The clue at 57A today was “Polyamory portmanteau.” I love portmanteaus. It’s when you squoosh two words together (like squeeze and shmoosh). The answer was THROUPLE. Rex didn’t like it — he said he would have preferred “threedom.” (Let threedom ring!, he wrote.) It gave me the opening to post:
If a throuple decides to end it and winds up in court over who gets the property, it’s a three-piece suit.
When my wife asked if I picked up my outfit for the wedding, I told her I had the jacket and pants but the vest was yet to come.
My buddy “mathgent,” see below. added this:
I had some fun just now looking up THROUPLE (rhymes with “couple”) and menage a trois, and trying to figure out the difference. I think that a THROUPLE can all be of the same sex, menages are two and one. And in a THROUPLE, each member typically will have sex with the other two, not so in a menage.
Good to know.
NEVADA was the answer at 2D, clued with “Home to the U.S. city with the most hotel rooms.” It led Son Volt to share this tune by Deer Tick with us, called “Nevada.”
From the “You-Can’t-Win” Department:
On a family trip about 25 years ago, which included Nevada, I learned that I had been mispronouncing it my whole life (till then). I was saying Nevada like Nev-ah-da, but the locals said it with the “a” as in arrow. I immediately started pronouncing it correctly. My teenaged daughter continued to pronounce it Nev-ah-da. I said, “Caity — we just learned that the people who live here pronounce it Nevada.” And she said, “Well, I don’t live here.”
D’oh!
The puzzle went somewhere it doesn’t usually go with PAD and TAMPON. And Natasha said: “I loved that this puzzle had PAD and TAMPON cross-referencing each other and a neutral reference to “polyamory.” I didn’t love ENGAGEMENTPARTY as the marquis answer, however. F*** the wedding-industrial complex and amatonormativity.” [Wow.]
“Amatonormativity” is a neologism coined by Elizabeth Brake, a philosophy prof at Rice University, in 2011. (Long-grained) It’s the assumption that all human beings pursue love or romance, especially by means of a monogamous long-term relationship.
It’s a two-poem day at Owl Chatter (Hi Jenny!). This first one is from The Writer’s Almanac. It’s called “My Ancestral Home” and is by Louis Jenkins.
We came to a beautiful little farm. From photos
I’d seen I knew this was the place. The house
and barn were painted in the traditional Falu
red, trimmed with white. It was nearly mid-
summer, the trees and grass, lush green, when
we arrived the family was gathered at a table
on the lawn for coffee and fresh strawberries.
Introductions were made all around, Grandpa
Sven, Lars-Olaf and Marie, Eric and Gudren,
Cousin Inge and her two children… It made me
think of a Carl Larsson painting. But, of course,
it was all modern, the Swedes are very up-to-
date, Lars-Olaf was an engineer for Volvo, and
they all spoke perfect English, except for
Grandpa, and there was a great deal of laughter
over my attempts at Swedish. We stayed for a
long time laughing and talking. It was late in
the day, but the sun was still high. I felt a won-
derful kinship. It seemed to me that I had
known these people all my life, they even
looked like family back in the States. But as it
turned out, we had come to the wrong farm.
Lars-Olaf said, “I think I know your people, they
live about three miles from here. If you like I
could give them a call.” I said that no, it wasn’t
necessary, this was close enough.
The clue at 27A today was “Outdoor installation using earth, rocks, vegetation, etc.,” and the answer was LAND ART, something I hadn’t heard of. It started LMS off on quite a paragraph. As you should recall, she teaches disadvantaged kids in NC. She talks about being moved to tears in it, and that’s what happened to me.
“I kept thinking about that LAND ART. As always, when ART comes up, I feel inferior and intimidated. I just don’t ‘get’ most art. The emotion I’m supposed to experience never happens. I take that back; once at the Louvre, a painting by Georges de la Tour rendered me speechless, stunned. And Maya Angelou’s ‘Caged Bird’ poem makes me cry every time. When that caged bird ‘opens his throat to sing … a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still,’ I’m overcome. I teach those birds, caged by the crappy circumstances they were born into, caged by the failure of our collapsing educational system, caged by the ignorance of the everyman who refuses to see their very real, very vast potential.”
Here it is, in case it’s been too long since you’ve read it:
A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
I got a nice e-note from “mathgent” yesterday, much appreciated. LIMERICK was in the puzzle and several folks shared limericks with us, including one on rabbits. It lead me to post this joke:
So these two life-long friends, Pete and Louie, make a pact that when the first one of them dies, he’ll come back after a year and tell the other what the afterlife is like. Years go by and Pete slips on a banana peel (badly) and dies. A year later Louie is waiting up, nervously, hoping to hear from Pete. But it’s midnight, then 1 am, and there’s nothing, so he falls asleep.
A few hours later, it’s pitch dark and he hears “PSST, PSST, Louie.” And he wakes up and says “Pete! You came back!! So what’s it like?” And Pete says, “Well, I get up in the morning, have sex, and then have a little breakfast. Then I have sex again, and then again, and then I have lunch. After lunch, I have sex again, and then again, and then dinner. And then there’s sex one more time and I go to sleep.”
And Louie says, “Wow, so that’s really what heaven is like?” And Pete says, “Who said anything about heaven? — I’m a rabbit in Colorado.”
I posted the joke fairly late in the day (4:30PM), so wasn’t expecting much of a response. But around 6:30, I got this email, which made my evening:
Dear Avi,
It’s too late to reply on the blog. Your joke cracked me up. Then I read it to my wife, who also doubled over. Great one.
mathgent
Quite an EGO BOOST, right? Well, the clue at 34D today was “Spirit-raising?” and the answer was EGO BOOST. It led LMS to post the following from which I learned that “peruse” is a contronym, i.e., a word that means both what it means and its opposite. Like “sanction” means both to allow and to punish. Peruse means both to skim over something and to study it carefully. Here’s what she wrote:
Loved EGO BOOST. Since BOOST can also mean “steal,” that phrase could *almost* be one of those Janus dealies like sanction and peruse. You can get your ego boosted by a compliment or a put-down. Last year, I called the mom of a student from the Congo because I wanted to tell her how terrific her son was. When she answered with an accented, tentative, Hello, I knew I was in trouble. Vic had told me that they speak Lingala, and my Lingala consists of one word: mbote. But I forged ahead. Parlez-vous francais? … Oui. I proceeded to tell her in French how lovely her son was – nice, smart, respectful. The next day my conversation with Vic went something like this:
Me: Did your mom tell you I called?
Vic: Yes
Me: Did she tell you I spoke to her in French?
Vic: Yeah. She said your French isn’t that good.
EGO. BOOSTed. Ouch. Hey – I haven’t really spoken French in almost 40 years. But he assured me that she understood what I was saying.
On the Barbie front, I suggested to Daughter #1 that she take the girls (Lianna, almost 14, and Zoey, 8) to see it as a nice mother/daughter outing. And she told me Lianna already saw it and hated it. D’oh!
Here’s MR, out of character:
That’s a pretty note to end on. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 