Don’t drive if you just had a salad. What? Reports from Australia (in today’s NYT) say baby spinach has caused delirium, hallucinations, and fever in over 100 cases. The Victoria health department surmises it’s “anticholinergic syndrome,” caused by plants in the nightshade, jimson weed, and mandrake root family. These plants deprive the brain of acetylcholine which it needs to function. The loss of this stuff naturally (i.e, without eating spinach) is linked to Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, etc.
Get this though — there are two types of hallucinations: “formed” and “unformed.” One that is formed is concrete and recognizable — usually involving people, objects, and landscapes. One that is unformed involves shapes, patterns, and colors. Spinach-induced hallucinations are formed, and since they involve memory, they tend to involve people the sufferer knows or recognizes, such as deceased relatives. In more serious cases, you lose the capacity to distinguish the real from the unreal, so you can get sucked into the “story” where something bad is going on and people are trying to harm you in some way. Bottom line: If Uncle Charlie is coming at you with a knife and he’s been dead for a few years, you probably have nothing to worry about.
Pass the dressing.
An important follow-up to the BBL/barrel discussion! According to our Vermont friend Susan, the current usage of BBL is for Brazilian Butt Lifts. She adjured me to “think Kardashians.” The medical term is Gluteoplasty and a lengthy discussion can be found in Wikipedia under “Buttocks Augmentation.” The following is just the tip of the, well, let’s leave it at iceberg. [Note: I will replace buttocks with the Yiddish tuchas below because it’s a much funnier word.]
The corrective procedures for tuchas augmentation and tuchas repair include the surgical emplacement of a gluteal implant (tuchas prosthesis); liposculpture (fat transfer and liposuction); and body contouring (surgery, liposculpture, and Sculptra (Poly-L-lactic acid injections), to resolve the patient’s particular tuchas defect or deformity. Moreover, in the praxis of sexual reassignment surgery, the prosthetic and liposculpture augmentation of the tuchas can be performed on transsexual and transgender women to enhance the tuchas’s anatomic curvature in order to establish the markedly feminine tuchas and hips that project more (to the rear and to the side) than does the masculine tuchas.
A BBL in particular involves transferring fat from one part of the body, e.g., the hips, to the tuchas. It’s Brazilian because a plastic surgeon from Brazil devised it: Dr. Ivo Pitanguy. Dr. P passed away at the age of 90 in 2016 when an enormous . . . (you can finish that sentence).
Oh, alright, I’ll finish it . . . when an enormous tuchas he was working on rolled off the examining table and crushed him to death.
His grieving widow said “I always knew he’d come to an unhappy end.” She added “He was always behind in his work, and always worried about the bottom line. Still, he was a loving husband and helped me rear two children.”
Here’s a photo of Dr. Pitanguy:
And there’s another rash (Ouch!) of tuchases in today’s puzzle! Incredible! They are right up top at 8 across: “Dodos,” — ASSES. There is also an ASS from ASSN (“Org.”) crossing SEAT (from BOX SEAT).
The swastika flap from yesterday’s puzzle made quite a splash well beyond the boundaries of Crossworld. It’s been mentioned (denounced) in and by quite a few media outlets, including The Jerusalem Post and the NY Post. (Post Cereal has not taken a position.) Donald Trump Jr. lambasted The Times over it via Twitter.
The Times finally responded: “This is a common crossword design: Many open grids in crosswords have a similar spiral pattern because of the rules around rotational symmetry and black squares.”
23A was “Scorch” and I filled in SEAR first, but the answer was CHAR. And here’s what someone posted on the matter:
“Cooking snob here: searing is something you do intentionally to create a Maillard reaction on the outside of the meat because browned and crispy (seared!) food tastes good. Charring is something that happens accidentally when you leave it on the flame for too long and it is destroyed.”
“Maillard reaction?” Huh?
The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that gives browned food its distinctive flavor. Seared steaks, fried dumplings, cookies and other kinds of biscuits, breads, toasted marshmallows, and many other foods undergo this reaction. It is named after French chemist Louis Camille Maillard, who first described it in 1912. Many recipes call for an oven temperature high enough to ensure that a Maillard reaction occurs. At higher temperatures, caramelization (the browning of sugars, a distinct process) and subsequently pyrolysis (final breakdown leading to burning and the development of acrid flavors) become more pronounced.
So, boy scouts and girl scouts, the next time you’re searing marshmallows be sure to show off about the Maillard reaction. We were visiting Sam in Traverse City once and wanted to use the fire pit in his housing complex to roast some ‘mellows, and make smores. (Lianna was with us.) The problem was the pit was in use by 3 or 4 beer-drinking gentlemen and it didn’t look like they’d be moving on very soon.
So I approached them and asked if we could slip in briefly and roast up some marshmallows. Absolutely! They were very nice about it. So I said, “You’re welcome to have some.” And this one fellow, who had a very large belly which was flabbing out because he was shirtless, pointed to it and said: “Hey — you don’t get a body like this eating marshmallows!” Very funny!
I’ll leave you with a quote by Beverly SILLS who was sort of in the puzzle today, clued indirectly with “Prime bird-watching spots for indoor cats.” (Sills) According to commenter T Trimble, a 1971 Times Magazine article on Sills mentioned that she was a crossword fan and said: “Beverly can do a crossword puzzle in 20 minutes, in ink.”
She is known to have said: “You are never famous until you’ve had your name in a crossword puzzle.”
Thanks for stopping by! See you next time!
The Wellington Files 