So let’s say George Washington really did chop down that cherry tree many years ago. And the axe was saved and continued to be used. After a few years the blade wore out so it had to be replaced. And after a few more years, the handle wore out and had to be replaced. So none of the original parts remained in the axe. Could it still be called “Washington’s axe” if none of the original parts were in it?
That’s the “thought experiment” posed by today’s puzzle. It’s called the Ship of Theseus. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians commemorated this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship? Plutarch wrote it up in his “Lives” (in the one on Theseus, duh), and said philosophers were split over whether it was still the same ship.
Hobbes expanded the issue. He said, suppose each time a part of the ship was replaced the old part was saved. And when all of the parts were replaced, the old parts were put together to form a “new” ship out of all of the original parts. Which of the two ships is the Ship of Theseus – the one with the new replacement parts and none of the original parts, or the one made entirely of the original parts?
It raises questions of “identity.” Hobbes said his two ships represent two concepts of identity. If the identity of the ship is the idea or form of it, then the ship with the new parts has never stopped being considered the Ship. But if identity is comprised of specific “matter,” then the ship remade out of the original discarded parts is the Ship.
The way it was used in the puzzle was brilliant IMHO. SHIP OF THESEUS was the answer for 22A, clued by “Thought experiment that asks whether an object remains the same object if its parts are replaced one by one.” And the word SHIP appears in shaded squares. Then, the grid works you down a “word ladder.” Do you know what that is? You change one letter at a time to form new words of the same length. So working down the grid, the theme answers give you a series of shaded words that replace SHIP one at a time, but then build back up to SHIP. It goes: SHIP CHIP CHOP CHOW SHOW SLOW SLOP SLIP SHIP. And the clue for that last SHIP (at 121A) is the same as for the first one: “Thought experiment that asks whether an object remains the same object if its parts are replaced one by one.”
So it’s posing the question: Is that SHIP at the end the same as the SHIP at the beginning, despite all the parts (i.e., letters) having been changed?
Here’s an image of the ship:
What was your favorite part of Trump’s deposition? Lemme guess. Was it when he mistook the plaintiff for his ex-wife Marla Maples after reiterating that she wasn’t “his type?” Was it when he called Roberta Kaplan (the questioning lawyer) a disgrace and said she wasn’t “his type” either? Or was it when he doubled down on his Access Hollywood statement that stars like him can do anything — even grab women by the p***y? He said that’s been the case for millions of years “unfortunately, or fortunately.”
Owl Chatter is having a tough time choosing a favorite between “or fortunately,” and gratuitously noting that Kaplan was not his type either. Each one is classic A-plus material. Delicious.
FYI: On the left, not his type; On the right, his type.
For a good rat’s nest of misogyny, the South Carolina Senate will do nicely. For three years Katrina Shealy was the only woman Senator, a Republican, and the leadership continued to address the body as “Gentlemen of the Senate.” One “colleague” said “women should be barefoot and pregnant, not in the legislature,” and said women are a “lesser cut of meat.”
Kudos then to Ms. Shealy who now has four other Senators who are women and all five are refusing to go along with anti-abortion legislation, even the Republicans. It’s enough to defeat it. They do not accept the men’s nonsense about protecting women — it’s about controlling women. Republican Sandy Senn addressed her male colleagues (while wearing flip-flops for comfort) saying: “We the women have not asked for, nor do we want, your protection. We don’t need it. We don’t buy into the ruse that what you really want is to take care of us.”
Here is the fivesome. Whaddya think — any of these Carolina babes Trump’s type?
Yesterday’s puzzle had some unusual items. “What a helicopter might fly out of?” was MAPLE. WTF? It’s one of those little twirly helicopter thingies that fall to the ground. They come from maple trees (ash and elm too). Their official name is samaras.
Next the clue was “Takes off, with ‘it’” and the answer was BOOKS. That was new to me. A slang meaning for book as a verb is to take off quickly. “With the cops on the way, we booked out of there.”
Then there was “Extremely hot peppers named for their scythelike tails,” and the answer spanned the grid: CAROLINA REAPERS. They sound “grim,” and look scary.
Owl Chatter looks forward to celebrating its 200th post this week. Yikes! Special invitations have gone out to Taylor Swift, Ana de Armas, Ted Kooser, and other OC faves. Zelensky may stop in too, if the offensive hasn’t started yet. Volodymyr! — we’ll try to scrounge up some rocket launchers for you — can’t send you back empty-handed!
We hope they can all make it. Hope you can too!
See you tomorrow! Thanks for popping in.
The Wellington Files 