Let’s remember Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and Christopher Monk today. These were the five colonists killed in the Boston Massacre that took place this week, on March 5th, in 1770.
British troops were quartered in Boston to protect the King’s tax collectors and tension was growing. Did you ever not pay for a haircut? Crazy, right? — they have those razors. Anyway, a barber’s apprentice claimed that a British officer failed to pay for his haircut. A fight broke out with the officer knocking the young haircutter down. A crowd gathered and soldiers came out. The crowd jeered the soldiers and threw “ice and oysters.” They dared the soldiers to shoot and they did! — killing the five named above. There’s no telling how many oysters were also slain. Five deaths is fairly skimpy for a “massacre,” but every life is precious, and the incident had legs, as they say, and helped stir the colonists towards revolution.
The soldiers were placed on trial, by the way. No attorney would defend them, so John Adams took the case, in the belief that everyone was entitled to a defense. He argued that the British policy was to blame, not the individual soldiers, and all but two were acquitted.
Here’s Crispus Attucks, the first to die in the massacre, and, actually, in the Revolution, although there is some dispute as to the latter point. Get this: He was African-American. (Are we still allowed to point that out under the new freedom of speech guidelines? We certainly can’t say if he was trans.)
Headline from my brain:
Opposing Thumbs Erupt In Thumb War
The NYTXW has certain guidelines, e.g., you will never see Hitler in a puzzle, even if he were clued appropriately by something like “mustachioed monster of historic proportions.” And the famous (maybe) “breakfast test” holds that the puzzle will not include words that might disgust a NYT reader sipping his or her morning coffee. I’m not going to give you any examples because I am sipping my morning coffee at the moment. Anyway, apparently, the proscriptions don’t extend to EL CHAPO, who visited the grid today as “Onetime leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.” The former drug lord was a pretty bad dude, believed to be responsible for 34,000 deaths, pretty impressive by monster standards. I mean, if five can constitute a massacre . . . Do the math.
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera is his real name. He got the nickname El Chapo from his heavy use of Chapstick. (No he didn’t.) You may have not thought of the guy for a while, if ever, but he is still alive and living in Colorado! No need to cancel that Aspen trip, though, — he’s in federal prison. Of course, back in 2001 he escaped from a maximum security federal prison (bribes), so there’s that. He was caught in 2014, escaped again in 2015 (tunnel), and caught again in 2016.
Here’s EC’s wife Emma, proof that quarterbacks and drug lords get all the pretty girls. She helped in one of his escapes. You’d do that for me, Linda, right? Linda? Hello?
After we annex Greenland and Canada and take the Panama Canal back, we may have to go to war with Lesotho for its uppity response to Trump’s diss in his ridiculous speech this week. Making his idiotic case that foreign aid is wasteful, Trump said we gave $8 million to help gays in Lesotho “which nobody has ever heard of.” Of course, this outrageous insult to a sovereign state by our fat f*ck of a president garnered a hefty, sickening laugh from his toadies in Congress.
When we do go to war with them, Lesotho will hold the high ground in every sense of the word. It is the highest country by altitude in the world — the only independent state entirely above 1,000 meters (3,281 feet). Its population is 2 million and its capital and largest city is Maseru. The government was deeply insulted by Trump’s moronic, gratuitous slur, and will lodge formal protests. Happily, these beautiful Basotho women couldn’t care less.
It’s been a while since Owl Chatter has reported on faves Taylor and Travis, so let’s catch up. Well, Trav has decided not to retire from football. As he told his big bro Jason on their podcast, he loves the game too much to leave it quite yet. And he feels he let his team and fans down with his poor performance in the Superbowl and wants to make up for it. For his part, brother Jason seemed to choke up describing how hard it was to watch the debacle. These two are just big bushy teddy bears.
As for Taylor, look for her on the silver screen along with vinyl in the coming days. Word is she’s thinking about acting — perhaps a superheroine role in a sci-fi film? Give Ana a holler, Babe — she’ll fill you in.
If you live in Westport CT and happened to drop into the library yesterday you would have seen Governor Lamont awarding the first Connecticut Governor’s Award for Excellence to, what? who?— Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones? The very same.
Keith is 81 now and has lived in CT for forty years. He wrote the acclaimed memoir Life in 2000, and 2014’s biographical Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar. His acceptance speech started out a bit clunky but adorable. “Without our books, without knowing things, without knowing their special meaning—this isn’t movies, this is not someone drawing you images. This is a book, and you have the movie in your head.” He then pushed back against book bans, saying “It’s very important that we keep our books unburnt.”
Keith went on:
“I’d like to say thank you to you all and thank you to the state of Connecticut. You kind of get lost for words with something like this around your neck,” he said, referring to the award he’d just received (see below). “I’ve been here for 40 years, and it’s been a great place for me. I brought the kids up here. I was interested when the kids were here, and I said I have to get the kids out of New York City so they could get some fresh air to breathe. And ever since, we’ve had a great life. I’m incredibly happy about everything, especially things like this, because you don’t get them every day.”
The award was a custom-designed medallion crafted by State Trooper Danny Carvalho.
OK – enough of that — turn it up!
From The Onion:
Area Dad Needs More Time With Museum Plaque
In the puzzle today at 10D the clue was “Highlight of many a Jimi Hendrix concert,” and the answer was GUITAR SOLO.
I shared this joke with the Commentariat.
A young anthropologist made contact with a tribe in the deepest jungle that had never been studied before. She arranged to spend some time there learning about their culture. She trekked for days through the difficult terrain and finally reached the small village. Her contact in the tribe greeted her and showed her to her tent. He spoke a little English and was very pleasant and welcoming. But when she asked him about a constant drumming sound that she heard, he tensed up and just said: “Drums good; drums no stop.” She tried several times to find out if the drumming had some cultural or religious significance, but each time she tried, he just tensed up and repeated “drums good, etc.”
As the days went on, she got used to the constant drumming and the visit went very well. It became a pleasant background noise. When it was time for her to go and she was packing up her gear, she noticed that the drumming had suddenly stopped. Its absence was eerie and troublesome. She ran to her guide to see what was up and found him with a terrified look on his face. She asked him, “What? What does it mean? What’s going to happen?” He just began weeping and said: GUITAR SOLO.
There was no response — probably for the best.
See you tomorrow Chatterheads!
The Wellington Files 