On most Mondays we take Granddaughter #1, Lianna, to school. Lawton C. Johnson Summit NJ Middle School, 8th grade. I yelled up to her that we had to go and she yelled back that she was still putting her bracelets on. They are not Taylor Swift friendship bracelets — Lianna is too cool to be a Swiftie — but there are about 25 of them, give or take. When she finally came down, all braceleted up, I noticed she also had various attachments all over the place — pants, hair, neck, etc. I said, Lianna — you don’t get dressed in the morning, you get assembled.
Remember when Tipper Gore was all up in arms over the lyrics in kids’ music? They devised warning stickers. How quaint that all seems now. Today’s music makes those old tunes seem like kindergarten songs. This morning Lianna treated us to a song that rhymed “comatose” with “overdose.” There are f-bombs all over the place. So much for your f*cking stickers Tipper. I’m glad I’m just the driver.
Here’s Tipper with her daughter and some guy.
The puzzle surprised me today by having “Numbered classical pieces” be OPUSES, i.e., the plural of opus. I had heard the plural of opus was opera, and it was one of my favorite plurals. (You all have favorite plurals, right?) So I checked with our dear friend Miriam Webster and she assured me the plural of opus is opera. But opuses is correct too.
Remember Steve Forbert? He’s a folkie from the late 70s. He turned 69 last month, and he’s from Mississippi. Sam and I saw him a few years ago in Annie Arbor at The Ark. Anyway, here’s one of his hits, “Romeo’s Tune.” (ROMEOS was in the puzzle today, nicely clued with “Lover boys.”)
“Let me smell the moon in your perfume.”
The puzzle was good today — even Rex liked it. The theme was “the birds and the bees,” so each theme answer had a phrase comprised of a bird and a second word that started with the letter B. GOOSE BUMPS. PENGUIN BOOKS. TURKEY BOWL. My favorite was “Certain ice cream or soap product,” DOVE BAR.
The clue at 66A was “What a score of 70 or less signifies on a common standardized test,” and the answer was LOW IQ. It set Rex off: ”LOW IQ is such a grim answer. All IQ stuff just reeks of eugenics. All IQ-related answers make me cringe. . . .” He cited an article from the DePaul Law Review.
It recounts how the IQ test was developed to identify lesser people for weeding out. Here is one paragraph from it:
In 1927, eugenic rhetoric condemning the “feebleminded” found its
way into the nation’s highest court. In Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the involuntary sterilization of Carrie Buck, a so-called “imbecile.” The Court noted that she was not only “feebleminded,” but also “the daughter of a feeble minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded child. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, famously declared, “[i]t is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them
starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind …. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (Apparently, he never met my in-laws. Just kidding, darling!)
Since we reported on the Pistons 4th win of the season last Monday, they have dropped two more games. So they are now 4-38. In their loss to Milwaukee Saturday they scored 135 points. (The Bucks scored 141.) They play the Bucks again tonight. Oy.
The Pistons are paying their head coach, Monty Williams, $78.5 million for a six-year contract — the highest amount in NBA history. Perhaps if they bumped it up to $100 million? Just sayin’.
Phil said this was closest thing to a smile he could get out of the poor guy.
It figures that just as he’s pulling out of the race, right-wing monster Ron DeSantis finally does something to win me over. In his dropout video, he used a quote that he thought was by Winston Churchill but was actually from — get ready for it — a Budweiser commercial.
I know — seriously, right? — you cannot make this stuff up.
The quote that DeSantis attributed to Churchill is: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Historians have repeatedly disproved that Churchill said it. The International Churchill Society states: “This fake quote is very often attributed to Churchill but appears nowhere in the Churchill canon.”
Richard Langworth, a historian and the author of 11 books on the wartime leader said, “While included in some poorly researched quote books, the quote can’t be found among Churchill’s 50 million published books, articles, speeches and papers; and words about him by close colleagues.” He added that it does not sound like Churchill’s prose.
So what, in fact, is the quote’s provenance? It comes from a Budweiser advertisement from 1938. (Burp!) It featured a young boy going fishing despite a gloomy weather forecast. The ad said: “The man who has lost the spirit of youth is too busy with gloomy forecasts to gather bait, much less go fishing. Men with the spirit of youth pioneered our America… men with vision and sturdy confidence. They found contentment in the thrill of action, knowing that success was never final and failure never fatal.”
Only a few hours before the post with the fake quote, DeSantis’s campaign chief faced criticism for spending too much time working on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. (Again, we are not kidding.)
Here’s Winston and his wife Casey. Hmmmm — does he look a little like Paul Rudd to you?
It’s been too long since we had a visit from Ted Kooser, Owl Chatter’s poet laureate. Wassup, TK? You got something for us?
This is from Winter Morning Walks
When I switched on a light in the barn loft
late last night, I frightened four flickers
hanging inside, peering out through their holes.
Confused by the light, they began to fly
wildly from one end to the other,
their yellow wings slapping the tin sheets
of the roof, striking the walls, scrabbling
and falling. I cut the light
and stumbled down and out the door and stood
in the silent dominion of starlight
till all five of our hearts settled down.
Thanks for stopping by. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 