The Wellington Files

  • Don’t Make Me Say It

    An exchange in the Dull Men’s Club (UK).

    Alan Davis: Today, I fitted a patio door friction retaining arm. I fitted the other one a few days ago.

    Chris Couchman: You’re a wild one!

    Here is Alan (with the wife).

    Apparently, it’s a thing in Britain for the Brussel sprouts to be overcooked. This is a post of Alan’s from last November:

    I’m wondering what the optimum date is for putting the Christmas sprouts on to boil? I’m thinking around the first week in December to ensure they are properly cooked.

    Paul Clark: You’re too late……! You’ll need to add a drop of olive oil now to make them easier to slide into the bin.

    Chris Brown: No need to be so profligate……cheap spread or engine oil is just as good.

    There were 73 comments, almost all of them noting that Alan was already way late.

    Rob Ashlee asked: For which year?

    Oooh, these look good. Roasted!

    This story by June Alpert was in today’s Met Diary and is called “Apricot Blossoms.”

    Dear Diary:

    When we moved to Brooklyn, we planted a rosebush against our front yard fence. It had delicate apricot blossoms with a beautiful scent.

    As it grew, it would spill over the top of the fence onto the sidewalk. In late autumn’s cool days, there would always be one or two roses that seemed to last for weeks.

    Naturally, people passing by would stop to smell the roses. Occasionally, I would come outside and see the ragged stems where someone had torn off a few. The selfishness upset me quite a bit.

    One October morning, I came outside to see a woman with her face and hands in the rosebush. I was on the verge of scolding her for taking a rose when she spoke to me.

    “My friend liked to stop here every day to smell the roses,” she said. “He died last week, but that rose is still here.”

    I had to go inside and lean against the wall with my eyes closed.

    Two pros constructed the puzzle today — Rachel Goldstein and Adam Wagner — and you could tell. The theme revealer ran down the entire center of the large (Sunday) grid, with the clue: “How a shirt might be put on in a rush” and the answer was: INSIDE OUT AND BACKWARDS. Then, get this — there were twelve theme answers that each had two clues and one circled letter. The first clue’s answer was traditional/across. But for the second clue’s answer you had to read the first answer backwards and take out the letter that is inside the circle. Here’s the best example:

    At 110A, the two clues were “Like some bikes,” and “Sunken, as the eyes.” So the first answer was TEN SPEED with the N in a circle. So take out the N and read it backwards for the second answer: DEEP SET. I know, amazing, right? And this happened twelve times. (TS ELIOT, with the S in a circle, became TOILET backwards.)

    And the final kicker: The twelve circled letters spelled INSIDE twice, in order, once backwards.

    Wordplay at its most genius-est, if you ask me.

    Do you know what a thawb is? (That’s not a typo.) Of course you don’t. I’d bet you also don’t know anyone who knows what a thawb is. So encountering it in the clue at 52A was not heartening (“Thawb-wearing leaders”). Turns out it’s those gown things arab men wear. The answer was EMIRS. Here’s some more stuff of no interest to you — a thawb may also be known as a dishdashah or a kandura.

    “C’mon, Khalil, we’re leaving for the mosque. We’re late already.”

    “Okay, Amirah, just let me throw my thawb on. Be right there.”

    Do you know what an islet is? If you’re like me (God forbid), you think you do but you don’t. You think it’s just a small island, right? Well, there’s more to it than that. It’s a rock or small island that has little vegetation and cannot sustain human habitation. So a small island that people can live on is a small island but not an islet. Thus the clue for ISLET today: “No man’s land?”

    At 72A, “Actress Sink of Stranger Things” was SADIE. Less than 2% of us are redheads, and Ms. Sink makes the cut. Add in a pair of blue eyes and you get the rarest hair/eye combo there is. Statistically. So we can factually present Ms. Sink to you as a rare beauty.

    Sink is 23 and from Texas. She’s an ardent vegan. She keeps her personal life personal. So there.

    For those of you who do not have much experience with New Yorkers, please meet this woman in Fletcher Laico’s Met Diary story today.

    Dear Diary:

    I go to the same Lower East Side deli every morning. Many days, a woman who is probably in her 70s or 80s and always dressed in several layers of coats and stockings comes in.

    “I’m extra hungry for my bagel today,” she often says.

    The sleepy crowd doesn’t usually respond.

    One day, though, she opened with something different.

    “Quick with my bagel,” she said. “I’ve got someone at home that I don’t trust!”

    Intrigued, I asked who she was referring to.

    “Somebody who doesn’t like my pet,” she said.

    Turning to the man preparing her bagel, she added: “Not too much butter. You always put too much butter!”

    I asked what kind of pet she had.

    “A parakeet,” she said. “And I’m afraid of what she might do.”

    What was that?

    “Don’t make me say it,” she said.

    She rushed through an explanation of how, against her better judgment, she had rented her spare room to the granddaughter of a friend and the granddaughter’s boyfriend. Now she was trying to get rid of them.

    “This woman isn’t usually awake when I come to the deli in the morning, and today I think she’s up,” she said. “I’ve got to get back there. I don’t trust her!”

    With that, she grabbed her buttered bagel off the counter and hurried off to save her parakeet.

    I’m certain you all join me in hoping she got there in time. The last thing we need is a distraught parakeet marring our Father’s Day, amirite? See you tomorrow!

  • A Needle and Thread

    It’s Flag Day. Good day to learn the meaning of vexillology, courtesy of Miriam Webster’s Word of the Day. It means the study of flags. I didn’t know it could be an area of study.

    What did you major in?

    Flags.

    Any particular specialty?

    Red ones.

    Billy Collins wrote this poem, and it was in today’s Writer’s Almanac.

    Genius

    was what they called you in high school
    if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall
    and all your books went flying.

    Or if you walked into an open locker door,
    you would be known as Einstein,
    who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.

    Later, genius became someone
    who could take a sliver of chalk and squire pi
    a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,

    or a man painting on his back on a scaffold,
    or drawing a waterwheel in a margin,
    or spinning out a little night music.

    But earlier this week on a wooded path,
    I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir
    were the true geniuses,
    the ones who had figured out how to fly,
    how to be both beautiful and brutal,
    and how to mate for life.

    Twenty-four geniuses in all,
    for I numbered them as Yeats had done,
    deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface—

    forty-eight if we count their white reflections,
    or an even fifty if you want to throw in me
    and the dog running up ahead,

    who were at least smart enough to be out
    that morning—she sniffing the ground,
    me with my head up in the bright morning air.

    Helen of Troy’s mom was LEDA. It says so right there at 7D in today’s puzzle. So Son Volt shared this song by Hozier with us (“Swan Upon Leda”). Hozier’s Irish. I’m including the lyrics because he wrote it to support American women upon the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I’m way too stupid to understand most of it, but at least I can tell it’s beautiful, as is the photo Phil sent in posted below it.

    “Swan Upon Leda”

    A husband waits outside
    A crying child pushes a child into the night
    She was told he would come this time
    Without leaving so much as a feather behind
    To enact at last the perfect plan
    One more sweet boy to be butchered by men

    But the gateway to the world
    Was still outside the reach of him
    Would never belong to angels
    Had never belonged to men
    The swan upon Leda
    Empire upon Jerusalem

    A grandmother smuggling meds
    Past where the god child-soldier Setanta stood dead
    Our graceful turner of heads
    Weaves through the checkpoints like a needle and thread
    Someone’s frightened boy waves her on
    She offers a mother’s smile and soon she’s gone

    The gateway to the world
    The gun in a trembling hand
    Where nature unmakes the boundary
    The pillar of myth still stands
    The swan upon Leda
    Occupier upon ancient land

    The gateway to the world
    Was still outside the reach of him
    Would never belong to angels
    Had never belonged to men

    We visited Colonial Williamsburg with the kids when they were little. Loved it. Sam was a riot getting confused about stuff like “about face” when he was in the regiment. Must have been those draft-dodger genes I gave him. We were waiting on line for something and a little girl in period garb came up to Caity and showed her how to play with a hoop, one of the things kids did back then. I mention it because Rex did in his puzzle review today. It came up in a very roundabout way. The clue at 36D was “Oldest sports franchise that has never won a championship in the ‘Big Four’ leagues (N.F.L., N.B.A., M.L.B., N.H.L.)” Answer: (Atlanta) FALCONS. Here’s Rex on it:

    “I used to love their helmets, back when I really cared about football (i.e. in elementary school). Got a whole set of football helmet magnets from IHOP when I was like 9 and I cannot overstate how much those magnets solidified my understanding of the league and its iconography. I can still feel those damn things. In the olden days, we didn’t have ‘devices,’ so we had to play with refrigerator magnets for fun. It was that or hoop rolling. And we were happy.”

    [OC Note: It’s still a big deal at Wellesley College on May Day.]

    BTW, in the nit-picking department, two commenters took the constructor (Barbara Lin) to task on the grounds that the Minny Vikings have gone longer than the Falcons without a title. But I was able to come to her defense. It’s true that Minny has never won a Super Bowl (or Superb Owl, for that matter), but they did win the NFL Championship in 1969, the year before the NFL and AFL merged. So Minny did win a league championship which is what the clue referenced.

    With my MLB-TV subscription, I am able to watch the Gnats games with their announcers. So I’ve grown fond of Bob Carpenter who is 72 but is just a big kid. All announcers (I think) keep score of the game, so they can refer back to what happened, but Bob is really serious about it, and has even published a scorebook. (bcscorebook.com. $30) I used to keep score of games I went to when I was little. It’s a lost art — I never see anyone keeping score anymore.

    Anyway, Ryan Zimmerman (retired Gnat) was guest-announcing with Bob at today’s game and Bob reminded Zim of a game-winning HR he hit against the Yankees on Father’s Day back in 2006 when he was just starting out his career. They showed a replay of it. And what I particularly liked was Bob Carpenter had brought his old 2006 scorebook to the game and opened it up to that game and had Zim autograph it for him. Carpenter has announced he’s retiring after this season. Boo hoo.

    Anne Meara, aleha hashalom, was in the puzzle today. What a treat!

    Quick, watch this so you’ll be in love with her. Wait — from a 30-second Jack-in-the-Box commercial? Yup. Guaranteed.

    Anne, of course, was married to Jerry Stiller, and Ben is their son. They also had a daughter, Amy. Jerry and she were married for over 60 years until her death at age 85 in 2015. Anne converted to Judaism six years after marrying Jerry and insisted she did not do it for Jerry, but because “Catholicism was dead to me.” She took Judaism very seriously and Jerry quipped that he became more Jewish because of Anne. After suffering a series of strokes late in life, she lived at the Hebrew Home for the Aged (Hi Justine!).

    Stiller and Meara were on the Ed Sullivan show 36 times.

    There were two nonsense words in the puzzle today. At 5D, for the clue “As if!” the answer was PAH. Rex and the commentariat were quite miffed at PAH. It lead me to post: “PAH might have been less objectionable if it were clued with ‘Two of them follow OOM.’”

    The second one was at 32A where “Moved clumsily” was GALUMPHED. That’s actually a real word now, but it started out as a “made-up” word in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Good word. Everyone loved seeing it. Rex went so far as to say it might have been the highlight of the puzzle for him. (It was Anne Meara for me.)

    Last note on the grid: At 49D: “Ones who never apologize, say.” Answer ASSES. Yup. (I’d include a photo of You-Know-Whom here, but Phil won’t let me.)

    Happy Flag Day, Chatterheads. See you tomorrow!

  • Opera Cake

    The difference between men and women came up in a song today, triggered indirectly by the puzzle. I may have already told you one of my favorite differences between men and women. It’s that if it comes down to a choice between catching a fly ball and saving the life of a baby, a woman will go for the baby without even considering if there are men on base.

    The clue at 39A was “Cocktails that might make for poor nightcaps,” and the answer was WHITE RUSSIANS, because they contain a coffee liqueur. And the song is by Paul Kelly called “Everything Is Turning to White.” It’s based on a Raymond Carver story “So Much Water So Close To Home.”

    You live in the South and you really look forward to a fishing trip with the boys. You meet up with your buddies and drive 100 miles to the perfect spot, even though there are places closer you could go to. When you arrive — yowtch! — you find the body of brutally murdered girl in the water.

    Sh*t, don’t you hate when that happens?

    Now your perfect fishing weekend may be ruined. But the guys and you figure she’s already dead — why not go ahead and enjoy yourselves and call the police after the weekend? So that’s what you do. You secure the body a little bit downstream, enjoy the weekend, and call the cops before heading home.

    See, now, they were considering the men on base. If it were women they couldn’t possibly have continued with their plans once the body turned up. Here’s the song. It’s from the wife’s perspective.

    At 34D, for “What might be pinched for pennies,” the answer was COIN PURSE. I used to have one like this:

    You can still get them (in different colors) at Wallet Gear for $6.95. If you mention Owl Chatter, it’s $7.95. But I just keep my change loose in my back pocket now.

    Remember Javier Bardem in “No Country?” He’d sometime let someone flip a coin to determine if Bardem would kill him or not. The coin flipper may not even realize what’s at stake. The old guy behind the counter at the gas station called it right, so his life was spared. Bardem said something like, “You might want to keep that coin somewhere special; otherwise you’ll think it’s an ordinary coin — which it is.”

    The Gnats had a very frustrating three games in NY, losing all three to the Mets when they shoulda won two. Let’s take a look at one play, though, from yesterday’s game. The Mets were up 4-0 and led off the bottom of the 8th with a double by Marte. If the Gnats were to have even a remote chance of a miracle comeback, they’d have to keep him from scoring. Gnat third baseman Tena was playing way off the line, almost at shortstop, with lefty Baty batting. The Mets announcers are the best there are: Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez, all great masters of the game. Darling saw Tena’s position and said, “Marte should try to steal third. Tena is so far off the bag he’d be racing to it along with Marte and he’d have to win that race, plus make the catch and tag while the catcher (Ruiz) would need to make a perfect, leading throw like a quarterback hitting a receiver crossing the field.”

    On the very next pitch, everything Darling had just described in such detail unfolded before us and it was gorgeous. Marte made his dash for third, a split second later Tena did the same. Catcher Ruiz caught the pitch and threw a bullet low and directly to the base. Tena got there just in time to catch it and slam his glove down on Marte’s helmet — he was out by a step.

    The Gnats rallied in the ninth, scoring three runs and putting the tying and lead runs on second and third with only one out. Alas, the rally petered out at that point.

    Here’s Tena.

    OMG, doesn’t this look good? You ever hear of it? Opera cake. It was at 2D: dessert with layers of sponge, buttercream and ganache.

    If the very first clue sets the tone for the puzzle, we were in good shape today. The clue at 1A was “Short shorts,” with the answer HOT PANTS.

    Rex asked “Do they still call them that? Feels very much like a ’70s phenomenon.” We referred it to our Dirty Old Man Dept, needless to say. Here are some U of Tennessee babes from 50 years ago. I bet they’re still knockouts.

    See you tomorrow!

  • Mississippi Goddam

    Seems like it’s double-letter week for the NYTXW. Yesterday took us down the Mississippi and today focused on quadruple doubles, perhaps to coordinate with the ongoing NBA finals. It’s an unusual statistic, the QD, because it can be achieved five different ways. That is, a quadruple double means you got at least ten of four of any of the following in a game: points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks. (Since official records of steals and blocks were not kept before the ’73-’74 season, a quadruple double could not occur earlier.)

    Only four (fittingly) quadruple doubles have been achieved in NBA history. Hakeem Olajuwon, Alvin Robertson, Nate Thurmond, and David Robertson. All four included points, rebounds, and assists. Only Robertson finished up with steals — the other three with blocks. Commenter Pabloinnh said he was more impressed that Oscar Robertson averaged a triple double for an entire season. (Russell Westbook and Nikola Jokic have done so as well.) The Big O still walks among us at age 86.

    So, I can hear you wondering, how did the puzzle work its quadruple doubles? It used rebuses. In three theme answers there were four double letter combinations that were smooooshed into a single square: AD HOC COMMITTEE, ALL-ACCESS PASS, and PEE-WEE FOOTBALL.

    What’s that? Did somebody say Mississippi? Check out this amazing song. It rewards repeated listenings.

    It’s time for me to use the puzzle as an excuse to bore you with some baseball stuff. At 10D the clue was “Risks an interception, say” and the answer was OVERTHROWS. Do you know the overthrow rule in baseball? I learned it when I took a training session to get certified as a softball ump a long time ago.

    What happens when a fielder throws the ball into the stands, i.e., out of play? The runners each get the next base plus one more. So if Tom is between first and second and the ball is thrown out of play, he gets awarded third (because second is the next base for him, plus one makes it third). But here’s the kicker — you go by the position of the runners at the moment the ball is thrown — not when it crosses out of play. Getting back to Tom, say he is a few steps shy of second when the shortstop heaves the ball and has crossed second by the time the ball goes out of play. Since he had not reached second when the ball was thrown he gets to go to third base, not home. Where he was at the moment the ball went out of play is not relevant.

    So, when the ball crosses into the stands the umpire has to try to remember where the runners were when the throw was made? Well, the good umpire will assume every throw will go out of play, and note where the runners are when the throw is made. Then, if and when it does go out of play, he can award bases based on runner positions at the time of the throw.

    In my umpire training class, I raised my hand to ask about that point. I said: “So you have to assume that every throw will go out of play?” and the instructor slammed the desk and said “Exactly!” and it was such a good question it launched him into a speech on what it means to be an umpire.

    Hey! Is this a lady umpire? She’s cute!

    It’s Amanda Clement, the first woman to get paid for umping a game. It was an amateur game her brother was playing in and the regular ump failed to show. Amanda’s brother said she’d be good. And she was — she went on to ump semi-pro games. That was back in 1904, so it’s okay if your memory of it is hazy. There still have not been any female MLB umps, although several women minor league umps are on the list to be called up, so it should happen in the near future. Three women have umped major league spring training games. And the Rules Committee has considered using topless female umpires as a way to increase attendance. (No it hasn’t.)

    Here’s Jen Pawol who has a very good chance of becoming the first woman MLB ump. A Jersey girl, Jen was an art teacher before becoming a full-time ump, and earned her BFA at Pratt and her MFA at Hunter College! Go Hawks!

    There was a fun clue for NASA today: “Org. that developed the ‘pumpkin suit.’” This is the actual NASA pumpkin suit.

    And here is the one Rex posted noting “the astronauts look much cooler now.”

    Whoa — Mia, is that you?? Take a load off, girl, great to see you. You heard about George? — we’re out of Fresca — seltzer okay? It’s Mia HAMM everybody. She was at 32A today, clued with the laudatory “Named U.S. Soccer Female Player of the Year five years in a row.” How are the twins? Nomar good?

    Mia has been married to the great Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra for 21 years(!), and they have twin girls who are 18 now, and a 13-year-old boy. OMG, could you plotz?

    Let’s go off tonight with The Staves singing Bruce’s “On Fire.” It (the song title) was in yesterday’s puzzle and Rex introduced us to this trio.

    Okay Chatterheads, that’ll do it for today. Thanks for stopping by!

  • One Mississippi

    Remember maps?

    Today’s puzzle was a paean to maps in two ways. First, the whole grid was turned into a partial map of the U.S. with MISSISSIPPI (as in the river) running right down the center. The clue for it was “Natural dividing line on a U.S. map.” Next, 8 states that the Mississippi runs through or abuts were embedded, two each, in four crossing answers, as geographically correct as possible:

    SIAMESE TWIN

    MOTOR SKILLS

    STAR WITNESS

    PLAGIARISMS

    The second map was at 30D where the clue was “The World Map is the largest one to date, with 11,695 pieces,” and the answer was LEGO SET.

    This is an eggs serpt from a poem we will not be sharing:

    I want to shake the sky with you,
    but a plain murmur interferes.
    If I’ve wronged you
    life will make me pay in handkerchiefs!

    Sarah Knight (no relation to Peggy Day) poses the following question for the Dull Men’s Club (UK):

    If this is where your beers were kept, on the left hand side of your American fridge/freezer, which beer would you take out first when you go to grab one?

    ⬅️ The beer on the left.

    ➡️ The beer on the right.

    🖕 Some other ridiculous option.

    Sarah is 37 and married to a 44-year-old man who expects the coldest beers on the clearly incorrect side “and it’s driving me nuts.”

    [Note: An “American” fridge is generally distinguished by its two vertical doors.]

    Comments by the membership:

    Claire Payne: Nearest the door.

    Sarah: They’re all on the door; you can’t get much nearer.

    Tony Clark: We fill the salad drawer with our beer.

    Sarah: We use that for salad.

    Alan Rooke: Unless you have replacements, beers that remain will roll around.

    Sarah: We replace one for one immediately when taking one out, hence the issue. If I get him a beer, I take it out of one side and push them along towards the empty space, then replace. If he then goes to get one after, because he takes out of the opposite side as me, he grabs the warm beer.

    Alan: That’s why you don’t use the door but pyramid-stack them on their sides on a shelf with something stopping them from rolling free. Can’t cope with beer cans or beer bottles in the door. What happens (god forbid) when you get to the end of the case and only have 3, 2 then 1 left??

    Sarah: Not sure how well you can tell by the photo, but they don’t roll around. The water/ice dispenser is there, so the shelf is only wide enough for the cans of beer, nothing behind.

    Stefan Woltmann: How long have you been married?

    Sarah: Long enough to want a divorce over the contents of the fridge.

    Joseph Daniels: This isn’t America, Sarah, I don’t keep random beers in the fridge

    Avi Liveson: Ouch! WTF does that mean?

    Paul Braybrook: Pick closest. Fill from rear.

    Darren Jones: It’s colder in the main compartment.

    Sarah: Yes, which is why the perishable things go in the main compartment and husband is lucky he’s allowed to keep any beers in my fridge at all.

    Darren: I’m starting to see why he drinks.

    Sarah: I’m pretty sure I’m the cause of his grey hair too. Good thing I’m cute and can cook.

    David Mortimer: The one furthest from the hinge.

    Allan Wright: The one closest to the hinge is furthest from the warm room. The one nearest you as you open the door will be the warmest (assuming all cans were put in at the same time.)

    David: Only if you forgot to close the door.

    [What?]

    Kurt Robinson: First job would be to ensure that all the labels were facing outward.

    Avi Liveson: Burp!

    Rest in peace, Brian — on safari to stay.

    See you tomorrow, Chatterheads.

  • Softly Scrambled

    Bad jokes inspired by today’s puzzle:

    Per egs: I asked my hairdresser out but she said she’d rather dye.

    Per Conrad: What does IDK mean?
    I don’t know.
    OMG! No one does!

    Per me: I bought some snow tires recently but had to ask for a refund: they melted!

    Ah, proof again that there is nothing better on God’s green earth than a nice raft of bad jokes. Breathe ’em in, readers.

    Brace yourself for some bad news: The Women’s pro hockey league draft that was held this week to stock the two new teams (See Attle and Van Coover) hit our Sirens hard. We still have Sarah F., thank God, but we lost our brilliant goalie, Corinne Schroeder, and a top scorer, Alex Carpenter. Ouch! Circle the wagons, girls. The puck drops in late Fall.

    How you might know the constructor of today’s puzzle is Jewish even if his name wasn’t Zachary David Levy: At 33A the clue was “Was verklempt,” and the answer was PLOTZED.

    Have you heard of Georges PEREC? His clue was “Georges who wrote ‘Life: A User’s Manual.’” His works were examples of “constrained writing.” It means what it says — it’s writing with some constraint imposed upon it. Amazing stuff. His 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is written entirely without the letter “e.” When a letter or letter-group is excluded in a writing, it’s called a lipogram. And his novella Les Revenentes (1972) is a complementary “univocalic” piece in which the letter “e” is the only vowel used.

    His most famous work is the one in the clue: Life: A User’s Manual (1978), and it has a whole bunch of interwoven stories all with different constraints. He also wrote a spoof of a scientific paper detailing experiments on the “yelling reaction” provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes. He also wrote a poem containing a palindrome 1,247 words long.

    I can’t believe I never heard of any of this before. Let’s see what he looked like.

    He was Jewish and married but had no children. He died in 1982 at the age of 45. He was a distant relative of I. L. Peretz, the Yiddish writer. Asteroid no. 2817, discovered in 1982, was named after him. In 1994, a street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris was named rue Georges-Perec. He was featured as a Google Doodle on his 80th birthday. And the French postal service issued a stamp in 2002 in his honor, for which the cat moved her tail out of the way.

    Since Kennedy, the deranged lunatic in charge of the nation’s health, fired all 17 medical experts comprising the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel (after lying to the Senate that he wouldn’t), Owl Chatter’s sense of civic responsibility calls for us to step into the breach with recommendations for replacements. Here is our meticulously composed list of medical experts whom we urge be appointed immediately to the panel:

    1. Dr. Pepper.

    2. Dr. J.

    3. Dr. K.

    4. Doc from the Seven Dwarfs

    5. Doc Rivers

    6. George Santos (requires a pardon and Georgie’s adding a med school degree to his resume)

    7. Doc Holliday

    8. Doctor Kildare

    9. Dr. Martens

    10. Doctor Zhivago

    11. Dock Ellis

    12. Alan Alda

    13. Hickory Dickory Dock

    14. Doctor Strangelove

    15. Google Docs

    The poem, below, is by Stephanie Colwell. It’s called “Livestreaming My Grandfather’s Funeral.” Here’s what she said about it.

    “My Granddaddy Colwell died while I was away in my first year of grad school. From the repast, my brother sent me a picture of himself, suit and all, drinking from a coconut. The service had left everyone sad. That’s why they were frying fish after. Thinking of home sometimes reminded me of the difficult relationships that could make me glad I was so far away. But looking at that photo of my brother in Granddaddy’s kitchen under those circumstances, all I wanted to know was what the hell was going on over there. I wrote this poem thinking of how I’d missed my chance.” 

    This day, I wake up later than South Georgia, slow and alone,
    while my family has all woken up together, ironed nice shirts

    and filed into black cars. I want my grandmama’s soft-scrambled eggs
    for breakfast, cat-head biscuits, cane syrup thick as any of us,

    and maybe some collard greens, though they don’t go together.
    From my laptop in my kitchen, I smile

    when my uncle stands to tell one of our sad-funny stories.
    I can pick out my cousin’s laughter from a pew near the camera.

    I name everyone I see, dressed in their Monday-best, as I stand
    to cook in my underwear. The livestream loses connection during

    the part of the story about thunder and lightning. From 2,000 miles
    away I don’t know how to tell them, so I sit down to eat a good breakfast

    that is not good enough. When my mother leaves the funeral, she calls.
    When she cooks, she works her way across the egg carton,

    using every egg on one side before using any on the other. 
    She also loads the dishwasher without any semblance of order. My way is slow,

    but efficient. I work from each side of the carton to the middle
    for balance. My mother and I don’t always know how to feel

    about each other. I mention feeling softly-scrambled and she agrees.

    Dreadful Gnat loss tonight. Late two-run lead blown. Must not lose faith.

    See you tomorrow.

  • Your Move

    Bear McWhorter is a very good young man. A mensch. Michigan recruited him for their offensive line and beat out Clemson, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida. Yay. But I only learned about him (at the cost of $30) from today’s NYT sports page. The story is all about how his family adopted two girls and started a foundation in Bear’s name to help families adopt kids. It’s the Brother Bear Foundation and you can find it at http://www.brotherbear.foundation.

    Bear’s real first name is Josh (same as his dad’s), but he’s nicknamed Bear for famed Alabama coach Bear Bryant because his grandfather was a big ‘Bama fan. (Grandpa has since switched allegiance to Michigan, of course.) Bear’s dad’s a big guy too and played football at Furman. When their first adoptee, Olivia, met Bear’s dad for the first time she said “You’re as big as the sun.”

    The foundation raises funds currently by selling currants, sorry, I mean t-shirts — hence my being out $30 (includes shipping). For obvious reasons, sizes run as large as 3XL.

    Here are the four McWhorter kids, Bear and Lily in the middle. The two youngest are Olivia and Lydia who were adopted.

    There’s only one thing left to say: Go Blue!

    This poem is by Angela Janda and is called “At Quarter To Five.”

    I was feeling lonely so
    I went outside to the wind
    swept yard and beyond
    that to the wind-tousled outer
    yard and found where last
    night in the moonlight we left
    two sets of boot prints, when
    you stopped on your way
    through the darkness to bring a
    lemon bar and a movie, and
    beside ours the tracks of the
    smallest thing with claws, which
    must have followed sometime
    later. And I chased its tiny prints
    and our mud-wash indents to
    the far back gate and through
    the gate out to where the
    land is still dirt and brush
    and bushes and cow
    pies, my hair pinned
    to my head but still blowing,
    blowing, and finally a hard
    breath, and I could see
    through lonely to the wide
    open, long blue lines of sunset,
    moonlit night, the airplanes
    trailing one another
    down to tarmac, all those
    people landing home.

    It’s hard, if not impossible, to explain what made Schwalberg such an extraordinary professor for the many of us he reached so deeply. The student of his who spoke after me mentioned the “crystalline clarity” with which he expressed concepts and processes, even complex ones. That certainly was part of it. He also mentioned the personal connection he fostered in class — his seeming ability to maintain eye-contact with each student as he spoke.

    The speaker after me was Michael Sandel, a political philosopher, and a professor of Government at Harvard. His course Justice was Harvard’s first course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world. He attended Brandeis on a basketball scholarship (no he didn’t), and graduated with a BA in Politics in ’75. (Thank God I didn’t have to speak after him.)  

    He told a story about Barney and him. The topic was “pollution credits.” The idea was there would be an overall “world” limit on pollution, and a rich country like the U.S. could buy “rights to pollute” off of a poor country. The economists liked the idea. Part of the thinking was that altruistic impulses are limited. So if you relied on Country A’s good instincts to avoid polluting, as opposed to a system such as this one, Country A would do less “good” on other issues in the world.

    Michael wrote an op-ed piece in the NYT disagreeing. He said that wasn’t a good model for human behavior. Would you want your son to drop a piece of litter on the ground, and when you chided him he’d say “Don’t worry, I paid Billy $5 to pick it up?”

    He received a lot of mail as a result of the piece, much of it from economists, and he heard, very good-naturedly, from Barney. And at the end of Barney’s note he wrote, “Please just do me one favor — don’t tell anyone I was your economics professor.” We all chuckled.

    Michael later wrote a book on a variety of issues and he recounted his back-and-forth with Barney in it and was careful not to mention Barney by name, in keeping with the pledge/request. He immediately got a mildly frantic email from Barney saying he hoped Michael knew that he was kidding years earlier when he asked Michael not to tell anyone who his economics professor was. Michael assured Barney he knew he was kidding and told him that whenever he told the story the audience did too (and laughed, as we did).

    Michael went on to tell us that over the years in their correspondence Barney told Michael that he came around to agree with him on one point. It centered on that business about altruistic impulses being finite — that if you do good in one area you would be less likely to do good in another. Michael’s take was completely different: it was like building up muscles at the gym. If you did good in one area, it made you more likely to continue doing good — you would become inclined in that direction. Michael said Barney came around to agreeing with him there. As Michael put it, “He agreed that ‘money isn’t everything.’”

    Here’s Michael Sandel.

    One last point, if I may crow a bit. Since Michael spoke after me, when I finished I had to hand the microphone over to him (it was a hand-held mic). And when I did, he said to me about my speech “Well done.” That was much appreciated, believe me, especially after I heard him speak.

    Today’s puzzle theme was silly wordplay, i.e., our favorite kind. The revealer was LAST BUT NOT LEAST, and the three theme answer all had “last” words that were like “least,” but weren’t least. They were BELLY OF THE BEAST, BREWER’S YEAST, and MOVEABLE FEAST. And, btw, beast, yeast, and feast are the only five-letter words ending in “east” apart from least.

    ADELE was in the puzzle, clued by “Singer of the theme song to ‘Skyfall.’” Son Volt shared this cover of one her songs.

    You know how time flies;
    Only yesterday was the time of our lives.

    Here’s Sierra Ferrell, whose voice you just heard.

    In Saturday’s puzzle, the clue at 55A was “Board game variant used as a last-resort tiebreaker.” You hear about this? A problem in chess, according to some, is that there are a lot of draws (ties). It sorta sucks if you have a big tournament and no winner emerges. So a tie-breaker was devised called ARMAGEDDON CHESS (the answer for the puzzle).

    Here’s how it was described for this year’s tourney in Norway:

    “Armageddon in chess resolves drawn classical games with a fast-paced tiebreaker. White gets 10 minutes, while Black has 7 minutes, with a 1-second increment per move starting from move 41. [What?] If the game draws, Black wins, giving White the incentive to press for victory. Norway Chess 2025 adopts this format to ensure every round delivers a winner, amplifying excitement. ‘It completely changes the dynamics,‘ says Magnus Carlsen, six-time Norway Chess champion, praising the format’s intensity.

    “This format pushes players to their limits. White must attack aggressively to avoid a draw, while Black defends strategically, knowing a draw secures victory. The time disparity adds pressure, making Armageddon a test of skill and nerves.”

    It’s the chess version of the runner on second base in extra innings in baseball. BTW, I have no idea how the hell it works based on the above description, but who cares?

    I played this girl in chess once and she had to say “Your move” to me over thirty times.

    Things to learn:

    The clue for OTTER at 54D was “River animal often seen on its back,” but commenter JNKMD says: It is the Sea Otter that feeds while floating on its back not the River Otter. [OK. Thanks! — so it’s the otter OTTER.]

    For the clue “Outliers in the data” at 34D, the term is EDGE CASES. New to me.

    An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter. For example, a stereo speaker might noticeably distort audio when played at maximum volume, even in the absence of any other extreme setting or condition. An edge case can be expected or unexpected. In engineering, the process of planning for and gracefully addressing edge cases can be a significant task.

    [Isn’t that nice? — “gracefully addressing.”]

    I’m shamelessly stealing (verbatim) the opening portion of historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter from Saturday, June 7, as follows:

    “In April, John Phelan, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy under President Donald J. Trump, posted that he visited the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial ‘to pay my respects to the service members and civilians we lost at Pearl Harbor on the fateful day of June 7, 1941.’

    “The Secretary of the Navy is the civilian head of the U.S. Navy, overseeing the readiness and well-being of almost one million Navy personnel. Phelan never served in the military; he was nominated for his post because he was a large donor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. He told the Senate his experience overseeing and running large companies made him an ideal candidate for leading the Navy.

    “The U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is famous in U.S. history as the site of a surprise attack by 353 Japanese aircraft that destroyed or damaged more than 300 aircraft, three destroyers, and all eight of the U.S. battleships in the harbor. Four of those battleships sank, including the U.S.S. Arizona, which remains at the bottom of the harbor as a memorial to the more than 2,400 people who died in the attack, including the 1,177 who died on the Arizona itself.

    “The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II.

    “Pearl Harbor Day is a landmark in U.S. history. It is observed annually and known by the name President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it: ‘a date which will live in infamy.’

    “But that date was not June 7, eighty-four years ago today.

    “It was December 7, 1941.”

    Could you plotz? See you tomorrow.

  • I Don’t Know Any Professor Schwalberg

    We’re back from our trip to Brandeis for the memorial service for Barney Schwalberg, alav hashalom. It was a beautiful service and my short contribution went very well.

    There were two distinct strains: the family, personal portion, and the Brandeis professor portion. The first speaker was a colleague of Barney’s at Brandeis for many years and then five former students, including me. Then family friends spoke, followed by his daughter and grandchildren.

    The distinction between the two parts was summed up when his granddaughter Claire got up to speak. She is 22 and has just graduated from Smith with a degree in Geology. She is bright and adorable and has a lot of that young person swagger about her — comfortable in any environment. But when she started to speak, she couldn’t. She turned her head and gasped “I’m sorry.” Her mom and sister ran up and she composed herself. The first thing she said was “First of all, I don’t know any Professor Schwalberg. Where is that coming from?” He was a loving funny warm Grandpa to her, completely different from the picture we had just spent a good 45 minutes drawing. And the rest of the service was on how great a family man he was. Very beautiful to see. His daughter Renee seemed terrific. I had never met her before. Someone noted that Barney once said “I don’t know why people feel compelled to have more than one child — I have the perfect daughter.”

    The first speaker was a Brandeis professor named Dolbear. I remember him from my time there, but did not take a course with him. He was reputed to be a “dull bear” and his speech did nothing to correct that. He rambled and was not very effective, given the incredible material he had at his disposal. But it did relax me a bit to watch him. Even if I bombed, it wouldn’t be worse. Then three former students spoke, all from periods later than me. They were all very good. Then I got up, and this is what I said:

    I graduated from Brandeis with a degree in Economics in 1971.  I had Barney as my professor for three courses.  I did not know what to do next.  My dad and brother were doctors, so forget that.  My mom was a homemaker and my sister a psychologist.  All useless.  So I visited Barney in his office during my last semester. He said something like “a bright young man like yourself should consider law school.”  And that’s why I went to law school — but I’ve long ago forgiven him for that.  If he had suggested goat farming, I’d probably have a nice herd by now. After several miserable years as a lawyer, I joined the faculty of the accounting program at Hunter College in NY where I taught taxation and business law for 38 years. I encountered another great professor in law school, Bernard Wolfman, who steered me towards taxation.  In my tax class at Hunter I told a story about Professor Wolfman to my students and said that based on his class, I decided to go into tax.  So those were the two great influences in my life.  Back then at Hunter students filled out a course evaluation form each semester with the option to write something in addition to checking off boxes.  And to this day I remember what one young woman wrote about my class.  Clearly referring to my having mentioned that Prof Schwalberg steered me towards the law and Professor Wolfman towards taxation, she wrote:  Based on Professor Liveson’s class I have decided to become a nun.

    But let’s get back to Barney’s class.  He needed to use a beautiful woman in an example one day, so he referred to Sophia Loren, the great beauty of her time.  But he called her Sophie, instead of Sophia.  And one kid in the back row yelled out “Sophie?”  And Barney, without missing a beat, said “Well, to her friends . . . ”  It was a great moment.  Skipping ahead about 45 years.  I had lost touch with Barney but I sent him a note sharing some good news about an award I received because I mentioned him in a short speech I made, and we started communicating by email. And in his very first message to me he asked if I remembered his Sophia Loren moment.  He was very proud of it.  Of course, I had.  A New Yorker article came out at that time by John McPhee about how each generation has its own set of icons.  I mentioned it to Barney and noted that if I had to use a beautiful woman in one of my classes I wouldn’t be able to use Sophie Loren, I’d probably use Taylor Swift.  And he wrote back:  “Who’s Taylor Swift?”

    In Statistics, we studied the Poisson variable.  And Barney explained how it was used by the British in World War 2 regarding a missile the Germans developed.  They took a map of London and divided it into segments.  If the missile were not capable of being aimed with precision, the Poisson variable should predict how many segments had zero missile hits, how many had one hit, two hits, etc.  If it couldn’t be aimed with precision they wouldn’t have to waste resources moving or protecting specific valuable assets.  The variable matched up perfectly with the actual hits so they knew it could not be aimed precisely. 

    When my son Sam was studying WW2 in high school I told him about the Poisson variable.  It fascinated him and he used it for his semester project, embellishing it with scenes of marching German soldiers and stuff like that.  I told Barney about it.  He was very pleased.

    One last story.  Barney asked a question in class and called on Mr. Spechler who had raised his hand. His answer was wrong as Barney explained.  But Mr. Spechler insisted that he was right.  Barney again corrected him and explained again why he was wrong.  Mr. Spechler started a third time to make his case and finally Barney cut him off and said, “Mr. Spechler — don’t commit yourself too strongly to an absurd position.”

    Words that all of us should live by.

    As I look back over my own life, even though I spend every waking moment complaining about something or other, the truth is I’ve been very lucky.  Wonderful parents and siblings, a wonderful wife and children, seven incredible grandchildren, a career I fully enjoyed.  And I was so lucky to have Barney in my life.  Every one of his students was.  Every single one.  

    Rest in peace, Barney.

    It went over very well. I knew right away that I was feeling comfortable and the big test was how the “nun” line would sell. It did well, so I was pretty much home from there.

    We stayed in Bedford, MA, in the Bedford Plaza and it was very comfortable. We were exhausted, so went to bed early, and thus missed seeing the Bosox drub the Yankees on TV. In the morning, the GPS lady’s first instruction was to turn on Shawsheen Road and I said, I think Bonnie and Mitch are buried here (my sister and bro-in-law). I remembered it was the Shawsheen Cemetery. In fact, it was right across the street and I miraculously managed to blunder our way to their graves for a nice visit.

    We stopped in Holyoke on the way back and caught the first seven innings of a College Summer League game: the Valley Blue Sox vs. the Ocean State Waves. Very enjoyable. Attendance: 307 diehards. It was 2-2 when we left (worried about traffic), and we missed a lot. It went into extra innings. The Waves scored four in the top of the tenth, but the Sox plated five in the bottom! Yay!

    Good to be home now, if a bit tired. See you tomorrow.

  • Loose Garlic

    This poem is called “Birdsong of Shaker Way” and is by Margaret-Ann Lim.

    Every day is perfect, if
    when you wake, you hear birds
    in the garden, in the yard. Birds

    up and down, ushering in one more day
    in all the houses on Shaker Way. Birds
    on telephone lines, light posts. Birds

    twit, twittering on trees
    hailing fellow birds
    with a nod of  beak—gray kingbird;

    top-hatted, streamertail
    tuxedoed, doctor bird—
    busy-bodied hummingbird

    tucking in, out, of pink, red ixoras
    punch-drunk in love. Birds
    preening for, chatting up other birds—

    the oriole, the grass quit, in mid-song
    on the lawn, in a dance of  birds
    an all-day-long conference of bird;

    red-headed woodpecker
    —drummer boy, or girl bird
    in this daily symphony of  birds

    —an orchestra on Shaker Way
    in serenade of each perfect day with birds—
    from the very first mockingbird

    heralding, in solo warble
    one more day, filled with birds—
    brightened, lightened, trilled by birds:

    precious, diamond-throated
    sweet song, miracle-toting birds
    the-gift-of-day-is-here birds.

    Bird, bird, bird. Hello bird.
    You lift me up bird.
    You sing the day beautiful, bird.

    From The Onion:

    Last Literate Person On Earth Dead At 98

    ROUEN, FRANCE—Béatrice Berceau, the planet’s last literate person, died Monday, marking the end of an era. Berceau, widely renowned in her native France and around the world for her remarkable ability to decipher coded inscriptions of symbols printed on paper, was 98 years old.

    “Béatrice’s death has officially ushered in the Post-Literate Age,” said Roland Habusch, head of Harvard University’s Department of Sound Bites and Pictograms. “No longer will we as a species have access to the information stored in the bound paper volumes known to Béatrice and our ancestors as ’books.’”

    I have never ordered groceries for delivery. In Britain, apparently, if you place an order and an item is not available, unless you check off the box for no substitutions, they will make a substitution. Does this happen in the US?

    Vicky Draisey asks the following in a post in the Dull Men’s Club (UK):

    Who in their right mind decided a garlic (large) was an appropriate substitute for a grapefruit??

    These are a few of the duller of the 62 comments:

    William Morgan: Never underestimate an idiot; they will surprise you with their ingenuity

    Anthony Des Desbois: This is what made me check that I always ticked no substitution on my online orders. Near Christmas during lockdown I ordered medjool dates and couldn’t understand how and why I had a mango. 

    Andy Burke: When life gives you garlic, make pastas ago e olio

    Suzanne Knowles: I ordered cat litter and got Huggies nappies!

    Fleur Davies: Exactly, and people are worried about computers taking over!

    John Cant: Did humans learn nothing from the AI dystopian genre of films from the 90s & 00s?

    Fleur: Did humans learn nothing from history?

    Jon: That is completely fair, look at the US at the moment

    Fleur: At the moment?

    Carole Tolson: I got frozen broccoli instead of pomegranate seeds.

    Hrrrrrrrrmph!

    The puzzle was great today, IMO. Two ten-letter, four-word stacks. They included neat stuff like: SLOPPY KISS, REGULAR JOE, BONE MARROW, and CANTILEVER. The clue for SLOPPY KISS was “Overly warm welcome, maybe.” Egs noted if you leave one of those little foil-wrapped Hershey chocolates out in the sun, you’ll get a sloppy kiss. On INSIDE DOPE, he noted: No wonder I never get anywhere — people keep giving me the outside dope. At 52A, “Split without warning” was UP AND LEAVE. Egs wrote: “After teaching my dog ‘down’ and ‘stay’, I taught him UPANDLEAVE. Haven’t seen him since.” I added a quote of Bill Lee’s (Hi Don!) — Kansas is so flat you can stand on a chair and watch your dog leave you for three days.

    Do you know about SAD KEANU? I love learning nonsense like this in puzzles. At 30A the clue was “Meme of the star of ‘John Wick’ looking downcast,” and the answer was SAD KEANU. It turns out there was a photo of Keanu Reeves taken by someone and it went viral on the internet. How viral? Well, it’s in the goddam NYT puzzle, for God’s sake.

    The great Yankee ELSTON Howard was in the puzzle today, clued via his 1963 AL MVP. Hey Ellie! Who could ever replace the great Yogi Berra behind the plate for the Yanks? Well, Ellie did. He was the first Black on the Yankees, in 1955, eight years after Jackie broke the barrier. He played for the KC Monarchs in the Negro Leagues from ’48 to ’50, rooming with Ernie Banks for a time. Ellie was an All-Star twelve seasons and a six-time World Series champ. His number 32 was retired by the Yankees.

    Here’s some trivia for you: he invented the “donut,” the circular thingie you slip onto a bat to increase its weight while you swing it in the on-deck circle. Josh Hart of the NBA Knicks is his grand-nephew. Ellie was only 51 when he died from a heart condition.

    Good to see you in the puzzle today, El — rest in peace.

    Heading up to Brandeis tomorrow for the Schwalberg memorial service. Full report to follow. Thanks for popping by.

  • Ici Commence La Mer

    A special Owl Chatter tip of the cap to 72-year-old Pamela Hemphill of Boise Idaho, the former so-called “MAGA Granny.” Pamela served time in prison for a misdemeanor conviction for her activities in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but rejected Trump’s pardon. Her eyes have been opened to Trump’s perfidy and she says accepting the pardon would be an insult to the Capitol police and help support Trump’s false narrative. Brava, Pamela!

    Linda and I went to our local (Chatham, NJ) library yesterday. I had some copies to make of some documents. The library’s copier is very good and the cost is 15 cents per page. Staples charges 30 cents a page plus tax. Ouch. And another local copy place charges 20 cents plus tax.

    It’s a new machine at the library with a new payment system. It used to be you fed money into the machine, made your copies and received any change that was due you. Under the new system, you make your copies and then go up to the front desk to pay for them.

    We made 39 copies. At the front desk I told the woman I wanted to pay for 41 copies. It came to $6.15 and I had exact change. On the way back to the car:

    Linda: Why did you say 41 copies when we only made 39?

    Avi: Because last week I made two copies and forgot to pay for them.

    Linda: That’s very ethical of you.

    Avi: For 30 cents I can be ethical.

    Linda: How much has to be at stake for you to abandon all of your moral principles?

    Avi: A dollar.

    I wrote a letter to the Times today!! Just sent it in. It was on Michelle Goldberg’s Op-Ed on the Broadway show “John Proctor Is the Villain.” It’s set in a high school in a small town in Georgia during the height of the #MeToo movement. She said she cried the first time she saw it. She went to see it a second time with a friend and when it was over her friend was in tears as was a woman in the row in front of them. Two other women were sobbing outside the theater.

    This is the letter I wrote to the NYT:

    To the editor:

    Michelle Goldberg’s article on the play “John Proctor Is the Villain” notes that it’s remarkable for so many audience members to find themselves openly sobbing during and after the performance.   As a long-time fan of the NY Jets, however, I can assure you it’s a very common reaction.

    This poem is called “We Dreamed You” and it’s by Keisha-Gaye Anderson.

    I see her face
    when my lids surrender
    to the limits

    of this battered body
    and it makes the cane ash sting
    less in my throat.

    She has fat brown cheeks
    red satin ribbons
    floating on fluffy plaits.

    She hums, traaa-la-la-la-la,
    so sweet
    like a sugar in a plum.

    She skips along a carpet
    of flamboyant petals,
    red like the rose apple she nibbles
    on an already full belly.

    Laughter like a bird song
    no thick memory
    whatsoever of who sent her
    into this future
    finally free.

    In yesterday’s puzzle, the clue at 55D sent Crossworld into a tizzy. Here it is: “‘Divine medicine,’ per the Greek physician Paracelsus.” The answer was BEER, but that’s not relevant to the problem. Do you see it? It turns out Paracelsus was not Greek — he was Swiss. A bunch of folks took it as a sad comment on the declining editorial standards of the NYT. Srsly?

    Also yesterday at 14A the clue was “Girl in Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit.’” The answer, of course, was ALICE. Rex’s guest blogger Malaika confessed to never having heard of either the band or the song. What’s with kids today? And get off my lawn! Here’s what such a person looks like (showing off her “mehndi” from a wedding she attended).

    Grace Slick is 85 today. I had forgotten (or never knew) that JA performed at Woodstock. They weren’t included in the movie because their performance wasn’t so great. They were postponed to early in the morning and they and the crowd were a little off. But, I don’t know, this version of White Rabbit seems good to me. I’d have put it in the movie.

    One of the comments yesterday took GS to task for supporting experiments on human prisoners once, instead of on animals. But I couldn’t find anything to support that on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the interweb. She has come out in support of 9/11 victims and the LGBTQ community. So I’m going to give her a pass unless I learn more.

    Grace Slick is not a stage name. Her name at birth was Grace Barnett Wing and her first husband’s name was Jerry Slick. Later in life she stated she did not realize she was considered very sexy back in the day, something most of the men in the country had no trouble noting. She said she would have slept with a lot more men had she known. She did reveal that she had a one-night stand with Jim Morrison (yes, that one). And she was struck by how sweet and gentle he was: very different from his dark on-stage persona.

    Here are three pics: Grace young, Grace later, and Grace’s only child, her daughter China Kantner.

    At 15A today, the clue was “Like 2027 and 2029, but not 2025.” Got it? Think numbers, not years. The answer is PRIME. Those are both prime numbers.

    Anony Mouse noted: There are thought to be infinitely many primes that are only 2 apart, like 2027 and 2029. These are called twin primes, and the twin primes conjecture that there are indeed infinitely many of them is the most famous unsolved math problem, as it is unproven despite being known about for thousands of years.

    Kitshef added: The largest pair of primes that are only 2 apart so far discovered have over 300,000 digits.

    OK, enough of that. My brain hurts.

    You ever been to (or seen on TV) a “walk-off” ballgame? This is when a run is scored that ends the game right then and there, so the home team “walks off” the field. What usually happens is the home team dugout empties out and the batter who got the walk-off hit is mobbed by his teammates, doused with Gatorade, etc. It’s a joyous scene.

    Last night, Reno was trailing Albuquerque going into the bottom of the ninth. Reno loaded the bases and the batter drove a double to deep right-center. That’s when things went a little crazy. The runner from third scored. No problem. But as the runner from second rounded third he was confronted by jubilant teammates bolting out of the dugout, and he tripped over one on his way home. D’oh! The umpire called him out on account of interference (by his own teammate)! So the game was only tied, right?

    Well, even though the runner was called out, the ball was still in play. The call did not trigger a “dead ball.” And the centerfielder, thinking the game was over, threw the ball into the stands! When a fielder throws the ball into the stands, every runner is awarded the base he is heading towards plus one more. Since the runner who had been on first was between second and third when the throw was made, he was awarded home and thus became the winning run!!

    Let’s finish up overseas today: France. This lovely note and photo were posted by Martin Phillips of the Dull Men’s Club (UK).

    “The Sea Starts Here. Don’t throw anything in”

    The other day whilst strolling through inland Libourne (SW France) on a hot and humid day, I noticed a simple yet profound message on a manhole cover which instantly transported me to the sea! Maybe not literally, but for a moment, and in my mind, I was there. Then a few paces later as I tried to cross the busy road, I was back to reality.

    See you tomorrow!