The puzzle’s theme today was HELLO KITTY, clued as “Fictional feline from Japan, or how one might greet [the four long answers],” which were PINK PANTHER, TONY THE TIGER, COWARDLY LION, and CHESIRE CAT.
Commenter Burghman says that Hello Kitty is not a cat!! What? Well, he’s sort of right. (Her full name, BTW, is Kitty White.) She is an “anthropomorphized” Japanese Bobtail cat — i.e., a cat to which is attributed human form or personality. She has no visible mouth and wears a red bow. She lives in a London suburb with her family and is very close with her sister Mimmy, who wears a yellow bow. She was created in 1974 by Yuko Shimuzo, and her first item was a coin purse introduced in 1975.
As of 2014, there were 50,000 Hello Kitty market lines, including a wine collection. Her value is estimated at $8 billion a year. And now she has a NYT puzzle honoring her. Meow!
Proving the contention that there is pretty much nothing in the world that cannot stir controversy, commenter John H said: “Pet Peeve: The word that Tony the Tiger stretches out is “theeeeeir” then the emphatic GREAT! Not the other way around.” But if you listen to this actual ad, you’ll see what’s what:
Aside from all those cats, there was an ANTEATER in the grid today. An anteater can stick its tongue out up to 24 inches, and flick it in and out of an anthill up to 150 times a minute. It may consume up to 30,000 ants/termites a day. An aardvark, which has a much funnier name, only goes half as far with its tongue, but it manages fine with the ant eating. Here’s a cute anteater, followed by a ‘vark.
Christine LAHTI is the grid today, right next to DECAF, someone noted. So you can ask your barista for a decaf Lahti. She’s a “Michigan girl,” born to a nurse mom and surgeon dad and she received her BA in Drama at UMich — Go Blue! She played Dr. Kathryn Austin on Chicago Hope from 1995-1999 for which she received a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Series Drama, and a bunch of nominations. She is 72, and will be celebrating her 40th anniversary with hubby-director Tom Schlamme in September. They have 3 kids.
And Pam from The Office came by — the great comic actress Jenna Fischer! What a treat! Until looking through some of her pix, I hadn’t realized how much she looks like my beautiful daughter Caitlin in some shots. And here are two Pam quotes: “I hate the idea that someone out there hates me. I even hate thinking that al-Qaeda hates me. I think if they got to know me, they wouldn’t hate me.” And in a separate context: “I don’t care what they say about me: I just want to eat.”
I hadn’t planned on poems or poetry today — there’s nothing poetic in the puzzle — but they kept hitting me over the head, everywhere I turned. Two major obits in the Times, and then The Writer’s Almanac told me it’s Philip Levine’s birthday — he was Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2011-2012. He was from Detroit, thus the cap (below), and was known as a “working class” poet. He passed away in 2015 at age 87.
He said: “You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn’t expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, ‘That is truly what I felt.’ That is truly what I saw.”
Next is Naomi Replansky, who was born in The Bronx, and died on Saturday at 104. She attended Hunter College! Here’s her poem “An Inheritance.”
Five dollars, four dollars, three dollars, two,
One, and none, and what do we do?”
This is the worry that never got said
But ran so often in my mother’s head.
And showed so plain in my father’s frown
That to us kids it drifted down.
It drifted down like soot, like snow,
In the dream-tossed Bronx, in the long ago.
I shook it off with a shake of the head.
I bounced my ball, I ate warm bread.
I skated down the steepest hill.
But I must have listened, against my will:
When the wind blows wrong, I can hear it today.
Then my mother’s worry stops all play
And, as if in its rightful place,
My father’s frown divides my face.
And last is Charles Simic, Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2007-2008, who died yesterday at 84. The idea of old age and death did not faze him, according to the Times. A spring day made him so happy, he said, that even if he had to face a firing squad he would “Smile like a hairdresser/Giving Cameron Diaz a shampoo.”
That’s a nice thought to end on. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 