On this date, 97 years ago, Marilyn Monroe was born in LA. The Writer’s Almanac, in its very short write-up, includes this quote of hers: “I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.”
It made me search for others:
“Beneath the makeup and behind the smile, I am just a girl who wishes for the world.”
“If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.”
“It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.”
“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” [Amen to that!]
“I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.”
“All we demanded was our right to twinkle.”
Happy Birthday, Marilyn! Thanks for twinkling.
So this wife jumps out of the shower and her husband jumps in, just as the doorbell rings. So he says, “Can you see who that is?.” and she says “Okay,” and wraps herself up in a big white towel and opens the front door. It’s their neighbor Ted. He takes one look at her and says “I’ll give you $300 if you let go of that towel.” So she does and it drops to the floor. And he hands her the money.
She wraps herself up in the towel again, and goes back upstairs. The husband says, “So who was it?,” and she says, “It was Ted from next door.” And he says, “Good — did he say anything about the $300 he owes me?”
Here’s OC fave Ana de Armas recreating a Marilyn moment.
Ana received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn in Blonde. She was the first Cuban-born actor or actress to be nominated for a leading role. The film got a 14-minute standing ovation after its international premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. Viewers mainly applauded the emotional performance de Armas gave. The film itself received eight “Razzie Award” nominations, including for worst picture and worst screenplay.
Here’s another shot of her as Monroe:
As discussed in an earlier Owl Chatter, otters are known for their playfulness. Thus the cute clue for OTTER today was “River gamboler.” But here’s a cautionary tale from a comment in Rex’s blog.
Reading up on otters, I found this from Wikipedia, “Animal welfare groups say that, unless threatened, otters rarely attack humans. In November 2021, about 20 otters ambushed a British man in his 60s during an early morning walk in Singapore Botanic Gardens. Despite weighing over 200 pounds, he was trampled and bitten and could not stand up without help from a nearby rescuer. The man speculated that a runner might have stepped on one of the animals earlier, and wished that there could be more lighting installed at that location.”
Here’s a shot that’s otterly adorable, or, if you will, “totes adorbs.”
14D was “Racing boats,” and the answer was SHELLS, altho I and others thought it might be sculls at first. Commenter jcal said:
A note on sculls. I’ve admired this picture since I was a boy. It’s at the Met museum in NY: Thomas Eakins – “The Champion Single Sculls.”
Frank Bruni’s newsletter just arrived. I was happy to see that a quote featured in Owl Chatter made it into his “For the love of sentences” feature. It was Anthony Lane’s line: “As career moves go, the path from neo-Nazism to horticulture has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserves.”
Several others were good too. In The Guardian, Emma Beddington served notice to friends about just how much she enjoys their visits to her home: “We don’t have many guests, because I get funny when people use my mugs, and offer a welcome along the lines of the peregrine falcon nest boxes I watch on webcams: a few strewn pebbles, dismembered pigeon corpses, me hunched and glaring in a corner, covered in viscera.” [That gets funnier every time I read it.]
In The Washington Post, on whether a campaign’s choice of Veep is important, Matt Bai wrote: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”
Going her way?
A little baseball chatter. When the Nats won the championship back in 2019 two of their most electric stars were Trea Turner at short, and Max Scherzer pitching. The Nats traded both to the Dodgers the following year in a fire sale. Turner later signed with the Phillies for zillions of dollars, and Max is on the Mets, getting $43 million a year. Anyway, I had the Mets game on today. They were playing the Phils and Turner came up to face Max for the first time since they were teammates in 2019. Max struck him out with a brilliant slider.
The confrontation led Gary Cohen, the Mets announcer, to ask Keith Hernandez, also a Mets announcer and former star first-baseman, if he was ever in the same situation — facing a former teammate like that.
Keith thought for a while and then said: Roger McDowell. He said he knew McDowell had a great sinker, so he went up braced for it. In the middle of the at-bat McDowell stepped off the mound and moved his third baseman over a few yards. Hernandez said he then threw him a sinker that really took a dive or else was loaded (i.e., a spitter). In any case, Keith hit a line drive directly to where McDowell had just moved the third baseman.
Hernandez and McDowell figured prominently in an hour-long Seinfeld episode that he (Seinfeld) has said is his favorite episode. It’s a spoof of the famous Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. Jerry befriends Hernandez (who also goes out with Elaine), and Kramer and Newman accuse Keith of spitting at them near the players’ parking lot after a game. Jerry supports a “second spitter” theory, which turns out to be correct — it was McDowell, whom Kramer and Newman had taunted during the game.
Let’s finish with a pair of words off of Dowd’s list.
Chiasmus: It’s a rhetorical device in which two or more clauses are balanced against each other by the reversal (“crossing”) of their structures to produce an artistic effect. (Huh?) Wikipedia says the specific words in the first part cannot be reproduced in the second part, but other sources are not so limiting. So an example in Wikipedia is (from Othello):
But O, what damned minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strongly loves.
The chiasmus appears in the second line with the cross from dotes/doubts to suspects/strongly loves.
This example is easier to see and it allows the specific words to repeat: Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you.
One more: Clinchpoop. What a great word! A clinchpoop is an uncultured, ill-mannered person. Example: It’s no longer unimaginable to have a clinchpoop serve as the President of the United States.
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 