The Wellington Files

  • Pickled Eggs

    Baltimore is such a nicely creepy city, thanks to Edgar Allen and his ravens. What other city would name its football team the Ravens — the creepy offshoot of the Orioles. This sign was in the window of a store that sells “Shoes & Chocolate.”

    The winter was rough at Valley Forge for Washington and his men, but lunch with Nancy and Eric on our way down today was a blast.

    Nancy was as horrified as I was to learn about the endangered status of chocolate sprinkles. She managed to score this precious sample on the black market for $275.

    I’ve never had a pickled egg, so when I saw this posted by Bob Lyons of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) I perked right up: “I tried my first ever pickled egg today. Not sure if I liked it or not.”

    It seems like the sort of thing you’d know if you liked or not, but maybe it isn’t? Here are some comments:

    Sarah Wallis noted: I worked in a Fish and Chip shop when I was 15, some 29 years ago. We used to have massive jars of pickled eggs on the counter. I always thought I’d try one, one day. 29 years later, I still can’t bring myself to try one. I expect it will be a food I request on my deathbed.

    Simon Macfeeters asked: Did you swallow it whole?

    Eric Hage: I bought the giant jar. Impulse purchase. Took me a year to get through it.

    So it got me thinking I should try them. A whole bunch of varieties are sold on Amazon, including pickled quail’s eggs. Not cheap. I guess getting the quail to stand still while it’s pickled increases the labor cost.

    These look good.

    Here’s a quail with her baby. Neither has been pickled (yet).

    Jim Daniels wrote this poem called “American Cheese.” It was in today’s Writer’s Almanac.

    At department parties, I eat cheeses
    my parents never heard of—gooey
    pale cheeses speaking garbled tongues.
    I have acquired a taste, yes, and that’s
    okay, I tell myself. I grew up in a house
    shaded by the factory’s clank and clamor.
    A house built like a square of sixty-four
    American Singles, the ones my mother made lunches
    With—for the hungry man who disappeared
    into that factory, and five hungry kids.
    American Singles. Yellow mustard. Day-old
    Wonder Bread. Not even Swiss, with its mysterious
    holes. We were sparrows and starlings
    still learning how the blue jay stole our eggs,
    our nest eggs. Sixty-four Singles wrapped in wax—
    dig your nails in to separate them.

    When I come home, I crave—more than any home
    cooking—those thin slices in the fridge. I fold
    one in half, drop it in my mouth. My mother
    can’t understand. Doesn’t remember me
    being a cheese eater, plain like that.

    We’ve been enjoying Irish Cheddar since our trip last October. A cheesemonger in Dublin started us off with a sample.

    See you tomorrow (I hope).

  • Road Trip

    Owl Chatter is hitting the road for a few days: a short vacation to Elkridge MD, near Baltimore. We hope to be broadcasting from there shortly.

    Please join us in wishing the best for our loyal staff member George Santos who is facing his legal difficulties with grace and dignity. Just kidding, of course. Knock ’em for a loop, Georgie!

    George joined our staff upon his expulsion from Congress. (It’s the country’s loss, Buddy!) His responsibilities have mainly involved keeping our refrigerator stocked with diet soda. We will miss him terribly while he’s in jail.

    Here he is outside of Owl Chatter headquarters recently, on his way to pick up some Fresca,

    OK, gotta run.

  • Gena

    Adrian Dorson, of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) has been pondering this for a long time:

    A bumblebee flying due east hits a train travelling due west, the bumblebee then obviously starts travelling due west with the train.

    To change direction from flying east, to being flat and travelling west, the bumblebee at one point must have been stationary in relation to the ground, if so the train must have been too.

    Did the bumblebee stop the train?

    Jeff Creeach notes: Wait until you think about how wheels work. The part of the wheel that touches the ground is stationary for a split second and the top of the wheel travels two times faster than the car itself.

    [What? My head hurts now.]

    Craig Williams: At EVERY individual point the train is stationary. To prove this take a photo of a single point in time. Is the train moving in the photo? No. It’s just that in the very next infinitesimally small point in time, it has travelled to a different point in space.

    Peter Marshall died on Thursday at his home in Encino CA at the age of 98. He was the host of the funniest game show ever from 1966 to 1981: Hollywood Squares. The game was a tic-tac-toe board with nine celebrities in the squares. Contestants would pick a square and the celeb in the square would answer a question. The contestant “earned” the square if he or she correctly stated whether the answer was correct or not. Typically, the celeb would give a joke answer first and then a real answer.

    Celebs often included great comics like Mel Brooks and Joan Rivers. Paul Lynde was a regular and was hysterical. Here are sample Paul Lynde lines: Question: Do guinea pigs whistle? Answer: Only when brought to a boil. Question: When your grandpa put oatmeal on his forehead, what was he trying to do? Answer: Get it in his mouth.

    Remember the comic George Gobel? He was also a favorite. Question: Who is pregnant longer: your girlfriend or your elephant? Gobel’s answer, horrified: Who told you about my elephant??

    “Is it a good sign if your man loves animals?” was the question for Joan Rivers. “Not to excess,” she replied.

    Other regulars included Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie from the old Dick Van Dyke show, and Wally Cox, who was Mr. Peepers.

    Gene Hackman, Redd Foxx, Dolly Parton, and Alice Cooper popped in as guest stars, as did — get this — Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron. OJ Simpson was on as a contestant after winning the Heisman Trophy at USC and later returned as a guest star. He was the only person to have been both. [Whatever became of him?]

    With so much talent on stage, Marshall’s job was essentially to be the straight man. As he put it: the show’s producers said they prized one quality in particular when they sought a host: “‘We’re looking for a complete nonentity,’ they told me. ‘Well, look no further,’ I said, and they offered me an audition.”

    BTW, I had always thought they fed the celebs the questions in advance, because the quips were so quick and funny. But Marshall insisted they didn’t. He did concede they sometimes crafted certain questions for certain celebs expecting to hit paydirt.

    Marshall’s name at birth was Ralph Pierre LaCock. If you can’t figure out why he changed it for show biz, see me after class.

    His first two marriages ended in divorce. But then he married Laurie Stewart in 1989 and it held. In addition to Laurie, his survivors include three children from his first marriage; 12 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Pete LaCock, the former baseball player, is one of Marshall’s children.

    Alright, just a couple more from Paul Lynde.

    Q: When is it a good idea to put your panty hose in the microwave for two minutes?

    A: When your house is surrounded by the police.

    Q: According to Julia Child, how much is a “pinch?”

    A: Just enough to turn you on a little.

    Q: What is the main thing we get from Honduras?

    A: You got it too?!

    Q: Marriage kills love. And love kills — what?

    A: Twenty minutes.

    Q: Within two, how many husbands have the three Gabor sisters had among them?

    A: Including their own?

    And, last one: When Paul Lynde was asked: According to the Food Editor of the Dallas Morning News, what’s the best reason for pounding meat?, his answer was: “Loneliness.”

    Rest in peace, Peter Marshall — I hope you enjoyed it all as much as we did.

    The puzzle today by Brandon Koppy had a ton of good stuff in it. If you’re not a puzzle person, you may be wondering, what the hell does that mean? It’s just word clues and answers? Well, they can be fun. At 20A today, the clue was “Reason one might read a ‘Speed Hump’ sign and laugh.” Answer: DIRTY MIND.

    Or at 35A: “Jamie Lee Curtis or Neve Campbell, notably.” Answer: SCREAM QUEEN.

    56A was cute: “A deal’s a deal.” NO BACKSIES!

    At 50A, “The “1” in 8-8-1, e.g.,” was a very clever clue for TIE (get it?).

    There were two Egyptian gods in the puzzle — that’s two more than I’d prefer: OSIRIS and AMON-RA. Rex asked: Who’s paying the NYT for this kind of exposure? Big Egyptology, no doubt.

    I learned something about beer at 36D: The clue was “Low-cost lager from Anheuser-Busch, familiarly.” The beer they were looking for was Natural Ice, but the answer was its cool street name: NATTY ICE.

    Also learned that in Buffalo it’s a faux pas to order RANCH with your wings. Here’s Rex on that: “I love the idea that some burly Bills fan snarfing wings is gonna use a word like “faux pas” with orange Buffalo sauce dripping off his lips and fingers. ‘RANCH? Oh dear, no. It’s simply not done,’ he splurted.”

    Last, at 51A, “Hold please?” was a great clue for I NEED A HUG.

    Who doesn’t?

    The brilliant actress Gena Rowlands passed away this month at the age of 94. She was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which, if you saw, you will never forget. In addition to an obit, the Times ran an article by Manohla Dargis on just one scene from that movie. Here’s how Dargis sets it up:

    “Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.”

    Dargis goes on:

    “As the two begin working it out, Cassavetes [the director] cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.

    “As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. ‘Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,’ she says. ‘I can be that. I can be anything.’”

    I remember that scene. I remember it seemed to me that she was taking us to a place we’ve been, but only alone, and we didn’t know anyone else knew we had been there. Here’s how Dargis continues:

    “Rowlands breaks my heart each time I watch this scene, to the point that sometimes I’ve been reluctant to revisit it. It’s overwhelming and, even after repeat viewings, it’s still shocking, and it seems as intimate and genuine as my own agonizing fights and struggles. I feel the performance — and Mabel’s confusion and desperation — in my bones.”

    Rowlands herself recounted a different scene from Under the Influence. She and Falk were working up an emotional intensity that suddenly seemed to be going too far. Cassavetes was shooting it with a hand-held camera and thought something cracked in Rowlands. “She’s gone,” he said, and he dropped the camera and “crashed the scene,” thinking he had to pull her out of the character.

    “’I think he thought he pushed me just a step too far,’ Rowlands said with faint amusement. He hadn’t. Instead, working in concert, Rowlands and Cassavetes had in this film pushed themselves to the point of perfection.”

    Forgive me for taking so much verbatim from the article, but you need to see the last paragraph before we say goodbye to her.

    “Rowlands and Cassavetes changed American cinema, and they also, as importantly, changed the women in it, making films that spoke to their liberated moment. Cassavetes may not have been a feminist, strictly speaking. Yet he and Rowlands made some of the greatest, truest films about women. In Rowlands, Cassavetes had an obvious muse; he also had an equal, a partner who could go to the edge, who could open veins, break hearts and blow minds with characters who were messy and real inside and out, and gloriously, at times terrifyingly imperfect. There have always been brilliant actresses who could bring great art and honest feeling to the screen. Few have been as transcendent as Rowlands — an immortal.”

    Rest in peace, Gena Rowlands.

    See you tomorrow.

  • Squirrels in the Loft

    Do you miss John Lennon? We do. At 3D today, “Was psychologically manipulative” was the clue, and the answer was PLAYED MIND GAMES. Here’s John.

    The clue and answer at 24D: “Artist Cindy known for her photographic self-portraits:” SHERMAN, don’t really do her justice. She’s a Jersey girl (Glen Ridge) and studied at SUNY Buffalo. She’s known for photos of herself in various outrageous guises. Here she is for real, first, and then some of her work.

    Look, who am I to say anything? — it’s a living. In 2010, Sherman’s nearly six foot tall color print Untitled#153, featuring the artist as a mud-caked corpse, sold for $2.7 million. In 2011, a print of Untitled#96 fetched $3.89 million, making it the most expensive photograph at that time. Imagine if they were titled! She also picks up a few bucks working bar mitzvahs.

    In 2000, she bought songwriter Marvin Hamlisch’s 4,200-square-foot house on 0.4 acre in Sag Harbor for $1.5 million. She sold her SOHO coop to Hank Azaria, who voices Moe the bartender on The Simpsons as well as Apu Nahasapeemapetilon who runs the Kwik-E-Mart, and Police Chief Wiggum who is the police chief. And get this — from ’07 to ’11 she was shacking up with David Byrne. Yeah, that one.

    Julia Child was born 112 years ago, yesterday, in Pasadena CA. She grew to be over 6 feet tall and wanted to be a basketball player when she went to college. She became obsessed with Chinese cuisine when she was over there but only began cooking when she was 32. “Up until then, I only ate,” she said.

    “Where lines may be drawn in the sand” was the clue at 30A, and I had no idea what the hell was going on because I am ignorant when it comes to ZEN GARDENs, the answer. It’s a miniature landscape composed of carefully arranged rocks, pruned trees and bushes, moss, maybe some water feature, and it uses gravel or sand as a base that is raked to give the impression of ripples in water. These ripples are the “lines drawn in the sand” from the clue.

    Mark Allcroft of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) posted: “I think I have squirrels in the loft.”

    Susan Carlyle asked: Is that a euphemism?

    Liz Goddard: People have been telling me that for years.

    Nick Renouf: Said the actress to the bishop. [What?]

    John Worledge: You will be needing some antibiotics for that.

    This may be Mark, below. Love the outfits.

    We’ve gotten a wonderful report from Vermont Lizzie who’s out on Martha’s Vineyard visiting daughter-extraordinaire Bridgette, boyfriend Carter, and Carter’s gorgeous-with-the-blonde-curls 7-year-old son Isla. I’m not going to share the photo she sent, lest some pervert surfing the web fasten on it and stalk him out. He’s that cute — I’m thinking of grabbing him.

    Liz reports she took everyone out for ice cream and it cost $38 for the four of them. Ouch! In hindsight, she’d have nixed the sprinkles.

    Take a good look at that cone, folks. It may be the last one like that you see for a long time. I was shocked to learn that Dairy Queen no longer carries chocolate sprinkles. Rainbow sprinkles, yes; chocolate, no. It turns out rainbow sprinkles have become much more popular than their dark-hued cousins and the latter may become an endangered species. Yikes.

    Choking up. Can’t go on.

  • The Whole Thing

    I defy you to find a better commercial than this old pie-eating contest ad for Alka-Seltzer from 500 years ago. I remember my friends and I marveling over it when it first appeared.

    It came to mind today as I read the obit for Howie Cohen in The Times. Cohen was famous for the “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” ads.

    The guy in the ad is Milt Moss, a comic. Cohen got the idea for it when he was gorging on an Italian dinner hosted by the director Milos Forman who had filmed a commercial for him.

    “I’m a nice Jewish kid from the Bronx, so I ate everything until I couldn’t fit one more thing in my body,” Mr. Cohen would often recall. “I leaned back in my chair and said, ‘I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.’ And my wife said, ‘There’s your next Alka-Seltzer commercial.’”

    Cohen was 81. He is survived by his wife of 52 years, Carol; his brother Jerry; children Jonathan and Johanna; a stepdaughter Cristina; and a granddaughter, not a single one of whom can believe they ate the whole thing.

    In the puzzle today at 19D the clue was “18th-century French novelist whose name means ‘the wise man’” and the answer was, of course, Alain-Rene LESAGE. Just kidding with that “of course,” of course, I never came close to hearing of him. Word is he was very independent and refused to accept patronage. Here’s a story about him from Wikipedia.

    According to the fashion of the day, he had been entreated to read his manuscript, a comedy, at noon at the Hotel de Bouillon by the Duchess de Bouillon. But he was detained until 1 o’clock attending the decision of a lawsuit. When he finally appeared and attempted to apologize, the Duchess was cold and haughty, observing that he had made her guests lose one hour waiting for his arrival. “It is easy to make up the loss madame,” replied Lesage; “I will not read my comedy, and thus you will gain two hours.” With that, he left the Hôtel and could never be persuaded to return.

    Hrrrrrrumph!

    Here he is. I bet you’d never catch him with bed head.

    At 26D, the clue was “Friends, in slang,” and the answer was PEEPS, because, Rex explained, your friends are neon-colored marshmallow birds. 

    So for Trump’s recent rally in Asheville NC, the city made him (the campaign) pay the $82,000 of related expenses in advance. Word had gotten out that other locations were stiffed. So here’s this schmuck running for President of the United fu*king States and he can’t get anyone to take his check.

    Felix Hernandez, retired Seattle pitcher, was interviewed on ESPN today on the 12th anniversary of his perfect game. He was asked: “After twelve years, what do you remember most about that game?” Hernandez answered: “I remember every pitch.”

    Well, my summer session ended today with the final exam. It’s the last time I’ll be teaching that course — Individual Taxation. It was a decent last hurrah. The class was a nice bunch of kids (see below). I’ll wrap up the career with the law course and Business Taxes in the fall, God and NJ Transit willing. Then I’ll ride the #6 train downtown into the sunset.

    See you tomorrow!

  • Days

    If you’re in the public eye or, in this case, ear, you really need a good filtration system. Jarren Duran of the Red Sox was being heckled by a fan at Fenway. The fan suggested that Duran needed a tennis racket in order to hit the ball. Duran told the fan to shut up. Even that is probably not cool. Probably best to ignore a hostile fan, not to engage him. But the sh*t really hit the fan (not the person-fan — the proverbial fan), when Duran called him a “fu*king fa**ot.” You know it’s bad when it takes three asterisks to write it out. And it was all picked up by the broadcast. Everyone watching the game on TV heard it. Ouch.

    Cut to the apology. So Boston suspended Duran for two games, which seems to be the going rate for homophobic slurs, and his pay for those games was donated to a gay charity. He also issued a well-drafted apology. The next step was to face the press, appropriately contrite. But according to the NYT, for his meeting with the press he wore a “F*ck ’em” t-shirt. The Times thought it undercut the apology. On the other hand, it’s a t-shirt he often wears under his uniform to battle his mental health demons, saying he doesn’t care what other people think.

    We don’t care so much about Duran. Ideally, he learned something about human decency from it all. Maybe he did maybe he didn’t. Here’s the kicker though — since the incident, sales of his jersey have skyrocketed. His jersey is currently the top-selling jersey on the online MLB shop, surpassing Ohtani, who’s in second place. Similarly, the jersey sales of the Philadelphia Flyers’ Ivan Provorov skyrocketed after he refused to wear pride-themed merchandise during warmups, citing his religion. Harrison Butker of the NFL also saw a rapid increase in jersey sales following his anti-gay speech at Benedictine College.

    When Duran’s suspension ends he’ll be in the lineup for the Sox against the Texas Rangers — the only team in MLB that refuses to host a gay pride night. There has still not been an openly gay active MLB player.

    God Bless America.

    Yesterday’s puzzle centered on the Nobel-prize-winning writer Toni Morrison. Her full name was one answer, along with the titles of six of her books. Solvers were impressed that they could be integrated into the grid symmetrically. (You may have picked up by now that crossword people are insane.)

    Rex was unimpressed with the theme, since it was no more than a list. But he went on to say:

    If you’re going to bore me with a list, I’d say this list is about as interesting a way as there is to do it. I enjoyed taking the trip through Morrison’s back catalogue. As an English major who was in college at the peak of Morrison’s productivity and fame (i.e. just after BELOVED came out), these titles all came to me very, very easily. Lots of my friends were Women’s Studies majors of one kind or another (English, Sociology, etc.), so I became very familiar with the Morrison bibliography very quickly, and though I’ve only read two of these books, I filled in every title in today’s puzzle without any difficulty at all. So I liked this puzzle insofar as I like TONI MORRISON and enjoyed briefly reminiscing about my college days, when she first came to my notice and when I first read her work. And yeah, SONG OF SOLOMON, man. It’s a life-changer. A disturbing, even horrifying work, but a warm and wise one as well. And a page-turner! I might pick it up again soon…

    If you’re up for a bouncy pop tune, he shared this one with us, I guess as a nod to his college “days?” I can use it, after that heavy Duran material.

    Here’s Kirsty MacColl. She was British and, sadly, passed away when she was only 41. She was diving off the coast of Mexico with her teen-aged sons when a powerboat entered the restricted area. She managed to save one of her sons, but was hit herself and killed instantly. Sheesh, sorry we’re such a downer today.

    The New Yorker’s humor issue (8/19/2024) repeats an article from 2002 by Tad Friend on scientific attempts to define what is funny. A British scientist, Dr. Richard Wiseman, undertook a project to identify the world’s funniest joke. Part of it involved a website where he had people submit jokes and rate other people’s jokes. Friend writes:

    When the experiment began, Wiseman posed for publicity photographs wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard as he scrutinized a student wearing a chicken suit who was crossing a road. One photographer shouted, “Could the guy playing the scientist move to the left?,” and Wiseman cried, “I am a scientist.”

    He concedes the concept of the world’s funniest joke is ridiculous, but there is much that can be learned.

    “We’ve learned one thing for sure,” he said. “Comparing scores for the same joke with different animals inserted in it, we found that the funniest animal of all is a duck. So science has determined that, if you’re going to tell a talking-animal joke, make it a duck.”

    Good to know. And you thought this whole project was just quackery, didn’t you?

    Tired. See you tomorrow.

  • Birthday Insomnia

    Because of some problems in transmission, there were several errors in yesterday’s account of a symposium held by the Women’s Civic Forum of Rye on the role played by slovenliness in cases of domestic violence. The moderator of the symposium, Laura Murtaugh, is not “a divorced mother of eight.” Mrs. Murtaugh, the president of the board of directors of the Women’s Civic Forum, is married to Ralph W. Murtaugh, Jr., an attorney who practices in Manhattan. The phrase “he was raised with the hogs and he lived like a hog” was read by Mrs. Murtaugh from the trial testimony of an Ohio woman whose defense against a charge of assault was based on her husband’s alleged slovenliness. It did not refer to Mrs. Murtaugh’s own husband. Mr. Murtaugh was raised in New York.

    That paragraph is from a humorous article called “Corrections,” reprised in the current New Yorker. It’s by Calvin Trillin, one of my favorite people in the world, out of, like, everybody, ever. It originally appeared in the Feb. 5, 1990 issue. Trillin is still among us, at 88, kinehora.

    Here’s another “correction” from that article:

    In Sunday’s edition, the account of a wedding that took place the previous day at St. John’s Church in Rye was incorrect in a number of respects. Jane Murtaugh was misidentified in two mentions. She was neither the mother of the bride nor the father of the bride. She was the bride. It was she who was wearing a white silk gown trimmed in tulle. The minister was wearing conventional ministerial robes. Miss Murtaugh should not have been identified on second mention as Mrs. Perkins, since she will retain her name and since Mr. Perkins was not in fact the groom. The number of bridesmaids was incorrectly reported. There were eight bridesmaids, not thirty-eight. Their dresses were blue, not glued. The bridegroom’s name is not Franklin Marshall. His name is Emory Barnswell, and he graduated from Franklin and Marshall College. Mr. Barnswell never attended Emory University, which in any case does not offer a degree in furniture stripping. 

    I can’t get over this. At 26D in the puzzle today, the clue was “Pained cries” and the answer was OYS. So Jared, who is apparently a moron, comments:

    Who on Earth says “OY” when they’re in pain? The only proper usage of “OY” is to get someone’s attention (mainly in the UK or Australia), and in “oy vey.”

    What?

    Anony Mouse replied on behalf of many of us with: “What do you think OY VEY means?”

    Some of you may recall I spent a little time honoring the passing of Joe Dipinto, a much-loved member of the commentariat on Rex’s blog. Today, a link was provided to us for his obituary. Here is some of it, with that sweet photo again:

    A high honors student, Joe received at graduation an unprecedented four scholarships to different high schools, the only student to do so, and (along with his brother) enrolled at Regis High School, a Jesuit school in Manhattan that provides a four-year tuition-free education for all students who are admitted. While at Regis Joe sang in the glee club and wrote for the school paper, and was active in dramatics, notably appearing as Sancho Panza in the musical “Man of La Mancha” to rave reviews in his senior year. The summer after his graduation he composed the score for a musical version of “The Little Prince,” co-written, directed and performed by classmates and friends from Regis and other schools.

    Joe then attended New York University, graduating with a B.A. in music. While there he continued his interest in acting as well, appearing in campus productions including “The Comedy of Errors.” He also wrote all the band arrangements for the senior year musical production “Anything Goes.”

    After graduation, he worked a variety of jobs. He was manager of the jazz record department at Sam Goody Records at Rockefeller Center, which enabled him to begin to amass his large collection of jazz LP’s. Next, he was hired as a solfeggist at ASCAP (American Society for Composers and Publishers), a job which required him to transcribe melodies he heard on radio or TV broadcasts so they could be identified and proper royalties could be paid to the composers. From there he moved into the area of music licensing and publishing. At one point, through his expertise, he single-handedly saved some early Beatles songs which had not been properly copyrighted from falling into public domain in the US. When his company packed up their NY offices to move to California, Joe opted not to relocate for his job and retired, staying in his hometown.

    It should be obvious from reading this that Joe was very smart. He was also very sweet, kind, friendly, conscientious, funny, witty and likable – in other words, a truly great person you would want to hang out with. He will be remembered very fondly by the many friends he made. He is survived by myself, his twin brother John, who could not have asked for a better brother. We shared an enviable amount of wonderful times together through the years, and I will love him and miss him always.

    Below Joe’s obit, there was room for friends to post comments. The following was posted by Nancy — another venerable member of the commentariat.

    “I’m sorry to say that I got to know Joe only virtually — through a crossword puzzle blog that we’ve both been contributors to for quite a long time. But the personalities of the various people in the commentariat tend to shine through over the years, and no one’s shone through more than Joe’s.

    “His posts were SO funny. I came to very much look forward to them. His humor could be playful or sardonic or irreverent , but it was always exceptionally good-natured and it always contained the element of surprise. He brought a flair all his own to the blog.

    “Joe and I originally bonded over a deliberately silly group writing project entitled ‘The Green Paint Mystery.’ The title, I’m pretty sure, was Joe’s. (For all of you non-crossword-puzzle-types, ‘green paint’ is an inside joke in the puzzle world. It’s where two words are plopped together by the puzzle creator that don’t really belong together. So that while ‘green tea’ is an actual phrase and ‘wet paint’ is an actual phrase, ‘green paint’ isn’t, and thus doesn’t make for an appropriate crossword answer.)

    It was Joe’s idea to call our opus — penned in alternating passages by various self-selected members of the blog — ‘The Green Paint Mystery.’ But the funniest thing Joe did was something I never noticed until several years later. I had gone one day — I don’t remember why — to take a look at Joe’s blog profile — the place where people introduce themselves and like to list their favorite books, films, music, etc. Under ‘Favorite Books,’ Joe, with a perfectly straight face, had written the title of only one book. It was ‘The Green Paint Mystery.’

    “I will greatly miss Joe’s humor and his irrepressible good nature.”

    This poem is called “One Woman.” It’s from today’s Writer’s Almanac and is by Ron Carlson.

    Oh, the old love song again and again
    devotion and desire without end,
    a woman half dressed somewhere and
    being admired, or dressed and being admired.

    These men go off alone into their rooms
    and write it down: she was this and she was that.
    Every man says she’s the woman above all,
    on a pedestal, though no one says pedestal,
    that would be crazy,
    and there’s a thousand of these poems,
    and by that I mean a million declarations
    of this singular love of this one of a kind woman,
    so rare, an absolute phenomenon which
    many times rivals the moon or the oceans,
    or the wind in the trees or night or any of the
    furniture of night or day.

    You see what I mean:
    big unknowable things.
    What are we to make of it? This:
    it’s true. Each man is telling the truth.
    Each woman puts all the other women second.
    It’s the way. The strap of her gown off her shoulder,
    and the paradox prevails. These poems are
    all true. Each woman stands alone
    in the doorway or on the pedestal
    in the perfect light.

    Welly and I agree! Linda — and Wilma — that one’s for you.

    On this date 125 years ago, Alfred Hitchcock was born. Remember The Birds, with Tippi Hedren? It was Hedren’s first role. She was a model when Hitchcock saw her and signed her for the role because she was gorgeous.

    Get this: An HBO/BBC TV film, The Girl (2012), depicted Hedren’s experiences on the set of The Birds. She said that Hitchcock was obsessed with her and sexually harassed her. He isolated her from the rest of the crew, had her followed, whispered obscenities to her, had her handwriting analyzed and had a ramp built from his private office directly into her trailer. Diane Baker, her co-star in Marnie, said: “Nothing could have been more horrible for me than to arrive on that movie set and to see her being treated the way she was.”

    While filming the attack scene in the attic — which took a week to film — she was placed in a caged room while two men wearing elbow-length protective gloves threw live birds at her. Toward the end of the week, to stop the birds from flying away from her too soon, one leg of each bird was attached by nylon thread to elastic bands sewn inside her clothes. She broke down after a bird cut her lower eyelid, and filming was halted on doctor’s orders.

    Sheesh.

    At 39D today, the “furry swimmer” was an OTTER. Some commenters shared neat otter facts. They are monogamous and because they sleep on their backs, an otter couple holds hands while they sleep to keep from floating away from each other.  Awwwww. Also, they use rocks on their tummies as tools to crack shellfish, and save them for later use. Yup — once you get hold of that perfect rock, you don’t want to lose it.

    I’m going to give commenter Andrew the last word today. It’s his birthday (70) and he couldn’t sleep. He said he gets birthday insomnia “even though my family is dead and the only presents I’ll get are things I forgot I ordered on Amazon.”

    See you tomorrow!

  • Leftovers

    It was two days and 705 years ago (on August 10, 1519) that Magellan set sail from Seville on his voyage around the globe. Seems like yesterday, I know. There was a discussion of explorers on Seinfeld in one episode. Seinfeld was pretty impressed with Magellan. He thought de Soto was overrated for discovering the Mississippi River. “Like they wouldn’t have found that anyway.”

    But Magellan himself never made it all the way around the globe. His fleet stopped off in what are now the Philippine Islands and he became friends with a local chief who was at war with a nearby island. He agreed to assist him in battle — what are friends for? — and was killed. D’oh! He was only 41. His fleet sailed on and arrived back in Seville on Sept. 8, 1522. He started out with five ships and 270 men, but only one ship returned, with 18 aboard.

    He had crossed through South America via the Strait of All Saints, which was since renamed the Strait of Magellan, and reached that big ocean thing on the other side. It was Magellan who named it the Pacific Ocean, since it was calmer than the Atlantic. He was the first European to reach it from the east.

    The man could grow a beard: I’ll give him that.

    In yesterday’s puzzle one commenter took issue with one of the clues as follows. The answer was PACK YOUR BAGELS AND GO, and the clue was “Eviction notice sent to a New York deli owner?” The comment was: “Bagels are served at a bagel shop, not at a Deli. Why you may ask? Because bagels are served with a schmeer (dairy), and you can’t mix dairy with meat, which defines a deli.”

    I agree that bagels are sold in bagel shops, but you can’t use the word bagel in the clue if it’s part of the answer. Also, the meat/dairy issue only holds for a kosher deli, and there aren’t that many of them. I think your basic NY deli will have bagels (so they can have lox on the menu). So I think, overall, the clue is defensible.

    Let’s see how you do on the medical expense question from my recent tax exam. There were six parts. How much, if anything, can count as a medical expense for tax porpoises? (Answers below) These are all out-of-pocket costs, beyond what insurance covered. All payments were made during the tax year.

    (a) Round trip uber-fare to get to and from a doctor’s appointment, $45.

    (b) Cost of installing air-conditioning system in home on doctor’s orders for a breathing condition. Cost $8,000. Value of home increased by $1,500. System expected to last 10 years..

    (c) Prescription sunglasses, $75. Same glasses without the Rx ($25).

    (d) Organic foods eaten on doctor’s orders due to food allergies, $175. (The same foods, non-organic, $120.)

    (e) Housekeeper hired for daytime hours to assist invalid. Not an RN. 25% of services are medically-related. Total expense: $1,200.

    (f) Cost of 3-day hospital stay: $20,000. If you had to allocate a portion to food/lodging, it would be 10%.

    Answers:

    (a) $45. Transportation to doc appts are included as medical expenses.

    (b) $6,500. Capital expenditures are included to the extent the cost exceeds the increase in value. The life of the item is not relevant. The expense is claimed when paid.

    (c) $75. Cost of corrective lenses/glasses are counted fully as med expenses.

    (d) $55. Only the excess cost is allowed here. Same with books in braille, if they still exist: can only count the excess cost over regular book’s cost.

    (e) $300. Need to allocate cost between med and nonmed functions. If it were an RN, would be fully deductible.

    (f) $20,000. Hospital stays count in their entirety. No need to subtract any amount for food/lodging.

    Fun, right?

    Okay, no further questions. You can get dressed now.

    A study in The Onion came up with some surprising results.

    Study: Gen Z Having Less Sex Due To Allure Of Leftovers At Home

    BLOOMINGTON, IN—A new study released Monday by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University found that members of Generation Z are having less sex than previous generations due to the allure of leftovers at home. “We found that a large segment of Americans between the ages of 18 and 27 routinely forgo sexual activity because the temptation of the takeout from two nights ago they know is waiting for them in the fridge is simply too hard to overcome,” lead researcher Janice Longhorn said. Four out of five participants stated they would prefer to go home alone to consume cold sesame noodles straight from the container rather than engage in consensual sex with someone they found attractive. “The main priorities for Gen Z seem to have less to do with finding partners for sex and more to do with the second half of the burrito, Reuben, or chana masala they know will be almost as good leftover as it was when it was fresh.

    I’ve never seen a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, but an interesting discussion arose today. In the puzzle, the clue was “Hobbes, vis-à-vis Calvin,” and the answer was IMAGINARY FRIEND. Calvin is a six-year-old boy, and Hobbes is, well, what? To some he’s a stuffed animal tiger. But to Calvin, he’s a living anthropomorphic tiger and they have adventures together. Because of this duality, some commenters quibbled about his being described as an “imaginary friend.”

    Commenter Emily Ransom was very helpful on the matter:

    “Vis-a-vis Calvin,” Hobbes is very much a pet tiger, not an imaginary friend. Watterson himself was famously ambivalent about whether Hobbes was a figment of Calvin’s imagination or a magic tiger that came to life. His explanation in the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is oft quoted by aficionados, and I can’t restrain myself from putting it in here, just to nerd-complain about the clueing of “imaginary friend.”

    “The so-called ‘gimmick’ of my strip — the two versions of Hobbes — is sometimes misunderstood. I don’t think of Hobbes as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin’s around. Neither do I think of Hobbes as the product of Calvin’s imagination. Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works. None of us sees the world exactly the same way, and I just draw that literally in the strip. Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than about dolls coming to life.“

    Let’s end tonight with a small story of joy. Joy and a sandwich. It’s from yesterday’s Met Diary and is by Kerry Madden-Lunsford.

    Dear Diary:

    It was 1985, and I was on my first trip to New York. I had driven up from Knoxville with a boy who didn’t like to drive. He was chasing a boy in the city, and I wanted to see the city.

    After we arrived, he went his way, and I went mine. I stayed with some actor friends but spent most days alone with a tiny bit of money, trying to soak up everything.

    Walking past a deli one day, I saw a sign scrawled on butcher paper: “Free sandwich if you can name Meryl Streep’s first movie.”

    I walked inside and approached the man at the counter.

    “I know the answer,” I said.

    “Oh yeah,” he said. “What is it?”

    “It’s ‘Julia,’” I said, speaking quickly. “Meryl Streep’s first movie was ‘Julia’ starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave.”

    The man looked irritated.

    “How’d you know that?” he said. “I can’t believe you knew that. Man. OK, what sandwich do you want?”

    “Really?” I said.

    “What sandwich — you won. Come on. Hurry it up.”

    He pointed to a menu on the wall. I couldn’t believe it. I had won a sandwich, and it was free, and I was broke, and knew Meryl Streep’s first movie.

    He made me a great sandwich — chicken salad on rye, maybe? I remember eating it in the spring sunshine, so happy to be out of Knoxville and on the streets of New York.

    See you tomorrow!

    [Chicken salad? Seriously? Gotta go for the brisket or corned beef. This woman was definitely from out of town.]

  • The Perfect Head

    From Met Diary:

    I stepped into the elevator at my Upper East Side building. A friendly older neighbor was there carrying a hat and some tchotchkes. He was going to the basement and I was going to the lobby. We exchanged small talk, and I asked him about the hat.

    His mood shifted from happy to looking like he was on the verge of tears. The hat had belonged to his wife, he said. She had died some time ago, and he was finally throwing it away.

    I could feel his pain. It was a perfectly beautiful hat. I asked if I could have it.

    He handed it to me, and I put it on.

    “You have the perfect head for it,” he said.

    I thanked him, and he smiled again.

    There was an unintentional connection in the puzzle yesterday I was happy to bring to the attention of Rex’s commentariat. The clue at 42D was “Gas relief brand” for BEANO. And the clue at 37A was “Out” for OPENLY GAY. Attentive Owl Chatter readers will recall our recent discussion of the late Billy Bean, the second openly gay MLB ballplayer.

    I also liked the connection between BEANO and GALE FORCE, at 32A, clued by “Ferocious, as winds.” What’s the difference between a tavern and an elephant passing wind? Well, one’s a bar room, and one’s a barROOM.

    If you enjoy making a fool of yourself bawling like a baby in front of strangers in a movie theater, you should go see the Icelandic heartbreaker Touch. We saw it down in Princeton and loved every minute of it. It features an incredibly gorgeous couple, the Japanese Koki, and the Icelandic Pálmi Kormákur Baltasarsson. All the characters and actors are spot on. Koki, 21, as shown below, is Japan’s Ana de Armas.

    So far the Gnats are surviving the loss of Lane Thomas (via a trade to Cleveland). Alex Call replaced him in right field and is on a tear (that won’t last, alas), and Jose Tena, whom they acquired from the Guardians (nee Indians) was called up from Rochester and thrown right in at third base last night and looks terrific. Tena got a key single/RBI earlier in the game and then slammed the game winning hit to deep left center in the tenth. He made some good plays at the hot corner too. Has our long search in the wilderness for a decent third baseman since Anthony Rendon left after the 2019 WS win finally ended?

    Reliever Derek Law, who pitched two stellar innings for the win, joked after the game that he hugged Tena on the field celebrating the win before he even got to shake his hand and meet him.

    Here — you can meet him now too.

    Thursday is International Apostrophe Day. It comes as the country, if not the world, is grappling with how to write the possessive form for Harris, Walz, and their families. An article in today’s NYT leaves the impression that whatever the hell you want to do is okay, though it’s good to be consistent. That is, if you are going to write Harris is pulling ahead in the polls, you can either write “Harris’ position” or “Harris’s position” in the polls is improving. (Same with Walz’ or Walz’s.) I’m going to go with Harris’s because that looks more like how you would say it if you were speaking. And for plural, I’m going with Harrises’ and Walzes’.

    Let’s take a look at today’s puzzle. Rex is still on vacation, so his friend Eli handled the write-up. For obvious reasons, ALE is a common puzzle answer. So we rely on the cluing to make it lively. Today’s clue was “Stuff served in a horn at a Renaissance faire, perhaps.” Did you know about these old-timey horns? Anyway, Eli handled it beautifully with: Not only am I the kind of nerd who brews his own beer, I’m also the type to go to a Ren Faire and drink ale out of my horn. Then he posted this photo with the caption: “Sorry ladies, I’m married.” (That’s as large as I can make it. If you can enlarge it, you’ll have a better view of that horn he’s holding.)

    On Eli’s brewing his own beer: I’m jealous. Sam and Sarah brewed their own for a while (pre-Morris), and won a brewing contest sponsored by a brewery in Detroit. Their winning brew was a porter (dark). The prize was that the brewery brewed a giant batch of it and put it on their menu for a few weeks. I was visiting out there while it was up. It was delicious and a real kick to see it on the menu.

    Years ago I toyed with the idea, and visited a brewing supply shop in NYC with a friend who made his own wine with his brother. He described their first batch. “You pour a little into a cup and take a sip. Then, after a few moments, no matter how horrible it tastes, you say ‘It’s not too bad.’”

    The puzzle was called “Take The El Train” and it was a simple concept: Just add “el” to phrases, and clue them to make them whacky. So, e.g., for the clue “Advice after one’s rival scores a perfect ten?” the answer was: DON’T GET MAD, GET ELEVEN.” And for the clue “Eviction notice sent to a New York deli owner?” the answer was: PACK YOUR BAGELS AND GO!”

    For the clue “Magician’s request” the answer was PICK A CARD. Eli posted this neat shot from The Magicians’ Alliance, from Arrested Development.

    Johan Olsen posted the following on the Dull Mens Club: I like peanuts. I eat a small bowl of them most evenings. The problem is the salt. Together with the oil it makes a sticky salty mess on my fingers. Wiping them off on my clothes or the sofa is not an option. Therefore I started eating the nuts with a spoon. This works well! I even introduced the idea to a co-worker. He also liked it. His family did not. They said he was nuts (pun intended).

    It generated 183 comments. Here are a few:

    Karen Severn asks: Do you have curtains you could wipe them on ?

    Kelly Owens (and others) suggested using chopsticks.

    Andrew Scicluna says: My wife likes to rest her head on my lap of an evening so I can massage her scalp. Little does she know that I am simultaneously wiping my peanut grease and salt into her hair. Still, she washes her hair most days and I save on napkins. Win Win.

    James McKillop asks: Have you heard of soap and water?

    Reinier Bruggers says: The pun (intended or otherwise) makes no sense since peanuts are not nuts. [They are legumes.]

    Vanessa Ortiz summed things up: man eats nuts with silverware rather than wash hands.

    Alex Bear asks: Have you considered eating them with your toes?

    Stephanie Fairey, off the topic a bit, shared: I drink tea and coffee with a straw so as not to stain my teeth, and I can drink while not taking my eyes off the road when driving.

    Squirrely Hill says: I use my hands!

    And Jenny McNeil posted:

    That’s more than enough nonsense for the day, no? Let’s close with another picture of Koki. See you tomorrow!

  • Butterflies

    Failing to attain the all-time MLB consecutive loss record after getting so close was apparently the last straw for the White Sox ownership. So Manager Pedro Grifol was fired last night, putting him out of his misery. Here he is in the dugout during a recent loss, praying to Jesus for “just one goddamn fucking relief pitcher who can fucking get one fucking out.” Jesus, however, as everyone knows, is a Yankee fan.

    On this date, 170 years ago, Henry David Thoreau published Walden. It was not a hot seller and it took five years for the 2,000 print run to sell. Most of the citizenry were waiting for the movie. His earlier work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers did worse. One thousand were printed, but only 300 sold, and the rest were returned to HDT. He wrote in his diary: “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”

    Yeah, try pushing a blog devoted to nonsense, Hank.

    This poem made me remember how thrilled my mom was over our Caitlin and how neither my dad nor my brother lived long enough to meet their grandchildren. It’s by Ira Sukrungruang and is called “How To Tell Your Mother There Will Be No Grandkids in Her Future.”

     Don’t enter conversations
    about generations. Use the art
    of misdirection. Tell her the rain
    is falling. Tell her today
    you saw a cardinal,
    her favorite bird, and it was
    feeding its young seeds.
    No. Better not mention
    the young. Tell her,
    instead, the garden is coming in
    thick this spring,
    and the tulips have multiplied,
    their buds like hands in prayer.
    Better yet,
    tell her about the work
    crying in your briefcase.
    Tell her you wish
    you had three lives:
    one for work, one for your dreams,
    and one for her. That one
    will have as many Siamese warriors
    as she wants, swinging on a tree
    as wide as an ocean,
    its limbs twisting and turning.
    In that life,
    they listen, those warriors,
    for the sound of her voice.
    They wait for her to emerge
    from the jeweled temple.

    I finished the article on RFK, Jr. in the New Yorker. It’s a compelling read. To say he does not come across well is putting it mildly. Even on his signature issue, vaccines, his work wallows in falsities. His marital infidelities were legion. At some point, Mary Richardson [his wife] became aware of a diary, from 2001, in which Kennedy had logged his sexual conquests. The New York Post obtained the contents of the diary, reporting that “it included dozens of women, with numbers next to their names to indicate sexual acts; ten meant intercourse.” I wonder what, like, three meant, or four. Mary was a bit off too, mentally, and later hung herself.

    Kennedy’s son Conor, who is 30 now, formerly dated Taylor Swift. Sure pays to be a Kennedy.

    Baseballer Billy Bean died, but it’s not that Billy Beane, with an e, who was played by Brad Pitt in Moneyball and was the groundbreaking GM of Oakland. His obit in the NYT even says that. This Billy Bean was a scrappy hustling outfielder for the Tigers, Dodgers, and Padres, who was the second ballplayer ever to come out as gay, in 1999, after retiring in 1995, because baseball was not ready to accept him. (Glenn Burke was the first.) He worked for MLB as an ambassador for diversity and inclusion and died at age 60 from leukemia. He was handsome and athletic, so he got all the hot girls and even married a “classic beach girl” for several years. But he couldn’t abide living a lie. He is the only player not a pitcher to throw a beanball.

    Craig Spot Maldoon Hardie posted this in the Dull Men’s Club: I saved a butterfly from being stuck in the pool, she then wouldn’t leave me alone and landed on my baldy head. I feel pretty now. 😁

    Lindsey Bradley came back with:

    This was me several years ago in a butterfly garden at the county fair 😂

    Headline in The Onion: Iowa State Fair Visitor Gored By 500-Pound Yam.

    In the puzzle today, I loved the clue for H BOMB: “What awakens Godzilla from the ocean, informally.”

    Rex’s guest blogger informed us that the production team of the most recent Godzilla movie wore matching shoes to the Oscars.

    Also in the puzzle, at 6D, “Marvel’s Maximoff” was WANDA. She was played by the beautiful Elizabeth Olsen. Smoky eyes; bedroom hair. We’re on to all of your tricks, Olsen.

    We’ll let those smoky eyes close for us tonight. See you tomorrow!