The wells from which I draw (steal) poems for Owl Chatter have been dry lately, but The Writer’s Almanac has wonderful material on Carl Sagan today, who was born on this date back in 1934, a Brooklyn boy. He died in 1996.

Sagan received a lot of mail and he kept a file labeled F/C for the crazier stuff. It stood for “fissured ceramics,” aka crackpots. LSD guru Timothy Leary wrote to him. Leary was interested in building a “space ark” and asked Sagan what star they should aim for. Seems like a reasonable question. You don’t want to be wandering around aimlessly out there. When Sagan wrote back that the technology to accomplish that goal did not yet exist, Leary replied: “I am not impressed with your conclusions in these areas.”

Hrrrumph.

This passage is from Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot: “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives […] [E]very king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every revered teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

 He didn’t believe in life after death, and once told his daughter, Sasha, that it was dangerous to believe in something just because you want very badly for it to be true. But he also told her, “We are star stuff,” and made her feel the wonder of being alive.

Happy Birthday, Carl!

You like cake?

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Poet Anne Sexton expressed the same idea, sorta, but more acerbically.  “Live or die. Make up your mind. If you’re going to hang around don’t ruin everything. Don’t poison the world.”

It’s her birthday today too. She was born in 1928, up in Newton, MA (Hi Don and Jelly!). Her bestie was poet Maxine Kumin. They spoke on the phone so much they had a second (secret) phone line installed so they wouldn’t annoy their husbands. She died by suicide in 1974. She wrapped herself in her mother’s old fur coat and climbed into her car and left it running.

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Along the same lines, Frank Bruni included this passage in his “For the Love of Sentences” feature this week. It’s by essayist Maria Popova: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”

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Switching gears, with a loud grinding noise. This headline is from The Borowitz Report, about Ivanka’s testifying in Trump’s fraud case in NY: “Ivanka Unable to Remember Name of Her Father.”

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The giant pandas are gone from the National Zoo — back to China. Tian Tian, Mei Xiang and their youngest cub, Xiao Qi Ji. They’ll probably be happy over there. They will join 150 other pandas in a lush nature preserve in the misty mountains of Sichuan Province. Xiao Qi Ji was born after his mom got too old to have kids, it was thought. Hence his name which means “Little Miracle.”

Remember the old kids’ joke: How do you fit six elephants into a car? Three in the front, three in the back. Well, how do you ship three Pandas back to China. Fedex, of course. The Fedex aircraft, loaded with 220 pounds of bamboo, a veterinarian and two zookeepers, took off for the 19-hour flight from DC to China yesterday.

Time to go, little fella! Boo hoo.

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If you prefer your friends to be out of captivity, you’ll be happy to learn that Flaco, the owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo nine months ago, was sighted in the East Village this week and seems fine. He was ordering some Indian food.

When Flaco first escaped it was feared that 13 years in captivity might have weakened his survival skills, but he’s been doing fine, living off rats which the city has in abundance. Yum! He had settled in Central Park, but fireworks for Sunday’s NYC marathon may have scared him off. After the recent sighting in the East Village, he took off again, heading to who-knows-where.

There was some concern for Flaco’s safety when he left Central Park. But a photographer who has been following him, David Lei, told our Phil: “Part of celebrating his freedom and pursuit of happiness is understanding that he is writing his own story now.”

This shot was taken of our owl friend last Monday. Yup, looks good.

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Try not to make eye contact with a Cyclops. That’s my advice. But the clue today at 33D was not about the fellow’s eye issue. The clue was “Huge,” and the answer CYCLOPEAN. I like it, but (voo den?) Rex was not impressed:
“I’m a middle-aged man who has been teaching Cyclops-containing literature for decades and I’ve never heard or seen the term CYCLOPEAN. They are indeed big, the Cyclopes, but if I were to make an adjective out of their name, I would think the iconic trait would be one-eyed-ness. Lots of things are big. Gargantua was big, and they made an adjective out of his name, and it made sense.” 

So there. [Note: Voo den is Yiddish for “what then?” meaning “what else would you expect?”]

But poster sailor noted:

“For most of recorded history, the Cyclopes were known primarily for their huge size and strength, enabling them (for example) to lift the huge stones to build the ancient Mycenaean walls. So the word has been in continuous use, with the meaning as clued today, for (literally) centuries.” OK, fine.

The puzzle had me up against the ropes — until it didn’t. The theme is hard to explain, but here’s how it worked: The clue at 39A was “Not that shrink!” And answer was crawling with parentheses: PSYCH(O(THE)R)APIST. You were supposed to read the innermost word first (THE), then the next inner one (OTHER), and then the entire word, to come up with: THE OTHER PSYCHOTHERAPIST. Wow! Good wordplay.

And that happened three other times, but not as cleanly. See if you can discern how this one worked:

Clue: “Result of dropping a tray of coffee drinks?” Answer: S(P(LATTE)R)ED. [LATTE PLATTER SPLATTERED]

Since this was a pretty wacky use of parentheticals, I posted a comment that said “This puzzle is in loco parenthesis.” (Get it?) It’s gotten no responses, thank goodness.

At 5D, would you have known that “Iconic feature of the Who’s ‘My Generation’” is BASS SOLO? I didn’t — I needed the crosses to get it. Let’s check it out.

One Rex poster opined that a better iconic feature of “My Generation” would be “stuttering.” Ag-ag-ag agreed.

Getting back to the psychotherapist for a moment, poster Andrew reminded us of an unfortunate portmanteau combining “analyst” and “therapist.” Take a look:

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A study released by The Onion concludes: People who are obsessed with celebrities may be less intelligent. A Hungarian study has found “a direct association between celebrity worship and poorer performance on cognitive tests,” with data showing high scores on the Celebrity Attitude Scale correlating with lower performance on two cognitive ability tests.

D’oh! That can’t include Taylor Swift, though. Right?

See you tomorrow!