This song is from a funny and wonderful British show called “The Detectorists.” It (the show) was recommended to Owl Chatter by Astoria Bob, who’s in the OC Art Department and we loved it.
I felt the touch of the kings and the breath of the wind
I knew the call of all the song birds
They sang all the wrong words
I’m waiting for you
I’m with the ghosts of the men who can never sing again
There’s a place: follow me
Where a love lost at sea
Is waiting for you
The puzzles today and yesterday were aimed at two areas foreign to me, but were fun and I was able to complete them. Yesterday’s was a linguistics lesson and an homage to Noam Chomsky, who is still living and is 94. Today involved reading music (which I can’t).
Back in 1957, Chomsky devised a famous sentence which he used to note that a sentence could be fine syntactically but have no meaning. The sentence was: COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY. So the puzzle included those words along with NOAM CHOMSKY himself, and the word NONSENSICAL. Curmudgeon Rex grumbled: There is absolutely nothing happening here. It’s basically a quotation. There’s no wordplay, no cleverness, nothing. Just “here is this guy who said this thing that is famous in his field” that’s it.
Ouch.
He liked today’s puzzle much better. It was pretty clever. At four locations it gave you a clue for a word along with a (musical) key signature. You had to solve the clue, and add the musical point to come up with a different (unclued) word. What? For example, at 45A the clue was
for the answer PALEST. The key is E, so it was “IN E.” So putting them together got you PALESTINE.
“Some energy drinks” was MONSTERS, and they were “IN C,” so you got MONSTERS, INC as the full answer.
“Court athlete, slang” was BALLER. It was “IN A,” so you end up with BALLERINA.
Last, and best (IMO) was “Leaf-raking time,” which is FALL and it’s IN G FLAT, so you get FALLING FLAT.
A clever clue/answer unrelated to the theme was “Made a semi circle, say?” The answer was STEERED. You steer to make a semi (truck) drive in a circle.
Jersey girl Meryl STREEP was in the grid too. The clue was “Holder of a record 21 Oscar nominations for acting.” Yikes, that’s a big number. She won three times. Not only is she from NJ, she’s from Summit, NJ, which is walking distance from Owl Chatter headquarters, maybe half an hour walk. She went to Vassar for her BA and Yale for her MFA. Here’s how she looked in those days.
She’s been married to sculptor Don Gummer since 1978. They have four kids: their son Henry is a musician, and their daughters Mamie, Grace, and Louisa, are actresses.
Jeez Louise! — “Weed in some medicinal wine” is DANDELION? Gimme a break!
Good song, though. It was first released by the Stones way back in 1967 (ouch), and, hey! — is that John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing the backing vocals? Neat! The Stones have never performed it live.
Jeanette Wyneken, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, has studied nesting sea turtles for over 30 years. She says we can’t be entirely joyful about the record number of sea turtle nests that popped up in 2023. Restrictions on beachfront development and careful monitoring of nests have helped get hatchlings safely to the water, and a gill net ban in 1995 sharply reduced the number of young turtles killed by fishing gear. A 13-mile stretch of beach in Florida in the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge set aside in 1991, had about 1,000 green sea turtle nests in 1994, almost 12,000 in 2013, and more than 23,000 this year. Woohoo!
But a portion of those nests are not bearing hatchlings. The eggs are most likely being killed by extreme heat and dryness, and Prof. Wyneken was quoted in the Times as saying, a bit unprofessionally: “it worries the crap out of me.”
The fear is the vast number of nests will send the message that environmental protections can be reduced. But the sea turtles are far from out of the woods (or out of wherever they should be out of). We’ll have to keep an eye on them, for sure. Thanks, Doc.
Here’s a six-pack of hatchlings.
We’ll let those little fellas (or gals) send us off tonight. Thanks for popping by!
The Wellington Files 