The Wellington Files

  • Taken By The Wind

    There is some fallout from yesterday’s mention of Stevie Nicks. I was intrigued by the comment that when she sang “Rhiannon” in concert it seemed like an exorcism, so I went to Youtube to watch a performance from 1975. It was pretty intense. Sometimes it strained her voice so much that a few shows by the band had to be canceled to allow her to recover.

    She introduces the song by saying it’s about a Welsh witch (a good witch). In Celtic religion Rhiannon’s the Welsh manifestation of a goddess. Wikipedia describes her as a strong-minded “Otherworld” woman, intelligent, politically shrewd, beautiful, wealthy, and generous. Nicks’ lyrics include the following lines:

    Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night
    And wouldn’t you love to love her?

    All your life you’ve never seen a woman
    Taken by the wind.

    She is like a cat in the dark
    And then she is the darkness.

    Parents started naming their daughters Rhiannon once the song came out: singer/songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, for example, born on 2/21/1977.

    Had you heard about this flap back in 2010? (I am so out of this loop.) At the Grammys, Nicks and Taylor Swift sang Rhiannon together as a duet. Nicks originally didn’t want to do the song with Smith. “She’s 20 years old, 5′ 11″ and slender; I’m 40 years older and, to be frank, neither of the other two things. I was not about to stand next to this girl on national television. But her little face just lights up like a star, and I couldn’t say no. Taylor reminds me of myself in her determination and her childlike nature,” and she praised Smith’s singing, songwriting, and musicianship.

    But Smith had a rare off-night, and when they sang the song together Tay Tay was badly out of tune. The critics did not hold back. Swift said she appreciated “constructive or professional” criticism, but she was furious that some of it “crossed the line,” and was just plain mean. Bob Lefsetz wrote a particularly vicious review stating, “Taylor Swift can’t sing. Did Taylor Swift kill her career overnight? I’ll argue she did. In one fell swoop, she consigned herself to the dustbin of teen phenoms. Taylor’s too young and dumb to understand the mistake she made.”

    Ouch!

    As you may recall from earlier owl chatter, Taylor is not a hick from West Virginia. She’s from West Reading PA, and her dad was a stockbroker and her mom a mutual fund marketing exec. She took vocal and acting lessons in New York City from age nine. As Mick Jagger noted after 9/11 — “You don’t fuck with New York.” Swift planned her revenge coldly.

    It’s impressive when an artist harnesses his or her artistry to make a point. I remember back in 1979, Reggie Jackson had a famous feud with manager Billy Martin. You could see them on TV, pushing and shoving each other in the dugout after Martin humiliated Reggie by taking him off the field in the middle of an inning. Then Reggie hit three home runs on three consecutive pitches on the grand stage of the World Series to defeat the Dodgers. Case closed. Martin was gone.

    Similarly, here, Swift struck back pointedly with her song “Mean.” In the video she references the feelings of the schoolgirl shunned by the popular kids, and the gay kid bullied in the locker room. But the song is mainly Swift herself striking back. I was going to reproduce the lyrics for you but they don’t pack the same power without the music and her performance. Check it out, below — She takes on the look of a flapper from the 1920s for part of it. And she’s playing the banjo.

    Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city
    And all you’re ever gonna be is mean.

    Oh, gosh, I haven’t even gotten to the puzzle yet. Hunker down. Get comfortable. Top off the coffee, or pop open another beer. There’s an awful lot to chatter about today.

    The clue at 62A was “Size option at Starbucks,” for VENTI. Here’s LMS on it:

    No place can make me feel like an outsider like Starbucks can. I feel like such an imposter that I can’t bring myself to say VENTI. I have to practically whisper medium black coffee, please and even then my face burns with embarrassment that I’m not spouting off VENTI iced skinny hazelnut macchiato, two pump, sugar-free syrup, extra shot, light ice, no whip.

    T Trimble chimed in:

    I feel not so much an impostor in a Starbucks (hi @Loren) as I do like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, who refuses to deal with the stupid lingo. “I’ll have a vanilla……….. one of the vanilla bullshit things, you know, you, whatever you want, some vanilla bullshit latte cappu thing, you know, whatever you got, I don’t care.” Barista guy: “You got it.”

    Jackie Mason has some material on the topic too. Those high stools you have to sit on at some Starbucks. “You can’t get down — elderly Jews are sitting up there and they can’t get down. They have to ask for help from the Gentiles, ‘Please, mister, can you help me down from here, I could break a hip.’”

    And Bill Maher has noted: The longer the Starbuck’s order, the bigger the a**hole.

    SALMA Hayek dropped by the grid, right up there at 8 across. Hi SH!

    Salma was born on Sept. 2, 1966 (so she’s 56), in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico and is a citizen of Mexico and the U.S. Her dad’s Lebanese and her mom’s Spanish, and an opera singer.

    Hayek’s portrayal of Frida Kahlo in 2002 earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, the first ever for a Mexican actress. On Dec. 13, 2017, Hayek published an op-ed in the NYT stating that she had been harassed and abused by film producer Harvey Weinstein during the production of Frida. She also directs and produces films. She married French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault in 2009. Their daughter Valentina was born in 2007.

    Hayek’s charitable work includes increasing awareness on violence against women and discrimination against immigrants. On July 19, 2005, Hayek testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee supporting reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.  She is a board member of V-Day, the charity founded by playwright Eve Ensler, discussed recently in owl chatter. 

    She’s got serious good looks. If she ever spoke to me (which, fuhgedaboutit), I couldn’t possibly form words. It would take all I’ve got just to make sounds and point.

    The clue at 40D was “Euphemism for a lesbian couple.” The answer was GAL PALS, and it generated a bit of controversy, starting with LMS’s ponderings:

    “Look. I don’t know what I’m talking about here, but I was brought up short by the clue for GAL PALS. I would think that the creation of a euphemism is born of trying to sidestep saying outright something not so great. You’re like, Excuse me, I’m going to go powder my nose. and not Excuse me, I’m going to go urinate. The very existence, then, of a euphemism implies the existence of something unpleasant. We have euphemisms for peeing, vomiting, mentally challenged people, firing employees, dying, etc. Nowadays do we really have to sugarcoat lesbian couple? I don’t think we have euphemisms for happy things like birthday cake. . . hold on. I’m gonna look into this

    …googling…..

    Ok, so I’m not quite right. Seems the euphemism doesn’t avoid saying something unpleasant so much as avoids being too direct. Pregnant/expecting. . . problem/issue. . . used/second hand. So never mind.”

    Kitshef said:

    I’ve heard GAL PALS used a ton, but never as a euphemism for a lesbian couple. I’ve generally heard it to mean a female friend with whom you (you being male or female) have a non-sexual relationship – a ‘girl friend’ but not a ‘girlfriend’.

    Weezie then chimed in with this, from the “battlefront:”

    Okay, this trans queerdo is here to defend GAL PALS as a totally awesome answer to a great clue and not at all offensive or suggesting erasure or cloaking is good or right. Over the last couple years, there’s been a swelling of critique around how academics, historians, and media seem to be wildly insistent on sticking to the Gal Pals narrative, amounting to lesbian or bisexual erasure. I.e., “Emily Dickinson really wrote to Sue ‘I tore open your letter and licked the envelope’s seal for any lingering taste of you’ and historians thought they were just friends.” #GalPals or #JustGalPals is shorthand for calling out and mocking that tendency. It is very much a current in millennial and Gen Z queer contemporary culture!”

    OMG! — a special shout-out to our excellent friend Pam who just let us know that she will be making a batch of Nanaimo bars for our get-together in Wilmington on New Year’s Day! She will be using Joyce Hardcastle’s award-winning recipe we reproduced in yesterday’s chatter. How great is that! Pam — brace yourself for some special bone-crushing owl-chatter hugs. [Pam notes she will be using gluten-free graham crackers, so Jenny and other gluten-shunning revelers will be able to partake. [Darn it — less for me!]]

    Here’s a poem by Ted Kooser from Winter Morning Walks, for a graceful ending today:

    Older this morning, the moon
    hid most of her face
    behind a round gray mirror.

    In a half-hour’s walk, I saw
    six shooting stars. Celestial notes,
    I thought, struck from the high end
    of the keyboard.

    Thanks for stopping by!

  • Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

    Happy Chanukah, everybody! — to those among you who are Jewish, and those among you who are Jew-ish. We are having our Chanukah dinner with 83.3% of our grandchildren tonight — on the eleventh night. How’s that for a miracle! It’s all symbolic, right? This year it’s symbolizing the Jews’ inability to get their act together during the regular holiday.

    How fitting that today’s puzzle is a NYT debut for a Jewish constructor: Josh Goodman, who cuts right to the chase at 40D with the granddaddy of us all: ABRAHAM, clued with “Isaac’s father, in the Bible.” Goodman includes this sweet note in the “Constructor’s Notes” section of Wordplay in the Times:

    “It’s especially exciting to be making my New York Times debut because the Times puzzle holds sentimental value for me. During college, I did the crossword every day at lunch, and in my sophomore year I was joined by another member of my dining co-op. We would solve the puzzle together and then sit and talk, sometimes for hours. Eight years later, she’s now my fiancée (and No. 1 test solver). Love you, Talia!”

    It’s a good puzzle. The clue at 32A was “Lowest pitches in chords,” and the answer was BASS NOTES. One comment asked: “Why would chords require that the lowest pitch be in the bass range?”

    And the response was: “The lowest note in a chord is called the bass note no matter where it falls pitch wise. If you’re playing a chord all the way to the right on a piano, the lowest note is still called the bass note even though it’s above the treble clef. Often the bass note is the same note as the name of the chord and then it’s also called a root note.”

    Music was certainly the order of the day. The theme centered on the only three women to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: Once with a band or partner, and again as a solo artist.

    Ready?

    TINA TURNER, CAROLE KING, AND STEVIE NICKS…

    Goodman noted a “glaring gender inequality” in that 23 men fall into that category.

    Nicks, who is 74 now, was born in Phoenix and started singing duets with her grandfather at age 4. She majored in Speech Communication at San Jose State, planning to be an English teacher, but dropped out with her dad’s blessing to pursue a musical career with Lindsay Buckingham, whom she met as a senior in HS. LB was at San Jose State too. On New Year’s Eve, 1974, Mick Fleetwood invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac, and Buckingham insisted that Nicks be welcome too.

    In 1975, the album Fleetwood Mac was a hit. Nicks’ “Rhiannon” was voted one of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time by Rolling Stone. Her live performances of the song took on a theatrical intensity and built to a climax in which Nicks’ vocals were so impassioned that Fleetwood said “her ‘Rhiannon’ was like an exorcism.”

    She is unusually pretty, with a soulful look.

    Carole King, who is turning 81 in February, was born in Manhattan. Her mom was a teacher and her dad a firefighter and they met in an elevator in Brooklyn College. (Comic Sam Levenson, whose birthday it is today (but who is dead), said, “If you die in an elevator, try to make sure it’s heading up.”)

    Carole attended Queens College but at 17 got pregnant and married Gerry Goffin and dropped out to get a job and write songs with him. Good move (the songs part). Earlier, Neil Sedaka dated King in high school and had a hit “Oh! Carol” in 1959.

    Among King’s 25 solo albums, Tapestry sold over 30 million copies, was No. 1 for over three months, and remained on the charts for nearly six years.

    Here’s a song she wrote over fifty years ago that still moves me to tears. Click on the arrow — you’ll be transported.

    I saw James Taylor perform at Tanglewood about five years ago with Sam and Sarah (in the audience — they weren’t performing). As you can see in the video, Taylor is bald now, and he told a story about his recent performance in Jamaica. He hadn’t played there for about 30 years, and at one point he took his cap off and a startled Jamaican fellow in the front row said “Wha hoppin mon?”

    Tina Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in Brownsville TN, is 83. Wikipedia says she is widely regarded as the Queen of Rock and Roll. No argument here.

    Impossible to capture the fire in a photo.

    Ever hear of NANAIMO? I hadn’t, which made getting 12 down a challenge. The clue was “Vancouver Island city.” It’s in British Columbia, Canada, and used to be called Hub City because of its central location on the island and the way its streets radiate from the shoreline like the spokes of a wagon wheel. The indigenous people of the area are the Snuneymuxw. It’s called Nanaimo because that’s as close as we can come to pronouncing it. Allison Crowe and Dianna Krall come from Nanaimo.

    The Nanaimo Bar is a dessert that requires no baking. It’s named after the city (duh). It consists of three layers: (1) a wafer, nut (walnuts, almonds, or pecans), and coconut crumb base; (2) custard icing in the middle; and (3) a layer of chocolate ganache on top. (Ganache is a paste made of chocolate and cream.) Variations are allowed. It’s been associated with the city from as far back as the 19th century.

    In 1985, Mayor Graeme Roberts initiated a contest to find the ultimate Nanaimo bar recipe. The recipe submitted by Joyce Hardcastle, a resident of Nanaimo (voo den?), was unanimously selected by a panel of judges. As a service to the readers of owl chatter, it is reproduced below.

    The designation “Nanaimo bar” appears in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

    A U.S. state dinner hosted by the Obamas in honor of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016 featured Nanaimo bars as the main dessert.

    In 2019, Canada Post issued a booklet of postage stamps dedicated to Canadian desserts and sweets. The booklet of 10 stamps features images of the Nanaimo bar, the butter tart, tarte au sucre (sugar pie), blueberry grunt, and Saskatoon berry pie. [OMG — blueberry grunt!]  The booklet of stamps resembled a recipe card. The image of the Nanaimo bar on the stamp received some criticism for its ratio of “the crumbly base, the custard filling, and the chocolate ganache icing.” Seriously.

    JOYCE’S OFFICIAL NANAIMO BAR RECIPE

    Bottom Layer

    ½ cup unsalted butter (European style cultured)
    ¼ cup sugar
    5 tbsp. cocoa
    1 egg beaten
    1 ¼ cups graham wafer crumbs
    ½ c. finely chapped almonds
    1 cup coconut

    Melt first 3 ingredients in top of double boiler. Add egg and stir to cook and thicken. Remove from heat. Stir in crumbs, coconut, and nuts. Press firmly into an ungreased 8″ x 8″ pan.

    Second Layer

    ½ cup unsalted butter
    2 Tbsp. and 2 Tsp. cream
    2 Tbsp. vanilla custard powder
    2 cups icing sugar

    Cream butter, cream, custard powder, and icing sugar together well. Beat until light. Spread over bottom layer.

    Third Layer

    4 squares semi-sweet chocolate (1 oz. each)
    2 Tbsp. unsalted butter

    Melt chocolate and butter over low heat. Cool. Once cool, but still liquid, pour over second layer and chill in refrigerator.

    (Judy from Lake Havasu says she used egg nog in place of the cream in the custard and it was a huge hit. Just sayin’.)

    The clue at 47A completely threw me: “Brit who wrote “The Vanishing Half.” Those of you familiar with the very popular book know how I was led astray. It’s not a British author — it’s an American author whose first name is “Brit.” Brit Bennett. “The Vanishing Half” came out in 2020 and rose to #1 on the NYT best-seller list. It was also named a top ten book of 2020 by the Times. Ms. Bennett is of particular interest to owl chatter because she pursued her graduate studies at UMich — Go Blue!

    There’s simply no end to the extraordinary women Josh Goodman was able to cram into the grid today. And JANE ADDAMS takes the cake (or at least the Nanaimo bar). She was born in Cedarville, IL, on Sept. 6, 1860. A lifelong pacifist, in 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She co-founded Hull House in Chicago, one of the country’s leading settlement houses providing aid to the poor. She essentially brought into being the field of social work as it is known today, and her work helped establish Sociology as an academic discipline.

    Mary Rozet Smith was the love of her life. They owned a summer home in Bar Harbor, Maine, and were together for 40 years until Mary’s death. When apart they wrote to each once or twice daily. “I miss you dreadfully and am yours ’til death,” Addams wrote.

    Addams herself died in Chicago on May 21, 1935 at the age of 74. In 1940, a 10c U.S. postage stamp was issued honoring her.

    Arggggh!– as ennobling as it would be to close with Jane Addams, I can’t let go of that Blueberry Grunt. Here’s what they look like, said Tom droolingly, with a clump of vanilla on the side.

  • Blood Oranges

    Mmmmm, what’s that neat smell? Don Christopher died this month in Gilroy, CA. He was 88. We all have a lot more garlic in our diets because of this man. For much of the last century, garlic (sometimes called the “stinking rose”), was considered exotic and was rarely found in the home. The influx of immigrants in the ’70s along with more health-conscious eating laid the groundwork for a garlic boom. Gilroy became the garlic capital of the world, and Christopher became known as the Garlic King, greatly expanding its production on his farm and boosting it in every way possible. The town of Gilroy’s association with garlic was so strong that Will Rogers once said Gilroy was the only town he knew where you could marinate a steak by hanging it on a clothesline.

    Christopher founded the Fresh Garlic Producers Association in 1978. In 1979 he created the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and only expected a thousand or so visitors. But over 15,000 came, and it grew to 100,000 by the early 80s. The Food Network played it up. From 1975 to 1994, the country’s garlic production tripled. Then, in 2019, a gunman opened fire at the festival, killing three and wounding 17. The festival was sued, and then the pandemic hit. The festival was canceled in 2022 and for the foreseeable future. But the demand for garlic remains strong. Don’s grandson Ken, the executive VP of the ranch, expects to set a sales record this year: Over a billion bulbs sold.

    Sadly, Don Christopher died without ever getting the answer to his life-long question: How many people does it take to change a garlic bulb? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

    Here’s a shot of Christopher doing what he did best — talking up the bulbs.

    The NYT obit also referred to garlic’s vampire-fighting powers.

    Did you know that Count Dracula and his wife almost didn’t get married? It’s true. When they went for their blood tests, he found out she wasn’t his type. And she was upset that he never earned his college degree – he flunked art because all he would draw is blood. They also had a big fight over whether to invite his cross-dressing cousin to the wedding — Count Dragula.

    But the wedding was nice — they hadn’t seen some of the family since her Bat Mitzvah. They served blood pudding, blood oranges, blood sausages, Bloody Marys, and Bloodweiser. For the band, they got Blood, Sweat and Tears. Once they were married, she almost threw him out of the castle when she suspected that his secretary was going down for the Count, and she caught them necking once. There’s always something. I could go on in this vein, but enough is enough. If you’re a little squeamish, please scroll by this shot of an actual vampire. It can be pretty upsetting.

    Is there a story in the news more delicious than that of George Santos? He’s the guy just elected to Congress from Long Island after lying about everything on his record that you could lie about. I’m kind of proud that he chose to lie about going to college at a CUNY school (Baruch). He chose Baruch over the Ivies or Stanford!

    He admitted to many of the lies, having no choice but to do so, but he had an explanation about his lie that he was Jewish. [You may find this hard to believe, but I am not making it up.] He said he never claimed to be Jewish. He said his claim was that he was “Jew”-ish. You know: “Jew-like.” (Based on some Jews on his mother’s side.) Put that in the “you can’t make this stuff up” file. So I got something out of the whole sordid business. Remember I was lamenting that I didn’t have a favorite suffix? It’s “ish” now. No question.

    Here’s Santos, swearing to something. Does he look Jew-ish to you?

    In the puzzle today, 1 across was CABALS (“small groups of conspirators”), and the word triggered a bit of a brouhaha. Commenter Natasha said the word comes from Jewish mysticism — Kabbalah, and has anti-Semitic connotations. She said the word should be shunned! Others noted the word is also associated acronymatically (I made that word up!) with five ministers in the government of England’s King Charles II. The initial letters of the names or titles of those men (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale) spell CABAL. Bottom line: the word does derive from the Hebraic Kabbalah, since its use predates the five ministers, but it does not appear to have taken on an anti-Semitic flavor. So you should feel free to continue using the word, as far as I’m concerned, maybe just not around Natasha. Why ask for trouble?

    BTW, Charles II was known as the “merry monarch,” and acknowledged at least twelve illegitimate children. He doesn’t look all that merry, or handsome, to me. But who am I to judge?

    The clue for 2 down was “Sean who voiced the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Rafael,” and the answer was ASTIN. WTF??!! I’m supposed to know that on a Tuesday? Even on a Saturday that’s ridiculous. But the acrosses were easy, so all is forgiven.

    You may recognize Sean (below). He’s been in stuff, including the popular Stranger Things, and 24. And get this — his parents are Patty Duke (she of the identical cousins), and John Astin — Gomez on The Addams Family. Who didn’t love Gomez? Anyway, Sean looks like a nice kid.

    There’s no such thing as identical cousins, amirite? Here are the lyrics from the old Patty Duke Show:

    Meet Cathy, who’s lived most everywhere,
    From Zanzibar to Berkeley Square
    But Patty’s only seen the sights
    A girl can see from Brooklyn Heights –
    What a crazy pair!

    But they’re cousins,
    Identical cousins all the way.
    One pair of matching bookends,
    Different as night and day.

    Where Cathy adores a minuet,
    The Ballets Russes, and crepes suzette,
    Our Patty loves to rock and roll,
    A hot dog makes her lose control –
    What a wild duet!

    Still, they’re cousins,
    Identical cousins and you’ll find,
    They laugh alike, they walk alike,
    At times they even talk alike –

    You can lose your mind,
    When cousins are two of a kind.

    I tried to get a sexy shot of Patty Duke. Fuhgedaboutit. This is the best I could do, fellas. She just wasn’t that kind of girl.

    With W. H. AUDEN in the grid today at 13 down, a poem would be fitting. Auden’s too hard for me, though (duh). Here’s one by Kooser from Winter Morning Walks that’s more my speed. (A photo of bittersweet follows.)

    How is it bittersweet could know
    to send its blind gray tendrils
    spiralling into the empty limbs
    of this particular cedar, dead and bony,
    set apart, in winter, on a hillside,
    where the bright red berries
    in their orange, three-petalled flowers
    are shown in such perfection?

  • Me Tarzan, You Valerie

    For those of you who, like me, pretty much forgot everything you learned on American History, it may be news that a significant early turn in the Revolutionary War took place on Christmas night 1776, right here in Jersey. The 5,000 men with Washington still able to fight were demoralized from defeats and retreats. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Tom Paine wrote in a pamphlet, urging the effort on. Congress had abandoned Philadelphia, fearing a British advance.

    When Washington learned the British garrison at Trenton was weakly manned (by Hessians), he crossed back over the Delaware River in an icy storm with 2,400 men. They marched nine miles and overtook the garrison. The Colonials’ spirits were buoyed by the victory at Trenton and enlistments increased. Several weeks later, Washington defeated the Brits at Princeton, causing them to abandon their posts in Jersey. By March, Congress moved back into Philly. Historians credit the Battles at Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.

    (It’s unclear how the British were able to get into Princeton in the first place because their SAT’s were low.)

    See those chunks of ice in that picture of Washington, above? Today’s puzzle started right off at 1 across with: “Floating ice chunk,” and I filled in floe, but it turned out to be BERG. I wasn’t the only one who did that, and here’s quite the explication by commenter Barbara S., whose husband, amazingly, is a glaciologist:

    ME: What do you think? Which is a better answer for the clue: BERG or floe?

    MY H: “Chunk” implies something smaller than a BERG which, famously, are colossal and mostly invisible. I’d tend to prefer floe. But another possibility, although it’s too long, is “bergy bit.”

    ME: “Bergy bit”? What?? Did you just make that up?

    MY H: No. It’s a term you see in the literature.

    ME: Literature? What literature? A children’s book on the Arctic?

    MY H: No, the scholarly literature.

    ME: Do you mean to tell me that if I were to read a scientific paper on the northern oceans in the journal Nature, I’d encounter the term “bergy bit”?

    MY H: Undoubtedly.

    ME: Where on earth did that goofy term come from?

    MY H: I’m not sure. Possibly scientists who are geeks and live in their heads too much. Or maybe from seamen in wooden sailing ships who were trying to navigate the north Atlantic through to the northwest passage. They needed to know by sight which ocean-based iceforms tended to be the most dangerous, and they may have made up these terms. Another one is “growler.”

    ME: “Growler”? For an iceform? Are you sure you aren’t about to invoke the big bad wolf?

    After this conversation I [Barbara S.] did some research, and found this on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website:

    “To be classified as an iceberg, the height of the ice must be greater than 16 feet above sea level and the thickness must be 98-164 feet and the ice must cover an area of at least 5,382 square feet.

    “There are smaller pieces of ice known as ‘bergy bits’ and ‘growlers.’ Bergy bits and growlers can originate from glaciers or shelf ice, and may also be the result of a large iceberg that has broken up. A bergy bit is a medium to large fragment of ice. Its height is generally greater than three feet but less than 16 feet above sea level and its area is normally about 1,076-3,229 square feet. Growlers are smaller fragments of ice and are roughly the size of a truck or grand piano. They extend less than three feet above the sea surface and occupy an area of about 215 square feet.”

    Hard to segue from that to Ron ELY, clued at 45 down as “Ron of Tarzan fame.” He’s still living and is 84. During the filming of the Tarzan series that ran for three years on NBC from ’66 to ’68 (57 episodes), Ely did virtually all of his own stunts, breaking his shoulder twice and suffering two dozen major injuries, including lion bites. Among his many other TV roles, Ely played Dobie Gillis’s older brother in one episode, and was in an episode of L.A. Law.

    Ely married his high school sweetheart in 1959, but they divorced in 1961. I guess drooling all over someone in Algebra and Trig for two years doesn’t always translate into a good marriage. Good to know.

    He waited until 1984 to remarry. His wife this time was Miss Florida in 1981, Valerie Lundeen, and they had three kids: Kirsten, Kaitland, and Cameron. Here’s a family photo:

    On October 15, 2019, Valerie was found stabbed to death in the family home; Ron was unharmed. Police were called to the scene and Ely identified their son Cameron as the assailant. He was located and confronted by the police. Although he obeyed their instructions at first, he lunged at them and shouted that he had a gun (he didn’t have a gun). He was then killed by 22 gunshots. The DA ruled it was justifiable homicide and no charges were brought against the officers. Ely filed a Federal wrongful death lawsuit against the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office. According to Ely, the shooting was uncalled for and the officers failed to give proper care to his wife and son. As far as I can tell, the matter has not been resolved.

    Asked for comment, Ely, who should know, stated “It’s a jungle out there.”

    Next time someone with a lisp tells you he has to take a PITH, don’t show him where the bathroom is –toss him an orange. The clue at 30 down was: “Bitter part of an orange.” I was today old when I learned that PITH is that white stuff that is part of the peel or rind. As it happens, the pith is rich in Vitamin C, fiber, and anti-oxidants. So someone who is “pith poor” has not eaten enough oranges. (Pleathe — don’t thtart me.) Here’s what your peeled oranges should look like:

    Wow — it’s David Sedaris’s 66th birthday today! Without question, you should stop reading this ridiculous blog, and pick up any collection of his stories. Here are some quotes:

    “If you’re looking for sympathy you’ll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”

    “Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings”

    “If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?”

    [IMHO — that third one? It doesn’t get any better than that.]

    I’m happy to note I finished grading the tax exams. For a class of around 35 students, 4 failed and two got A+. Too many C’s. Oh, well. Another semester in the books.

    Thanks for stopping by!

  • Ragamuffin

    Met Diary this week ran a feature selecting the top five items for the year and picked a winner. I’m going to share one of the non-winners, though. It’s by Jane Moos Cohen, and is called “Extra Ticket.”

    It was April 1992, and I had two tickets for the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall.

    The person I had invited to join me was unable to come, so I did something I had never done before: I stood on the sidewalk and held up the extra ticket to see if I could find a taker.

    A man approached me, asked for a discount, and we completed the transaction.

    We sat next to each other, and the rest is history. I had just turned 40, he was 45 and neither of us had been married. We got engaged that August and married in October, 30 years ago last month.

    Happy Anniversary, my love.

    01 April 2019: Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at Seventh Avenue. Manhattan is world’s major commercial, financial and cultural center and the most densely populated of New York City’s 5 boroughs. Local people are crossing the street.

    Oh, my goodness — Phil Ochs is here, at 100 down today, clued as a “Joan Baez contemporary.” My heart skipped a beat. His song “Changes” was sung at my wedding by sisters-in-law Bobbie and Judy. “Sit by my side, come as close as the air.” Our cat Philly was named after him.

    But the song of his I want to share in owl chatter this morning is the extraordinary “When I’m Gone.” Here are the lyrics, and you can hear him perform it while you read them via Youtube with a simple click, below:

    There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone
    And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
    And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

    And I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone
    All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone
    My pen won’t pour a lyric line when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

    And I won’t breathe the bracing air when I’m gone
    And I can’t even worry ’bout my cares when I’m gone
    Won’t be asked to do my share when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

    And I won’t be running from the rain when I’m gone
    And I can’t even suffer from the pain when I’m gone
    Can’t say who’s to praise and who’s to blame when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

    Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone
    And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I’m gone
    Can’t be singin’ louder than the guns while I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

    All my days won’t be dances of delight when I’m gone
    And the sands will be shifting from my sight when I’m gone
    Can’t add my name into the fight while I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

    And I won’t be laughin’ at the lies when I’m gone
    And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
    Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

    There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone
    And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
    And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it
    I guess I’ll have to do it
    Guess I’ll have to do it
    While I’m here

    Youtube allows for comments below the performances, and I found this one below “When I’m Gone:”

    “An angelic voice, a beatific heart, a sturdy conscience, a troubled mind and addicted body. It’s no way to go through life, son. Thank you for trying as long as you did.”

    That’s a tough segment to follow, but who better to try than Jennifer Aniston, or JEN, at 58D. I looked for a funny quote of Rachel’s but found a better one of Ross’s, which was probably spoken to Rachel:

    “You’re over me? When were you under me?”

    Sounds like Groucho.

    I looked through about 100 photos of her, trying to pick the perfect one. She’s pretty even when she’s not trying. In this one, she’s trying.

    It’s Rod Serling’s birthday today (1925), of The Twilight Zone. There were 172 episodes of the original show, starting in November of 1958. I remember several, including one in which a dollhouse enthusiast becomes a miniature figure in his dollhouse at the end.

    Serling was born to a Jewish family in Syracuse, NY. His dad was a grocer and his mom a homemaker. He was a chatty child and once, during a two-hour car drive, his mother, father, and brother decided to stay silent to see if Serling would notice. He didn’t; he spoke nonstop for the entire ride. He smoked 3 to 4 packs of cigarettes a day and died of a heart attack when he was 50. File it under “Way Too Young,” in The Twilight Zone.

    Dorothy Wordsworth, William’s sister, was also born on this day in 1771, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. (We’ll just let that sit there, and tiptoe away.) Get this — she was a poet too, filling journals with her verses, and William often stole from her work, including parts of some of his best known poems such as “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud.” WTF Bill?!

    Their parents died when William and Dorothy were young and they were separated and sent to live with different relatives. When they later reunited (when she was 23), they stayed together for the rest of their lives. Bill wrote this of her in Tintern Abbey:

    Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
    My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
    The language of my former heart, and read
    My former pleasures in the shooting lights
    Of thy wild eyes …
    My dear, dear Sister!

    Everybody’s favorite clue today was at 69D: “Cut with a letter opener?” If you can think of “cut” as a cut of meat, and “letter opener” as “starting with a letter,” you can come up with T-BONE STEAK.

    TIL (Today I Learned) that RAGAMUFFIN is a breed of cat, known for being friendly and having thick fur. A pair of ragamuffin kittens:

    Meowy Christmas, everybody!

  • Germany 3, England 2

    To steal LMS’s phrase, “I was today old” when I learned that Beethoven originally named his Third Symphony to honor Napoleon Bonaparte, who was a hero of his as a “man of the people.” But that image was exploded when Bonaparte declared himself Emperor. When Beethoven found out, he broke into a rage and exclaimed, “So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of Man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!” Beethoven seized the top of the title-page, tore it in half and threw it on the floor. The page had to be recopied, and the symphony was renamed The Eroica (heroic) Symphony.

    But he must later have had mixed feelings. A copy of the score that still exists has two handwritten subtitles that included “Bonaparte” scratched out. But three months later he told his publisher the title was really Bonaparte, and it was eventually published with the title “Heroic Symphony — composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.”

    There were eight 15-letter answers in today’s puzzle — 2 each next to each other, and symmetrically placed, in each direction. Quite a feat of construction. And one was BEETHOVEN’S THIRD, thus the above chatter. Another one was ELECTRICAL POWER that was clued “It’s measured in watts,” and may have been a subtle link to another answer: TYRESE Gibson, the singer and actor, who was born and raised with his three older siblings by his single mom in Watts (LA) after his dad left them. Quite a success story. He has sold over 4 million records in the U.S. and is an actor in the “Fast and Furious” films. He got his start when his HS music teacher suggested he audition for a Coke commercial. I guess it went well.

    My favorite of the long answers was ALABAMA SLAMMERS “Southern Comfort cocktails.” I don’t drink them, I just like how they sound. It led LMS to comment:

    “I was at my sister’s last night for a Christmas party, and her husband had an array of bottles in his makeshift bar. Southern Comfort was among them. We were thinking of different cocktails, but ALABAMA SLAMMER didn’t come up. Well, actually, we were trying to invent Christmas-themed cocktails like a ‘Mistletoe Margarita’ and a ‘Santa Sidecar.’ I said, Hey! How ‘bout a Tom Coins?! Crickets. Blank stares. I explained, You know, the noel version!. They still didn’t get it. Sigh. Rodney Dangerfield and all that.”

    It took me longer to figure out Tom Coins than to do the puzzle, but I got it. The “Noel” version of a “Tom Collins” would be a Tom Coins, — after you remove the “Ls.” Get it? Noel!

    Before I saw that I thought it might have come from a Rodney Dangerfield line so I googled “Dangerfield Tom Coins,” but got nothing. She only mentioned Rodney because she “got no respect.” I did get to listen to some of his lines though. Here’s one:

    Boy, my neighborhood is tough – I asked a cop, “How long does it take to get to the subway from here?” He said, “I don’t know — no one’s ever made it.”

    Today’s “Writer’s Almanac” recounted a well-known WWI Christmas Eve story I had heard, but it added (for me) a crucial fact. As you may know, the fighting in the trenches was brutal, but on Christmas Eve 1914 British soldiers heard the Germans singing Silent Night at one point and joined in. Then both sides raised candles and lanterns and a German said, “Tomorrow is Christmas, if you don’t fight, we won’t fight,” and a truce settled in for the one day.

    The Germans sent over beer and the British sent over plum pudding, and they met in between the lines and exchanged handshakes and small gifts. Someone produced a soccer ball and a game ensued. Fighting resumed on the 26th.

    The “new fact” I learned was that the Germans won the soccer match, 3-2. (Britain won the war.)

    In general, during the war, soccer often helped reduce tension among the troops. Here’s a shot of an impromptu game that was played in Greece on Christmas Day, 1915.

    The clue at 3 down was a trick! “Bush growth” didn’t mean “shrub,” it meant something native to the “Bush region” of Australia, i.e., the undeveloped and unsettled region (not as remote as the Outback which is more rugged and arid). And the answer was EUCALYPTUS TREES, most species of which are native to Australia, with only a few present outside the continent.

    Eucalypt wood is commonly used to make didgeridoos, the traditional Aboriginal wind instrument. The trunk of the tree is hollowed out by termites, and then cut down if the bore is of the correct size and shape. This one may be getting a thumbs up? Hard to tell.

    George SEGAL, alav hashalom, was at 22 down, clued as “Actor George of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” He was so young in that movie. He played Nick to Sandy Dennis’s Honey, and, of course, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor were George and Martha. All four received Oscar nominations and both women won. Burton lost out for Best Actor to Paul Schofield in “A Man For All Seasons.” Segal lost out for Best Supporting Actor to Walter Matthau in “The Fortune Cookie.” Mike Nichols directed Woolf and was also nominated, but lost out to Fred Zinnemann for “A Man For All Seasons.”

    One of my favorite Segal movies was “The Hot Rock” with Robert Redford. Wonderfully funny. Ron Liebman as the car-obsessed getaway driver was especially good. Sadly, Liebman died in 2019.

    Here’s an exchange Segal had with Jacqueline Bisset, who was playing Natasha (“Nat”) in “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?:”

    Segal: Come on, Nat, you don’t consider a roll in the hay with your secretary adultery?

    Bisset: What do you call it, shorthand?

    Here’s George, and then Jackie.

    Happy Happy Merry Merry, everyone! Thanks for stopping by.

  • Bang The Drum Slowly

    Ha! The clue for 42A today is “End of one’s money,” and the answer was BOTTOM DOLLAR. The Joker noted: “Bottom dollars are what one pays for a BBL.”

    The clue for 28D was “Stay out of it!,” and the answer was MYOB (“mind your own business”). Egsforbreakfast crafted this “invitation to a cheap introvert’s party:” BYOB and MYOB.

    The clue for 9D was “High-tech security device,” and the answer was RETINALSCANNER. Egsforbreakfast noted: “If you don’t like canned retinals, don’t get a retinalscanner.”

    At 39A, “Hennery” was the clue for COOP, and LMS chimed in with: “Love the word hennery because -ery is my favorite suffix. A connery could be a prison, amirite? I like that, in addition to denoting a place, -ery can be tacked on to indicate a kind of behavior – jackassery, quackery, etc.”

    [I don’t have a favorite suffix. I need to get out more.]

    At 52D, a “good name for a florist or optometrist” was IRIS. And I was thinking a good name for an optometrist or a proctologist might be “Rod.” (Ouch!)

    Bang the drums for Elayne Jones, who died last Saturday at the age of 94. She was a percussionist, and had quite a tale to tell. How did she choose percussion? “Racism,” said Jones . “Mr. Russ [her high school teacher] handed me a pair of drumsticks and said, ‘We all know that Negroes have rhythm.’ When my family would visit Barbados during my childhood, I loved the music and the dancing and the drummers, but it never entered my mind that I would play drums someday.”

    Her talent took her to the High School of Music and Art in NY, and then to Julliard. Jones graduated from Juilliard in 1949, and that summer, she attended the Tanglewood Music Festival in the Berkhires, performing in the student orchestra. She studied with Roman Szulc, then-timpanist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as other musicians such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. She said the six weeks at Tanglewood were one of the happiest experiences of her life.

    Her career began with the NYC Opera and then the American Symphony Orchestra led by Leopold Stokowski, who was a great supporter of Jones. When she subbed briefly with the NY Philharmonic in 1958, she became the first Black musician to perform with them. She encountered racism and sexism every step of the way. She was instrumental in introducing the concept of the “blind audition,” in which performers audition behind a screen so race is not a factor.

    When an opening arose in the San Francisco Symphony in 1972, she was awarded the position with the support of Seiji Ozawa, the music director, and she quickly wowed the SF music critics. One wrote that her work was “so rounded and suave, I just about fell out of my seat.”

    After two years, however, despite her excellence and the full support of Mr. Ozawa, she was denied tenure by a committee of seven white men, two of whom rated her talent at 1 out of 100. Audience members picketed and organized petition drives and Ozawa resigned, although he stated it was for unrelated reasons. Jones sued the orchestra and the musicians’ union. A judge ordered a second, supervised vote by a new committee, but she was denied tenure again, supposedly based on her intonation. She took a tenured position with the SF Opera and had a superlative career, but her experience with the orchestra remained with her, bitterly. “I think her greatest contribution to percussion was that she paved the way for women and non-white players in the mostly-white world of classical music,” a fellow timpanist said. “Also, her strength as a player and as a survivor. And she was so much fun to watch!“

    [Linda and I have been attending concerts of the NJ Symphony for decades and their timpanist from 1971 until his retirement in 2015, was a much-loved Black musician, Randall Hicks. Sadly, Mr. Hicks passed away in 2019.]

    This photo is the cover of Elayne Jones’s autobiography, published in 2019.

    My g-daughter Lianna is in 7th grade in the Summit NJ school district. So she’ll be in high school in two years, if all goes well, kinehora. So I get emails from the “Boosters,” with news about the high school sports teams. Is it common for a public school to have a women’s ice hockey team? Summit does. (And so does Chatham (I just looked it up.)) It sounds brutal. Here are a few sentences from the write-up of a recent game. No one died, but the language is pretty gruesome — slashing and killing seems to be a routine part of the vernacular:

    “Josie DiFeo scored early after a turnover on the blue line. Later in the period, Anneliese Claus got called for a slash. While on the kill, Elizabeth Puskar got called for a crosscheck. We killed off a 5-3 penalty for 1:06 to keep it at a one-goal deficit. This was a huge kill for the girls.” 

    Here’s the team:

    I’ve wasted enough of your time — Happy Puzzling!

  • Vermont Postscript

    Owl chatter is back in NJ after a wonderful trip with Welly to see our Vermont friends, Susan, Lizzie, Robert, and Greta (woof woof!). I collected the hugs I was promised. Fair is fair. Here’s a shot of the view from their kitchen that doesn’t do it justice:

    A riddle from Lianna: To quit your job, what do you need?

    Give it some thought, and I’ll give you the solution somewhere down below.

    There were two sports deaths this week. Cincy pitcher Tom Browning was only 62. He was very popular with the fans, in part because he was a prankster. On July 7, 1993, when the Reds were playing the Cubs at Wrigley, Browning snuck out of the stadium in his uniform, and joined the fans watching the game from the rooftop of a building across the street. (He was fined $500. Booooooo!)

    Browning was called up from Wichita in September of 1984 and beat Orel Hershiser and the Dodgers in his MLB debut, pitching into the ninth inning and yielding only one run. He won 20 games his rookie year (1985), a feat no rookie had performed since 1954. An auspicious start, but who could have predicted his perfect game? — the only one ever by a Reds pitcher in their history. It was 1-0 over the Dodgers in Cincy on September 16, 1988. It took him 102 pitches — 70 were strikes, and he didn’t go to ball 3 on a single batter. He was wearing red underwear — something he always did on the days he pitched.

    And Football Hall of Famer Franco Harris died, at age 72. His dad was an African-American soldier stationed in Italy in WWII and he married an native Italian woman — a “war bride.” She moved to the U.S. with him when he returned, and Franco was born in Ft. Dix, NJ, on March 7, 1950, just about 50 days after I was born in Brooklyn.

    After excelling at Penn State, Harris had a phenomenal pro career with Pittsburgh — 4 Super Bowl wins and 9 Pro Bowl selections. He was the MVP of Super Bowl IX. His most famous play was dubbed “The Immaculate Reception” by Steeler sportscaster Myron Cope. With Pittsburgh down 7-6 to Oakland with only 22 seconds left in the game, a pass intended for Steeler receiver Frenchy Fuqua was deflected, and Harris scooped it up just before it hit the ground. He ran it in for a touchdown and the win. It was the first ever playoff win for Pittsburgh. Oakland claimed it touched Fuqua first, which would have meant Harris was not eligible to grab it under the rules then in effect. But the replays were inconclusive on the issue, and the league upheld the call.

    OK — back to that riddle: To quit your job, what do you need? A job.

    Now don’t you feel silly? (Thanks, Lianna!)

    If you’ve been decrying the lack of opera chatter, decry no more. It’s the birthday of composer Giacomo Puccini, born in 1858. His full name was Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini. That’s some serious middle name shit. He wrote La Boheme in 1896 and Madama Butterfly in 1904, just to name two, but Puccini died in 1924 before he could finish his last one: Turandot. When Arturo Toscanini conducted the premiere of Turandot in 1926, he stopped the orchestra at Puccini’s final notes, saying, “Here the opera finishes, because at this point the Maestro died.” Later, another composer, Franco Alfano, wrote the last two scenes based on Puccini’s sketches.

    Wanda Sykes was in the puzzle today — very funny lady. Some people can read from the phone book and I’m roaring. Here’s some of her work:

    “I love my family but my family – they’re the type of people that never let you forget anything you ever did… I was in the first grade Christmas play – I’m playing Mary. Now, during the course of the play, I dropped the baby Jesus… They still talk about this. I go to my family reunion, and one of my cousins just had a baby. So I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s a cute little baby. Let me hold the baby…’ And my aunt runs over, ‘Don’t you give her that baby! You know she dropped the baby Jesus!’”

    Also: “Seriously, I don’t need a gun. I’m easily annoyed. I would shoot people in my house that I invited over.”

    Last one: “When my parents send me emails, the first three are blank.”

    Wanda — you are welcome in the grid any day of the week!

    I have to balance my Vermont morning with one from Nebraska, from Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks:

    An anthem of geese on the wing,
    and over the next field
    a thin flag of starlings billows and snaps.

    At dawn, a sudden fire on a hilltop
    four miles east—
    Joe Skala’s Airstream trailer
    reflecting the sun.

    Let’s see how the Jets are doing in their rare Thursday game against Jacksonville. Good night!

  • Mismo Bili Volonteri

    [Owl chatter is broadcasting tonight from a dumpy little motel on the outskirts of Albany, on the way to collect a promised hug from Susan in Vermont. The heat works, and the wifi, and it’s quiet — heaven!]

    Residents of Crossworld know that ORR is either Bruin ice hockey great Bobby or, less frequently, Yossarian’s tent-mate in Catch-22.  That latter ORR had no first name in the novel, but was Ivor ORR in the mini-series.  In any event, as far as I can tell, it’s never been Louis ORR, who played pro basketball for the Knicks from ’82 to ’88, after excelling at Syracuse.  He died last Thursday at age 64.  In my house, he’s best known as head coach at Siena College in upstate NY, where Linda went!  In his one year there, he led the Saints to a 20-11 season and a three-way tie for first place in their conference.  He moved on to coach at Seton Hall and Bowling Green. 

    Orr was 6′ 8″ but weighed only 175 (ridiculous), so he was careful to avoid overly physical play when he was in the NBA.  He scored over 5,500 points in his pro career, including a game-winning three-point shot against the Celtics as time expired on Jan. 20, 1987.  He was inspired to become an evangelical Christian by a sermon of Jimmy Swaggart’s, and saw coaching as a kind of ministry.  He wrote verses on the back of his game plans.  His favorite:  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

    Amen to that, Coach!

    The Orr in Catch-22 would sometimes stuff crab-apples in his cheeks.  Or horse chestnuts.  He also held rubber balls in his hands and when anyone asked him why he had crab-apples in his cheeks he’d show them the rubber balls and explain that they are not crab-apples, they are rubber balls, and they are not in his cheeks they are in his hands.  He thought that was a good story but was not sure it got across well because it’s hard to speak clearly with crab-apples in your cheeks.  Yossarian once asked him why he had crab apples in his cheeks and he said because they are better than horse chestnuts.  When Yossarian blew up and asked why he had anything in his cheeks, Orr said “I don’t have anything in my cheeks — they are crab-apples.”  

    What perfect nonsense! We can only dream of attaining nonsense that pure.  We miss you Joe.

    I enjoy reading the comments on the day’s NYT puzzle that are posted on Rex Parker’s column. On many days, they are just random notes on how people did with the puzzle. Sometimes there’s a gem or two — some of the folks are very funny. I’ve already stolen material liberally from LMS, a teacher of problem children who’s a brilliant and amazing woman.

    I’ve noted how little things in the puzzle sometimes open neat little doors for me — for example, who would have known about the Brazilian Butt Lift had not the puzzle used BBL in a recent grid? And sometimes people are moved to tell stories.

    Today’s puzzle asked what fruit was used to make slivovitz. It’s PLUM. It opened doors for two stories:

    My cousins in Poznan gave me a bottle of Slivowitz once. They distilled it from plum wine made from the plums in their orchard. The orchard in which their grandfather had buried their valuables when the Germans were coming in 1939. They still dug the occasional hole back there, on a slow day, hoping to luck onto more valuables. They gave my mother one of the valuables once, a scapular which was a sizable piece of thick metal which would have stopped swords and bullets quite well if worn on the breast. They thought it was medieval but an art historian friend said it had phony rivets on it, it was a 19th century tourist trinket. But back to the plum brandy. I used to sip a thimbleful of it every Christmas Eve and think of the Polish relatives, till I had a drunk over for Wigilia one year and he decided based on the taste that it was cheap rotgut and swilled the rest of the bottle in about 3 large gulps.

    Here’s the second one:

    My first experiences with slivovitz/slivovica came back in the mid-90s when I took a year off from college to roam Europe, ending up for several months on a grassroots post-war reconstruction project in Pakrac, Croatia. We worked a lot on the Serbian side of town (the UN peacekeepers had left by then, so there was an understood border between the Croat and Serb sides that the internationals could cross without hassle). One morning, we walked over to Ljuba’s house to chop some wood. Ljuba was in her 70s, and lived not just through this war, but the horror of WWII. Despite her thin, frail appearance, she was still strong physically and mentally. She damned well would have chopped her own wood if we weren’t around. She greets us with shots of slivovica (which we just called “rakia”) and demitasses of Turkish coffee. Mind you, this is 9 a.m., and we’re starting the day with shots of seriously strong coffee and seriously strong spirits before we go out to wield a sharp axe for an hour or two. But this was hospitality.

    I developed a fondness and palette for the drink. Every Wednesday, there would be a morning market near the town center and, among your standard provisions, there would be around six to eight vendors selling their homemade slivovitz. With free samples. Once again, bright and early in the morning. You could wander from stall to stall and get seriously blitzed by noon. But, with the sampling, you quickly learned the nuances of slivovitz and who made it well, and who just made awful rotgut. The flavors ranged from the unsweetened essence of Damson plums to odd off-flavors of soil and leaves. A trick was to dip your finger in the slivovitz, rub it on the back of your wrist, wait a moment, then take a whiff, as if you were testing a perfume. If it smelled of fruit and nothing else, it was good.

    I found one vendor near the graveyard who had the reputation for having the best slivo in the area. On my way back to the UK and then the US, I picked up three two-liter Fanta bottles of the stuff for presents and personal consumption. Customs didn’t seem to care. My uncle (from Zakopane, Poland) loved the stuff so much, I gave him an entire bottle. He swore not only that it didn’t give him a hangover, but that he even felt better the next day after drinking it, as if it were some sort of elixir.

    Three years later, I found myself living in Budapest. One of my fellow volunteers, a Kiwi named Jackson, came through town and stayed at my place for a month. His mother had just passed away, and he was backpacking across Europe to process his loss. In a bit of youthful spontaneity, we decided to rent a car and revisit Pakrac with a couple colleagues of mine. Part of the visit was impelled by the news of the death of Ljuba, whom we wanted to pay our last respects to at the graveyard. Part of it was for Jack. We arrive, find the graveyard and the austere plot, and say a few words. As I left the graveyard, I remembered the slivo, and I hoped I remembered the house. I approach the door, knock, and mumble the best of my half-remembered Serbian to say, “um…[mismo bili volonteri] we were volunteers here three years ago, we think we bought some rakia here, do you have any?” A blank face stared back at me, then a wave of comprehension, and a big smile. “Come in, come in! How much do you want!” We were sat, fed, and, of course, served shots of slivo. We talked about the town, how post-war life was progressing, all in my broken Serbian, and the understanding was though life was tough, things were getting better and people were tired of the tensions.

    When I have a shot of slivo these days and taste the burning plum liquid slide down my throat, all of those feelings and memories fill my spirit.

    He ended by sharing a link to this photo of Ljuba:

    Oooh, it’s almost eleven and I have to make it to Middlebury by 1 tomorrow. And who the hell knows when I’ll grade the damn tax exams. They can wait. Thanks for stopping by!

  • The Maillard Reaction

    Don’t drive if you just had a salad. What? Reports from Australia (in today’s NYT) say baby spinach has caused delirium, hallucinations, and fever in over 100 cases. The Victoria health department surmises it’s “anticholinergic syndrome,” caused by plants in the nightshade, jimson weed, and mandrake root family. These plants deprive the brain of acetylcholine which it needs to function. The loss of this stuff naturally (i.e, without eating spinach) is linked to Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, etc.

    Get this though — there are two types of hallucinations: “formed” and “unformed.” One that is formed is concrete and recognizable — usually involving people, objects, and landscapes. One that is unformed involves shapes, patterns, and colors. Spinach-induced hallucinations are formed, and since they involve memory, they tend to involve people the sufferer knows or recognizes, such as deceased relatives. In more serious cases, you lose the capacity to distinguish the real from the unreal, so you can get sucked into the “story” where something bad is going on and people are trying to harm you in some way. Bottom line: If Uncle Charlie is coming at you with a knife and he’s been dead for a few years, you probably have nothing to worry about.

    Pass the dressing.

    An important follow-up to the BBL/barrel discussion! According to our Vermont friend Susan, the current usage of BBL is for Brazilian Butt Lifts. She adjured me to “think Kardashians.” The medical term is Gluteoplasty and a lengthy discussion can be found in Wikipedia under “Buttocks Augmentation.” The following is just the tip of the, well, let’s leave it at iceberg. [Note: I will replace buttocks with the Yiddish tuchas below because it’s a much funnier word.]

    The corrective procedures for tuchas augmentation and tuchas repair include the surgical emplacement of a gluteal implant (tuchas prosthesis); liposculpture (fat transfer and liposuction); and body contouring (surgery, liposculpture, and Sculptra (Poly-L-lactic acid injections), to resolve the patient’s particular tuchas defect or deformity. Moreover, in the praxis of sexual reassignment surgery, the prosthetic and liposculpture augmentation of the tuchas can be performed on transsexual and transgender women to enhance the tuchas’s anatomic curvature in order to establish the markedly feminine tuchas and hips that project more (to the rear and to the side) than does the masculine tuchas.

    A BBL in particular involves transferring fat from one part of the body, e.g., the hips, to the tuchas. It’s Brazilian because a plastic surgeon from Brazil devised it: Dr. Ivo Pitanguy. Dr. P passed away at the age of 90 in 2016 when an enormous . . . (you can finish that sentence).

    Oh, alright, I’ll finish it . . . when an enormous tuchas he was working on rolled off the examining table and crushed him to death.

    His grieving widow said “I always knew he’d come to an unhappy end.” She added “He was always behind in his work, and always worried about the bottom line. Still, he was a loving husband and helped me rear two children.”

    Here’s a photo of Dr. Pitanguy:

    And there’s another rash (Ouch!) of tuchases in today’s puzzle! Incredible! They are right up top at 8 across: “Dodos,” — ASSES. There is also an ASS from ASSN (“Org.”) crossing SEAT (from BOX SEAT).

    The swastika flap from yesterday’s puzzle made quite a splash well beyond the boundaries of Crossworld. It’s been mentioned (denounced) in and by quite a few media outlets, including The Jerusalem Post and the NY Post. (Post Cereal has not taken a position.) Donald Trump Jr. lambasted The Times over it via Twitter.

    The Times finally responded: “This is a common crossword design: Many open grids in crosswords have a similar spiral pattern because of the rules around rotational symmetry and black squares.”

    23A was “Scorch” and I filled in SEAR first, but the answer was CHAR. And here’s what someone posted on the matter:

    “Cooking snob here: searing is something you do intentionally to create a Maillard reaction on the outside of the meat because browned and crispy (seared!) food tastes good. Charring is something that happens accidentally when you leave it on the flame for too long and it is destroyed.”

    “Maillard reaction?” Huh?

    The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that gives browned food its distinctive flavor. Seared steaks, fried dumplings, cookies and other kinds of biscuits, breads, toasted marshmallows, and many other foods undergo this reaction. It is named after French chemist Louis Camille Maillard, who first described it in 1912. Many recipes call for an oven temperature high enough to ensure that a Maillard reaction occurs. At higher temperatures, caramelization (the browning of sugars, a distinct process) and subsequently pyrolysis (final breakdown leading to burning and the development of acrid flavors) become more pronounced.

    So, boy scouts and girl scouts, the next time you’re searing marshmallows be sure to show off about the Maillard reaction. We were visiting Sam in Traverse City once and wanted to use the fire pit in his housing complex to roast some ‘mellows, and make smores. (Lianna was with us.) The problem was the pit was in use by 3 or 4 beer-drinking gentlemen and it didn’t look like they’d be moving on very soon.

    So I approached them and asked if we could slip in briefly and roast up some marshmallows. Absolutely! They were very nice about it. So I said, “You’re welcome to have some.” And this one fellow, who had a very large belly which was flabbing out because he was shirtless, pointed to it and said: “Hey — you don’t get a body like this eating marshmallows!” Very funny!

    I’ll leave you with a quote by Beverly SILLS who was sort of in the puzzle today, clued indirectly with “Prime bird-watching spots for indoor cats.” (Sills) According to commenter T Trimble, a 1971 Times Magazine article on Sills mentioned that she was a crossword fan and said: “Beverly can do a crossword puzzle in 20 minutes, in ink.”

    She is known to have said: “You are never famous until you’ve had your name in a crossword puzzle.”

    Thanks for stopping by! See you next time!