The Wellington Files

The challenge this blog poses for me is to make it appealable to folks who don’t do the daily puzzle that inspires it. I think the first post was a little too puzzle-centric and may have scared some of you away. So I’m going to try to minimize the puzzle matter and maximize the tangents it leads me on.

For example, I’ll just note that today’s puzzle had the clue: “Subject of a drawing, perhaps,” and the answer was DOOR PRIZE. This led to the following series of posts in Rex’s blog.

LMS: I never, ever win the DOOR PRIZE, but I’m beyond thrilled when the hygienist gives me my little gift bag. No, really. It’s ridiculous how happy I am with that damn thing.

ME: The goody bag my hygienist gives me contains a tiny “travel-size” thingie of floss, about the size of a medium-sized button. It’s adorable, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never had trouble fitting regular-sized floss into my bag for trips. I showed it to my wife, and, since then, every time I’m packing for a trip I yell out to her, “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to floss while we’re away — I can’t seem to cram the floss into my bag — do you have one of those travel-size flosses?”

The Joker (commenting on my note): Too funny!

Me: Thanks Joker! I’ll be high for six hours from your accolade. That’s how shallow I am.

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I learned several new words today. First, ZHUZH. To make something more stylish, or attractive. “To zhuzh something up.” Apparently, it’s used often on HGTV.

And, if you can imagine something even more interesting than that: Sockdolager. (That was the clue, and the answer was LULU.) This word plays an extraordinary role in our nation’s history. In the play Lincoln was watching when he was killed (Our American Cousin), the actor Harry Hawk had the line: “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap!”

It was known to Booth that that line always got a big laugh. He waited for the line to be read, waited for the laughter to arise, and shot Lincoln at that moment so the sound of the laughter covered the sound of the gunshot.

So the next time you’re at a Will Ferrell movie, be careful.

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My favorite clue/answer today was: “Second line of a child’s joke,” and the answer was WHO’S THERE? The reference, of course, is to knock-knock jokes. My g’daughter Zoey, who is six, tells this one: Knock Knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo who? Don’t cry, it’s only a knock-knock joke. (Sort of a pull-back-the-curtain approach.)

When my son Sam was little, he loved knock-knock jokes, but fell just short of getting the hang of constructing them. So in his famous one he’d say Knock knock. I’d say Who’s there? And he’d say: Apple. Does anyone want an apple? It still sends us into gales of laughter, thirty years later.

And my grandson Leon, who is five, has a different take on them. He says: Knock knock. Then I say “Who’s there?, and then he also says “Who’s there?” I usually crack up at that point, but sometimes I say, “Hey, that’s my line!

I’ll just let myself out now — don’t get up.

Today’s NYT puzzle (Friday 10/7) starts with a joke by Demetri Martin.  “How fast does a zebra have to run before it looks gray?”  (The answer was ZEBRA.)  I noted in a post on the Rex Parker blog that Demetri Martin is a comic with a very dry wit, like Steven Wright, who once said – “I have no fear of heights, but I am afraid of widths.”  It prompted another person to share this incredible Wright line: “I put instant coffee in a microwave oven.  I went back in time.”

Speaking of time travel, several answers in the puzzle, in combination, brought me back 50 years to when I was a pimply, gawking, teenage boy:  I SAW IT (17A).  CLEAVAGE (6A).  OMG! (25A)

The clue “They come with strings attached,” was for APRONS.  It reminded me of the sign in the music store window:  “Violin for sale:  Only $25.  No strings attached.”

But the highlight of the puzzle was its featuring a three-word “stack” for KETANJI BROWN JACKSON.  Right smack dab in the center on the week she made her appearance on the bench.  That J, with the Z from zebra, made me wonder if today’s puzzle might be a “pangram.”  A pangram is when the grid contains at least one of all 26 letters of the alphabet.  But it was missing Q and X.

For those of you who think the NYT is stodgy, last Sunday’s puzzle had ASSHAT as an answer, right up there at 1 across.  The clue was “total jerk.”  And today one clue was “Jerkwad,” with the answer TOOL.

When I first joined the faculty at Hunter, the Chair of our department was Marjorie and we always got along because she enjoyed a good laugh.  Sadly, she passed away a few years ago.  But I recall one email from her that got me to laugh out loud, reading it alone at home in my bedroom, which was rare.  She wrote me that a student was formally appealing a grade and asked me to set up a meeting with her (the student) to try to resolve it.  I am the Chair of our department’s grade appeal committee.  She forwarded the student’s complaint to me, and it was incredible.  It went on for page after page after page.  It was Tolstoyan.  I wrote back to Marjorie: “Is it me, or does the student seem a bit wordy?”  And Marjorie replied with just three words: “Wear a hat.”  I took it to mean, the shit’s going to fly, and I loved it.

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One thing I love about puzzles is that they play with words.  Words are malleable in a good constructor’s hands.  I like to think I tried to show my kids (and show my grandkids) that words can be toys.  You can twist them around like little action figures and it’s fun, it’s funny.  Lianna and I were trying to make up jokes once in the car on the way to school.  And we came up with one that I love – what do you call it when French fries start falling from the sky? – Precipitatoes!

Here’s an example from a puzzle I just completed by Erik Agard (New Yorker, online 10/5).  The clue was “How much longer?” and the answer was long – 14 letters.  I first thought of “Are we there yet?”  But that’s only 13 letters and the crossing letters I had were not consistent with that.  It turned out to be something I could make no sense out of – the answer for “How much longer?” was – THE WAYS IN WHICH. 

Huh?  WTF? 

It made no sense to me until I had what some call an aha moment.  Agard’s clue is playing with the word “how.”  A “much longer” way to say “how” something is done, is to explain “the ways in which” something is done.  Get it?  So how (much longer) is “the ways in which.” Brilliant, it seems to me.  Still confused?  Now you know how my students feel. 

The clue for eleven down today was “Animal that the Aztecs called ayotochtli, or ‘turtle-rabbit,’” and the answer (of course) was ARMADILLO.  Did you know there is a baseball team in Texas, the Amarillo Dillas, with an armadillo as its mascot?  God bless America.

Not to crow (much), but I almost always finish the NYT crossword puzzles that I try, i.e., Weds thru Sun. I sometimes have small errors, but I never look stuff up. Today, however, the very first day of this blog, I crashed and did not finish (DNF). It happened in the Northeast where ARCO finally popped into my head (amazingly), regarding the violinist’s bow, but I couldn’t let go of LOAF for “Lie about.” (It was LOLL, of course.) And “F in music class?” — fuhgeddaboutit. So I sputtered and crashed.

But it was a very impressive puzzle, it seemed to me, with two themes working together in five locations. Two downs “merged left” to answer the clue. So for “Noble title” the answer was COUNTESS, but it was formed by four across pairs: CO, UN, TE, SS, each also forming part of their own separate answers. And each down pair spelled another (unclued) word! — CUTS and ONES, from Countess. Wow.

So, bravo, Simeon Seigel. Other treats included a pair of identical clues: “Officer’s title,” with the answers being SIR in one case and MAAM in the other. And I somehow remembered that Melville dedicated Moby-Dick (good name for a porn star, btw) to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I did not know but was happy to learn that the Swiss flag is square! Really?

Rex (of the Rex Parker puzzle blog) absolutely hated it. He’s quite the curmudgeon. And one member of “the commentariat” paraphrased Samuel Johnson wonderfully and said: “The theme must have been extremely difficult to execute. I wish it had been impossible.” Another carper recounted what the losing football coach said when asked about his team’s execution. “I’m in favor of it.”

But another commenter countered: “Why do you always complain that themes don’t have a “reason” for existing? It’s a puzzle. You have to figure out which letters the clues want you to put in the boxes. That is the reason.”

The very first clue/answer was “Musky ‘cat’” for CIVET. And I bet you coffee drinkers didn’t know this: “Civet cats in Sumatra eat the fruit of coffee plants. Unable to digest the bean, they excrete them whole. The beans are then gathered, cleaned, and roasted to produce a rare and expensive ( $100 USD per pound) coffee prized by aficionados. I’ll….pass.” (per Rex commenter Joel Palmer) (I might put a little more emphasis on the “cleaned” part.)

That’s my puzzle chatter for the day, and I’m sticking to it.