Roger Allen of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) threw this raw meat out to us lions:
I wonder about the calibration on these speed signals. It clocked me at 3mph walking past. So I went around again and achieved 4mph..! Obviously only accurate to 1 decimal place so perhaps I was achieving 3.9mph on the warm up lap??
Mike Smalley: That’s to 0 decimal places. One decimal place would be 3.8 or 4.2 etc. The warm up lap could have been from 2.5 to 3.4mph (to 1 decimal place).
Ken Irvine: Excellent pedantry of the dullest order.
Mike: I thank you, sir.
Bob D’cruz: You have to run at it, why haven’t you already !! ?
Roger: If I tried running I’d cripple myself.
Avi Liveson: But surely in a noble cause.
Ken: Where is this? Looks like an indoor exercise yard in a prison, so why the speed signal?
Roger: it’s a multistory carpark..
Avi Liveson: Perhaps it’s a combination multistory carpark/prison?
Ken: Sorry, nodded off while thinking…..
Bernard Shaw: Honda walk-behind self-propelled mowers are set at 2.7 mph flat out. If you have or can borrow one, try it on that indicator.
John Scotland: ” Walking Furiously on the King’s Highway…”
[John’s reference is to the hymn “Walking on the King’s Highway,” the King being Christ, I’m guessing, and not Kings Highway in Brooklyn.]
There’s a highway there and a way,
Where sorrow shall flee away;
And the light shines bright as the day,
Walking on the King’s highway.
[I’m not sure how the “furiously” got in there.]
Any grammarians out there? At 41A the clue was “Explicit subject for her?” (10 letters) I had no idea what the hell was going on, but here’s the scoop:
“Her” is a pronoun, of course. And you always need to know what the “subject” of a pronoun is, i.e., to whom it is referring, or else it’s floating off in space. That is, you need the “explicit subject” of a pronoun, as the clue states. And that is called the ANTECEDENT, which was the answer.
Okay, sort of got it.
At 35A the clue was “Receiving end?” and answer was GEE. The end of the word “receiving” is its last letter: GEE. This REM song is new to me and nice.
There wasn’t even time to say
Goodbye to Wendell Gee.
So whistle as the wind blows
Whistle as the wind blows did he.
How does “Congressional record” at 32D become SEX TAPE? Because “congress” is an old-timey term for sex. The act of coming together: sexual congress. You’ll never be able to look at Chuck Grassley the same way again, amirite? Love the sweater, CG!
When you are associated with something horrible so closely that it takes on your name, that’s pretty low. On Cheers, when Frazier Crane was humiliated by being left at the altar in Europe, he described it by saying, “In European soccer, when you take a free kick and miss the ball entirely, it’s now called a ‘Frazier.’ If you also fall down, it’s a ‘Frazier Crane.’”
And that’s the story behind 12D in the puzzle today. The clue was “Quisling, e.g.,” and the answer was TRAITOR. It’s from Norway where Vidkun Quisling’s betrayal of his nation via collaboration with the Nazis was so deeply vilified that the name Quisling took on the meaning of traitor. When the Nazis overran Norway, Quisling headed the collaborationist government and worked with the Nazis to deport Jews to their death. He was tried and executed by firing squad after the war.
My Wordle streak of 63 was sorely tested today. I barely pulled through on my sixth try and had no idea what the word means. LORIS: a small, slow-moving nocturnal primate with a short or absent tail, living in dense vegetation in southern Asia. Gimme a break, Wordle lady! You short on sleep or something? Aw — what a cutie! All is forgiven.
If you would be inclined to answer the question “Would you like some?” with “Just a skosh,” then you would have been fine today where the clue was “Tiny bit” and the answer was SKOSH. It gave me pause, but I got it. Commenter Anony Mouse explained it’s derived from Japanese, sukoshi, meaning a tiny bit (duh), and was introduced to English as slang by servicemen after World War II.
When a member of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) posted a picture of the odometer on his truck that read 867,530.9 he said he asked his wife for his phone to take the picture NOW! One more tenth of a mile would have lost it. What was going on? Quite a few club members understood right away. I was not among them. You?
See you next time Chatterheads!
The Wellington Files 