Since HYPOTENUSE was in the puzzle today, commenter Lewis shared this with us:
Katie and Zachary [the constructors] had me at HYPOTENUSE – which has appeared in a Times puzzle but once before – a word I’ve loved since I was a kid, just for its sound and how it looks. It makes me smile because it shoots me back to the witty and magnificent Major-General’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” appearing in this snippet:
“I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.”
I added the following note:
“If you take two hippos of equal length and a third that is longer, and arrange them (carefully and politely) to form a triangle, the longest will be the hippopotenuse.”
You can start with these:
Lewis is also wonderful for teasing little observations out of grids. Today he noted a pair of rhyming trios: UMA, IMO, and EMU, as well as DEBT, FETE, and BETE. He also paired yesterday’s excellent clue for PORN STAR (“One who’s barely acting?”) with today’s Line 7, which begins with the separate answers ACT and BARE. Adding to the excitement, today also had TOO HOT, nicely clued with “Goldilocks’s complaint about the first bowl of porridge,” and FAST AND LOOSE (“Reckless way to play things”).
While we’re mucking it up with those hippos, here’s another of Maureen Dowd’s words: leptodactylous. It means having slender toes or fingers. It’s also a species of frog, including ditch frogs or white-lipped frogs.
Here’s a frog cartoon from a recent New Yorker:
Three items in the NYT today from the You-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up Department:
The Dallas, TX, school district sent a Winnie the Pooh book home with elementary school kids (including pre-K) showing how to react to an active shooter situation. “If danger is near, do not fear. Hide like Pooh does until the police appear.” I wondered how they got the Pooh folks to go along, but that was easy — since Pooh was first published in 1926, it entered the public domain last year, i.e., it’s no longer copyright-protected.
Cindy Campos, a parent who complained about it, said “the book was not something I wanted. It’s unsolicited advice.” Other parents complained that the school district was “tone deaf” since the book was distributed so close to the anniversary of the Uvalde shooting that killed 19 students and 2 teachers, and a week after the shooting in Allen, TX, that killed 8 people, including 3 children. The book makes no mention of guns — only “danger.”
The district apologized for distributing the book without guidance or context. Bottom line, though — it is a lesson the kids need to learn.
Federal District Judge Nina Y. Wang sided with the school district in Colorado that told graduating senior Naomi Pena Villasano that she cannot wear a sash designed in the style of a serape that honors her Mexican-American heritage. It was a gift from her older brother that represents the U.S. and Mexican flags and says “Class of 2023.” Her family’s position: “The sash is a reminder that not all Mexican Americans, including her parents, have the opportunity to graduate from high school and to walk across a graduation stage. By wearing the sash, Naomi represents her family, her identity as a Mexican American, and her culture during this important occasion.”
The school did not allow the display of flags because “that would open the door to a student wearing a Confederate flag pin or another flag that would cause offense.”
OK, I hear ya, school. But get this: the school said it would allow other students to wear sashes celebrating their Native American or Pacific Islander heritage at graduation.
WTF??!!
Thomas Saenz, of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, said the prohibition violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Further, wearing the sash was private speech protected by the First Amendment. But Judge Wang disagreed and held:
“Although it is true that many pieces of regalia that complement the cap and gown are worn at the graduate’s option, in the context of Grand Valley High School’s graduation ceremony, any such expression is subject to the school district’s discretion and supervision as a matter of course.”
You are more than welcome to wear it here at Owl Chatter, Naomi. It’s gorgeous! And congratulations to you and your family on your graduation — Mazel Tov!
And, thirdly, lawyer Steven A. Schwartz submitted a ten-page brief in federal court with cites to a half dozen court decisions supporting his client’s position. The problem was Schwartz relied on AI, ChatGPT, for his legal research and the cases were just made up — they didn’t exist. Schwartz practiced law in NY for 30 years, but this was the first time he relied on AI for his research. He said he never intended to deceive the court — he essentially just f*cked up in relying on it without tracking the cases down. My favorite part: As part of his defense, Schwartz said he asked ChatGPT if the cases were “real,” and it assured him that they were. It’s a front page article in the Times and goes on at greater length. But that’s enough nonsense about it for Owl Chatter.
Let’s knock a couple more off of Dowd’s vocab list:
Paronomasia. It means punning – using puns. It’s what Shakespeare (and our friend Carl) did (does) a lot. An example is the headline “Otter Devastation” for a story on environmental changes affecting otters.
Aeternitatis. It’s from the expression, sub specie aeternitatis and means “in its essential or universal form or nature.” It’s linked to Spinoza: “There is no such thing, we have said, as an individual fact; and the nature of any fact is not fully known unless we know it in all its relations to the system of the universe, or, in Spinoza’s phrase, sub specie aeternitatis.
Yow — my brain hurts a little now. Enough of Dowd for today.
The puzzle said that write-INS are typically protest votes. I’m not entirely sure of that. Here’s a comment by jberg:
“As a political scientist, I’m here to tell you that the typical write-in vote is not a protest, but the result of an organized campaign by a candidate who hopes to win, and sometimes does. Here in Massachusetts we say that such a candidate “runs on stickers,” because they organize their campaign to hand out stickers with the name printed on them that can be stuck to the ballot. OTOH, my father was once elected Justice of the Peace as a gag, when some friends noticed that no one was running and all wrote his name in. It was fine with him, he got to marry people and collect a fee.”
Hey, it’s Bob Hope’s birthday today. He was born in 1903 and lived to be 100 years old (and two months). Hope was his real last name — he changed his first name from Leslie to Bob. He was born near London; his family moved to the U.S. (Cleveland) when he was four. He never won an Oscar for his acting. He said “Oscar Night at my house is called Passover.” But he received five special recognitions from the Academy. He also received 54 honorary doctorates in his lifetime and was knighted by England. In recognition of decades of entertaining the Armed Forces, in 1997 Congress named him the nation’s first Honorary Veteran, and he considered that his highest achievement.
Since Owl Chatter readers should already know what Hope looked like, here’s a sexy shot of Rosemarie Frankland, Miss World 1961, whom Hope called “the great love of his life.” She was born in Rhosllannerchrugog (pronounced just as it’s spelled), in Wales in 1943. Sadly, she died of a drug overdose when she was only 57.
Get this — she had an uncredited role as a showgirl in the Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night.
Hope you’re having a nice Memorial Day. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 