Special Owl Chatter cheers for Jacob Steinmetz of the Israeli National Baseball Team. Jake is the first ever Orthodox Jew to be drafted by a Major League team — the Arizona Diamondbacks. He was the starting pitcher for Israel against DR on Tuesday (the Dominican Republic) and gave up one run and two hits in an inning and a third while facing the entire DR lineup. He struck out Manny Machado, one of the best hitters in the game, and Jeremy Pena, last year’s World Series MVP. After several pitches got by Juan Soto, he gave Jake a “pretty impressive” face look.
Whatever his mom gave him, he ate. Steinmetz is 6’5″ and weighs 220. He’s 19, was born in Queens, and raised on Long Island. He is willing to play ball on the Sabbath as long as he can walk to and from the stadium. He says he’s only felt warm support so far from teammates and fans. No anti-Semitism.
Cheers as well for Owl Chatter fave Ana de Armas who wowed them at the Oscars last Sunday in her bid to snare the award for Best Actress for her performance in Blonde. She was beaten out by Michelle Yeow, but no hard feelings. Here she is in the gown she wore, followed by a more relaxed, if no less devastating, pose.
Congresswoman Pat Schroeder died in Florida on Monday. She was 82. Oliver North called her one of the nation’s 25 most dangerous politicians. She was a pilot herself, and fought for women to have the right to fly combat missions. She was elected to Congress in 1972 out of Colorado, as an opponent of the Vietnam War. She helped pass the law that bars employers from firing women because they are pregnant and from denying maternity benefits. That reminds me, when I was working for the notoriously cheap Journal of Taxation, I once asked the bookkeeper if the company offered maternity benefits, and she said “Yeah — you get to keep the baby.”
Schroeder was one of only 14 women in the House when she was elected and she confronted extraordinary hostility. She was the first woman to sit on the Armed Services Committee, and at the first committee meeting she was forced to sit in the same chair with Rep. Ron Dellums, a Black committee member. You may have to read that last sentence again — it’s hard to believe. As Schroeder tells it in her book, she and Dellums had to sit “cheek to cheek” because the Chairman “said that women and blacks were worth only half of one regular member.” (The Chairman was F. Edward Hebert, of Louisiana.) The NYT states it is not clear whether he actually uttered those words, but the seating arrangement is not in dispute. Hard to imagine AOC being told to squoosh her tush into half a seat today without it registering on a seismograph.
Schroeder won her seat by ousting a Republican incumbent in the face of the Nixon landslide in 1972. Years later, when she requested her F.B.I. file, Schroeder found out that the bureau had placed her under surveillance during that race, breaking into her home and even recruiting her husband’s barber as an informant. She was re-elected eleven times with little opposition.
She is survived by her son, her brother, four grandchildren, her husband, and her husband’s barber.
I learned something new today, indirectly, from the puzzle. Rex said he felt the spelling of one of the answers seemed “jury-rigged.” I thought he meant “jerry rigged,” and I was going to politely correct him. But I’m glad I checked first. I mistakenly thought jury rigged was a legal thing — when you buy off a member of the jury. But it isn’t — Rex used the term correctly. It’s from the “jury mast” on a ship. The jury mast is used in an emergency to replace a damaged mast – it’s a hasty and temporary repair. And “jerry rigged” just means put together badly. That would have been correct too in this case.
There was some grumbling about MIDGUT as an answer for “intestines place.” Rex didn’t accept the term as real, and felt one’s gut is one’s intestines. But medical people quickly weighed in and all agreed it is a valid anatomical term, e.g., “I am a physician and midgut is sort of a word. It’s usually used in association with the condition ‘Midgut Volvulus.’ It’s more of an embryologic term, in which there is a foregut, midgut and hindgut and they develop into different things. the midgut develops into the intestines and if something goes wrong, you get a twisting called a Volvulus which can be life threatening and needs to be recognized quickly after birth.”
One person shared this story: “My younger son was born on December 20, 1989 and developed life threatening health issues three days later, leading to a helicopter flight from Central Louisiana to New Orleans (without mom or dad) for a tiny baby, and what I have and will always describe as emergency surgery–Sunday afternoon, Christmas Eve!! The life threatening issue was a MIDGUT Volvulus (so I have no problem with MIDGUT as a legit medical term). Thanks to a gracious and skilled pediatric surgeon, we received our son from the pediatric NICU at the Ochsner Clinic on Christmas morning. He’s thirty-three now, and married.” [I assume he means the son, not the surgeon.]
Henny Youngman: “Every time I ask what time it is, I get a different answer.”
Mort SAHL was in the puzzle again. Here’s what he said about Reagan: “Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference. Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.”
See you tomorrow — thanks for popping in!
The Wellington Files 