Did you know that the white inner part of the orange rind is called PITH. Learned that from the puzzle, though I vaguely recall learning it before. Anyway, I posted the following for the gang: I keep a bowl nearby when I’m peeling an orange so I have a pot to PITH in.

Naomi Watts was in the puzzle too, leading egs to comment: When I see NAOMI from the rear, I moan. (Get it? “Naomi” backwards spells IMOAN.) It led me to share how Ed Norton described his mother-in-law to Ralph: From the front, she looks like you from the back.

We’ve been moaning over Naomi for a long time. Mulholland Drive: very weird film, can’t recommend. Saw it with Caity a long time ago. We were hanging on by our fingernails until tiny people came on the screen. It was hopeless after that. (David Lynch.)

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When I go beer shopping, one of my favorite past-times, I’m often discombobulated (oysgefumphed is the Yiddish word I made up) because (1) I want to try everything, (2) I’m too cheap to buy the expensive stuff, and (3) I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. So I wander around in a daze waving off attendants offering to help. But at the Bottle King in Chatham, I had a good, decisive experience. I was looking for something a little on the dark side (sounds scary!), but not porter or stout, to counter what I’m usually having these days, a cheap light beer (Busch Light) good for my diet. And I found Brooklyn Amber Lager right away in a nice twelve pack of bottles. Perfect! Then I saw my favorite Vermont ale: Fiddlehead. Key to it all is freshness: they have to be stamped with a packaged on date that is fairly recent, or a best buy date that is well ahead, or I’ll just walk out. And both of these were right off the truck (relatively)! Decided just to get the Lager but was happy to see both. Had one with dinner just now. Nice! (Burp!) (George! — keep Phil away from it. I mean it — I’ll kill him. Or at least I’ll have Sarah F. kill him — she could do it one-handed without her pulse rate rising. And there’s not a jury in the world that would convict us.)

That’s not the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. It’s the Manhattan. And here are some fiddleheads. They’re ferns.

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My practice for the daily NYTXW is to complete the puzzle the night before (i.e., I do the “Thursday” puzzle Wednesday night). It pops onto my phone at precisely 10pm. That way, at 6am the following morning, when Rex Parker’s assessment and discussion of it appears, I have either completed it or given up, which is rare (he says, giving himself a pat on the back and nearly pulling a muscle).

I can rarely predict Rex’s take, since he sees so much more in it than I do. Today, e.g., what I thought might have been seen as a gimmick, he loved. The theme was BREAKDANCING and in three squares there were little drawings of figures performing dance moves. In each one, the figure appeared to be forming the shape of a letter, and that letter was used in the answer that ran across it. But that’s not all. Each long answer crossing it had the name of a dance embedded in it and the figure “broke” it. (What the hell am I talking about?) For example, for the answer VINCENT VAN GOGH the second V was a dancer with her body shaped into a V. And that figure “breaks into” the letters that spell T[V]ANGO (tango) that are embedded in VNCEN[T VAN GO]GH.

Egs said that at his age he doesn’t bend well anymore so any dance is a BREAKDANCE for him. [Yup. I hear ya.] On the topic of aging, Commenter Gary noted in a different context that he took his wife to the oncologist yesterday who was a woman (the doc) so young he would have guessed she was a Starbucks barista. (I wished him good luck. That’s what we do in the Commentariat. We care about each other.)

At 11A, the clue was “[blank] hair (edgy 2000s trend)” (3 letters), and I had no idea. (The crosses didn’t help, so I crashed on a Wednesday to my great disgrace.) The answer was EMO hair. Srsly? Commenter Nancy S. had the E and filled in EAR hair. Hysterical. EMO is long, side-swept bangs, layered lengths, and a side-swept look.

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In a headline no doubt written by the American Society of Cardiologists, it was pronounced “Taylor Goes Bare.” Sadly, the story was about her not wearing makeup. Puh-leeze don’t do that.

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I should inform our readership (both of you) that broadcasting may be spotty for a while. A (big) falling branch knocked out the internet/cable service at Owl Chatter’s NJ headquarters. Verizon came to do the repair yesterday, but we didn’t know we had to clear the whole driveway from the street to the house from snow for them. So they left. Arggh. We are faring ok so far without it. I’m actually thinking of suspending it for a bit. I get what I need on my phone and we don’t watch much TV. But for the blog, I’ll be using the wonderful Chatham Library and I may not get there every day.

We’re very sad to note the death by suicide of Katherine Hartley Short, Martin Short’s beautiful daughter, at the ridiculous age of 42. Katherine was a social worker with degrees from NYU and USC. Short and his wife Nancy (who passed away from cancer in 2010) also had two sons, who survive Katherine. All three kids were adopted.

Martin is a favorite of Owl Chatter’s with a devotion to nonsense at the highest level and a remarkable quickness. He does a physical impersonation of a bagpipe, for Pete’s sake. We fondly recall his appearance on Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” At one point, Jerry says to Short, “none of this is scripted,” and Short says “No kidding.”

Rest in peace, Katherine.

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Thanks for dropping in.