Let’s keep our owl eyes on Ligaya Mishan. It shouldn’t be too hard: she’s the chief restaurant critic for the NYT. Here is the remarkable opening paragraph in her review of the seafood restaurant Smithereens in the East Village:
To describe Smithereens as a New England-style seafood spot is like calling “Moby-Dick” a story about fishing. The restaurant is darker and weirder, a love letter to the North Atlantic at its most ominous and brooding, written in seaweed and smashed lobster heads. Even the martini tastes like a gulp of saltwater, the last memory of a drowning man.
Who writes like that?
This person.
From food to football. Here’s how Jim Souhan in The Minnesota Star Tribune, described a pass by Sam Howell, one of the Vikings’ backup quarterbacks: “The ball hung in the air like an oblong piñata. Time passed. The Twins traded another 10 players. Beards grew. Finally, Howell’s pass fluttered back to earth, and a few Patriots drew straws to decide who would intercept it.”
Last, in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols described a television interview in which Trump made preposterous claims about the war between Russia and Ukraine: “The setting, as it so often is when Trump piles into a car with his thoughts and then goes full ‘Thelma & Louise’ off a rhetorical cliff, was ‘Fox & Friends.’ The Fox hosts, although predictably fawning, did their best to keep the president from the ledge, but when Trump pushes the accelerator, everyone goes along for the ride.”
Thanks to Frank Bruni’s newsletter for all of the above.
Picked you up in Pocatello
At some truck stop parkin’ lot
You could do worse than start a song with that verse. In the puzzle today, the clue at 3D was “A smile, perhaps,” and the answer was POKER TELL. I needed a few crosses to nail it but thought it was a wonderful clue, perhaps a bit advanced for a Monday, but so elegant. It conjures an image. Rex hated it:
“What in the world is a POKER TELL? Let me rephrase. I know precisely what a “tell” is, but how (in the world) is a POKER TELL any different from any other tell!?!?!? It’s a tell. The smile is a tell. You’d call it a tell. A POKER TELL!?!?! That is a silly phrase on its face, and it’s ridiculous when absolutely nothing in the clue suggests a card-playing context. [A smile, perhaps] … that’s it? Ugh. The wikipedia entry is for “Tell (poker).” Not POKER TELL (a phrase that appears nowhere in said entry). It’s a term from poker, but the term is tell, not POKER TELL. POKER FACE, that’s a term. POKER TELL, that’s a redundancy. Bah and humbug to that answer.”
And it caused him to think of Pocatello, Idaho, partly because IDAHO was also in the puzzle. Turn it up!
The theme of today’s puzzle was things that are ON THE LINE. And the theme answers were LEFT TACKLE (on the offensive line in football), LAKE TROUT (fishing line), COLD CALLER (phone line), and LAUNDRY.
Some folks groused about Lake Trout, thinking “lake” was arbitrary. You know, it’s a trout. Why do we care where it hangs out?
But Commenter Bob says: “Lake Trout” is a recognized classification, just like “Grizzly Bear” or “Sperm Whale.” The word “Lake” is not extraneous.
And Carola says: I’ll pile on and as another Upper Midwesterner defend LAKE TROUT, which we are sometimes lucky to be able to get and are much different, flesh-wise from the trout-stream trout that are locally available.
Want more? Anony Mouse says: We’ve learned a lot about trout in the last couple of decades. The lake trout is a “char,” like the arctic char. We now know that the brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) and a couple of others are also chars. The brown trout (Salmo trutta) is closely related to the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). Most surprisingly, we now know that the venerable little rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is closely related to the various Pacific salmons, like the Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha).”
[Love the “most surprisingly.”]
Let’s give jberg the last word:
I’ve got to defend the LAKE TROUT, which is indeed a species of fish. When I was growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan, it was the dominant commercial fish of the great lakes. The local dish was the fish boil, where you would cook a whole lot of lake trout in a huge pot and people would line up to get their portion, along with an ear of corn and probably some potatoes. Much more delicious than it sounds. Talented boil-masters made a living at it. They were a big business (they had other uses, as well). Then the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened, some lampreys came in from the ocean on the hulls of ships, bred like mad, and pretty soon there were very few lake trout. The problem was finally solved by poisoning all the fish, including both the lampreys and the trout. Then the lakes were restocked, but to create a sport-fishing industry they were stocked with coho and sockeye salmon, and steelhead trout along with the lake trout. So there are not so many of them. There are even more fish boils than there used to be, but the fish are often imported from the great lakes of northern Canada. They are still a lot of fun.
At 10D, “Loosens, as a shoe,” was UNLACES. Any nitpickers out there? jberg: You just need to untie them and loosen up the laces, not take the laces out, which is what UNLACE means.
OK, thanks!
Best “line” of the day, from egs, of course: TV game show for coke heads: Where’s My Line?
That’s him — the guy who tried to eat me.
See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 