Ikebob!! Ikebob?? Are you sh*tting me? That’s a “common word” by you? I am ranting about today’s (Sunday’s) Spelling Bee in the NYT. I missed burble and blubber, which is fine. I certainly should have seen blubber (no jokes please–I am not in the mood), but ikebob? And they didn’t accept bubbe!!??
For those of you wondering what I am blubbering about, there is a game called Spelling Bee in the NYT. There’s a daily Bee online, which I do not play (Hi Joe!), and a separate additional one on Sunday (in the Magazine), which I do. You get seven letters with one of them the central one. You need to form as many words as you can with them. Each must contain the central letter. On Sundays each word must be at least five letters long. (For the daily Bee, the minimum is four.) The Sunday instructions state we are to look for “common words,” and they provide you with their complete list. That’s the goal — to come up with all of the words, making you a “Queen Bee.” And, so, I ask you — is ikebob a common word?
Here’s how the Urban Dictionary defines ikebob. (I am not making this up.)
“A dragon slayer who knows how to handle her pudding cups.”
What??
It goes on: “Often times a gamer, or a loner. Someone who makes a lot of cartoon, and game references.”
Yeah, Monique — We’re as puzzled as you are.
Today’s “Tiny Love Story” in the Times is by Nancy Glazer Pearl:
The subject line: “Here Comes the Sun.” The email: “You don’t know me, but your late husband was my fourth-grade teacher. Every winter solstice, he’d bring out his guitar, and the whole school would sing the Beatles song together. He’d remind us that, even on the darkest day, each one after would bring a little more light. I wanted you to know that every year on this date, my friends and I have a group Zoom to sing and remember Mr. Pearl.” I smiled, thinking how, 14 years after his death, Michael’s light still guides us through the darkest days.
Today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac is “The Video.” It’s by Fleur Adcock. I’m dedicating it to our newest older brother Michican Morris.
When Laura was born, Ceri watched.
They all gathered around Mum’s bed —
Dad and the midwife and Mum’s sister
and Ceri. “Move over a bit,” Dad said —
he was trying to focus the camcorder
on Mum’s legs and the baby’s head.
After she had a little sister,
and Mum had gone back to being thin,
and was twice as busy, Ceri played
the video again and again.
She watched Laura come out, and then,
in reverse, she made her go back in.
The “online initialism of excitement” in the puzzle today was FTW, which is “For the win!” It’s an expression of support or approval, which I don’t fully get but fortunately don’t care about. We asked Miriam Webster for an example of how to use it and she came up with: “Weekend brunch FTW! It’s cheaper than going out to dinner at the same restaurant.”
It’s not to be confused with FTD which is “fresh to death.” You might think this one has something to do with a corpse that has not yet started to rot, but it doesn’t. It actually means something is very stylish or cool. “Fresh,” of course, means stylish (“a fresh look”), and “to death” is like in the expression, “I love it to death,” meaning a lot, or extremely.
“Sh*t, Jerome — those new boots are fresh to death. Can I borrow them Tuesday?”
So, there — try to use those on your kids (or grandkids).
In yesterday’s NYTXW, the clue at 24D was “Star-forming region nearest to Earth,” and the answer was ORION NEBULA.
But Anony Mouse had this to say:
(Pushes glasses up nose) Ackshually the Orion Nebula is not the nearest star forming region, not even close. The Taurus Molecular Cloud, rho Ophiuchus, and Perseus are all closer, and there are probably others. At best you could argue that Orion is the closest region where stars more massive than the sun are forming.
Well, okey-dokey — thank you very much!
And if that’s not enough to get your panties all up in a bunch (or your knickers in a knot, for the gentlemen), at 56A the clue was “Last ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, familiarly,” and the answer was CLEO.
But commenter Sailor writes: Ptolemy XV Caesar, aka “Caesarion,” eldest son of Cleopatra VII by Julius Caesar, and co-ruler with his mother, outlived her by about 2 1/2 weeks (until he was captured and executed by Octavian), making him the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt.
So I ask you: Where are the standards? Is no one checking these puzzles?
This Met Diary story by John Berlind is called “More or Less” but it’s all about irrefutable logic.
Dear Diary:
It was 1994, and I was living in the East Village. On my way home one day, I stopped at the Second Avenue Deli.
After waiting in line for a few minutes, I stepped up to the counter.
“One pound of chopped liver, please,” I said.
The counterman waved his hands dismissively as if batting the idea away.
“No, no, no,” he said. “That’s not the way to do it here. What I’ll do is I’ll make you a chopped liver sandwich, and that way you get more than a pound of chopped liver.”
“Otherwise,” he added, “I gotta charge you more for less. Makes no sense!”
“Oh, thank you,” I said. “But really, I just want a pound, and I’d like to get it in a plastic container.”
Before I finished speaking, though, he had unspooled a long sheet of white deli paper and loaded a thick slice of marble rye with a softball-size dollop of creamy, fresh chopped liver redolent of sweet garlic and raw onion.
When my request finally registered with him, he stopped and fixed me with a long, disappointed stare.
“Look,” he said, “what’s the problem? I make you a nice chopped liver sandwich, you take the sandwich home, you unwrap the sandwich, you throw away the bread! What’s the problem?”
I conceded that it sounded like an excellent course of action.
It has not been a good few days for Owl Chatter’s sports teams. We were pulling for Tennessee to upset the hated Ohio State Buckeyes. Didn’t happen. (42-17. Ouch.) We were pulling for OC fave Paige Bueckers to lead Uconn past USC last night. Didn’t happen. And the Jets. Oy.
Too painful to go on.
The Wellington Files 