The Republicans have put a new spin on “No Child Left Behind.”
Not really new, though.
This poem is called “Adage.” It’s by Billy Collins and was in today’s Writer’s Almanac.
When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter
of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.
A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.
Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.
No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.
You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,
but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.
Did you know this about William S. Burroughs, the writer from the Allen Ginsberg world: One night at a party, he and his wife, Joan, agreed to demonstrate how he could shoot a glass off the top of her head. He missed the glass and killed her. Yikes. He was born on this date in St. Louis in 1914. Actually, Burroughs recanted that version of the incident and maintained that it was purely accidental (didn’t know it was loaded, it went off when he dropped it, blah, blah, blah). He was convicted of manslaughter, which I’m trying to change into man’s laughter right now (and failing).
Linda! Maybe we should hold off on our glass-shooting act for a bit.
It puts a whole new spin on the meaning of “shot glass.”
Ever hear of a SEXER? It was the answer at 31A today, clued with “Chick checker of a sort.” It’s someone who is specially trained to pick up baby chicks and determine their sex so they can be sorted (for future consumption or egg-laying or whatever). Large commercial hatcheries employ sexers to weed out the undesirable male chicks, which are mostly killed because they are “useless” (can’t lay eggs).
Here’s a joke from my Uncle Morris from sixty years ago. A woman brought a bunch of chickens to the market to sell. She asked the man behind the counter how much he’d pay for them. He said it depends on where they’re from. “Let’s see,” he said. Then he took one, stuck his finger up its tuchas and said, “This one’s from Rhode Island.” He took the next one, stuck his finger up its tuchas and said, “This one’s from Kentucky.” And so on for all of them. He said he’d give her $30 for the lot and she said fine. As he was counting out the bills, he said “I haven’t seen you around here. Where are you from?” At that point, she turned around, pulled up her dress, bent over, and said: “You tell me.”
[Thanks, Maish!]
Yesterday’s puzzle’s theme was very inventive, especially for Seinfeld fans. There were three “rites of passage” as theme answers: BAR MITZVAH, VISION QUEST (for Native Americans), and RUMSPRINGA (for the Amish). Then, the revealer, from all the way in left field was ” ‘Seinfeld’ catchphrase… or, when parsed as three words, how a participant of the theme entries might be greeted?” Answer: HELLO NEWMAN. (Get it? Hello new man.)
BTW, Jerry was asked by an interviewer once why he hated Newman, and he said, there was never any reason given for that on the show. It just seemed funny for that to be the case.
Women’s Olympic hockey hit the ice running (skating) today, well, only part of it did. The U.S. topped The Czech Republic 5-1 in the opening game, but the much-anticipated Canada-Finland match was postponed because ten of the Finns fell ill.
Here’s the Canadian team that won gold in 2022. Our Sarah Fillier is fourth from the left. Yay!
Andy Spragg, of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) says there’s an irreconcilable issue within this sentence of a review he wrote: It’s a bit corny, and apparently is an (allegedly much inferior) retread-for-UK of a Belgian TV series, but we’re enjoying it very much.
I was too stupid to spot the issue, but several other dull members did. It’s an “a/an” issue pertaining to the word (an) immediately preceding the parentheses. “An” certainly sounds right as he wrote it. But there is a rule that says a sentence must make sense grammatically and logically if the parenthetical information is removed. I.e., were a parenthesis to be removed, the surrounding text must still be grammatically sound. And, here, removing the parentheses leaves you with “an retread.”
As Andy puts it: “a sentence with an embedded fragment in brackets must be equally correct whether that fragment is present or absent, and in this case it’s not possible because the preceding indefinite article should be ‘an’ (if the fragment is present) or ‘a’ (if it is not).
“SWMBO has suggested writing ‘a(n)’ as a neat trick to resolve the conundrum, which is nice but cheating, really, I think.
“Allegedly, there is no ambiguity because the indefinite article ‘belongs’ to the noun immediately after the fragment. I’ll be very happy to have learned a new rule of English composition if this is indeed the case. However, several people asserting something to be so does not make it so. I wonder if anyone can point me to an ‘official’ reference that confirms this assertion, please?”
[OC note: SWMBO stands for “she who must be obeyed,” i.e., his wife.]
My vote is for “an” here. I think the phonetics trump the grammatical rule.
Brain hurt now? Follow me to the beer department. Now drink this.
See you tomorrow! Thanks for (burp!) stopping in.
The Wellington Files 