The St. Joseph Hawks (Phila., PA) were in the NYTXW today, right up there at 1 down. At games, by tradition, the Hawk mascot has to flap its wings at all times (although it can be one wing at a time) in keeping with the motto that “the Hawk will never die.” During one game, the Hawk got into a fight with the other team’s mascot but kept waving its wing(s) during the entire tussle. Serious business.
Alanis Morrissette was in the puzzle too, along with her hit album Jagged Little Pill. Impressively, they were both spelled out in full, one on top of the other — they are each 16 letters long so the grid was one space wider than usual to accommodate them. The constructor did that again with Justin Timberlake and the film he was in, The Social Network. One on top of the other; both 16 letters. Pretty neat.
LMS did some digging and says the “jagged little pill” is the pill of life — reality — the pill in the expression “a hard pill to swallow.” Alanis was born in Ottawa with a twin brother who is 12 minutes older, Wade, a musician. Her mother has Jewish (and Hungarian) ancestry but Alanis was raised Roman Catholic. She married rapper Mario “Souleye” Treadway in 2010, and they have three kids: Ever, Onyx, and Winter (boy, girl, boy).
The clue at 5D was “Does drudgery, old-style,” and the answer was MOILS. That word was new to me. It means to work hard. It led me to post the following on Rex’s blog:
I got a chuckle out of MOILS when I thought of it as a verb form of MOHEL. A mohel is the person who performs a circumcision (or bris) and it’s often pronounced “moyle.” But it hasn’t made the journey to verbhood yet, so you would not say “Rabbi Cohen moiled my new grandson last week.” It would save you one syllable from “circumcised,” but I guess we’re not that lazy (yet).
I had the pleasure and honor of attending my new grandson Morris’s (Mo’s) bris in Michigan back around Thanksgiving, 2021. Only the immediate family was invited due to Covid, but others could attend via zoom. The mohel was terrific and everyone thought the ceremony was beautiful (except for Morris, obviously).
I started wearing suspenders a few years ago — not as a fashion statement — they keep my pants from falling down. A friend who was attending the bris via zoom mentioned to me that he noticed that I was wearing suspenders and was also wearing a belt. I said “that was one ceremony where I really didn’t want my pants falling down.” Here’s a photo.
(What did you expect a photo of?)
Another expression that was new to me from the puzzle was ON TILT. It means “in a reckless or rash state; acting without proper care, attention, or consideration.” It was originally a poker term, for someone whose play is ragged, and it derives from pinball machines, which will shut down if you tilt them too wildly.
The clue at 60A was “Where orders come from,” and the answer was MENUS. Here’s an observation by LMS:
The clue for MENUS is great. Funny that they’re called “orders” when so many people, my daughter included, invariably turn it into a request, Can I have the snapper? Like maybe the waiter’ll say no. But I guess even saying I’ll take the snapper still isn’t an order. Bring me the snapper and make it snappy. Now there’s an order.
At 33D, “Genesee Brewery offering” is CREAM ALE. It used to be a regular of mine for the few years I lived in Rochester. That’s where it’s brewed. (Burp!)
There was a great pizza/beer place up there: Bay and Goodman, on the corner of Bay and Goodman Streets (duh). It was a real dive in the middle of nowhere, although it changed locations after I left, and recently closed permanently (oh no!). Their pies were round but they cut the slices into squares. (Yes, deal with it.) IMHO it was the best pizza place in the city, which is saying something because a study named Rochester the No. 1 pizza city in the U.S. Yes, little Rochester, NY.
The study appeared on a real estate website, Rent.com, and can be disputed because it was based solely on the following three factors, weighed equally: pizza restaurants per square mile, per capita, and as a proportion of all restaurants within the city. Here are the top ten, according to those standards.
- Rochester, NY
- Pittsburgh
- New Haven
- Philadelphia
- Bridgeport, CT
- Miami
- Buffalo
- Cambridge, MA
- Worcester, MA
- Manchester, NH
Here are some follow-up notes on the Mr. Elko/Cold Milk story. Before reading it at the wedding, I tested it out on one of my classes, to get a sense of how it might go over, etc. And when I got to the last part, on what Sam’s answer meant, I had trouble reading it because I got emotional. The class was very touched by that, but it posed a problem for me in terms of getting through it at the wedding. The solution I came up with was to turn the last part over to my niece (nibling) Deborah to read. She did a great job.
At the wedding, when I got to Sam’s line “What I love most about my family is that they keep the milk cold,” the room exploded with laughter. It was the biggest laugh I (or Sam, actually) ever got, in all my years of going for laughs. I remember standing there thinking — “when will it stop? I need to keep reading,” and then thinking “no, wait, that’s good that they’re still laughing.”
I wrote it up a few months ahead of the wedding and when I finished, I checked the directory for the Chatham School system and found that Mr. Elko was still teaching. So I emailed it to him with a nice cover letter catching him up on how Sam was doing. After a few days or so he wrote back. He said he remembered Sam (fondly) but, amazingly, did not remember the milk business. He loved the story and said it made him laugh out loud. He said he was getting to the stage of his life when he was starting to think about retiring but that letters like mine make him want to continue teaching.
See you tomorrow, everybody!
The Wellington Files 