A hearty Owl-Chatter chuckle for a term in today’s puzzle that is a real word: UNOBTANIUM. It was originally coined for an element or material that would be perfect for one’s needs but that doesn’t exist. Now it’s used in engineering or more widely to describe something that is impractically hard to get, due to scarceness or cost. It’s the compound mined in the Avatar movies. According to Wikipedia, similar terms include hardtofindium, eludium, and handwavium.
Other elements that have only recently been discovered are kvellium, which imparts a feeling of joy; kvetchium, which has the opposite effect; verklemptium, which causes one to be overcome by emotions; and schlepium, the effects of which are not known, but it’s very hard to transport.
And let’s have a very special Owl-Chatter welcome for an old Brandeisian from before our time, the late Abbie Hoffman, in today’s NYTXW at 6D. Here’s what I posted for the Rex folks:
“The late ABBIE Hoffman at 6 down — love him or hate him, he was very very funny. He was the original “Sandwich Man” when he was a student at Brandeis, before my time there. (You could say he was a dorm-to-dorm salesman.)
“He said he was against women’s rights — “Why, if you give women rights, the next thing you know men would want them too!”
“When he was negotiating with the Miami police chief for protests of the GOP convention, he said, ‘Listen Chief, if one curly hair on this head is hurt, my father will never come down to Miami Beach again.’ And the chief replied — ‘Abbie, I know your father — he’ll come.’”
Abbot Howard Hoffman was born on Nov. 30, 1936 in Worcester MA, and died at his own hands when he was 52. He graduated from Brandeis in 1959 with a degree in Psych. He studied under Abraham Maslow and Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, who Hoffman said was a great influence on him. Abbie was on the Brandeis tennis team. After Brandeis, he completed the coursework for a Masters degree in Psych at UC Berkeley.
So much can be written about Abbie, but there’s a danger of Hoffman overload. He was married twice and had three children, Andrew (62), Amy, and america (age ?). Sadly, Amy also took her own life in 2007, at the age of 45. Abbie’s memorial service was held in Worcester, at Temple Emanuel, the synagogue that he attended as a child, with 1,000 friends and family members in attendance.
Here’s Abbie with his youngest son, america. Below that, Abbie’s bar-mitzvah? Could be.
If I had to come up with a definition for OAST, the answer at 23A today, I would say I thought it was some sort of oven, like a kiln. I would be right – it’s a kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco. But it’s also used to describe the building it’s in. So the clue today was “Outbuilding that’s sometimes converted into a dwelling.” They usually have a conical or pyramidal roof.
Here’s a limerick on the topic, courtesy of LMS:
Mrs. Bread moved into her OAST.
Its warmth appealed to her most.
Though cozy at first,
The heat just got worse
She has since changed her name to Ms. Toast.
The very first clue/answer at 1A was clever today. The clue was “Finishing-line cry?,” and the answer was BINGO! I didn’t get it at first — the “line” is a line on your Bingo game card. When/if you fill in (“finish”) a line, you win and yell Bingo. It’s not a finish line in a race.
Here’s some priceless chatter on the topic from the redoubtable LMS:
“I think I’d happily stay home and stab my kneecap with a plastic fork than go with Mom to the Tuesday BINGO event. You should see how she frets about her outfit and who’s slated to do the calling for the night. She and her friend get there 30 minutes early so they can sit at their customary table. No, really. For her, it’s the highlight of the week. For me, I get to come home to an empty house and collapse onto the couch in a fugue state. No questions, no chit-chat. No dredging the bottom of my empty tank trying to conjure conversation from the fumes.”
Here’s something: The clue for 11D was “Language that’s mutually intelligible with Hindi.” The answer (of course) is URDU, but it begs the question, if they are co-intelligible are they really different “languages?” Could they just be different “dialects?” The following observations by language-lover LMS got me wondering about that:
“The convention of what we call ‘languages’ is a lot of times purely political or geographical. Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, so you could argue that they’re actually just dialects of each other – not separate languages. And we have a ‘language’ with dialects that are not mutually intelligible, so like you could argue that the cockney English spoken in London’s East End is a separate language from the English spoken in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. And the English a very agitated Boogie [a student] was using last week to recount his upsetting run-in with the police because he was carrying in violation of his ankle monitor and tried to run and and and, well, I just couldn’t follow even though I was listening with all my might. . . you could argue that his English is a separate language from my English. The cool thing is, Boogie can understand mine, so in a sense he’s bilingual and I’m not.”
jberg later added: When I was in college there were courses in the Serbo-Croatian language; it was generally considered one language until Yugoslavia broke up, after which everyone insisted they were distinct. My son worked with a bunch of Croatians, and would occasionally ask what the difference was; the answer was always that they had different words for “belt.” No one could come up with anything else.
Do our bike-riding friends know this one? At 18A the clue is “Long ones can be measured in centuries,” and the answer is BIKE RIDES. So, e.g., a 200-mile bike ride is referred to as “two-centuries long.”
Here’s a pretty bike rider from Copenhagen who caught owl-chatter’s eye.
Gertrude Stein was born on this day in Allegheny City, PA in 1874. Happy Birthday Ms. Stein! I cite her in my tax class, stealing a line from my old professor Bernie Wolfman (alav hashalom). The definition of gross income in the tax code is very broad. E.g., if you find $50 on the street and you’re an honest taxpayer, you should include it in gross income. So Wolfman said Gertrude Stein wrote that Code Section and it says “Income is income is income.” The joke is based on Stein’s famous line: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Hysterical, right? Tax humor. You should hear my material on depreciation deductions. You’ll plotz.
But enough about me. Stein moved to Paris in 1903 and met Alice B. Toklas, the love of her life. (The B is for Babette. I bet you’ve gone your whole life without knowing that.) They drove an ambulance in World War I. Of course, it wasn’t called World War I back then. Who knew? After the war, they maintained a salon attended by the cultural big shots of the age: Picasso, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, Matisse, and others.
There is some “dark matter” in Stein’s history — collaborationist activity with the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France. Some have cited the difficult situation she was in by virtue of being Jewish. Owl Chatter is just going to tip-toe away from that for now.
Stein’s writing style was abstract – the verbal equivalent of Cubism – so it was not easy to understand and her work did not sell well. The only book of hers that did sell was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was actually her own autobiography written from the perspective of Toklas. Her other well-known line is about Oakland CA where she grew up: “There is no there there.” Just two weeks ago, Biden used that line to dismiss all the hoo-ha about the classified documents, and he didn’t credit Stein! WTF Joe! Stein may have just meant that her old home or neighborhood simply no longer exists, but the quote has grown to be a way of describing something that has no substance to it, akin to a “nothing-burger.” That was Biden’s meaning.
Stein died at the age of 72 from stomach cancer. Here she is, as painted by Picasso.
33D was “Broke up a band, say,” and the answer was WENT SOLO. But a whole bunch of folks said they liked WENT YOKO better. (Owl Chatter is one of them.) Ha! “The band was doing well, until the lead guitarist went Yoko.”
Yoko is 87 now and in poor health, wheelchair-bound. She is very close to her son Sean who is 44. Here she is, earlier in life.
To end on a sweet but sad note, we bid farewell to, and bang the drum slowly for, Clevelander John Adams, who died on Monday at 71. He worked at AT&T as a systems analyst and quality manager for 40 years, but we hail him today because he banged a bass drum in the bleachers at Indians games for close to 50 years — at over 3,700 home games.
He began playing the drums when he was nine. And on August 24, 1973, when he was 21, Adams asked for permission from the Indians to bring his drum to the game. It was granted but he was told not to disturb anyone. He only started beating it when a drunk fan challenged him to. Once he began, the crowd started clapping to his beat and he was credited with rattling the opposing pitcher. From that day on, until the pandemic and health issues quieted him, he was a fixture at Cleveland homes games. Owl Chatter is pleased to note it was in attendance at a handful of those games over the years.
At a home game in 2006, the team gave away bobblehead dolls modeled on Adams with a drum and moveable arms. In 2012, Great Lakes Brewing introduced Rally Drum Red Ale in his honor. And just last year, on the 49th anniversary of his first “performance,” he was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame. A sculptor created a bronze replica of his drum and it was affixed to his bleacher bench and installed in the team’s Hall of Fame area behind center field.
“There’s nothing like being down at the ballpark,” he said. “Because it’s more than just the game.”
Amen to that, John Adams. Rest in peace.
Good night, everybody! See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 