrote back to me: “Who’s Taylor Swift?”
She was born Taylor Alison Swift (it’s her real name), in West Reading, PA. She’ll be 33 next Tuesday (12/13). Her rise was almost Mozartian — she signed a songwriting deal with Sony when she was 14, and a record deal when she was 15. Her dad was a stockbroker and her mom a mutual fund marketing executive. Her grandmother was an opera singer, and one of Swift’s earliest musical memories is hearing her grandmother singing in church. She was named after James Taylor. (Wow! — that’s news to me.)
Swift identifies as a pro-choice feminist, and is one of the founding signatories of the Time’s Up movement against sexual harassment. She advocates for LGBT rights, and has called for the passing of the Equality Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Swift performed during WorldPride NYC 2019 at the Stonewall Inn, frequently cited as the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. She has donated to LGBT organizations. In August 2020, Swift urged her fans to check their voter registration, which resulted in 65,000 people registering to vote within a day after her post.
She must be the most photographed woman on the planet. I’m going to pick one that’s not too sexy — I’m a married man!
Unfathomable grief. I woke up today to the weekly Story Corps feature on NPR: People telling “stories from the heart.” It was a conversation that took place in 2017 between the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook massacre: their six-year old daughter Avial. The mother requested that it be replayed for the tenth anniversary of the killings, which is coming up this week.
The mother started by explaining that Avial was not supposed to be in school that day: a family outing to New York had been planned. But the class was making gingerbread houses and Avial so much wanted to participate that they brought her in. After the shooting occurred it was chaotic and parents were seeking out their children and the father discovered that Avial was among the missing. He placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders and looked her in the eyes and said he had to tell her directly so she wouldn’t hear it from someone else, that Avial was probably dead. The mother said it was hard for months and it’s been years and it’s still hard, all the time. The father said it’s with him every waking moment and he feels it in his sleep sometimes.
He asked her what she missed most about Avi and she said, “the weight of her arms on my body when she’s hugging me. And her cheeks.” They later had two more children. He asked her what she fears most for her children and she said even though it’s statistically improbable, she fears that they will be shot. But she’s living her life without letting herself be ruled by fear, and she is doing her best to give her children the tools to enable them to not live in fear. She closed by saying, “And I love you,” and he closed by saying “I love you too.” The program’s theme music came on, and the program’s host said that a year after that story was recorded the father died by suicide at the age of 49.
It seems like more than ten years ago to me, but it’s ten years ago this week. It took place on December 14, 2012.
The Wellington Files 