OK folks, here’s Owl Chatter’s tip for today: If someone comes up to you and asks: “Are you the lawmaker Bae Hyun-jin?” just say no. This happened to the real Bae Hyun-jin yesterday and the next thing she knew some 15-year-old kid hit her over the head with a rock the size of a fist 15 times in ten seconds. She fell backwards and hit her head on the pavement. D’oh! This caused some cuts around her eyes and on her face. The rock attack caused some bleeding, but she remained conscious and should be okay. The attacker is under arrest.

Bae is a member of the South Korean National Assembly and a member of the People Power Party, for whom she picks pickled peppers. She was a news anchorwoman previously. This sentence appears in her Wikipedia writeup: ”Although she had had a short career as an anchor, she responded calmly when Kwon Jae-hong abruptly left in the middle of a program because of a sudden headache.”  Man, I hate those headaches. I hope he or she is feeling better. Here’s Bae. She’s 40, enjoys yoga, reading, and baseball, and has never had a boyfriend (by her own choice, for sure).

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The folksinger Melanie passed away on Tuesday. She was 76. Her full name was Melanie Anne Safka and she was born in Astoria, Queens. Her family moved to Long Branch NJ where she was ridiculed as a “beatnik” so she ran away to California. Yikes! When she returned, the family moved to Red Bank NJ. (Did you know that the First National Trust Co. of Red Bank opened an office in Long Branch? It was the Long Branch branch of the Red Bank bank.) Get this — she graduated from Red Bank HS in 1966 but was barred from attending graduation because of an overdue library book. (You can’t make this stuff up!) Revenge: Thirty years later she was inducted into the school’s hall of fame.

Melanie was one of only two female performers to perform solo at Woodstock. (Joan Baez was the other.) She had been performing at small cafes before, and it freaked her out to see 400,000 people in the audience. It began to rain before she started and thousands of people lit candles. That image inspired her song “Candles in the Rain.”

You may recall her other hits, “Look What They Did to My Song, Ma,” and “Brand New Key.” She had a raspy, compelling voice. Billboard named her the top female vocalist of 1972. The “key” in “Brand New Key” was a roller-skate key, but this lyric was interpreted as sexual (or the key was read to mean “kilo”), and the song was banned on some stations:

Well, I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates
You’ve got a brand-new key
I think that we should get together
And try them on to see

She said the song was about her innocent days learning how to ride a bike and skate and “the thrill of first love.” Nothing sexual or drug-y. We believe you, Mel. 

Melanie married her record producer Peter Schekeryk in 1968. He died in 2010. They had two daughters, Leilah and Jeordie, and a son, Beau Jarred. The girls, when 7 and 6, released a cover of “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” that reached #27 on the charts in Canada, although Mel was their mom, not their grandma. Still.

She wanted to be thought of as a serious social commentator but never overcame her “cherubic” image.  She said “‘Brand New Key’ doomed me to be cute for the rest of my life.”

There are worse things than cute. Rest in peace, Mel.

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What the hell is Harold Baines doing in the Hall of Fame? He was a very good player — but Hall of Fame? You need to be on 75% of the ballots to get in, yet Baines never got over 6.1%. That’s not a typo – let me write it out — he never got over six point one percent. He was voted in by an alternate panel of 16: six players, one manager, six executives, and three journalists, several of whom had a close personal relationship with Baines. The decision was subject to intense criticism, and rightfully so, IMO. But he’s a good man. I’m not going to go nuts over it.

Baines comes up because when I heard that Adrian Beltre was inducted into the Hall this week, for a moment I wondered if it was another Baines. But that’s not the case at all – Beltre is totally deserving, and was on a whopping 95.1% of the ballots. He had 3,166 lifetime hits, 477 HR, and 1,707 RBI. He won a Gold Glove at third base five times. He is the all-time leader for third basemen in hits, RBI, and plate appearances (12,130). At retirement, his 2,993 games played was the 14th highest in MLB history.

It’s easy, in baseball, for the game to squelch your personality a bit. If you’re too brash, you can catch sh*t for being unprofessional. And Beltre was quiet for the earlier part of his career. It was only when he joined the Rangers in 2011 that his personality blossomed. He was very funny (by baseball standards). He was on deck one night but standing closer to the plate than the on deck circle. (He later explained he did that because it was safer for avoiding foul balls.) Usually it wasn’t a problem, but this time the second-base umpire told him he had to be on the circle. So Beltre went over, picked up the circle, and moved it to where he had been standing, and stood on it. He got kicked out of the game.

He did other little funny things: played patty-cake with second base after he slid in on a close play; ran way out into left field to avoid a tag. You know how the announcer might say the runner took a lead and was “dancing” off the base? Beltre actually danced out there from time to time. 

When it became clear he’d make it into the Hall, I picked up an autographed card of his off of eBay for my collection. That was a goal of mine way back when I started it in high school — to get as many Hall of Famers as I could. So I try to keep up with the new inductees unless they have become too overpriced. (In the early days, you could write a letter to the players and they’d answer! No more. Too much money in autographs.)

Here’s Adrian’s card. 

Mazel Tov, Buddy!

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Let’s get to the puzzle. Up for another tune? At 25D, the clue was “Ones whose careers have turning points?” and the answer was BALLERINAS. Here you go:

Everyone loved 4D. The clue was “Starts off-key?” And the answer was HOT WIRES. Get it? To hot wire a car is to start it without a key. 

But my favorite clue/answer was at 4A: The “handsaw” in Hamlet’s “I know a hawk from a handsaw.” The answer was HERON. I had completely forgotten the quote. The King had just welcomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who were visiting, and he explained to them that Hamlet was off his rocker and the King was hoping they could use their friendship with H to figure out what was bugging him. 

But Hamlet explains to them that the King is deceived. And he says: ”I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Hamlet’s “handsaw” is a corruption of heronshaw, which is a bird (a heron) — so he’s really saying he knows a hawk from a heron. To confuse matters further, a hawk is another term for a mortarboard, that a plasterer uses, so Shakespeare may be playing off hawk and handsaw as two tools, as well as their being two birds. If you followed all of that, that makes one of us.

Commenter egs added:  I don’t know my ass from a handsaw, which has resulted in some painful carpentry projects.

BTW, Hitchcock’s film title North by Northwest is derived from this quote.

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If you like picking nits, 23A was “Rutabaga, for one” and the answer was TUBER. Are you outraged? Dusty R says: I’m not going to die on this hill, but from what I remember taking plant science classes in college, a rutabaga is a taproot not a tuber. I realize that if you google rutabaga it says “tuber,” even on some university extension websites, but they are significantly different parts of a plant morphologically.

Hrrrrrumph! 

See you tomorrow.