Today’s poem in The Writer’s Almanac is by Louis Simpson and is called “Tall Girl Running.” No doubt it’s a nod to the Boston Marathon that is being run today.
The poem starts with a quote by Richard Dawkins: “There is no gene which single-handedly builds a leg, long or short. Building a leg is a multi-gene cooperative enterprise.“
She went running by.
I never saw a girl
with such long legs.
She ran by again.
I shouted to her,
“You run like an angel.”
She smiled and said,
“Thank you.”
She did some knee bends.
I said, “Where did you
get those legs?”
“My father,” she said,
and went her way smiling.
As I noted earlier, Rex solves the Monday puzzles using the down clues only because they are otherwise too easy. This has led to some very funny comments on other ways to increase the challenge. Michael Joseph wrote this today:
My Monday blindfold is at the dry cleaners, so I tried solving this in a pitch black closet and found it to be extremely challenging. Not only did I have trouble knowing what the clues were. I also ended up with a DNF [did not finish] because I didn’t realize that my pen had run out of ink.
With SAP in the puzzle today at 10A, LMS confessed: I prefer the crappy chemical-laden fake maple syrup to the real stuff from real maple sap. I’m thinking I like all the added sodium, I dunno. Waffles with the “good” syrup eat too sweet and one-notedly.
[Owl Chatter could not disagree more.]
It elicited this response from Wanderlust:
LMS, I don’t agree with you on syrup, but I’m not a snob, I swear. I’d actually like to do a blind taste test to see if my purism will hold. I remember when Cook’s Illustrated magazine did a blind taste test with serious foodies on real vanilla extract vs. artificial, and artificial won. It rocked the cooking world. I think they did it again, and this time the real stuff won, and everyone settled down. My sibs and I grew up eating Little Debbies Swiss Rolls in our lunch boxes, while our cousins had Ho-Hos. Each of us insisted our product was superior, so we did a blind taste test with the chocolate logs cut into slices so we wouldn’t know the size (Ho-Hos are bigger). We sheepishly had to admit Ho-Hos were better. Oh, and I should say that we did this taste test as adults in our 50’s. OK, have I proven I am not a snob yet?
Meir Shalev, an Israeli writer known for his sense of humor, died last Tuesday at his home in the village of Alonei Abba in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley. He was only 74. He wrote mostly about the years before Israel became a state.
On the Bible, he observed:
The Tenth Commandment, unlike the other nine, is a prohibition against coveting — that is, against feeling, not action.
“Everyone covets,” he wrote. “Everyone fails the last commandment. Thus, the biblical lawgiver made sure that no Jew would ever get a perfect 10 in the test of the commandments. Nine is the highest score on the Jewish report card.”
Rachel Pollack also died recently at her home in Rhinebeck at the age of only 77. She was a transgender activist and writer who created the first trans super-heroine for DC Comics.
Pollack said she came out as transgender and lesbian in 1971 and underwent transition surgery in 1976. She noted a difference between when she underwent her transition 47 years ago and today. “The big thing that’s changed, an astonishing change, is that transgender people are now visible,” she said. “Society recognizes that this is something people can be. Obviously, there is a strong reactionary element fighting change, as always, but the difference is remarkable.”
She developed a fascination for tarot cards in her youth, and used them in her writing. Her guide “Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom,” established her as an authority.
The trans superhero she developed for DC Comics was Kate Godwin, aka Coagula. She had an unusual superpower — she could dissolve objects with one hand, and solidify them with the other.
Tired. See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 