James Lowenstein died back on Jan. 3, at age 95. He was a Jersey Boy, born in Long Branch. Lowenstein was a key, if understated, figure in turning the country against the Vietnam War. After Nixon presented his strategy for ending the war, which included its Vietnamization, i.e., turning the fighting over to the Vietnamese, William Fulbright, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was dubious. He sent former Foreign Service Officers Lowenstein and Richard Moose over to investigate. They didn’t just scratch the surface meeting with the big shots, they met with mid-level officers and traveled the country to meet with village elders. Their report blew the lid off the public perception of how the war was going. (It was not going well.) It included numerous instances of “fragging,” in which American soldiers intentionally caused the deaths of their own superior officers with hand grenades. Return trips uncovered more dirt. The tide slowly turned.
A small note tucked into the NYT obit was of particular interest to Owl Chatter: Lowenstein’s dad was a prominent NYC estate lawyer one of whose clients was Babe Ruth.
Have you ever had a moment in which all the clouds of worry and stress dissipate — even the little wisps — and you feel a pure peacefulness? It’s very rare, but it happens, if fleetingly.
I can go months without finding a poem in The Writer’s Almanac that grabs me. (TWA includes one each day.) But here’s the second one this week that I liked. It’s Subway Psalm by Alden Nowlan.
It’s the first storm of the winter
and the worst since 1888,
the girl on television said.
I keep slipping in my leather-soled shoes.
Twice I’ve turned into a windmill
in my efforts to keep from falling.
At the top of the stairs leading down
to the subway, Johnnie watches me,
not just with his eyes but with his arms and legs.
He’ll do his best to save the old man.
That’s how I must have looked at him
when he was five or six years old.
Now he’s twenty-six, and it seems
we’ve traded places.
Why are you laughing?
he asks me.
The honest answer is:
Because you look so funny, standing there
like that, my beautiful son,
and because I’ve loved you
for such a long time and because this
is the finest storm I’ve ever seen
and everything is exactly as it should be.
In the puzzle today, 22A was “Comicdom’s ‘Queen of the Jungle,’” and the answer was SHEENA. Sheena was the first female comic book character with her own title, preceding Wonder Woman by less than a year (in 1942).
Sheena is the young, blonde daughter of Cardwell Rivington, who was exploring in Africa with his daughter in tow. Cardwell died from accidentally drinking a magic potion made by Koba, a witch doctor. Don’t you hate when that happens? Koba raised Sheena, teaching her the ways of the jungle. The adult Sheena becomes “queen of the jungle” and encounters a hell of a series of adventures with her monkey sidekick Chim, including battles with a super-ape, the Green Terror, sabre-tooth tigers, voodoo cultists, gorilla-men, devil-apes, blood cults, devil queens, army ants, lion men, lost races, the Princeton Glee Club, leopard-birds, cavemen, serpent gods, vampire-apes, — you name it.
Sheena was created by Jerry Iger who said he picked the name because his mind wandered to the derogatory name “sheenies” that Jewish people were sometimes called in his early days in New York. (Iger was Jewish.) Wow! So Sheena’s Jewish!!
I’ll tell ya, fellas, we don’t have too many like her.
“Beer containers” was the clue at 4D and the answer was GROWLERS. It generated this very informative comment:
“A growler is a 64-ounce container, typically glass, that gets filled from the tap at a brewpub. There is also a 32-ounce container, which is called a howler (at least at the places I know around Chicago). And finally, there is the crowler, which is also 32 ounces, but is a can that is filled with tap beer and then sealed with a special machine. Not many places have them though; the machines that seal the cans are expensive.”
Burp!
How often have your family dinners exploded over whether Omaha or St. Louis is the “Gateway to the West?” Seriously, amirite? The puzzle today went all in for Omaha at 45A, but several angry comments disputed the matter, opting for St. Louis, which even took the trouble of erecting the goddamn Gateway Arch, for cryin’ out loud, they pointed out. But get this —
According to Wikipedia, all of the following have been dubbed “Gateway to the West” at various times for one reason or another:
- Lyons, Illinois
- Fort Wayne, Indiana
- St. Louis, Missouri
- Eureka, Missouri
- Omaha, Nebraska
- Fargo, North Dakota
- Bridgeport, Ohio
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Kemmerer, Wyoming
- The mountain formation known as Cumberland Gap.
(Hrummmmph.)
A commenter remembered how big a deal the arch was when it was erected in the mid-60s, giving the title to St. Louis, in his or her view. “Until then, from its founding in the mid-1800s (I think), OMAHA was the ‘Gateway’ because of its location at the junction of the Platte and Missouri rivers, making it the perfect place for folks to gather to start their journeys westward. Wagon trains used OMAHA as the starting point which helped the city develop.”
Here’s stuff I learned about some words. Have you heard the term “niblings?” It was new to me in Monday’s New Yorker puzzle. The clue was “Some niblings.” I (wrongly) associated it with food — you know, to nibble on something? And I had [x]IECES, so I guessed PIECES. Well, the answer was NIECES. It turns out “nibling” is a relative, so to speak, of “sibling.” Sibling is a brother or sister, and nibling is a nephew or niece.
According to the folks at Merriam-Webster, the word was coined in the 1950s but only took off to the extent it did recently.
Finally, — you know the phrase to run “amok?” I bet, like me, you thought it meant to run around sort of crazily, right? That’s how it’s consistently used in puzzles. But it’s much more violent than that. It’s Malaysian in origin and means “possessed with or motivated by a murderous or violently uncontrollable frenzy.” That’s straight out of Merriam-Webster, and it’s not just an alternate meaning. Yikes.
Try nibbling on that for a while. See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 