Mills Lane died last week. I know — right? — you didn’t even know he was sick. Lane was the boxing referee who worked the Tyson-Holyfield fight in which Tyson bit off part of Holyfield’s right ear and spit it to the mat. Tyson was outraged at getting head-butted in the earlier round. Reb Hillel of Minsk noted it was a variation on the biblical “eye for an eye.” Sort of “an ear for a butt.”

Amazingly (and I am not making this up), Lane did not stop the fight after the ear biting — he only deducted two points from Tyson. And let me repeat — Tyson actually bit off a piece of Holyfield’s right ear. The fight was only stopped later in the round when Tyson bit into Holyfield’s left ear!

“One bite is bad enough,” Lane said after the fight. “Two bites is not deserved.”

Ya think?

Before the fight, a memorabilia collector from Canada offered Lane $200 for the shirt he wore refereeing the fight and he accepted the offer. Once the fight gained its notoriety, Lane thought he could have gotten $4,000 for the shirt, but he honored the agreement.

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Do you give a damn? On this date in 1939 (12/15), Gone With The Wind opened officially in Atlanta after three days of parades, receptions, and a costume ball. Confederate flags and false antebellum façades covered the city. Democratic Governor Eurith D. Rivers declared the day a state holiday, and asked Georgians to dress in period clothing. Jimmy Carter remembered it as the biggest event in the South in his lifetime, even bigger than Purim. The cast attended the premiere, with the notable exception of the African-American performers, who were prevented by Georgia’s Jim Crow laws from sitting next to their white co-stars.

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Today’s puzzle, at 40 across, asked for the first name of Houdini’s wife. It was BESS. Can you imagine being married to that guy? Forget about tying him to the bed, right?

Bess was first courted by Houdini’s younger brother Theo while she was working in Coney Island in a song and dance act. But she fell in love with Harry, and they married on June 22, 1894.

They worked together as “The Houdinis” for several years before Harry hit it big. But they continued to perform their signature trick together, “Metamorphosis,” throughout his career. In this trick, one of them would be handcuffed and locked in a trunk, a curtain would descend briefly, and when it was lifted they would have changed places. Linda and I have figured out how it’s done and will be happy to perform it for you the next time you’re over. I just need a little extra time getting out of the trunk if my back is acting up.

Bess also looked after their menagerie of pets, collected dolls, and made the costumes for Harry’s roadshow. Due to a medical condition of Bess’s, they did not have children. After Harry died, Bess briefly performed a vaudeville act in which she froze a man in ice.

Bess tried to contact Harry after his death via seances, with a code that only Harry and she knew about, to be sure that the medium was not a fraud.  (Occasionally, instead of a medium, she used a large or an extra-large.) The code included the word “Rosabelle,” the name of the song Bess sang in her act when they first met. “Rosabelle” was also inscribed in Bess’s wedding band. The other words corresponded to a secret code used to pass information between a magician and his assistant during certain acts. It spelled out the word BELIEVE.

She tried one final seance on Halloween in 1936 on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. When it failed she put out the candle she had kept burning for ten years. She said “ten years is long enough to wait for any man” (especially if he’s dead, we might add).

Bess died from a heart attack when she was 67. Her family did not let her be buried with Harry in Queens, because she was raised Roman Catholic and Harry was Jewish. She’s up in Hawthorne NY instead. Rest in peace, Bess and Harry.

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A special shout out to Roy who emailed me that when he was a little leaguer he had (if memory serves) a Curt Simmons model baseball mitt. There was some owl-chatter yesterday about CS, on the occasion of his death. I sent Roy a “curt response.”

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“Pouring gravy on, say,” at 42D, turned out to be SAUCING. A little awkward, but good enough to invoke “Sauce” Gardner the excellent first draft pick of the Jets who is having a superb rookie year. That phenomenal nickname was coined by a youth coach of Gardner’s when he was six, based on his play on the field. He called him “A1 Sauce Sweet Feet Gardner,” and “Sauce” stuck. He was born in Detroit but Michigan stupidly failed to scoop him up with a scholarship, and he played his college ball at Cincinnati. How sweet is that sauce? — he signed a four-year rookie contract with the Jets for $38.7 million, guaranteed. He is also in partnership with Buffalo Wild Wings to endorse a new sweet and spicy BBQ sauce called the Sauce sauce.

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Rex Parker’s daily blog on the NYTXW is in the hands of guest bloggers while RP is vacationing in New Zealand with his wife (a native). Today’s guest just issued a profanities-laced rant on how bad the puzzle is. (It’s not nearly that bad, IMHO). The commentariat exploded, with 275 comments, mostly very upset at the rant. More than twice as many comments as usual. But this note was fun:

From the South Yorkshire Times, 1951:

“Whenever ‘Mark Twain’ became angry he would utter a torrent of profanity that would cause his horrified wife to flee. For many years she pleaded with him to stop this vicious habit.

“One morning she decided to teach him a lesson. Twain was shaving, and he cut himself. Immediately the room was filled with foul imprecations. Without pause he went through his entire repertoire.

“When he finished, his wife repeated his speech, word for word. Twain looked up, mildly surprised, and then said calmly, ‘You have the words, my dear, but you don’t carry the melody.’ “

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Thanks for stopping by!