Some very creative people were born on this date. Send in the clowns (or owls!) to celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s birth in NYC in 1930. His very brief write-up in The Writer’s Almanac quotes him as saying “I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.” (He was Jewish.)
And poet Billy Collins, also born in the city, eleven years later. This poem of his is called “The Country.”
I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice
might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.
Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe
behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,
the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—
now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,
lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?
I crashed on the puzzle today. Just couldn’t nail it. At 10D, the clue was “Slogan on a blue, pink and white pin.” I had TRANSP and filled in trans power. But that was wrong. It turned out to be trans pride and it just didn’t come to me. Two crosses didn’t help. Have you heard of Cereal RYE? I hadn’t. And “Tamil [blank], India” was NADU. Gimme a break!!
There was also grumbling about 48A: “___ Dutta, winner of the Miss Universe 2000 pageant.” Answer LARA. WTF!! But that came easily to me from the crosses. She’s an actress from India and very pretty.
I also failed at 17A: “One of two in Mötley Crüe.” The answer was METAL UMLAUT. I love it, but I had never heard of it. It’s a thing with its own Wikipedia page: A metal umlaut (also known as röck döts) is a diacritic (mark) that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively over letters in the names of mainly hard rock or heavy metal bands—for example, Blue Öyster Cult, Queensrÿche, Motörhead, Mötley Crüe and the parody bands Spın̈al Tap and Green Jellÿ.
[Green Jellÿ, a comedy rock band, used to be Green Jello, but changed its name due to pressure from Kraft Foods to protect its Jell-O brand name. One of its songs is “I’ll Buy You Any Major Appliance You Want Baby, Ooo Ooo”.]
The first umlaut use was by Blue Öyster Cult in 1970. It’s not designed to affect pronunciation. Its purpose is to give a gothic or tough effect. The Onion once ran a story: “Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts.”
In the puzzle METAL UMLAUT appeared right under another clue/answer I really liked: 13A “Pie preference,” was EXTRA CHEESE.
Other strong entries were “Petty person?” for ANIMAL LOVER. (Get it? Petty = petting.) And “Inapt response when somebody says ‘Happy birthday!,’ presumably” was SAME TO YOU.
Here’s another Petty person.
At 60A, “60s peace org” was SDS. It elicited this comment: Not sure a group established and funded by the auto workers union can be considered a peace org.
And then this reply: As an old SDSer, I would agree that it was not a peace organization — it had many goals along the lines of economic reform and, in particular, participatory democracy. And in Vietnam the primary focus was victory by the National Liberation Front, not “peace” per se. As for UAW funding, though, that was SDS’s predecessor, the League for Industrial Democracy. The UAW broke ties when SDS repealed the rule that members could not be communists.
[SDS stands for Students for a Democratic Society and sought to broaden out from its historic labor base. Its first meeting was held at U. Michigan in 1960 and its first convention in 1962 with Tom Hayden as President. The UAW did cover expenses at that point. The split over communism followed.]
Boy, with Abbie Hoffman in the other day and the SDS today, the puzzle is doing some serious time travel.
Going to say goodnight early tonight. Catching the Oregon State Lady Beavers first round game in the big tourney. Who’s our star tonight?
Go Beavs! See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 