I’m thankful for my beautiful owls who mean so much to me. Here are Welly and Wilma, the owls behind Owl Chatter, getting a little sun on our front porch. (Special shout out to Jenny their very special friend and creator.)
Some holiday headlines from The Onion:
Man Getting High And Eating Taco Bell Thousands Of Miles Away From Family Having Best Thanksgiving Of Life
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Balloon Floats Away After Handlers Let Go To Check Their Phones
Dave Holmes of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) posted the following:
Went shopping for onions today. Decided that the 4kg net-bag was the best value, whilst removing said bag from the top shelf several onions fell out of a hole in the netting on to the floor. I picked up the fallen onions and pushed them back through the hole, I then checked the shelf for any other loose onions, which there were 3, I duly put them into my bag and then checked them out.
On my way home I started thinking, maybe I missed some escaped onions, or maybe I had added onions to my bag that had come out of another bag, potentially shop lifting. As soon as I got home I weighed my bag of onions to find it weighed 4053grams. Worried that I had unwittingly stolen an onion by mistake I weighed each onion in the bag individually. None of the single onions weighed 53grams, even the lightest onion weighed in excess of 53g so I concluded that I must have purchased the correct amount of onions and that the generous supplier must have rounded down to 4kg when packing the product. A worthwhile exercise.
Kevin Hitch: That story brought tears to my eyes.
Trevor Syrett: Bravo, peak dullness! Bringing this group back to its roots.
Neil Christie: How many onions do you need?
Rob Upham: 4kg? That’s shallot of onions.
Julia O’Connor: Maybe you picked wrong onions up from the floor and the total with other onions would have come to exactly 4kg.
But I replied to Julia: What’s a “wrong” onion? What “other” onions? By his account, he picked them all up.
OMG, this woman looks like an onion. How does that happen? Was her mom an onion?
Best clue in today’s puzzle: “Pitcher for the reds?” Six letters. No, it’s not gullet (for Don Gullet). The tipoff is the lower case R in reds: It’s CARAFE (reds here are red wines). (And, I know, I know — don’t write in — Don Gullett spelled his name with an extra T so it has seven letters.) Here’s a shot of Gullett, amazingly, pitching with no left hand. It was detachable.
I don’t think this counts as nitpicking — it’s a good point. At 31D, the clue was “Best possible,” and the answer was IDEAL. Here’s the comment:
IDEAL and “Best possible” are not the same thing. “Best possible” is the best you can achieve short of the IDEAL, which, by definition, is an “idea” of perfection that is unachievable.
NYT persists in making this error. And, no, it is not close enough for crosswords.
I made my living on this question, and my reputation depends on it.
[I was puzzled by that last sentence, but then I noticed the name of the poster was P. L. Ato.]
The puzzle theme today was “stacks.” It set up four three-square stacks. For example, three across answers were [smoke] screen; goes up in [smoke]; and bum a [smoke]; and in each the “smoke” was smooshed into a single square (it’s called a rebus), and the three “smokes” were right on top of each other forming a smoke “stack.” There was also a “hay” stack, a “short” stack, and a “sub” stack. Clever.
One of the answers for the “sub” stack was TURKEY [SUB], clued with “Common order at a hoagie shop.” A nod to Thanksgiving. Several nitpickers, however, noted that hoagie shops are limited to the Philly area and one would not order a “sub” there. [I say CEFC (close enough for crosswords).]
Re: stacks, Rex shared this song.
There’s a black crow sitting across from me
His wiry legs are crossed
And he’s dangling my keys, he even fakes a toss
Whatever could it be that has brought me to this loss?
Commenter Son Volt cited the Thanksgiving connection to Arlo’s “Alice’s Restaurant” so I was able to attach a note for the folks in Rexworld mentioning Alice’s passing just last Thursday, as we discussed recently in our post “Alice Doesn’t Live Anymore.”
A visitor to the puzzle was a rap artist I hadn’t heard of (not that I’ve heard of many) known as BIG PUN. He wasn’t a punster: It was short for Big Punisher, and his real name was Christopher Lee Rios. He passed away in 2000 at the age of only 28, from being literally “big.” He weighed close to 700 pounds and his heart could not handle it. I will not share the song of his that Rex shared, but it’s called “Still Not A Player.” I’m generally not a fan of rap (though I’m not a hater), but I enjoyed it. I guess it says something that it still has currency 24 years after his death.
Looks like he might have been a Yankees fan. He was born in the Bronx and is wearing a Yankees’ cap in some of the other pictures I found.
There are people who don’t mind cats. There are people who like cats. There are people who love cats. And then there was Harold W. Sims, Jr., of whom it was said in the headline of his obit in the NYT today, that he “poured his heart” into cats. Sims passed away earlier this month in Sylva, NC, at the age of 89.
Sims, a retired college prof, poured his life savings into his own no-kill animal shelter and founded the American Museum of the House Cat. His love for cats began when he volunteered at an animal shelter after retiring from teaching. His first cat was a Persian named Buzzy.
The shelter, named Catman2, started as a shed in his backyard, and expanded into a 4,000-square-foot house that Sims outfitted, with cat towers, cubbyholes and all the toys his new tenants could swat a paw at — but not a single cage. (They’ve committed no crimes, he said.) Over the course of three decades the shelter found homes for over 5,000 cats.
The cat museum opened in 2017 and was a success. Sims built a new home for it in Sylva, NC, in 2023. Thousands of visitors come by each year to take in wall after wall of cat-themed paintings, rows of display cases full of antique cat toys, and a child-size, cat-themed carousel.
Some of the displays are macabre, including a petrified cat found in a 16th-century English chimney, and a mummified cat from ancient Egypt, which Sims had X-rayed to make sure it contains actual feline remains. (It does.)
His love for cats grew out of his belief that they are a better version of ourselves. “Cats don’t discriminate. They don’t care if you’re white, Black or yellow. Plus, cats don’t care about what other cats have. A cat has what it has, and that’s fine with him.”
Sims is survived by Tortie, Clarissa, and Eskimo. Rest in peace, Dr. Sims.
This poem by Margaret Saiser is called “Thanksgiving for Two.” It’s from The Poetry Foundation.
The adults we call our children will not be arriving
with their children in tow for Thanksgiving.
We must make our feast ourselves,
slice our half-ham, indulge, fill our plates,
potatoes and green beans
carried to our table near the window.
We are the feast, plenty of years,
arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it
rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted
to be good company for one another.
Little did we know that first picnic
how this would go. Your hair was thick,
mine long and easy; we climbed a bluff
to look over a storybook plain. We chose
our spot as high as we could, to see
the river and the checkerboard fields.
What we didn’t see was this day, in
our pajamas if we want to,
wrinkled hands strong, wine
in juice glasses, toasting
whatever’s next,
the decades of side-by-side,
our great good luck.
An article in the current New Yorker about “The Golden Girls” reminded me how good the writing was for that show, although I did not watch it very often. It mentioned how the show shattered the taboo against “senior sex.” The character Blanche boasted of having had 143 paramours. The writer Erin Donnelly counted 165 depicted or referred to over the course of the show, “although questions remain about the precise number of Flying Fanelli Brothers.” “Oh, back off, Blanche,” she is told in one episode. “Not all of us have been classified by the Navy as a friendly port.”
“Maureen says I need glasses, but I don’t know. What do you guys think?”
Armas — what gives? Owl Chatter’s style and culture consultant, the beautiful Ana de Armas, has gotten herself into a little hot water for dating Manuel Anido Cuesta, the stepson of Cuba’s repressive president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez. Here they are, below. For the life of me, I can’t figure out where his left hand is.
“It’s truly disheartening when someone, particularly a fellow Cuban, aligns themselves with a regime that has brought so much pain and oppression to our people,” wrote fashion and travel influencer Luis Caballero. “For any Cuban to not only support such a regime but also engage with its inner circle — like dating Díaz-Canel’s stepson and advisor — feels like a betrayal of the shared struggle for liberty and justice.”
Ouch.
Here at Owl Chatter the feeling is everyone should be allowed one dalliance with a repressive regime. We’re sure she’ll dump the creep in due time.
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 
One response to “Big Pun”
loved the info about Dr Sims and the 5,000 cats. we had seven at one point….fascinating creatures!
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