The Wellington Files

  • The Indelible Print of a Small Hand

    Yesterday’s puzzle had so many little doors to open and walk through. 42A was “Bringing in, as a sail,” and I thought furling might do it. You know, the opposite of unfurling. Or, once I had a few crossing letters, reeling seemed like it might work. But it turned out to be REEFING, which I had never heard of.

    Anoa Bob contributed this very helpful post:

    “Did a hitch in the Navy in the 60s and bought my first sailboat in the early 70s and have long had a interest in all things nautical, so I definitely perked up when I saw 42A “Bringing in, as a sail”. My first thought was “sheeting” where the angle of a sail to the wind is brought in (or let out). REEFING is a reducing of the amount of sail exposed to the wind, usually by partially hauling it down (and securing it with REEF knots). Furling is folding up and securing a sail after it has been doused or hauled down so it doesn’t blow around uncontrollably in the wind.

    “Aarg, I’ve done me duty, now where’s me grog?”

    This fellow is reefing a mainsail. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but I bet it ends in “You idiot!!”

    At 18A the clue was one word: “Coruscate.” OK, what the hell does that mean? I had heard of it but had no idea. Five letters; turned out to be GLEAM. It’s said of light — to flash or sparkle.

    At 18A, “Freak on a Leash” band was KORN. Word of them had not reached me under my rock. Rex noted Korn is also the name of a painting by Gerhard Richter in the Guggenheim. This one:

    The puzzle also led us to two extraordinary areas of natural beauty: The SLOT CANYONS of Zion National Park, and, well, Taylor Swift.

    We had been to Zion on a family trip several hundred years ago, but I did not know, or forgot, that those things are called slot canyons: 13D, “Narrow landforms prevalent in Zion National Park.” Narrow canyons with steep walls, sort of “slots” in the landscape. I do recall walking through them.

    Taylor Swift popped up in the clue at 34D: “Reality show whose cast appeared in the music video for Taylor Swift’s ‘You Need to Calm Down.’” The answer was QUEER EYE. Take a look/listen:

    Hey, SASHA OBAMA dropped in too! How ya been, girl? Twenty-two now? — No Sh*t! Sit yourself down — how bout a cold Rheingold? That should be okay with your folks, no? Some Sunchips? [BTW, the clue was “Youngest White House resident since John F. Kennedy Jr.”]

    Sasha started college at UMich (yay) but transferred to USC (boo), and graduated last May. [Yikes!! — did you know that in February of 2017, her sister Malia started an internship for Harvey Weinstein at The Weinstein Company film studio in NYC?! Sheesh. She apparently emerged unscathed and graduated from Harvard in 2021.] Here’s Sash on her big day. Knock ’em dead, sister!

    Speaking of daughters, today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac is by Brendan Galvin and is called “For a Daughter Gone Away.”

    Today there’ve been moments
    the earth falters and almost
    goes off in those trails of smoke
    that resolve to flocks so far
    and small they elude my naming.
    Walking the old Boston & Maine
    roadbed, September, I understand
    why it takes fourteen
    cormorants to hold the bay’s
    rocks down. Have I told you
    anything you ought to know?
    In time you’ll come to learn
    that all clichés are true, that
    a son’s a son till he marries,
    and a daughter’s a daughter
    all her life, but today
    I want to begin Latin One with you
    again, or the multiplication
    tables. For that first phrase of
    unwavering soprano that came
    once from your room, I’d suffer
    a year of heavy metal. Let all
    who believe they’re ready for
    today call this sentimentality,
    but I want the indelible
    print of a small hand
    on the knees of my chinos again,
    now that my head’s full of
    these cinders and clinkers
    that refused fire’s refinements.
    I wish I could split myself
    to deepen and hold on as
    the crossties have, and admit
    goatsbeard and chicory,
    blue curls and blazing star,
    those weeds of your never quite
    coming back. I wish I could stop
    whatever’s driving those flocks
    and drove the B & M freights into air.

    Here are goatsbeard, blue curls, and blazing star, respectively.

    If yesterday was your birthday — are you funny? I ask because it was the birthday of both Richard Pryor and Woody Allen. Allen was born in 1935. Despite his name, Pryor was born subsequently — in 1940. Allen still lives (he’s 88), and Pryor doesn’t (he died shortly after turning 65). This short clip is a bit raw. [In particular, if his use of the N word offends you, skip it.]

    Today’s puzzle did me in. Even Rex rated it Medium-Challenging. I was okay except for one damn square. 14A was “Statement of admiration after someone’s impressive feat,” which I was pretty sure was WHAT A BEAUT. But that U made 8D (“Stuff in microdots”) LUD. Since I have no idea what’s in a microdot, it might as well be LUD, right? Anyway, that’s where I fell. It turned out to be LSD, and WHAT A BEAST. (Boo.)

    At 24D the clue was simply “Likewise,” and the answer was SO DO I. I know I shared this gorgeous song once before, but I’m putting it in again. It’s by Wally Page and is sung by Christy Moore (with Declan Sinnott).

    This is the day the fisherman likes, and so do I.

    I got nothing to top that. See you tomorrow! (Go Blue!)

  • A New Earth

    Margaret Walker died on this date in 1998 in Chicago at age 83. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Sigismund C. Walker, a minister, and Marion (née Dozier) Walker, who taught her philosophy and poetry as a child. She was captivated by the bedtime stories her grandmother told her, which were often tales of slavery. She knew at a young age that she wanted to become a writer so she could write books about people of color that would not make her feel ashamed. She married Firnist Alexander in 1943. They had four kids and remained married until death did them part.

    Her poem, “For My People,” was The Poetry Foundation’s poem of the day today.

    For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
    repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
    and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
    unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
    unseen power;

    For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
    dragging along never gaining never reaping never
    knowing and never understanding;

    For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
    Miss Choomby and company;

    For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
    people who and the places where and the days when, in
    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
    were black and poor and small and different and nobody
    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

    For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
    marry their playmates and bear children and then die
    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

    For my people thronging 47th Street
    in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
    Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
    people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
    land and money and something—something all our own;

    For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
    being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
    burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
    and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
    who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

    For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
    the dark of churches and schools and clubs
    and societies, associations and councils and committees and
    conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
    devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
    preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
    false prophet and holy believer;

    For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

    Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
    rise and take control.

    On a lighter note, this was the poem in The Writer’s Almanac today. It’s by Robert Lax and is called “Therapist.” [It continues the gymnastics theme we introduced recently with Olga Korbut.]

    a man came to me with the
    following problem:

    «my mother-in-law, he said, «despises me;
    my creditors, once friendly, are now all over
    me; my wife threatens to leave me tomorrow
    unless i put the children in a better school;
    my employers criticize the tone of my work
    for what they call a failure of nerve. what do
    you suggest i do?»

    i turned a somersault for him & he felt
    better.

    Winston Churchill and Mark Twain share this date as their birthday, the former born in 1874, and the latter in 1835. They met in 1899 in London at a party. Twain was 63 and Churchill 24. Here’s how it was described to Twain later:

    You [Twain] and Churchill went up to the top floor to have a smoke and a talk, and Harcourt [another guest] wondered what the result would be. He said that whichever of you got the floor first would keep it to the end, without a break; he believed that you, being old and experienced, would get it and that Churchill’s lungs would have a half‑hour’s rest for the first time in five years. When you two came down, by and by, Churchill was asked if he had had a good time, and he answered eagerly, “Yes.” Then you (Twain) were asked if you had a good time. You hesitated, then said without eagerness, “I have had a smoke.”

    They met again two years later in NY. Churchill was on a lecture tour, and Twain introduced him to the audience at the Waldorf. Years later, in his book My Early Life, here’s how Churchill remembered that evening:

    Throughout my journeyings, I received the help of eminent Americans, and… I was thrilled by this famous companion of my youth. [Twain] was now very old and snow‑white, and combined with a noble air a most delightful style of conversation. Of course we argued about the [Boer] war…. I think however I did not displease him; for he was good enough at my request to sign every one of thirty volumes of his works for my benefit; and in the first volume he inscribed the following maxim intended, I daresay, to convey a gentle admonition: “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble.”

    Article in The Onion:

    25,000 Recalled High Chairs Returned To Manufacturer With Infant Still In Seat

     “To be clear, we really just wanted the high chairs back for safety reasons—we aren’t equipped to take these kids,” said Graco spokesperson Steven Sanders, describing the thousands of 6- and 7-month-olds who had arrived at the company’s loading bay strapped into the company’s defective high chairs, many with their faces still covered in food. “We’re trying to figure out the best path forward. This is an industrial factory environment, and the babies are clearly not happy here.”

    14A today: “Evidence that one is going into labor?” Ans: UNION CARD.

    26A: RAISA Gorbachev. Remember her? She died in 1999. She and hubby Mikhail had one daughter, Irina. On June 1, 1990, Barbara Bush and Raisa addressed the graduating class at Wellesley College on the role of women in modern society.

    Mikhail was a devoted and loving husband. He wept openly at her funeral. “One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life,” Gorbachev told Vogue magazine in 2013. He released a CD of seven romantic songs, “Songs for Raisa,” in 2009 on which he sang along with well-known Russian musician and guitarist Andrei Makarevich. He is buried next to her.

    This statue of a beautiful young Raisa watches over their graves in Moscow.

    Sportsfans — you hear of Jesse Luketa? Me neither — he’s a linebacker for the ‘Zona Cardinals. Played his college ball at Penn State and was drafted in the seventh round. He drives a 2019 BMW and the front left tire had been acting up. Usually, adding some air took care of it, but last Sunday it breathed its last breath. As luck would have it (bad), he was on his way to the Stadium for the game against the Rams, and it didn’t look like he could make it in time under the circumstances.

    Thinking fast (as is required of linebackers) Luketa noticed a guy in an old ‘Zona jersey pumping gas into his car. Three kids in the back were all wearing ‘Zona gear too. Bingo! He explained who he was and what happened to his tire. The guy’s wife squeezed into the back with the kids, Luketa settled into the front seat and they raced to the Stadium, arriving with 8 minutes to spare. He talked football to the kids the whole time and they were in heaven. He got them a spot in the players’ lot and met them after the game for photos. He promised them tix for the next home game.

    The dad’s name was J.W. Phillips. He said they didn’t help Luketa because he was a pro football player. He was just a guy with a flat tire who had to get somewhere. Everything else was just a bonus.

    Frances Sternhagen, the Tony-award winning actress, died in her home in New Rochelle on Monday at the age of 93. She went to college at Vassar and was studying history when an adviser suggested she try drama. The rest was history — or, rather, drama. Cheers fans will recognize her as Cliff Clavin’s mom. Cliff may have gotten his habit of explaining odd facts of interest to no one from her because in one scene we come upon her explaining that the Bermuda Triangle was actually a rhombus. The following clip takes place after Cliff tells her he “met someone.”

    See you tomorrow.

  • I’m Just Mad About Saffron, and She’s Just Mad About Me

    There’s a riveting story in The New Yorker of 12/4/23 by Rebecca Mead on the actress Sandra Hüller. I was drawn to it by the photo of Hüller in it, because there is a little bit of our friend Susan in her looks. Amirite, Liz?

    Mead starts by discussing Hüller’s portrayal of Hamlet in a German stage production. In it, the figure of Hamlet’s father’s ghost is not a separate character appearing to Hamlet. Instead, “[the director] Simons and Hüller agreed that it would be potent for the father to rise from within the son—speaking through him. As Simons recently described the conceit, “The father is so deep in your soul that you can’t get away from him—he is always in you.”

    Here’s Mead’s description:

    “When it came time for Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost, an eerie chord resounded, and Hüller’s soft, breathy voice suddenly dropped an octave. She was no longer Hamlet, or not entirely. ‘Pity me not!’ Hüller said, her eyes hardening and her voice quickening as she channelled the Ghost: ‘I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.’ As Hüller played it, Hamlet wasn’t seeing a ghost; he was being possessed by it. Hüller’s previously gentle demeanor was displaced by lurching motion, and when the Ghost furiously commanded his son’s obedience—’List, list, O, list!’ in Shakespeare’s original—she practically vomited up the words: ‘Hör, hör, o, hör! ‘

    “The scene was as scary to watch as any horror movie, but it also felt profound: the sins of the old were literally infecting the bodies of the young, emphasizing the generational rot at the heart of the play.”

    Mead next addresses Hüller’s role in the movie “Anatomy of a Fall,” in which she plays a wife suspected of killing her husband. Both wife and husband are writers, but the wife is more successful and the husband resents the feeling that he sacrificed his work to support hers. At the trial, an audio recording is played in which the couple is fighting. Here’s Mead again:

    “The fight between the spouses, which is presented in court as the key to whether Hüller’s character is responsible for her husband’s death, in fact addresses a more complex, and more widely applicable, question: whether she is responsible for her husband’s life.”

    Get this – as she played the role, Hüller was never told by the filmmaker, Triet, whether her character was guilty or not. She was instructed to play her as if she were innocent. (The viewer is also left wondering where the truth lies.)

    The photo, above, is from The New Yorker; our Phil captured her very nicely too.

    This poem is by Jim Daniels. It was in The Writer’s Almanac yesterday and is called “Brushing Teeth with My Sister after the Wake.”

    Brushing teeth with my sister after the wake

    at my kitchen sink, the bathroom upstairs
    clogged with family from out of town

    spending the night after the wake
    and the after-wake—cold beverages

    have been consumed and comfort food,
    leftovers bulging both the fridge

    and the minifridge. In our fifties, both
    half-asleep half-awake, we face each

    other. My sister’s smile foams white
    down her chin at the end of a day

    on which no one has smiled. We laugh.
    We may never brush our teeth together again.

    No mirror down here to see our haggard faces.
    We rinse, we spit. As we were taught.

    The theme of yesterday’s puzzle was rhymes with colors, e.g., GRAY DAY, RED HEAD, GREEN SCREEN, and Donovan’s hit song from 1966 MELLOW YELLOW.

    But it was 58A that caused all the ruckus: “Colorful (albeit rare!) rhyme for an item at a hardware store.” The answer was ORANGE DOOR HINGE. It is supposed to rhyme but many pointed out that it’s at best an imperfect rhyme (a “slant” rhyme). Miriam Webster says:  “Of course, the two-word term door hinge does not form a true rhyme with orange, but half of it can be used to create a half rhyme with the name of the citrus fruit.”

    When Tom Lehrer was challenged to come up with a rhyme for orange, he produced:

    Using an orange
    While making love
    Makes for bizarre enj-
    Oyment thereof.

    Some thought ORANGE DOOR HINGE was just horrendous, but others (like me) found it so awful they loved it. Then it turns out it’s a “thing.” First, apparently, it’s known that there is no true rhyme for orange. And when rapper Eminem was on Sixty Minutes he said:  “If you’re taking the word at face value and you just say orange, nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly. If you enunciate it and you make it like more than one syllable, or-ange, you could say like, ‘I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George.’”

    Then, anonymous said: “I’m 67. I would have been single-digits-years old when one of the interstitial bits during the cartoon-forward show we all used to watch (Captain Penny) on our local channel pointed out that no word rhymes with ‘orange.’ Then somehow they worked in a punchline with ‘door hinge.’ I’ve never forgotten it, and all I’m sayin’ is that it’s been around a lot longer than Eminem.”

    It was also noted that Kurt Vonnegut rhymed orange and door hinge in Welcome to the Monkey House, which was published in 1968.

    Now, back to Donovan. BTW, Paul McCartney dropped by during the taping of “Mellow Yellow” and his voice is somewhere on it, among the revelers. And if you’ve been wondering what that “electrical banana” in it is, years later Donovan explained he was leafing through the paper with Lennon one day and found the phrase in a newspaper ad for a “marital aid.” [We’ll just tiptoe away from that one.] He liked the sound of the words; it has nothing to do with drugs.

    Today’s puzzle returned to the old rocker’s theme with YAYAS from the Stones’ live album, Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out! The title is taken from Blind Boy Fuller’s song “Get Your Yas Yas Out.” [Yup. I see the connection: it’s subtle but it’s there.] The lyric in Fuller’s song was “Now you got to leave my house this morning, don’t I’ll throw your yas yas out o’ door.” In the context of Fuller’s original song and its use in other blues music, “yas yas” appears as a folksy euphemism for tuchas.

    The album’s cover photo by David Bailey, featuring drummer Charlie Watts with guitars and bass drums hanging from the neck of a donkey, was inspired by a line in Bob Dylan’s song “Visions of Johanna:” “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule” (though, as mentioned, the animal in the photo is a donkey, not a mule). The band would later say “we originally wanted an elephant but settled for a donkey.” You can’t always get what you want, right fellas?

    Here’s that cover, followed by a tune.

    Hey, is Mick up there barefoot? Who does he think he is, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on an airplane?

    It’s the last time the Stones toured as just the Stones, the five of them. They added backing musicians afterwards. It was also guitarist Mick Taylor’s first tour (he replaced Brian Jones shortly before his death).

    Is it me? Or does U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb seem like a moron? She just sentenced a mother-son team who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and helped with the theft of Nancy Pelosi’s laptop to 18 months and 12 months of “home incarceration,” respectively. She described the sentence as “jail but at home.”  That’s one hell of a “but.” That but is carrying one big shitload of weight on its back, if you ask me. The government sought sentences of 4 years for each of them in prison — you know, what you might describe as “home, but in jail.”

    “They were acting very stupidly,” Cobb said. She said she was giving them a “significant break.” Ya think?

    We don’t have photos for you. Phil was too disgusted to take on the assignment.

    Let’s get back on safer ground: Travis and Tay. Turns out that’s what he calls her: Tay. We like it. You may have heard Joy Behar took a pretty big swipe at the fella. She found out about some of his tweets from a long time ago — they make him out to be sexist and pretty dumb, so she’s worried about what Tay may be getting into (Behar’s a Swiftie).

    “Here’s one of his [tweets], ‘Damn, the Clippers girls gotta be the girls that don’t make the Lakers team ’cause they was all ugly,’” Behar read. She then read two more of his old tweets: “Why can’t girls hide they back fat?” and “I feel like if you want to be a cheerleader, you have to pass a beauty test. There’s too many ugly cheerleaders out here.”

    I’m hoping he’s grown up. If he ain’t, that sh*t won’t fly with Swift, Behar’s right. Meanwhile, Owl Chatter is pulling for you, sweetheart. But you knew that.

    Good night everybody. I have to go floss — appointment with Karen the dental hygienist at 8 am tomorrow, and she shows no mercy. Doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

  • The Korbut Flip

    The clue at 17A today is “Any facial feature of the man in the moon, in reality” and the answer for the puzzle was CRATER, but that’s not a good answer! Those blotches you see when you look up there are actually called MARIA (with the first syllable accented), the plural of MARE (pronounced MAR-ay). They got that name because it’s Latin for seas, and the early astronomers mistook them for actual seas. Only ignorant slobs who don’t read Owl Chatter would make such a blunder. Not worth getting into a BAR FIGHT over it (19D: “Pub brawl”), but good to know.

    Remember this sweet punim?

    It’s OLGA Korbut — 4-time Olympic gold-medal-winning gymnast. She was in the grid today even though her heydays were back in 1972 and 1976 for the USSR. She’s from Belarus. She retired in 1977 at age 22 and was the inaugural inductee to the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 1988. She’s 68 now.

    Olga married Leonid Bortkevich and they had a son. Fearing the effects of Chernobyl, they emigrated to the U.S. and settled in New Jersey, ironically the only state the toxicity of which rivals that of Chernobyl. She lives in Arizona now and teaches gymnastics.

    Hubby Leonid was a member of the popular Belarusian folk band Pesniary, among whose influences was early Frank Zappa.

    Pesniary was one of the few (and maybe the first) Soviet band to tour the US. This was in 1976 and they toured with the New Christy Minstrels. After joining them for dinner at Wendy’s (and too many drinks back at their home), Phil was able to tease this rare video out of Leonid. It’s the 1972 video from the band’s song “Alicia.” It’s a romance, sort of, with a handsome couple cavorting in the woods. Owl Chatter fans should be warned, however, — it will be the longest 4 minutes of your life.

    Olga’s legacy includes her incredible “Korbut flip,” which entails, in part, her standing on top of the bars. It has since been banned, in part for safety reasons. This video of her performance speaks for itself. Unfortunately, it speaks for itself in German, but it’s still worth a look.

    After our long drive back from Brookville, PA (stopping point on the journey back from MI), I still have exams to grade, so I gotta go. Will return when I can. Thanks for popping in!

  • Wind and the Sound of Wind

    What the hell?!

    Do you believe in hell? I don’t mean the hell you just went through spending the holiday with your creepy relatives. I mean the “real” one, with the fires and demons. It’s a pretty ridiculous notion, isn’t it? That’s what Bishop Carlton D. Pearson realized while watching the news one day back in the 1990s. It was a report on children starving during the Rwandan genocide. Supposedly, they were consigned to hell because they hadn’t accepted Christ as their savior before dying. The idea struck Pearson as abhorrent — it had to be that God loves all mankind so everyone is already saved. And from that day on, he no longer believed in hell.

    He subscribed to the doctrine of universal salvation, which covered Muslims and gays too. He lobbied Congress to pass protections for gays. Well, none of this sat well with the higher ups at his church, which declared him a heretic and said anyone following him “put at risk the eternal destiny of their souls.” Yikes! We don’t need that sh*t!

    His congregation dwindled from thousands to bupkis. He went from being a big macher to small potatoes. He died last Sunday in Tulsa at age 70. His agent often asked him if he regretted taking the positions that cost him so much. “Don’t you think you should have just shut up?” But Pearson never looked back. Bullshit is bullshit.

    He is survived by his mom, five siblings, and a daughter, none of whom is at all worried about going to hell.

    Rest in peace, Bishop.

    I loved 11D in the puzzle today. The clue was “Get ready in a hurry,” and the answer was SCRAMBLE THE JETS. It inspired me to make up these riddles:

    What do eggs and jets have in common?

    A. They can both be scrambled.

    B. They are both NFL teams, except for the eggs.

    What can be scrambled but never with onions?

    Ans: Jets

    The MILLION MOM MARCH was in the puzzle clued as an anti-gun group, but it triggered a rant by egs about different “moms,” Moms for Liberty. You heard of these folks? Who could be against liberty? Here’s what Wikipedia says:

    Moms for Liberty advocates against school curricula that mention LGBT rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination. They have also campaigned to ban books that address gender and sexuality from school libraries. Founded in January 2021, the group began by campaigning against COVID-19 protections in schools, including mask and vaccine mandates. Moms for Liberty is influential within the Republican Party.

    A newsletter of theirs from an Indiana chapter highlighted a quote by Hitler which they at first tried to “explain” but then apologized for. (Don’t you hate it when you get caught and have to pretend to be decent?) And one of their pastors in the Philly chapter in charge of outreach was revealed to be a registered sex offender. He spent 3 years in prison for sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy, sort of a special form of outreach. Yeah, let’s put these folks in charge of the library books.

    It has 285 chapters in 45 states and over 115,000 members. God Bless America.

    43A is “Japanese zither,” and the answer is KOTO. Ever hear one?

    Hey, CHER popped by too, at 54D: “Singer whose likeness was the highest-selling doll of 1976, surpassing Barbie.” Anybody remember those dolls? They were only available for a few years and are collectors’ items now. You can snare one of these for about $200.

    This poem from today’s Writer’s Almanac is by Jon Loomis and is called “At the Lake House.”

    Wind and the sound of wind—
    across the bay a chainsaw revs
    and stalls. I’ve come here to write,

    but instead I’ve been thinking
    about my father, who, in his last year,
    after his surgery, told my mother

    he wasn’t sorry—that he’d cried
    when the other woman left him,
    that his time with her

    had made him happier than anything
    he’d ever done. And my mother,
    who cooked and cleaned for him

    all those years, cared for him
    after his heart attack, could not
    understand why he liked the other

    woman more than her,
    but he did. And she told me
    that after he died she never went

    to visit his grave—not once.
    You think you know them,
    these creatures robed

    in your parents’ skins. Well,
    you don’t. Any more than you know
    what the pines want from the wind,

    if the lake’s content with this pale
    smear of sunset, if the loon calls
    for its mate, or for another.

    Michigan 30, Ohio State 24. Hail to the Victors!

    Good night, everybody. Thanks for popping in.

  • Talking Turkey

    Happy Holiday, readers! I’m not sure if we’ll be able to post much of anything later from the road. Phil is off drunk somewhere, for one thing. But here are a few small items.

    As a nod to the day, the puzzle at 1D had “Site of what many regard as the first Thanksgiving,” and the answer was PLYMOUTH. Several folks noted what a dud Plymouth Rock is, as a site to visit. It’s just a rock (duh) not very well maintained. An anonymous poster wrote: “I grew up in MA and Plymouth Rock is literally just a rock. My sister dropped a flip flop down there which was the highlight of my visit.”

    But it did inspire Son Volt to share this tune with us, called “Plymouth,” by Strand of Oaks. “Sometimes I move like shadows. Sometimes I move like wind.”

    This beautiful note was posted on Rex’s site by Lewis:

    Just a silly little diversion, crosswords.

    Or so some say. I for one love silliness, so give me silly in any form. Give me play. Give me inventiveness. Give me riddles to crack. Give me laugh-out-loud moments. Give me a diversion that takes me to a place that I deep down enjoy. Give me the work of people who earnestly strive to entertain, strive to give the brain the opportunity to figure things out and feel exercised and happy.

    Thrust me into a community of those who are like minded, and who pile on more silliness, inventiveness, and edifying insight, and who feel like family – as this place is.

    Have the puzzles be honed and scrubbed by skilled and talented craftspeople who set a high bar.

    And what a gift! What a ball of beauty! What a piece of magic, spark, and brightness to adorn the path we travel. It never had to come about, and yet here it is, this towering gift. I give thanks for it always.

    Amen, Lewis.

    I also received this email from CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodriguez:

    I had the privilege to participate yesterday in Kingsborough Community College’s “Thanks for Giving” festivities, a yearly tradition where administrators, faculty and staff serve students a Thanksgiving meal. From start to finish, I was able to do my part in giving back — in the form of a delicious potato station — to excited students.

    The experience reminded me of what an honor it is to serve the CUNY community. It’s days like this that reaffirm our school’s motto, “the education of free people is the hope of humanity.” Each day, we strive to work together to ensure that all 25 campuses are thriving and that we continue to provide a life-changing education to New Yorkers.

    Our campuses are centers of knowledge and places of acceptance. We understand that our many differences are special qualities to be celebrated and embraced. It’s what gives me hope in good times and bad.

    Last, a big thank you, readers, from Wilma and Welly, the owls behind Owl Chatter, from our crazy photographer Phil, and the entire OC staff. Now dig in!

  • No Woman is an Isla

    I was on the phone with a friend a few days ago, and he asked me how many tries I needed for Wordle that day and what the word was. So I said “Four Queue” and he hung up on me!!

    Here’s some important news from The Onion:

    Dad Spends Most of Phone Call Praising New Bucket

    AUSTIN, TX—Describing the plastic 5-gallon container as “a real stunner,” local father Edward Nielsen reportedly spent most of a phone call with his son Andrew on Monday praising a newly acquired bucket. “It’s a quality bucket, and comfortable to grip too,” said the retiree, refusing to let his son get a word in as he raved over the bucket, which he noted also came with its own high-quality lid. “The best of both worlds. You remember the bucket I had last year, don’t you? That one wasn’t as good. It didn’t have the same capacity. This one’s much better. I wonder if I should have bought a second one. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to go back to the store tomorrow and get another one for myself and one for you, too.” At press time, sources confirmed Nielsen was ignoring questions about how Mom’s surgery went to tout the bucket’s durability.

    Another headline was:

    Biden’s Lungs Fly Out Of Mouth In Attempt To Blow Out Birthday Candles

    Charles de Gaulle was born on this date in 1890. Happy Birthday, Monsieur le President! He ate very quickly. At state banquets plates were often taken away while still full. He didn’t eat fruit, thinking it took too long to peel. And it was he who had this great line: “How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?” 

    He said this about Churchill:  “When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.”

    He was married to his wife, Yvonne, for close to 50 years, until her death did them part. They had three kids. Here he is with his youngest — his daughter Anne. Anne was born with Down Syndrome and lived with the family until passing away at age 20 from pneumonia. De Gaulle loved Anne dearly and took long walks with her, hand-in-hand, talking quietly of things she could understand. She was able to say only one word clearly: “Papa.” At her death, de Gaulle said, “Maintenant, elle est comme les autres.” (“Now, she is like the others.”) Heartbreaking. When de Gaulle died 22 years later, he was buried next to Anne.

    Yvonne was a conservative Catholic and fought against prostitution and pornography. She tried to convince de Gaulle to outlaw miniskirts, but he refused. [OMG, too painful to contemplate. Let’s not go there.]

    After Anne’s death, the de Gaulles created the “Fondation Anne de Gaulle“, to assist young women who were mentally handicapped. Yvonne worked for the foundation for the rest of her life.

    De Gaulle’s son Philippe is a retired French admiral and senator. He is still living, in Paris, at age 101. He has three children, the oldest of whom is named Charles. Charles, however, disappointed the family by moving into right-wing politics. Probably was a slow eater too.

    The NYT had a feature yesterday in which they invited readers to share tips on how to survive the holiday with one’s relatives. Maureen, of Palm Desert CA, wrote: “When spending time with family over the holidays, I bring a few mementos — my business cards, photos with friends, and my house keys — all to remind me that I have a fulfilling life elsewhere.”

    17A in the puzzle today is “Actress Fisher of ‘Wedding Crashers,’” and the answer was ISLA. Pabloinnh said that it was new to him “as I had previously thought that no woman is an ISLA.”

    29D: “Team with a sausage race at every home game,” is THE BREWERS. R Duke noted: I’ve been to a few Brewers games over the years and always enjoyed the sausage race. It doesn’t matter who comes in first, everyone’s a wiener.

    Owl Chatter will be broadcasting our usual nonsense from Bloomfield Hills. MI, over the holiday, just a quick ten-hour drive west. We’ll be schnorring off of Sarah, Sam, Worthington the Owl, and the amazing two-year-old Morris, below. Got cake? Happy Holiday everybody! And, of course, Go Blue!

    We’re going to let Owl Chatter’s Poet Laureate Ted Kooser have the last word tonight. This poem is from Winter Morning Walks. We’ve shared it before, and I’m sure we’ll share it again.

    I saw the season’s first bluebird
    this morning, one month ahead
    of its scheduled arrival. Lucky I am
    to go off to my cancer appointment
    having been given a bluebird, and,
    for a lifetime, having been given
    this world.

  • Bad Citizenship

    It’s the writer Don DeLillo’s birthday today. He’s 86. (Ouch.) He was born in NYC and his alma mater is Fordham. His eighth novel, White Noise, published in 1985, won the National Book Award. George Will didn’t like his ninth novel, Libra, on the JFK assassination. Writing in WaPo, Will declared the book “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.” DeLillo said “being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.” DeLillo rejected Will’s claim that he blames America for Lee Harvey Oswald, countering that he instead blamed America for George Will.

    The rock band “The Airborne Toxic Event” took its name from a section of White Noise. I recall that event, even though I read the book decades ago. There was an emergency response team that took its drills very seriously. So seriously that they responded to the actual disaster from the standpoint of using it to see how they could improve their drills.

    Here’s the band. You like strings?

    Some of you know the singer Shakira, — you know, with the hips? She’s 46 now, from Colombia, and has two kids. Well, she couldn’t use those hips to wriggle out of her tax bill in Spain, and nearly wound up in jail. The question was how much time did she spend in Spain during the years at issue. She danced her way into court last Monday in a pink outfit, just a few days after winning two Latin Grammy awards in Seville. A last-minute settlement has her paying around 22.5 million euros to close the books on the matter. Owl Chatter asks — does this look like a tax cheat to you? Don’t pay any attention to those nasty tax people, darling.

    Today’s poem is by Charles Simic, from The Writer’s Almanac. It’s called “Rural Delivery.”

    I never thought we’d end up
    Living this far north, love.
    Cold blue heaven over our heads,
    Quarter moon like chalk on a slate.

    This week it’s the art of subtraction
    And further erasure that we study.
    O the many blanks to ponder
    Before the night overtakes us once more
    On this lonely stretch of road
    Unplowed since this morning;
    Mittens raised against the sudden
    Blinding gust of wind and snow,
    But the mailbox empty. I had to stick
    My bare hand all the way in
    To make sure this is where we live.

    The wonder of it! We retraced our steps
    Homeward lit by the same fuel
    As the snow glinting in the gloom
    Of the early nightfall.

    In the puzzle today, the clue at 25A was “Exasperated cry you might make when being turned over to voice mail.” The answer was PICK UP THE PHONE! It elicited this back and forth between Rex and Pete.

    Rex: Why are you shouting “PICK UP THE PHONE!” when it’s already gone to voice? Shouldn’t you be shouting it earlier? I mean, you shouldn’t be shouting it at all, no one can hear you, but for your inherently ineffectual shouting to make any kind of sense, you gotta be doing it earlier.

    Pete: You yell PICK UP THE PHONE when you know that the person has a home voice mail system and no caller ID and is screening calls to see who it is and you know that the person they’re screening out is you but you feel obligated to try and make them pick up the phone anyway. (Not that this ever happened to me.)

    This song is 45 years old. It’s from the same album (Parallel Lines) that had “Heart of Glass” on it with the lyric:

    Once I had a love and it was a gas
    Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass

    Hands up if you’ve been there. See you tomorrow!

  • Cranberry Sauce

    Yesterday’s Michigan win over Maryland, was much more difficult than expected. It was a real Yogi game — it wasn’t over till it was over. The final score was 31-24. Four of our points came off of safeties, which is unusual. One from an intentional grounding call against the Terps from their own end zone, and the other on a blocked punt. On the punt, the ball rolled into their end zone and would have been a TD for us had we recovered it, but a Terp alertly kicked it out of bounds for a less disastrous (for them) safety. Neither our running game nor our defense was dominant. We did enough to win, but as a Maryland fan tauntingly said to some Michigan folk as we were walking out — “You almost lost to an unranked opponent.” The guy behind me replied: “Almost.”

    Linda, Phil, and I were seated in a section that was almost entirely Michigan fans. Overall, the Maize and Blue was well-represented – maybe 25-30% of the crowd? I’m not sure you can tell from this shot Phil took.

    I love looking at all the different Michigan hats and shirts. My favorite new one that I saw was a sweatshirt in Michigan blue that just said “OF” in maize (yellow) lettering. Nothing else front or back. It must be the OF of University of Michigan, no?

    It was a good little outing. We stopped at our favorite place in Baltimore for dinner (incredible pizza) — Joe Squared, and stayed at a very comfortable Best Western in North East, MD, a bit up Route 95 from Cal Ripken Stadium where the Aberdeen Ironbirds play. “North East” is the name of the town, not a region in Maryland. It’s sort of a silly name, because it will only be north east of you if you are standing south west of it. If you are north east of North East and someone asks you, how do I get to North East?, you’ll have to say, “Head south west to get to North East. Don’t head north east because you are already north east of North East so heading north east will not get you to North East.”

    Todays’ poem from The Writer’s Almanac is by Sharon Olds. It’s her birthday today — she’s 81, kinahora. I guess it’s especially for you moms out there, but I think the rest of us can relate to it too. It rewards re-readings.

    First Formal

    She rises up above the strapless, her dewy
    flesh like a soul half out of a body.
    It makes me remember her one week old,
    soft, elegant, startled, alone.
    She stands still, as if, if she moved,
    her body might pour up out of the bodice,
    she keeps her steady gaze raised
    when she walks, she looks exactly forward,
    led by some radar of the strapless, or with
    a cup runneth over held perfectly level, her
    almost sea-sick beauty shimmering
    a little. She looks brave, shoulders
    made of some extra-visible element,
    or as if some of her cells, tonight,
    were faceted like a fly’s eye, and her
    skin was seeing us see it. She looks
    hatched this moment, and yet weary—she would lie
    in her crib, so slight, looking worn out from her journey,
    and gaze at the world and at us in dubious willingness.

    In 2005, during W’s presidency, Laura Bush invited Olds to The White House. She declined, and wrote an open letter published in The Nation. It concluded with: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

    Her collection Stag’s Leap, published in 2013, won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She was the first American woman to win it. It also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

    Today’s Modern Love column in the NYT by Rick Newman starts out with the following:

    She offered to bring fancy cheese, the kind that costs $35 per pound. I said a couple of supermarket slabs would be fine, for one-fourth the price.

    Four days later, she dumped me.

    Was it the cheese? Did the cheese represent something bigger? Or was the cheese just an innocent bystander? I had been through too many breakups to let it go. I had to parse the cheese.

    [I’m not going to give away how it ends, but here’s the artwork that accompanies it.]

    Today’s puzzle was a pun-fest centered on Thanksgiving Dinner. E.g., “Pro tip about seasoning stuffing?” was SAGE ADVICE. And “Selects green bean casserole, candied yams and mashed potatoes?” was CHOOSES SIDES.

    Pabloinnh noted: This was my kind of puzzle, with cool mellow puns, which is to say, no hot cross puns.

    The clue at 108A was “Make cranberry sauce from scratch?” and the answer was KICK THE CAN.

    Rex poster Gary shared this tale: Here’s my cranberry story: Like many, we grew up with cranberry from the can and it was served in the shape of the can. Nobody thought this was weird. When I brought my future wife to her first Thanksgiving with us, she was helping with meal prep and took a fork to the cranberry cylinder, ya know, to make it look not like it came out of a can, and mom flipped out. We got through the incident, I got married to her, she’s by far the best cook I’ve ever met, and we have homemade cranberries with orange in it these days.

    Beezer responded: Gary, I laughed out loud at your wife’s cranberry faux pas! The first Thanksgiving I hosted for my husband’s family I made real cranberries AND giblet gravy. Neither were touched. I got the message and just decided there were two less things I had to worry about for future Thanksgivings.

    Teedmn has the last word on the topic, and a neat piece of advice:

     My family also served the cranberry sauce in the can shape, with a couple of slices pre-sliced before bringing it to the table. I’ve shown a couple of people the cool hack of how to get the sauce out in one piece by putting a hole in one end before opening the other end. Works like a charm.

    58A was “Features of a vacant stare:” DEAD EYES. Creepy.

    And 35A sends us off tonight: “Time to head out:” LET’S GO. Remember The Feelies? Me neither.

    See you tomorrow.

  • Lobsterman!

    According to a House Ethics subcommittee, GOP Congressman George Santos defrauded campaign donors, falsified financial records, and used campaign money on beauty products, rent, luxury items from Hermes and Ferragamo, and purchases at the website OnlyFans. It recommended Santos be referred to the DOJ. It also suggested Santos try to get his money back for those beauty products.

    BTW, according to wikipedia, OnlyFans is an internet content subscription service used primarily by sex workers who produce pornography, but it also hosts the work of other content creators, such as physical fitness experts, musicians, and tax professors.

    Content on the platform is user-generated and monetized via subscriptions, tips, and pay-per-view. As of May, OnlyFans had more than 3 million registered creators and 220 million registered users. Bella Thorne broke OnlyFans earnings records when she joined the platform in 2020, generating $2 million in a week. Thorne promised subscribers nude photos, but instead provided only photos in lingerie, leading to a large number of chargebacks. [In defense of OnlyFans, Owl Chatter notes that we got our refund pretty quickly.] Here’s Bella.

    Lobsterman Rescues Man From Submerged Car. That was the headline. I thought a new superhero had risen among us – half man, half lobster. But it was just a lobster fisherman in Maine jumping off of his boat to help a guy who drove a stolen car into the water.

    Here’s our hero — Manny Kourinos — let’s just take a look at his hands closely before giving up the dream. Nope, they’re human. Good job Kourinos!

    True story: Many years ago a distant cousin of mine, Murray Lubitsch, was working a part-time job down in Florida as a parking attendant near a shallow canal, and he saw a car swerve off the road and into the water. An elderly woman had lost control of the car. The water wasn’t very deep, but the woman was pretty shaken up and was having trouble getting out. My cousin waded into the canal, and helped the poor dear out.

    Somehow, word of the incident reached the local paper and it wrote a story about the “rescue.” Then, since these towns in Florida don’t have much going on, my cousin got a call saying the mayor was going to issue a certificate of valor to him in a special ceremony. My very funny Uncle Morris (alav hashalom) went. We called him Maish. After the certificate was presented and some words were spoken, people were milling around, and the local reporter who was covering the event went up to Maish and asked him what his connection to Murray was. Maish said he was Murray’s swimming instructor.

    It happened again during my law exam today. A student came up and said he was confused about Question 16. The question described a contract and asked whether one of the parties, Bob, could assign his contract right to Ellen. Okay, I said, what’s confusing you? (He was whispering, of course.) So he whispered: Can Bob assign his contract right to Ellen? I looked at him for a few seconds and then I whispered back: That’s what I’m asking you — that’s the question.

    God, I love these students – I would teach for free.

    This poem by Ted Kooser is from Winter Morning Walks. I’m going to let it usher us out tonight. Thanks for stopping in.

    A rag rug of a landscape this morning —
    remnants of dirty snow,
    torn strips of muddy stubble field.
    Behind the yellow windowshade of dawn,
    in an enormous, sunny room,
    my grandfather’s older brother Lou,
    wearing a woman’s apron, blue and white,
    bends stiffly away from the loom
    upon which he’s weaving the day
    and rummages through his bag of scraps.
    He needs one with a spot of green
    to show me down here on the gravel road
    stepping along in my winter coat.

    Owl Chatter is heading down to College Park, MD, early tomorrow for the Michigan/Maryland game at noon. Go Blue!