It’s Easter Sunday today. So Friday was Good Friday. And that’s fine. I just wish, for once, we could have a Great Friday.
It really feels like Easter today. I was up around 4:30 this morning and took some Benadryl to help me get back to sleep. You ever do that? It worked, but then when I woke up for real around 7 it felt like I was coming back from the dead.
It’s also the last day of Passover. In our house Passover is mostly marked by having “matzoh brei” or fried matzoh for breakfast. It’s sort of French toast but with matzoh. Stir up some eggs with a little milk. I use one egg per sheet of matzoh. Three sheets for two people. Then, soften the matzoh using hot water. (I just run hot water from the sink over it until it softens enough to be broken into little pieces.) Then break up the matzoh and stir it into the egg/milk mixture. Let it sit for a bit and then fry it up in some oil, until the egg part is fully cooked. You can use maple syrup on it. It was hard to get real maple syrup in the desert, so some people just use salt and pepper. If that’s your plan you can add sauteed onions and peppers like I did today.
Anyway, so even though today is officially the last day of Passover, in our family it lasts until we finish up the matzoh.
This poem is “Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet,” by Ann Caston. It’s from today’s Writer’s Almanac.
Here is a genial congregation,
well fed and rosy with health and appetite,
robust children in tow. They have come
and all the generations of them, to be fed,
their old ones too who are eligible now
for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age.
Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one,
heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said.
Here there is good will; here peace
on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits
of the gardens of America’s heartland. Here is abundance,
here is the promised
land of milk and honey, out of which
a flank of the fatted calf, thick still
on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction
over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.
This Tiny Love Story from today’s NYT is by Christine Oh. It’s called “Waiting For My Mother’s Hymn.”
The walls in our house couldn’t muffle my parents’ fights. My father had a temper, and I doubt my mother ever won. At the end of each argument, she would resume her chores while quietly singing the same hymn. I’d wait for her to start singing: my own reassuring ritual that all was well. Years later, I overheard my mother tell a friend that she sang that hymn whenever she was at her lowest. She passed away last year. I never got to tell her that during her saddest times, as she sang to console herself, she gave me comfort too.
In the NYT book review section today there’s a review of two books with cats. On “Kafka on the Shore,” by Haruki Murakami, Joumana Khatib tells us that one of the characters is an older man who gained the ability to speak with cats. Crazy things happen and there’s a terrible cat murderer the man learns about from a cat. Khatib writes: “These dialogues can stray into Jellicle territory . . . but occasional inane cat talk is a minor complaint. When nearly everything in a story is a puzzle or semaphoric contradiction, plain-spoken discussions about the deliciousness of tuna come as a relief.”
[FYI: “Jellicle cats” are briefly mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s 1933 poem “Five-Finger Exercises,” although they are not described until Eliot’s poem “The Song of the Jellicles,” depicting the cats as commonly nocturnal, black and white, scruffy cats. Eliot specifically mentions how they gather at an event called the “Jellicle Ball.” The name “Jellicle” comes from Eliot’s unpublished poem “Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats”, where “Pollicle dogs” is a corruption of “poor little dogs” and “Jellicle cats” of “dear little cats.” (Wikipedia)]
Here’s a good-looking couple.
That’s Ian Somerhalder and Nikki Reed. Hubby Ian popped in to the puzzle today way down at 126A: “Actor Somerhalder.” Some of you may recognize him from his role in the TV series Lost (2004-2010). He was the first major character to die, although, in the spirit of Easter Sunday, he returned for seven episodes post-mortem including the series finale. Wife Nikki also acts. They have two kids. Her mom was Cherokee/Italian and her dad Jewish, and she identifies as Jewish. Baruch Hashem! (Praise the Lord.)
The puzzle nailed me today at the cross of 118A: “Mother of Perseus” with 109D: “RNA base.” In crosswordspeak, those are two WOES (what on earth?) forming a Natick. For Mother of Perseus my best guess would be Mrs. Perseus, but it’s DANAE. And RNA base is URACIL.
I liked 49A where the clue was “Honcho,” and the answer was NABOB. No indication of any nattering.
Now I’m going to repeat a song by The Cure that we shared a while ago because I love it and it’s joyous. At 102A, the clue was “Smitten person’s declaration,” and the answer was (sigh) I’M IN LOVE. Turn it up!!
We learned a new word today: DRUPE. The clue was “Peach or plum, botanically.” Drupe means: a fleshy fruit with thin skin and a central stone (pit) containing the seed, e.g., a plum, cherry, almond, or olive.
A Rex commenter today went by the nom de plume of Donatello Nobody. Coulda been head of security on Car Talk. Remember their great staff names? Staff swimsuit designer: C. Bigbe Hinds was my favorite. Also loved Staff Butler: Mahatma Coat, and Staff Chauffeur: Pikup Andropov.
What do you get when you combine Rogaine and Viagra?
Answer: Don King.
Commenter Nancy shared with us that she’s going in for cataract surgery tomorrow. I wished her well and told her my wife had that same procedure. It improved her vision so much that she’s leaving me.
Sometimes, when I’m flipping around TV channels I fall upon a show on one of the food channels called Man vs. Food. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine. A nice guy named Casey (or Adam in earlier seasons) takes on food challenges offered by various eateries around the land — giant 5-lb burgers, or ice cream mountains, or huge burritos. If he can devour it all, Man wins. If time runs out, Food wins. A small local crowd cheers him on.
I was watching it the other day when the challenge was for Casey to drink three giant-sized ice cream shakes. As he was downing the first, I realized I had seen that episode before. (Man won.) Here’s a good rule of thumb: You know you may not be making the most of your retirement years when you’re sitting on your fat tuchas watching repeats of some poor slob shoving massive amounts of food down his gullet. Oy.
As commenter Andrew said: Happy Easter every bunny!
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 