Let’s wake up with a hot song this morning! It’s Bull in the Heather by Sonic Youth. It’s relevant because THE CRETAN BULL (“Bovid of Greek mythology”) was in the puzzle today. Have a listen and then we can chat about it a bit. Hey, careful with that nail polish, girl!

The song was released exactly 30 years ago tomorrow. The title refers to a racehorse that won the Florida Derby in 1993. Kim Gordon is the singer and bass player. She says the song is about “using passiveness as a form of rebellion—like, I’m not going to participate in your male-dominated culture, so I’m just going to be passive.” Can you tell she was five months pregnant when the video was shot? She gave birth that July to her only child, daughter Coco Hayley Gordon Moore. The dad was Thurston Moore, one of the guitarists. They were married for close to 30 years, divorced in 2013. Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna is dancing around in the video and accidentally gave Moore a bloody lip during it.

Here are the two of them years later. Jeez, Coco got big.

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Hey Bob — you remember this?

AYN Rand was in the puzzle today. She was pretty well-known for the book she wrote about that hotel in Florida The Fontainebleau. Anyway, I posted this on Rex’s site:

“Jeez Louise, you know the clutter in your brain has gotten out of hand when you have an AYN Rand story to share (67A). (Steve Martin said it would be good as you grow old if you could shift some of the detritus from your brain, which is losing capacity, to your stomach, which has grown cavernous.)

Anyway, on AYN, back in college several of us had read some books of hers and a discussion about her arose one evening. It was the era of ‘free love,’ and the question came up: ‘What does Ayn Rand say about sex?’ And Bob chimed in with ‘Not tonight.’”

[How I remember that from over 50 years ago is a mystery. Good line Bob!]

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You may be able to find a letter to the editor in the NYT more beautiful than this one, but I wouldn’t bet on it:

To the Editor:

The problem is not that we are confusing the male/female binary; the problem is that the human gender story is bigger than a simple binary, and our language does not reflect that, but it should.

When we adhere to strict binary language, we are asking gender-abundant people to amputate whole parts of themselves. We need to allow people to flourish in the language that fits them.

As my 9-year-old recently explained to my 6-year-old, “You don’t really know what gender a baby is when it’s born, because you know their parts, but you don’t know their heart.”

Meghan Lin, St. Paul, MN

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At 7A in the puzzle yesterday, the clue was “Mental [blank]” and the answer was MATH. Mental math. It perplexed Rex who wondered, “Is there such a thing as physical math that I missed in school? But comments explained it probably means math you work out in your head, as opposed to on paper or with a calculator.

Hey can you tell me what 65 squared is in two seconds in your head? I can — there’s a trick Mathgent taught us. [Judy —- you know about this?] It works for any number ending in 5. For 65, take the six and multiply it by the number right above it (7). So 6 x 7 = 42. Then stick 25 on at the end: 4225. So 65 squared = 4225. Try it!

And it turns out you can use a similar trick to multiply any pair of numbers with the last digits adding up to ten and the first digits the same. So, e.g., for 83 x 87, take the 8 and multiply it by 9 for 72. Then multiply 3 x 7 to get 21. Put them together to get 7221, which is 83 x 87. (The squaring trick above is just a subset of this.)

So, there, I’ve changed your life.

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Yesterday’s puzzle was wonderful, IMO. The theme was THE CYCLOPS, aka POLYPHEMUS. His friends called him Polly. He only had one eye, so the puzzle only had one letter “I.” That included the clues — there was only one letter “I” in the grid and none in the clues. That “I” in the grid was encircled and was part of the word MAIM coming down and I CAN’T SEE going across, a reference to the part of the Odyssey in which Odysseus drives a stake through the giant’s eye. You may recall Odysseus had previously told the Cyclops that his name was “Nobody,” so when the Cyclops asks for help and is asked who put out his eye, he says “Nobody.” It’s sort of the original “Who’s on First” routine. “Third base: I don’t know!” BTW, it’s where the expression “I’ll keep an eye out for you” comes from. (No it doesn’t.)

Amazingly, Phil was on hand when the maiming took place and got this shot for us.

It looks like Odysseus’s head had fallen off — but so what?

I posted the following: My incredibly beautiful grandchildren Zoey (8) and Leon (6) team up very nicely when confronting their younger siblings or the world at large. But they do on occasion blow up into a battle between themselves. It starts off nuclear — they go right for the eyes. I yell, “ZOEY — not the eyes!!” How anyone makes it out of childhood in one piece is a miracle.

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Brooklyn lost a giant on Tuesday: Carl “Oisk” Erskine, an Indiana boy who was one of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ best pitchers during their glory years. He was 97. Erskine was with the Dodgers for his entire career: from 1948 through 1959, during which time they won five pennants and the 1955 World Series, the only title won by Brooklyn.

Erskine was only 5′ 10″ and 165. His success was due to a very effective overhand curveball his dad Matt, who played semipro ball, taught him to throw. His lifetime record was 122-78, with an ERA of 4.00. He pitched two no-hitters. He was 20-6 in 1953. He pitched a complete game 3-2 victory against the Yanks in Game 3 of the 1953 WS, striking out 13, a WS record at the time. In the 1952 WS, also against the Yankees, Erskine pitched an 11-inning complete game, retiring the last 19 batters in the Dodgers’ 6-5 victory. This gorgeous card is from my collection.

Carl and his wife Betty had four children. Their son Jimmy was born with Down Syndrome. In those days, many families placed such children in institutions, but Carl and Betty were having none of that. Carl devoted his life after baseball to Jimmy’s care. He and Betty formed a society to raise funds for the Special Olympics and related causes. In 2023, the Baseball Hall of Fame awarded Carl the Buck Owens Lifetime Achievement Award for this work. Betty and he, below, are standing next to a statue of Carl in front of a Medical and Rehab Center named after him. There is also a school named after him in his hometown, and Erskine Street was named in his honor in 2002 in Brooklyn, where he will be remembered and admired by baseball fans forever.

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I was always impressed by Derek Jeter’s ability to use a lot of words in interviews while saying absolutely nothing of substance. Apparently, Canada’s Trudeau has the same gift. The following is from Frank Bruni’s “Sentences” feature this week:

In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Shannon Proudfoot wrote: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on the first sentence of his first answer at the public inquiry into foreign interference when it became clear that, uh oh, he’d summoned That Guy. You know the guy: Ask him a factual question and the response is a purring, generic values statement so distantly related to the original question they could legally get married.” 

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This poem by OC’s Poet Laureate Ted Kooser is from Delights and Shadows. We may have shared it before; it’s one of our favorites. It’s called “At the Cancer Clinic.”

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

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Owl Chatter is heading down to DC tomorrow to see how the Nats are looking this year. We’ll catch them taking on the hated ‘Stros on Saturday at 4. Play Ball!

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