Can tomorrow night’s Colorado-Colorado State game get any more delicious? State’s coach Jay Norvell took a personal swipe at Colorado Coach Deion Sanders: “When I talk to grown-ups, I take my hat off and my glasses off. That’s what my mother taught me.” It was a reference to Deion’s ever-present shades and cap.
Sanders was not going to let it slide by. His response: “Now he messin’ with my mama.”
He went on: “I’m a grown man, you telling me what I’m supposed to wear, what I’m not supposed to wear. Please.” (Norvell is 60; Deion is a very youthful 56.)
“I’m minding my own business, watching some film, trying to get ready, trying to get out here and be the best coach I can be and I look up and I read some bull junk that they done said about us,” Sanders told his players.
“Once again. Why would you want to talk about us when we don’t talk about nobody? All we do is go out here, work our butts off and do our job on Saturday. But when they give us ammunition, they done messed around and made it what? Personal.”
May have to drop 50 on them, eh Prime Time?
Mary Clarissa Agatha Miller was born on this date in 1890. She is better known as Agatha Christie. She worked as a nurse in WWI, which is how she learned a bit about poisons, which came in handy in her writing. Her first book was rejected but the next one featured an extravagantly mustached Belgian detective named Poirot and it took off. Personally, Christie found Poirot “insufferable and an egocentric creep.” When she finally killed him off, the Times ran his obituary on the front page.
She disliked guns, so her victims were killed by other means, often poisons. In one book, a child dies bobbing for apples; in another, a murderer is subdued by being squirted with soapy water.
Here’s a pic of Agatha Christie as a young girl, no doubt looking at some fellow and thinking: Let’s lop his head off and take it from there.
Happy Birthday, AC.
I had two wisdom teeth removed yesterday — upper and lower on my left side. The doc told me for a few days when I eat anything, I should limit myself to the right side. So I only had the right half of my tuna sandwich at lunch, and only the white part of my black and white cookie.
14D in the puzzle today was: “Some complainers, in modern lingo,” and the answer was KARENS. Rex noted: I love this, but not everyone will. Some people think this is a slur. Some people think it’s misogynist (feminizing the act of complaining, in the grand tradition of “harpy,” “shrew”). But I know women who use it. Opinions will vary.
One fellow wrote: KAREN is an unambiguously derogatory term with clear sexist/racist/classist overtones. It has no place in any puzzle.
And Weezie really got into it:
“KAREN is one of those terms that emerged out of Black culture with a very specific meaning and setting that some white folks have co-opted and broadened in a way that doesn’t reflect the political analysis that was part of why the word emerged in the first place. A Karen in its original meaning is a white woman, often middle aged or older, usually class privileged, who is so entitled and locked in to her racist assumptions and entitlement that she will attempt to involve authorities when she feels uncomfortable with some normal thing that Black (or BIPOC folks) are doing. The consummate Karen is the woman who called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher in Central Park, and claimed she had been threatened simply because he dared to ask her to leash her dog.
“Unfortunately (and similarly to ‘woke’), the term got defanged by non-Black folks and is now being used to mean ‘complainers.’ So my nit here is not with the definition, but with the broader culture that has robbed this word of its really robust meaning. It’s about the gendered ways in which some ‘white’ women enact white fragility, but the way I see some (usually white) men use it now it basically seems like a sexist insult for any person who sets a boundary. I saw a trail review recently in which a white guy called a trail steward a Karen for asking them gently to pick up their trash and put out an illegal campfire above 3500’. That’s not being a Karen, that’s doing a literal job that protects an ecosystem and the people who live in it. Anyway, I know that word meanings evolve, but this one’s a personal pet peeve of mine, so you all got an essay.”
Happy New Year, everybody! Is it 5784 already? Hard to believe. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 