Before we go any further, I need to inform you about something serious that involves me. Better to hear about it here, before you learn about it from other sources. I expect to be named in the Epstein files. Please don’t be too upset. It’s a different Epstein: Barry Epstein, a kid I went to high school with. Still, it may get pretty ugly.
One of the children’s books Daniel Pinkwater wrote is called The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. That is really all you need to know to fall in love with him, but I am going to share the plot summary from Wikipedia.
The main character, Arthur Bobowitz, is asked to pick up a reserved turkey for his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. However, the meat market has lost their reservation and has no unclaimed turkeys or any other type of bird available for purchase, nor does any other market in the entire city of Hoboken. Arthur eventually finds an eccentric old man, who sells him a live chicken named Henrietta that weighs 266 pounds. The Bobowitz family welcomes her with open arms and full hearts, but the neighbors are not so sure. Everyone in town is horrified after Henrietta escapes.
Pinkwater wrote that book with his wife Jill.
I was happy to learn Pinkwater is still among the living (age 84), but sad to learn Jill passed in 2022. It was his birthday yesterday! To 120, DP!
I heard about him from his work on NPR, but don’t know much about him. I do know that the width of his tuchas was adopted as a unit of measurement by Tom and Ray of Car Talk, who would say, e.g., “the car’s backseat is 2.5 Pinkwaters wide.” (Another unit of measurement they used was “mothers-in-law.”)
Pinkwater once described himself as: “Very fat. Medium height. Mostly bald. Likes television. Has owned several French automobiles, for which parts were seldom available. Likes sausage. Lives on a farm. Has a wife. Votes for fictional characters in elections. Finally quit smoking. Likes to write for kids because they are a more respectable audience than adults. Hates his own books. Expects to do better in the future.”
Was it necessary for him to note that he likes sausage? Who doesn’t?
His name at birth was Manon Pinkwater. He and Jill joined a cult. The guru lived somewhere in Asia and said he had the power to divine a person’s true name, so Pinkwater wrote to him about his name.
The guru wrote back. “Your name should begin with ‘D.’” Pinkwater sent a reply suggesting some “D” names. He included “Duck” as an option, just to test the guru. [Note: I am not sure how that is a test.] The guru’s next letter said that his name would be Daniel. Pinkwater told his mother that his name was Daniel. She started calling him Daniel. So did everyone else.
The cult had a certain vacuity that appealed to Pinkwater. “The thing seemed to be contentless. I just wanted the straight energy.” He got so good at meditation that he didn’t need Novocain at the dentist anymore. He figured there was some scam at the heart of the cult, but it didn’t bother him. “The quality of the rip-off was so minor you could ignore it,” he said. For example, notes in the cult newsletter asked members who happened to be traveling to the Asian country where the guru lived to bring along a spare muffler for the guru’s Mercedes. But they eventually quit. “The amount of superstition and nonsense got boring,” Pinkwater said. “I didn’t need them anymore.”
They bought a farm in the Hudson Valley and moved there after they had this conversation in bed one night: Jill said “I bought the horses.” “What horses?” Daniel asked. “The mother and foal,” Jill said. “What are you talking about?” Daniel asked. “We discussed this,” Jill said. “When did we discuss this?” “The other night.” “Where were we when we were discussing this?” “Here in bed.” “Did I say anything?” “Yeah, you said it would be fine.”
He still maintains a spiritual practice, decades after leaving the cult. “Every morning I have my breakfast and then I take my dog and we get in the car and we go to a lovely place,” he told me. “We see things and we experience movement. The dog pees, I don’t. The dog sniffs things. Me, not so much. And we look out over the river at some point, we look at the Catskills in the distance, and she gets a cookie. And we come home. Restored, refreshed, advanced, and having communed with whatever that thing is.”
Have you ever had a baby fall asleep on your arm and you know if you move he or she could wake up, so you stay there, like, forever? That’s how the puzzle started yesterday. At 1A: “Unable to move while holding a sleeping baby, in slang.” NAP TRAPPED. Rex said it’s his experience more often to be “cat trapped.” Here he is with his cat Ida.
But the stakes are much lower with cats. You move and wake the cat up, it just stretches a bit, yawns, and goes back to sleep somewhere else for another 15 hours. You move and wake the baby and you are f*cked up the kazoo, amirite?
If you like babies, this was the puzzle for you. At 48D: “Like a baby’s fingers, perhaps.” PUDGY. Awwww.
The puzzle also had a nice pair that involved something flat and something the opposite of flat. At 56A: “Bad way to be caught,” FLATFOOTED. And at 12D “Brand associated with push-ups,” WONDER BRA.
My visit this morning to the Dull Men’s Club (UK) left me dismayed. This was Andrew Norton’s post: “Can anyone explain to me, in simple scientific terms, why we do not use tidal power rather than solar and wind? There must be a reason but I can’t find it.”
It generated (pun intended) 148 comments (!) almost all of which were serious. What gives?
One member said “It has its ups and downs,” and another said “You need wellies.” (Boots.)
One member was even chided for “trying to be funny.” I replied: Isn’t trying to be funny good?
I did post these two efforts at answering the inquiry:
Hesitation to appear before others in a swimsuit?
The Sea Cow lobby has been throwing its weight against it.
Michael Winter posted: They don’t want to electrocute fish. To that I replied: The way my wife cooks, that would be an improvement. (Just kidding. Love you, Babe.)
Here’s a brother/sister story. It’s the Tiny Love Story by Meredith Jewett from today’s NYT called “A Whisper in the Wind.”
The beach where my brother and I spent our childhood is all driftwood and rocks — better suited to fort-building and crab-searching than to swimming. In our youth, we ran along the wave break, screaming while dodging the other’s volley of bull kelp. As adults, we walked his dogs in the cool morning fog. Last July, I stood ankle deep in the cold water, a fistful of his ashes in my hand. My older brother, Michael, taken by an aneurysm at 36. “I miss you,” I whispered as the wind swirled his ashes through my fingers, falling softly into the Salish Sea.
The photo is of the beach on Decatur Island, the last time Michael and Meredith were there together.
Today’s puzzle was called “Misquoting Shakespeare” and it just threw some bad puns at famous lines, e.g., “a nose by any other name.” Pretty lame. Don’t get me wrong — I generally love bad puns, but these did lack zip. I posted the following for the gang:
By the time my consistently late daughter showed up at the theater it was Thirteenth Night. Another time the performance was so bad, the audience changed the play’s name to All’s Well That Ends.
Hey, you know why Hamlet never went hungry? There were always some Danish in the castle. It’s true — look it up.
Yesterday’s UMICH-Northwestern game was held at Wrigley Field. They had to screw around with it to fit the field in, like remove a dugout. The game itself was a real nail-biter and it shouldn’t have been. We were favored by over ten points but committed five turnovers and barely eked out a win on a last-second field goal. It may sound crazy, but the offense and defense looked good. We’ll be big dogs against Ohio State in two weeks, but I’m not entirely hopeless.
There was a lot of banter about the history of Wrigley, including talk about all those years before lights were installed and only day games could be played. It led me to wonder who got the first hit at Wrigley in a night game. I might want his autograph in my collection as a piece of baseball history. So I did a little digging and found out the first night game was scheduled for August 8, 1988: 8/8/88. The city of Chicago and the Cubbies really played it up big. Celebrities were in attendance; tickets were scalped for hundreds of dollars. Ernie Banks and Billy Williams threw out the first ball. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played. A local realtor paid $7,500 for the “honor” of being the bat boy.
Phil Bradley got the first hit that night. He was the first batter up for the visiting Phils and hit a homerun. But heavy rains came and wiped it out. They waited for hours, but couldn’t get five innings in, so nothing counted. The first official night game was thus played on 8/9/88 and Mark Grace of the Cubs had the first hit, a single. I already had Grace’s autograph and was able to pick up Bradley’s for just a few bucks.
Sticking with sports, I just learned that Jets cornerback Kris Boyd was shot in his abdomen at 2 am last night on W. 38th Street in Manhattan after a dispute turned violent. He’s 29 and is listed in critical but stable condition. Yikes. Of course, we wish him a complete and speedy recovery. Kris is from Texas and played college ball with the Longhorns. As always occurs when a member of the Jets is shot, the police have announced that every single Jets fan is considered a suspect.
See you tomorrow Chatterheads. Thanks for dropping by.
The Wellington Files 