One man’s (Rex’s) ho-hum is another man’s (mine) neat puzzle. The constructor was Victor Schmitt. There were six shaded blocks in the puzzle, 3-squares x 3-squares, representing the six sides of a die. Within those blocks each letter O from your puzzle answers was a PIP — a dot on the die. So the six blocks became the six possible rolls of the die, although not in order. If you take a moment, you can see them, below. I thought it was impressive how Schmitt got the Os in the right places. And it was “clean” in the sense that there were no other Os outside of the squares anywhere in the grid. Still, Rex (and others) gave it a “So what?”
The die representing a “six” had to have three consecutive Os twice. The answers supplying them were BOO OFFSTAGE and TOO OFTEN.
At 69A, two of the needed Os were provided by COLON, clued with “Start of many emoticons.” I would have clued it with former pitcher Bartolo Colon, but no one ever does. BOO. He pitched for many teams but retired as a Met.
Every few months Owl Chatter bumps into Linda Ronstadt for some reason and I am reminded how great she is. She just turned 79. Never married; raised two adopted daughters. To 120, Babe! Here she is weighing in on today’s dice theme. Turn it up!
At 46D the clue was “Sameness” and the answer was PARITY. Commenter Mack was disappointed the clue wasn’t obstetrics-related. What? So I looked it up — it’s a service we provide here at Owl Chatter — information you haven’t the slightest interest in hearing about.
In biology and medicine, gravida is the number of times a woman has been pregnant regardless of the outcome. And PARITY is the number of times the pregnancies reached “viable gestational age.” (Abortus is the number of pregnancies that did not make it to that age, regardless of the reason.)
So, as the saying goes — learn something new and useless every day.
Phil took on this assignment grudgingly for obvious reasons, but ended up having fun with it.
Phil! Why is she looking at you in that tone of voice??
From Frank Bruni’s “For the love of sentences” feature:
In The Wall Street Journal, Jared Diamond recognized how differently Hal Steinbrenner approaches his stewardship of the Yankees from how his father, George, did: “The elder Steinbrenner ran the Yankees with all the patience of an Upper West Sider stuck behind a tourist in the whitefish line at Zabar’s.”
Boy is it hard to stop smoking. My wife and I, we made a deal. We only smoke after sex. I’ve got the same pack since 1975. What bothers me is she’s up to three packs a day. (R. Dangerfield)
I took a lie detector test. No I didn’t. (S. Wright)
I have all the erasers from all the golf pencils in the world. (S. Wright)
Steve Bower of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) asks: Why does eating cheese or spicy foods give you wierd dreams?
Ben Stoneman: It doesn’t.
Avi Liveson: Appears to affect your spelling too.
Daniel Faraday-Kiss: That isn’t a thing but if you leave a nicotine patch on over night you have some of the most vivid dreams you’ve ever had.
Stuart George: I put my nicotine patches over my eyes. Didn’t affect my dreams, but helped me give up smoking. Couldn’t find my cigarettes.
Nick Haynes: I wrote a song about this:
Mark Timms: I used to eat Greek cheese but stopped because it was giving me hallouminations.
Brian Greenhalgh: Halloumi is from Cyprus not Greece.
Mark: I stand corrected, every day is a school day.
Mark: I once had cheese before bed and had a dream I was eating a giant marshmallow, the next morning I could not find my pillow.
Raymond Wimaway: Cheese creates a mild reaction similar to LSD. It varies by person and is so weak that the conscious mind wouldn’t be affected but the unconscious mind is more easily affected.
Avi Liveson: Thus the concept of a limburger trip, or dropping cheddar.
The girl of our dreams?
This is from a poem that did not make it past the Owl Chatter guards:
The mockingbird says, Hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day
bright, I wake the night-booming jasmine. I am
the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus-pocus passion
flower of delirious retribution.
Jeez Louise — give it a rest girl. Night-booming jasmine? Believe me, any night booming I do ain’t jasmine.
The media are falling all over themselves following Trump’s zigzags on Ukraine. Is Owl Chatter the only outlet that realizes every position Trump takes just floats off into space the minute he blows it out of his ass?
Oy. Enough. See you next time.
The Wellington Files 