Oy. Spent the morning with the lawyer going over our wills. Need a Kooser to get back on the planet. Here’s one from Winter Morning Walks.
Where two fences meet at a corner,
two thickets of bare plum bushes
also have met, and have blended
to soften the corner with clouds
of wine red canes and purple thorns.
Two weeks ago, they pulled a snowstorm
down out of the wind and spread
a long soft drift beneath their branches,
and though by this morning the snow
had melted away from the field,
the drift sleeps, long and white and cold,
rounding the corner, an L shape
that gracefully tapers out to its ends
like a boomerang, a new one that never
flew back to the hand of the wind.
Here’s a plum bush bloom.
In the puzzle today at 29D “They’re roasted at a roast” is WIENERS. I just applied the “i before e” rule, but if you’re wondering about its spelling (IE vs EI) check out this short video Rex shared on it:
Then Jim in Canada wrote:
“NO, you can never spell it WEINERS. It’s name derives from the Austrian spelling of Vienna, which is WIEN. WIENERS are ‘from Vienna’ such as Wiener Schnitzel.
“Likewise, frankfurters are from Frankfurt, which isn’t even in the same country as Vienna, but somehow we tend to use those terms interchangeably on this side of the world. Whatever.”
[Note: Since Jim in Canada wrongly inserted an apostrophe in “its,” above, you should take his point with a grain of salt.]
[BTW, the expression “to take something with a grain of salt,” comes from an old belief that a little salt can counteract the effect of poison (or help it go down better). Thus, the “poison” of an error, can be mitigated with a bit of salt.]
When I noticed that the answer at 40A turned out to be YEE (from the crosses), I wondered how that could be clued. It seems like a nonsense word. But constructor Brandon Koppy clued it nicely with “Start of a rodeo cry.” (Think “yee-ha.”)
And. speaking of rodeos, at 57A, BUFFALO BILL was clued with “Wild West showman who lent his name to an N.F.L. team.” It led Beverly C. to the following memory:
“I spent a couple of pre-teen years living in Cody Wyoming in the late ‘60s. It was Buffalo Bill Central. His grandson rode on horseback in the 4th of July parade looking just like him, lanky, with the beard and long white locks. After the parade I’d roam around the basement of the Woolworth’s store, eyeing the colorful plasticware like candy. Sometimes at the soda counter they had a collection of helium balloons. You’d pick one and the lady behind the counter would pop it. A little piece of paper fell out with your price for a banana split. Kept hoping for a free one, but liked them anyway.”
[That’s a perfect example of why I love the puzzles, and Crossworld. The little doors that open. What a sweet story.]
Walt Whitman was born on this date, 204 years ago. Yikes. He was living with his mom in Brooklyn when he read Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which said that America needed a poet to tell its story. Whitman felt it was he. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
So he began working on “Leaves of Grass,” and used his own funds to have 795 copies printed. He was 37. He was careful to make it small enough to fit in one’s pocket because he imagined its being carried out to be read in the open air. Since parts of it were openly erotic, some of the criticism was pretty harsh — “a mass of stupid filth.” Ouch! Willa Cather referred to him as “that dirty old man.” [Hey, what’s wrong with dirty old men??!!] Whitman responded by adding 146 poems to the next edition.
He left NY for Washington DC when his brother was wounded in the Civil War, and served as a volunteer Army hospital nurse. Towards the end of his life, when asked directly if he was gay he declined to answer but said sex was “the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood — that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world.”
You tell ’em Wally! Happy 204th!
That head-over-heels feeling — is it love, or is it limerence? (It’s the first word on Maureen Dowd’s list.) From what I can tell from my exhaustive research of about a minute and a half, if it progresses into a deep affectionate relationship, then it’s love. If it never gets beyond superficial obsessiveness with a tinge of lunacy, then you’ve got yourself a badass case of limerence.
This woman? I’m a little worried it’s limerence. It’s that little smidge of insanity in her gaze.
And this guy? — Fuhgeddaboutit.
See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 