We watched another great Gnats game last night: a 3-2 win in Miami. An unusual game. It was the first time in franchise history that both teams scored more than one run in the first inning and no runs thereafter. Yes, folks, the boys took a shaky one-run lead in the first and nursed it home through eight more fraught innings.
Jacob Young’s two-run blast accounted for 2/3 of our runs, but an earlier RBI single by CJ Abrams was more interesting. The leadoff batter, James Wood struck out to start the game. Three straight curve balls did him in. When CJ got up several batters later, Kevin Frandsen, our announcer, said CJ should have been watching Wood’s at bat, based on which he should be expecting a curve ball. Sure enough, the next pitch was a curve that CJ seemed to be waiting for. He laced it into the outfield to knock in a run. Good baseball and great announcing.
Here’s a nice shot of Franny from his playing days. He’s “filled out” a bit since then.
Happy Mom’s day to all of you moms out there. It’s the one day of the year that the letter M is not owned by Michigan. Well, it’s sorta on loan, I guess. How about a special shout-out to Octomom! Remember her? I used to use her in my gift/estate tax class when discussing the annual exclusion. I’ll spare you the details. Wow, they all look great! Kinehora.
I recognized the co-constructors of the puzzle today as superstars (Rachel Fabi and Adam Wagner) and they did not disappoint. The theme revealer was CLOSE THE LOOP, and the grid gave us a C that you had to fill in with three squares marked “BLOCK” to close it up to be a circle.
Then, in the italicized theme clues, you had to figure out to read the C’s as O’s. E.g., The answer for the clue “Wild cats” was YOUTHFUL INDISCRETIONS, which only makes sense if you change “wild cats” to “wild oats.” That happened eight times. And, since these constructors are incredible, they kept the grid clean for the theme. That is, there were absolutely no C’s or O’s in any of the other (nonitalicized) clues! I hadn’t even noticed that until it was mentioned by a commenter. (Duh.) Rex didn’t notice it either, and wrote: “This is an added level of constructing difficulty that seems … insane. Something only dogs can hear. Crossword-constructing dogs. Anyway, this dog didn’t hear it.”
Many were bothered by the clue/answer at 6D: “”Meek” in “Blessed are the meek,” e.g. The answer was ADNOUN. What? It’s a real word that means an adjective used as a noun. Here, the adjective “meek” is used as a noun: “the meek.”
Rex was apoplectic:
What in tarnation and also on god’s green earth and/or the world is this word? I learned the term for what you call “meek” in the phrase “the meek shall inherit the earth” when I was in high school and I have never forgotten it and I have occasion to use it from time to time in my teaching and that term is “substantive adjective.” Today is the first day in my entire life, to say nothing of my English-teaching life, that I have seen the extremely ugly and awkward and confusing term ADNOUN. It’s like that word was someone’s very first assignment at portmanteau school. “OK, Billy, what if you combine ‘adjective’ and ‘noun,’ what would you call that?” “Uh … ADNOUN?” “Hmm. OK. Well … you keep trying, Billy.”
This poem by Charles Simic is called “In the Library.” It’s from today’s Writer’s Almanac.
There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.
Did you read Nick Kristof’s article in the NYT today? Oy. The title: “The Children America Abandoned,” doesn’t come close to describing the horror it details. He starts off with: As Jeremy Lewin, the acting under secretary of state for foreign assistance, put it: “Contrary to false media narratives, the data shows that President Trump’s foreign assistance review maintained and improved frontline lifesaving programs, while reducing bloat and costs.”
He goes on: This glossy new Trump narrative is absurd. Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71% cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year. The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5.
He then notes the actual numbers will be difficult to determine because the administration has cut data collection.
That’s just on the aid cuts that Musk so cavalierly imposed in thoughtless, brutal, hit-and-run fashion. Add to that the insane anti-vax policies which estimates say will needlessly take an additional 600,000 lives. Trump slashed funding for an international vaccine alliance, and is refusing to release $600 million that Congress has already appropriated.
To say these criminals have blood on their hands doesn’t begin to describe it. They are awash in blood, swimming in it, doing the back stroke and the butterfly stroke in it. How can anyone be anything but ashamed to be an American anymore?
The Wellington Files 