Story in The Onion: Bored Riot Cops Break Up Calculus Class.
LOS ANGELES—Kicking down the unlocked classroom door after listlessly wandering around campus, bored riot cops reportedly broke up a calculus course at the University of California, Los Angeles, on Tuesday. “Hey guys, look—there’s some students in there,” said Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Thomas Larkins, who led a team that stormed the lecture hall, tearing laptops and calculators from the surprised undergraduates’ hands and dragging them away in handcuffs.
“Objection, Your Honor! The witness is using a Trump Bible!”
Regarding yesterday’s RINGS A BELL puzzle, this extraordinary post by Anoa Bob:
When I saw the RINGS A BELL reveal, I literally groaned and lamented “Oh no! The NYTXW has perpetuated one of the biggest myths in psychology.” IVAN PAVLOV didn’t use a BELL when he conditioned dogs to salivate! He said that a ringing bell was aversive to their sensitive hearing and would upset the dogs and interfere with his studies. He most often used the audible click of a metronome as the stimulus to be associated with food being put into the dog’s mouth.
The erroneous belief that it was a bell has been attributed to a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of PAVLOV’s writing. Daniel P. Todes’ definitive biography Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science, winner of the 2015 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society, opens with this sentence: “Contrary to legend, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell.”
Where else but in Owl Chatter can you find such an earth-shattering revelation, I ask you. An afterthought: need we worry that the acronym for the History of Science Society is HISS? Nah.
In the puzzle today, the clue at 1D is “Doomsday prepper’s stockpile,” and the answer is AMMO. In the Jewish version of the puzzle, the answer is BRISKET.
At 23D, the clue was “Having a baby bump, slangily,” and the answer was PREGGO, which sounds like a combination spaghetti sauce/fertility drug, IMO.
At 20A the clue was “City on Florida’s Space Coast.” COCOA BEACH. It was new to me, and I’ve put some time in down in FLA visiting my mom, back in the day (aleha hashalom). It sent Rex off on a mini-rant. He noted it’s pop is only 11,539, and “that is the one and only fact about it in the entire opening paragraph of its wikipedia entry, beyond the fact that “[i]t is part of the Palm Bay–Melbourne–Titusville, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area.” It’s a minuscule town (“city?” come on…) inside a metro area I’ve never even heard of.” He damned it with the label “not crossworthy.”
But he’s wrong. It’s where Major Nelson and Jeannie lived in I Dream of Jeannie. Quite crossworthy.
Verbatim, from my tax class last week, after a brief interruption:
Me: Where were we? I have no idea.
Student: You said, “This is very important.”
Me: Oh, man? Did I really? Darnit. Well, how important could it be? It’s not life and death.
(I eventually remembered.)
Gotta keep it short tonight. Tired. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 