Wow. No sooner do we finish watching the first season of HBO’s White Lotus, with Sydney Sweeney playing the rich couple’s daughter, than she shows up as the hot babe in the Rolling Stones’ video of their new song “Angry.” Our Phil was able to call in a few favors and get an advance copy of it for Owl Chatter — check it out! It’s vintage Stones.
And here’s Syd:
Mick’s 80, Keith is 79, and Ronnie Wood is the baby at 76, but the only one who has lost a step or two is drummer Charlie Watts, who died in 2021. Watts had recommended the new drummer, Steve Jordan, about whom Keith said it would have been a lot harder moving on without Charlie’s blessing. Charlie is missed “incredibly.” He’s on two of the tracks on the new album, Hackney Diamonds. It’s been 18 years between albums, which Mick explained by noting the band is a bit lazy.
The story in the NYT today ended with the following observation about their unannounced theater performance promoting the new album:
“As the huddle to see the band grew, three schoolgirls walking past asked what was happening. Told it was the Rolling Stones, Anya Morrison, 16, said, ‘I’ve heard of them, I think.’ Then she got on a bus home.”
Let’s not let go of Sydney so fast. It’s her birthday next Tuesday: she’ll be 26. She was born in Spokane to a criminal defense lawyer mom and hospitality professional dad. Makes us wonder if the smarmy Armond in White Lotus has a little of the dad in him. Hope not, though I did love poor Armond.
Sydney was raised in northwestern Idaho in the panhandle region along the Washington border at a rural lakeside home that her family has inhabited for five generations. Sweeney says she has a “religious family,” in which case let’s hope they don’t see the Stones’ video.
She’s not just a pretty face. She studied entrepreneurship at UCLA, which is nearly impossible to spell, let alone study. They couldn’t come up with something less letter-y? And she’s already earned two Emmy nominations (for Euphoria and White Lotus). She was a sports nut in HS, participating in every sport she could, including wakeboarding, which was the subject of a joke in White Lotus, when her dad calls it waterboarding. Roaring, she corrects him: “It’s wakeboarding, Dad — waterboarding is a form of torture.” Oh, yeah. That.
FYI, wakeboarding is like water skiing except you try to stay in the boat’s wake and perform aerial maneuvers.
Yeah, she looks athletic. How’d you keep up with her Phil?
The clue at 13D today was “___ ipsum (placeholder text),” and the answer was LOREM. Lorem ipsum is a truncation of dolorem ipsum which means “pain itself,” not to be confused with dolorem assum which means, well, you can figure it out. It’s Latin writing that’s used when you just need some text to take up space until what really goes there is ready. Thus, “placeholder text.” Here’s how it can be used in a sentence:
A strong case could be made that Owl Chatter in its entirety is nothing but lorem ipsum.
Commenter Mary shared this standard Lorem Ipsum passage from lipsum.com, used since the 1500s:
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”
Thanks Mary!
Another doozy today was at 62A where the answer was TURING TESTS, which Alan Turing devised (duh). It was also called the imitation game. It’s a test to distinguish between a human and a machine. That is, if you are conferring with a party and you are not sure if it/he/she is a person or a machine, the Turing Test will let you know. It was devised as part of Turing’s investigation into whether machines can think. I don’t think I should take it any deeper than that. Here’s Turing.
Some cute clues today: 15A “Adam’s apple locale.” You might think neck or throat, but it’s EDEN.
And 43A was “What often has a heart beat?” and the answer was SPADE. As in playing cards — in some games a spade “beats” a heart.
The puzzle overall was very funny, IMO. The constructor, Ryan Patrick Smith, was pretending it was written by a computer pretending to be a person. So the clue at 17A was “What this puzzle is definitely not, having been created by me, a real and true human being,” and the answer was AI GENERATED.
And at 62A the clue for TURING TESTS, discussed above, was “Assessments I would pass with flying colors — if I had anything to prove, which I don’t, since I’m human.” (Get it?)
My favorite was at 40A. The clue was “Ambitious objective for, um, a total villain, not a human like me! How did this answer even get in here? (Nervous synthetic laugh),” and the answer was WORLD DOMINATION.
The Gnats snapped their losing streak at 6 games by beating the Mets last night 3-2. In one of the middle innings, the final out by the Gnats was a fly ball caught by Met outfielder Brandon Nimmo. Before heading for the dugout, he took several steps towards the outfield stands and threw the ball into the seats. He seemed to be aiming for, and the camera showed, one girl, about ten, wearing a Mets jersey standing in a small sea of kids wearing Gnats-phernalia. The announcers and we surmised Nimmo was trying to get the ball to her. But a little kid in a Gnats jersey caught it instead. The announcers and the camera followed the drama. The Mets girl pleaded her case to the little boy — he meant to give it to me!, she said. And the little boy gave it to her — she held out her glove and he let it plop into it.
The announcers were effusive in their praise for the little boy — he did the right thing. He should feel good about it, although sad about losing the ball of course. A nice character study, except it didn’t end there. The camera came back to them the next inning to show the little girl and her dad enjoying the ball, and showing the poor little boy crying. His mom was trying to console him, but, you know, f*ck that. Searing human drama at Gnats Park.
Happy ending: Word of the drama reached the Gnats higher ups and they came over to the section and thanked the little guy for doing the right thing and they gave him a ball.
God Bless America.
Good night, everybody. Thanks for dropping in!
The Wellington Files 