With three of its top executives bounced from their positions, Boeing today announced it was changing its name to Boing.
Don’t take your eyes off of Lily Hansford, this very pretty young woman from Green Bay, WI, — not that you’d want to.
She’s a sniper; she will drive a stake through your hopes. That’s what she did twice on Sunday for the Oregon State Lady Beavers as they defeated Nebraska 61-51 to advance to the Sweet 16. At 6′ 2″, blonde and brown-eyed, Hansford has the highest shooting percentage from three-point range on the team. Twice when the Cornhuskers were creeping back into the game, she sank long arcing shots from the corner, and buried Nebraska’s comeback bids. We’ll be watching Lily when the Beavs take on Notre Dame Friday at 2:30. The Lady Irish bring serious sh*t. This will be a very tough game.
This poem by Frederick Smock is called “Morning.” It’s from yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac.
All year long there is
the table by the window,
blue cups with white rims,
the black teapot.
There are sometimes flowers,
when we remember.
There are paisley napkins,
and always oranges.
The window looks down
into a courtyard,
and sometimes up
into blue sky.
The puzzle today, at 24A, brought a smile to the hard-working folks in our Dirty Old Man Dept: “The Sports ___ (Portland bar dedicated to women’s athletics).” What a great clue for BRA!
It’s a sports bar with a heavy emphasis on women’s sports. It especially features Portland’s female soccer team, The Portland Thorns, pledging to show every game of theirs with the sound on. It’s Portland OR, btw — in the Sullivan’s Gulch neighborhood and it’s LGBTQ-owned.
People loved the puzzle today. The theme was revealed at 34A: “Kind of fallacious argument … or, phonetically, a hint to the answers to the starred clues.” The answer was AD HOMINEM, and the idea was to use phrases that “added” a homonym at the end. Get it? Add homonym.
So, e.g., my favorite was 57A: “Mother Superior?” was SECOND TO NONE NUN (none and nun being the homonyms.)
Similarly, 17A was “Mint on a pillow, maybe?” and the answer was HOTEL SUITE SWEET.
Commenter Ben wrote: I generally enjoyed the theme, except for a fairly glaring flaw — as I say them, at least, “hominem” and “homonym” are not homonymous: I say the final syllable of “hominem” as to rhyme with “hem,” and that of “homonym” to rhyme with “him.”
[Homonymous!! Love it.]
C’mon Benny — it’s close enough for crosswords.
Owl Chatter’s good friend Miriam Webster chimed in: “Homonym can be troublesome because it may refer to three distinct classes of words. Homonyms may be words with identical pronunciations but different spellings and meanings, such as to, too, and two. Or they may be words with both identical pronunciations and identical spellings but different meanings, such as quail (the bird) and quail (to cringe). Finally, they may be words that are spelled alike but are different in pronunciation and meaning, such as the bow of a ship and bow that shoots arrows. The first and second types are sometimes called homophones, and the second and third types are sometimes called homographs—which makes naming the second type a bit confusing. Some language scholars prefer to limit homonym to the third type.“
Clear?
The issue arose as to whether an ad hominem attack is “fallacious,” as the clue states. I thought of it more as “off the topic” than fallacious. But Wikipedia says: “Ad hominem (Latin for ‘to the person’), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.”
Okay, if you insist.
Wait, what’s that? Argggggh — our Dirty Old Man Dept doesn’t want us to leave The Sports Bra so quickly. OK, fellas — but just one tasteful one, and that’s it! Here’s one of my tax students modeling a simple version. Thanks Melodie! Throw something on before class — the guys will all have strokes.
Owl Chatter recently endorsed “These Puzzles Fund Abortion 4.” For a donation of just $20 you get a packet of very good puzzles. If you are not a puzzler but want to help these good folks and great cause, consider their merch at the following link: https://www.bonfire.com/these-puzzles-fund-abortion-4/?utm_source=copy_link&utm_medium=campaign_page&utm_campaign=these-puzzles-fund-abortion-4&utm_content=default
Here’s the hoodie:
Alright — not quite as exciting as Melodie in her sports bra, but it’s a nice hoodie. Phil picked one up for Taylor.
From egsforbreakfast today:
Waiter: I’m pleased to inform you that we have a new main course on our MENU tonight.
Diner: Entre nous, is this entree new?
Speaking of women, have you heard of the Bechdel test? It was mentioned by Rex’s guest blogger Claire today. It’s a measure of how male-dominated movies are. She noted that Shrek (who often appears in a puzzle clue for OGRE) — that the movie Shrek does not pass the Bechdel test.
To pass the test (1) at least two women must be in the film, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something other than men. In some versions, the women must have names. The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in whose 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For the test first appeared. Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf. Bechdel herself prefers the test to be called the Bechdel-Wallace test.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf wrote: “All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. … And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. … They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that.”
The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited database of some 6,500 films classified by whether they pass the test (with the added requirement that the women must be named characters). As of April 2015, 42% of these films fell short of passing all three of the test’s requirements. An analysis by BBC in 2018 looked at the 89 films that won Oscars for Best Film and found slightly less than half (44) passed.
One writer further noted that half of the films that pass the test only pass because the women are talking about marriage or babies.
The Pistons have hit the skids again. Since winning three of four earlier in March, they have lost seven in a row. Ouch! They are severely short-handed: starters Cunningham and Duren are nursing injuries. Hope they come back by April 6, when we’re heading over to Brooklyn with Phil and Georgie to see them face the Nets, God and NJ Transit willing.
Special Owl Chatter wishes go out to our friend Justine who’s having cataract surgery soon — Don’t let them push you around, girl!
Good night, everybody! See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 