I love the nitpickers. In fact, I am a dues-not-paying member of ANAL (American Nitpickers Association & League). Yesterday the clue at 22A was “High-pitched bark,” and the answer was ARF.
Sharon wrote:
ARF IS NOT A HIGH PITCHED BARK.!!!
YIP is a high-pitched bark. ARF covers the range but is mainly middle pitch.
Thank you Sharon! Woof woof.
An absolutely wonderful person, Howard Buten, died on Jan. 3 at an assisted living facility near his home in Plomodiern, France, a town in coastal Brittany. He was 74.
He performed as Buffo the clown to sold-out theaters around the world. Extremely popular in Europe, he was compared to Charlie Chaplain and Harpo Marx. During the day, he volunteered as an aide with autistic children and eventually opened a treatment center.
It took him a while to get going. He was born in Detroit and dropped out of UMich after two years when he decided to take up clowning. He did the math. “I could go to clown college for 13 weeks and become a clown,” he told his friends. “Or I could go to the University of Michigan for another two years and become a clown.” Makes sense.
I love this quote by a friend of his in the NYT obit about his early struggles: “Howie was going absolutely nowhere. He wrote a novel that nobody wanted. His girlfriend broke up with him. His dog, Frank, got run over. He was in a horrible place.”
To pull his life around, he volunteered to help developmentally struggling children. The first he met was a 4-year-old named Adam Shelton. “He bit and he head-butted and he pinched and he pounded, himself as well as others,” Buten wrote. “He had no language. He did not come when called. He would not sit still in a chair.”
Buten worked with Adam almost daily. Unable to communicate with him, he decided to imitate his actions — “rocking when he rocked, flapping my hands when he flapped his hands, screaming and humming when he screamed and hummed.” And then, one day, a connection: Adam started imitating him. Intrigued, Buten kept up the approach, ultimately using imitation to teach Adam acceptable social behaviors and more than a dozen words. The method Buten stumbled on wasn’t entirely new. It’s called reciprocal imitation training, and is a helpful treatment for autism.
Out of his work with Adam, Buffo the clown emerged: a clown who can sing and make noise but is unable to speak.
“What I learned is how to be autistic. His mannerisms, speech patterns (or lack of them), physical behaviors and perceptions of reality are all real autistic. A kind of idiot savant syndrome is what Buffo is: lovable, infantile, totally innocent.”
Buten earned a degree in clinical psychology and opened a treatment center in Santa Barbara, CA, lovingly named after his special friend Adam. He continued performing as Buffo and wrote several books that were very well received.
The French adored Buten in a way Americans never did, a mystery that would puzzle him. He was made a chevalier of arts and letters by the French Culture Ministry in 1991.
Very special honors for you here at Owl Chatter too. Rest in peace, Buffo.
The Spice Girls were featured in today’s puzzle. They’ve sold over 100 million records and are the best-selling girls group of all time. But am I familiar with even one of their songs? Not that I’m aware of. What I needed to know was that Sporty Spice was MEL C (I did somehow know there were two “Mels”), and their song title “2 Become 1.” Here’s Sporty:
On this date 49 years ago, the day after his inauguration, Jimmy Carter pardoned draft dodgers who had fled to Canada. The pardon did not cover deserters, the dishonorably discharged, protestors who engaged in violence, or men named Ziggy. It is not known how many dodgers there were: Canada did not keep records or ask immigrants about draft status. Tens of thousands is a decent guess.
Many remained in Canada despite the pardon, entering all of the professions and even taking positions in government. In the 1970s, a senior aide to Prime Minister Trudeau hired a draft dodger for a top cabinet position, and felt no need to mention that to the Prime Minister.
Wow, is that Jane Fonda? Hey, girl — lookin’ good!
I still consider the actions I took to avoid the draft by flunking my physical the most important I ever took for my country. Countless American lives were saved by my avoiding combat. I can barely work the remote — you want me with a gun?
After writing about Lenny Randle’s passing in OC recently I checked eBay to see if any autographs of his were being offered. I was interested in getting his signature on a photo of his infamous effort to blow a slow roller foul, like by blowing air at it. Surprisingly, it was never memorialized on a baseball card or widely circulated as a photo. The only item on the incident was a business card containing a photo signed by Randle with his full name and his nickname in Japan, “Cappuccino.” I was able to snare it for under $20, as a birthday gift to myself.
This poem by Danusha Lameris is called “Fictional Characters,” and is from today’s Writer’s Almanac.
Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the white pages
and enter our world?
Holden Caulfield slipping in the movie theater
to catch the two o’clock
Anna Karenina sitting in a diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
serves up a cheeseburger.
Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires the tulips.
Maybe they grew tired
of the author’s mind,
all its twists and turns.
Or were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.
For others, it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they’d been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.
Whatever the reason,
here they are, roaming the city streets
rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders.
Wouldn’t you, if you could?
Step out of your own story,
to lean against a doorway
of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee,
your life, somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.
We asked Sarah Fillier, star forward for the NY Sirens of the PWHL, OC’s new sports consultant, how the league was doing. It’s still early — only the second season. A game in Montreal filled the arena with over 20,000 in attendance. Amazing. But the Sirens are running only around 2,000 a game, the lowest average in the league. They play in a gorgeous arena — the Pru Center in Newark where the NHL’s Devils play, but that effectively cuts off NYC. It’s hard to get there. We’re going to try to get to another game. The other teams in the league are drawing better – maybe around 6,500 average. That’s Boston, Minny, Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto.
And Sarah’s hoping all this free coverage for the league in Owl Chatter doesn’t do too much damage. Wait, what?
We’ll let her pretty smile send us off tonight. Thanks Sarah!
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 