An emergency session of Owl Chatter’s Dirty Old Man Dept. was convened this morning. How had we not heard of Begoña Gomez, the pulchritudinous first lady of Spain, adored the world over by drooling accordionists?
Begoña, 55(!), has been married to President Pedro Sanchez of Spain for twenty years. They have two daughters. She comes to our attention via a NYT article on corruption charges she’s facing from her business activities. It may be politically motivated: “a deeply flawed hit job by an obsessed judge,” and President Sanchez is attempting to turn it to his advantage. Who cares? Here she is again. Hubba hubba.
It was a dreadful loss for the Gnats last night, seeking to rebound from an even dreadfuller one the night before. Oy. Double Oy. In each case they had a lead going into the ninth only to watch in horror as the rival Phils snatched up wins. It put a bit of a damper on the first half of the season that ended with the Gnats just peeking out over the .500 mark at 41-40. We soldier on. Amirite CJ?
A running gag Sam and I had last year was creatively misspelling “Odyssey” (as in Honda) when texting one another. It came up a lot because we sold our 2015 black one to friends of Sam and Sarah in Chicago. I drove it out to Detroit where they picked it up. Anyway, the New Yorker article I read at our pool today was about the film version of the epic that is coming out soon, and which I doubt I will see. It made me question whether I got my tuition-money’s worth out of Brandeis since I realized I remember almost nothing of it, despite studying it and writing at least one paper on it as a freshman in Allen Grossman’s then-famous Humanities class. What I do remember from that class was his assessment of the first college paper I ever wrote: “An utterly illiterate work.” (Are there degrees of illiterateness? Was that “utterly” really necessary?) He also once caught me napping (with my eyes open) in class and charged me with “sitting there like a bump on a log.” But I don’t remember squat about the poem. E.g., it was only via the article that I was reminded that Telemachus was O’s son.
The article is by David Denby and here’s a small piece of it I liked. It’s about O’s encounter with Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla, Denby reminds us, was a sea monster that ate men. O lost some of his in this horrifying scene.
. . . In agony they cried
to me and called my name—their final words.
As when a fisherman out on a cliff
casts his long rod and line set round with oxhorn
to trick the little fishes with his bait;
when one is caught, he flings it gasping back
onto the shore—so those men gasped as Scylla
lifted them up high to her rocky cave
and at the entrance ate them up—still screaming,
still reaching out to me in their death throes.
“Agony is hard to watch in a movie. As for the simile of the little fishes, the cinema can hardly match it; the medium is mostly wedded to what it shows. An image may resonate with deeper meanings (that’s what great directors can bring about), but the compression and displacement that make the simile devastating on the page have no cinematic equivalent. Sometimes poetry leaves the cinema behind, gasping for breath.”
Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, the football widow on the Sunday that lasted twenty years. Matt Damon plays the O-Man. Did you know he’s 55? Anne’s 43. We agree with Phil: She’s looked better.
Speaking of football, Phil just sent in this shot he got for us of Taylor’s engagement ring. The Knicks are a hard act to follow, but Tay and Trav will be tying the knot at The Garden next week. Mazel Tov, kids.
In the NYTXW today, at 15D, “‘Bye Bye Bye’ boy band” was NSYNC. It reminded me of the time Linda and I had tix for a concert but it was such a nice day out, we had trouble tearing ourselves away from the pool. It was a question of NSYNC or swim?
The wordplay in the puzzle was impressive. The theme was “insider trading” and in the theme answers, letters “inside” were “traded” to come up with the answer while the post-trade word was also a word, albeit unclued. (I know, WTF, right?)
Here’s how it worked: For the clue “Advocate of women’s equality” you filled in the squares with FINE MIST. Then, by having the EM and IN “trade” places, you wind up with FEMINIST. (See?) F*cking brilliant, IMO. That happened six times! The sexiest one was BRA PADS clued with “They may result in people being wrongly sent to jail.” Trade the AD with the RAP to get BAD RAPS.
Bravo, Tarun Krishnamurthy. TK is a sophomore at San Diego State.
Thanks for dropping in, Chatterheads!
The Wellington Files 