The Wellington Files

  • Sexy Sadie

    Some inhabitants of Crossworld despise Will Shortz (who, BTW, wears Shortz shorts in the summer). I don’t have feelings about him either way, but one change he (or his staff) made to Robyn Weintraub’s puzzle yesterday was definitely bad IMO. The answer was ROBE, and the clue in the puzzle as it appeared was the boring “After-swim wear.” Robyn’s clue as submitted was “Burger or Frankfurter topping.” (Think Supreme Court.) So much better, amirite?

    Here’s the non-feline Felix. As you can see, his topping is a robe.

    I wasn’t going to chatter about Bobby Knight in Owl Chatter since most everyone knows all the stories already. (He died last Wednesday at age 83.) But the (front-page) obit in the NYT by Bruce Weber had so many delicious little treats that, well, here we are.

    He was unquestionably a lunatic. His biographer John Feinstein wrote: “If I had a dollar for every time someone told me a story about encountering Knight and finding him gracious and charming and funny, I would never have to work another day in my life. If I also had a dollar for every time I’ve been told a story about Knight being a bully or being rude and obnoxious, I’d be Bill Gates.”

    On Knight’s use of colorful language, Feinstein wrote: “When Knight read Chapter 1 [of the biography], in which I described the locker-room scene in which he completely went off on Daryl Thomas, he couldn’t believe how much profanity there was in his rant. What he didn’t know was that I had removed about 80 percent of the f——— in the speech and had completely removed his repeated use of a word that rhymes with bunt.”

    He was abusive towards refs, and one of his most famous scenes was when he threw a chair across the court. (It hit several fans on the other side, but no one was injured.) Part of this reflected his frustration with refs who didn’t know the game well enough to do their job.

    “I don’t think there’s an official in the country who knows as much about basketball as I do,” Knight said in a Playboy interview in 1984 about his rough treatment of the referees. “Not even close. Or as much as any other coach knows. And when I’ve got a complaint, I want it listened to. I’ve seen an official not watch for traveling. I’ve seen him watch the flight of the ball instead of the shooter’s hand afterward — whether or not he gets hit. I think that basketball officiating is tough, but I don’t think there are very many officials who know how to watch logically from one to two to three to four to five in a given position on the floor. And when I see somebody violate the logical progression of what he should be looking for, then I’m going to let him know about it.”

    Before attaining fame and numerous national championships as the head coach at Indiana for 29 years, he was head coach at West Point for six years. Mike Krzyzewski played for him there as a guard. (It’s pronounced sha-shef-ski, for reasons I never understood. What happens to all those letters before -ski? A “K” can be silent without an “n?”)

    To his credit, Knight had a high regard for education and made generous donations to the schools he was a part of, particularly libraries. He was a voracious reader, especially of military history. At Indiana, Knight endowed two chairs, one in history and one in law. He also raised nearly $5 million for the Indiana library system by championing a library fund to support the library’s activities. The fund was ultimately named in his honor. He was well known for stressing the importance of academic achievement to his players, telling them to “focus on the book, not the ball.”

    Ultimately, of course, his hot-headedness got the best of him.

    Knight was married to his first wife, Nancy, for over 20 years. They had two sons, and were divorced in 1985. He then married Karen Vieth Edgar in 1988. Here she is smiling at the camera as she tries to choke him. Phil: Back away slowly. They are both very dangerous.

    I’m guessing there’s not much chance of it, but, — try to rest in peace, Knight.

    In today’s puzzle, the clue at 41A was “Paradise of the Beat Generation,” and the answer was SAL. (The character Sal Paradise.) Turns out Rex (who is a literature prof) hates Kerouac, and he quoted Truman Capote who said “On the Road isn’t writing at all — it’s typing.” Ouch!

    And tea73 noted: Eons ago we used to listen to books on CDs on long road trips and for one of them we thought “On the Road” would be good to listen to. We put in the first CD and listened to over half of it before we discovered that we had inadvertently put it on shuffle. Oops.

    Oh, no! At 49A the puzzle answer was EVIL EYE. The clue was “It’s a bad look.” Yikes! That’s all we need. Kinahora! (For those of you unfamiliar with the Yiddish term kinahora, it’s a reference to the “evil eye,” designed to neutralize it. It’s often accompanied by spitting, or at least spitting sounds (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo). For me, the kinahora is enough.

    Serious fans of The West Wing may recall a scene in which the president insanely says something like “The polls are looking good,” which would clearly tempt the Evil Eye to cause them to plummet immediately. So Toby and Josh forced him to conduct a serious kinehora ceremony right outside the Oval Office, complete with the spitting. Whew. Good catch, guys.

    At 48A, the clue was “Strip” and the answer: DENUDE. egsforbreakfast asked: Shouldn’t DENUDE mean to put on clothes? Hmmmmmm.

    Close to DENUDE in the grid was that EVIL EYE and ASSESS.

    At 28D, “Title woman in a Beatles song,” was SADIE, from, of course, Sexy Sadie. Do you know the story behind that song? The Beatles were departing from their visit to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, and John heard that the Maharishi had made a sexual advance on Mia Farrow (who was studying with MMY at the time). He was very disillusioned and wrote the song dissing the Maharishi. It is considered one of the earliest examples of a “diss track.” “What have you done? You made a fool of everyone.” It was originally to be called “Maharishi,” but George convinced John to change the name.

    George, Paul, and John’s wife at the time, Cynthia, did not believe the story. In 1992, Harrison gave a benefit concert for the Maharishi-associated Natural Law Party, and later apologized for the way the Maharishi had been treated by saying, “We were very young” and “It’s probably in the history books that Maharishi ‘tried to attack Mia Farrow’ – but it’s bullshit, total bullshit.” Cynthia Lennon wrote in 2006 that she “hated leaving on a note of discord and mistrust, when we had enjoyed so much kindness from the Maharishi.” Asked if he forgave the Beatles, the Maharishi replied, “I could never be upset with angels.” McCartney took his daughter, Stella, to visit the Maharishi in the Netherlands in 2007, which renewed their friendship.

    Anyway, bottom line, since “Sexy Sadie” is the Maharishi, the puzzle clue “Title woman in a Beatles song” is wrong! Sadie is a man!

    Now, I ask you, where else but in Owl Chatter can you get three full paragraphs of utter nonsense like that? Blathering on about nothing. I can’t get enough of it.

    [That’s what I told the dentist once. He put some latex covering over my mouth and chin to isolate a tooth he was working on, and he asked me if I was okay with latex. I guess some people are allergic to it. “I can’t get enough of it!” I told him.]

    Can you make a yo-yo go up and down a few times before it gets all bollixed up with the string? I think I can. Maybe. The clue at 31A was “Yo-yos in a way,” and the answer was WALKS THE DOG. Take a look at this fellow, as I let myself out. See you tomorrow!

  • Who Wears Short Shorts?

    My favorite radio show was Steve Post’s, weekday mornings, on WNYC. It called Morning Music: Post played classical music and jabbered away. Even his take on the weather was great. Patchy fog became patchy frogs. When it went off the air (Steve was ill with cancer and then passed away), I kept my radio tuned to the station. Post was replaced by a talk-interview show. It was background noise for when I worked at home.

    One morning, a professor from England was being interviewed. He had written a book on teenage sex and was getting grief about it. He was accused of being in favor of it, or of making it seem like a good thing, and thereby exacerbating the problem. (Exacerbating is not a dirty word — look it up.) He was defending himself by pointing out that he was only describing trends in a factual manner. I dismissed it all as the usual nonsense and turned my attention to my work.

    About a half hour later I turned an ear back to the radio and was amazed to find out that that crap was still going on. The poor professor was still being pilloried. Clearly, they had all gone mad and drifted off the planet. First of all, they were worried that the book would increase teenage sex. When, in the entire history of mankind, has a teenager ever read a book? — let alone a book by a professor? And they accused him of making sex seem like fun? Hello? I think the horse is out of the barn on that one. I’m pretty sure the word had slipped out already. Sheesh.

    Everyone loves today’s constructor, Robyn Weintraub. So there were many clever clues/answers. Who else would clue BLT with: “‘Giant ___,’ soft sculpture of a sandwich at the Whitney Museum.” It turns out there is a pretty famous giant BLT sandwich by Claes Oldenburg at the Whitney.

    At 6D, “Cheeky attire?” was SHORT SHORTS. Rex shared this ad for Nair with us which I have no memory of seeing from way back when. It always seemed like a weird product to me. You rub this cream all over yourself and what does it do? — burn the hair off chemically?

    Alright. I looked it up. Nair works by breaking the disulfide bonds of the keratin molecules in hair. This reduces the tensile strength of the keratin so greatly that the hair can be wiped away. Calcium hydroxide is an active ingredient that chemically breaks down the hair for removal. Some formulations also contain potassium thioglycolate, which breaks down the disulfide bonds in the hair’s keratin. The Nair products often include softening agents, such as mineral oil, to help offset the harsh active ingredients.

    I think that’s how the Werewolf was captured. The FBI traced an order for a 50-gallon drum of Nair to a house in Colorado.

    At 14A the clue was “Show that featured the first lesbian kiss on prime-time TV (1991).” Five letters. Hands up if you thought it was ELLEN. Many folks did. But it was LA LAW.

    At 1A “Bill for expensive clothing?” was BLASS. Blass was born on June 22, 1922 and died a bit before his 80th birthday. His Wikipedia entry says:

    In 1943, Blass enlisted in the Army. Due to his intelligence and talent, he was assigned to the 603rd Camouflage Battalion. For three weeks no one could find him. (Just kidding.) Its mission was to deceive the German Army into believing the Allies were positioned in fake locations, for example by using dummy tanks. He served in this unit at several major operations including the Battle of the Bulge, and the Rhine River crossing. After the war, Blass returned to New York, and was promptly hired as Anne Klein’s assistant. However, he was soon fired; allegedly, Anne told him that while he had good manners, he had no talent.

    Good manners are important, no? These outfits are his.

    How about this one at 55A? The clue: “Subject of a first-person narrative.” The answer ADAM. Good one Robyn!

    In the hall of mirrors in which the GOP now operates, their attempt to cut the deficit by $14.3 billion by tying a cut in funding for the IRS to the foreign aid bill, will actually increase the deficit by over $28 billion. That’s what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has determined. Historian Heather Cox Richardson notes:

    “New House speaker Mike Johnson tried to spin this information in a way that can only be described as dishonest: ‘Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit,’ he said.”

    It reminded me of the joke about OJ Simpson’s daughter cracking his car up against a telephone pole. The cop comes over and she says: “When my dad finds out about this he’ll kill me.” The cop sees who she is and says: “You’re right. He’ll get away with it too.”

    Just like Johnson will. If not this time, next time.

    Thanks for popping in. See you tomorrow.

  • Boola Boola

    Margaret Renkl looks like her brother, Billy Renkl. But they are not twins, having been born 18 months apart. She has longer hair and wears glasses. Her new book is called “The Comfort of Crows,” and it was reviewed in yesterday’s NYT by Dina Gachman. Her brother created the cover art for it, as well as 52 original full-color collages that appear within it, one per essay.

    Renkl sees things in the natural world that most of us don’t, and is able to express what she sees in words. Her line about water buckets, below, is what drew me to chat about it in Owl Chatter. Here are two paragraphs from Gachman’s review:

    All 52 essays are meditations on the changing seasons of the natural world. She writes about growing older, watching her sons move away and coming to terms with the fact that she may have more life behind her than ahead. Paying attention to the living things in her backyard helps her cope with climate change, political strife and cultural upheaval — and she hopes it will help the reader, too.

    “The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets,” Renkl writes in a chapter called “Wild Joy.” “For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway.”

    Here’s what she (and her brother) look like:

    Ellin Johnson of Portland OR, wrote this letter (to the NYT) that appeared yesterday:

    As a child, Matthew Perry was a strong Canadian junior tennis player. In the early 2000s, he enlisted the help of my son, a teaching pro, to be a hitting partner.

    In late 2001 my son died unexpectedly. We had a service for him and invited Matthew to be a reader. Not only did he come and do a lovely job as a reader along with a few others, but after I returned to Portland, he sent a large check “to defray expenses” incurred, a lovely and thoughtful gift.

    When Matthew’s sad book recounting his drug and alcohol addictions came out, I wrote him of my concerns for him but praise for his candor.

    Our family has never forgotten both the happy connection my son had with Matthew as well as his graciousness in our time of sorrow.

    *********

    Perry never married. He was engaged to literary manager Molly Hurwitz in 2020, but it ended in 2021.

    He also dated actress/model Yasmine Bleeth for a time. That’s her real name: not a typo. What in the world did he see in her?

    He went out with Julia Roberts after Yasmine.

    His Wikipedia site notes: Perry had a perfectionist and obsessive personality, e.g., spending many hours perfecting his answering machine message.

    Beep!

    This poem by C.K. Williams from today’s Writer’s Almanac is called “Peace.” The warring couple in it breaks the rule that says, “Never go to bed mad.” But it works out.

    We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
    even knows now what about,
    what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws
    like fishbones,
    the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, to
    bed, and through the night,
    feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touch-
    ing, back to back,
    the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep
    us lifting, turning,
    through the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain, the aching dark,
    the weary dark,
    then, toward dawn, I can’t help it, though justice won’t I know be served,
    I pull her to me,
    and with such accurate, graceful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive
    embracing our entire lengths.

    There’s a new sheriff in town. Well, actually, it’s a new coffeemaker that’s in town. Sam (who is obsessed with coffeemakers) sent it to us as a gift. So far, I’ve taken it out of the box. It’s a little daunting. But I hope to have it up and running by the weekend.

    ??

    Frank Bruni shared two football quotes in his “For the love of sentences” feature this week:

    In WAPO, Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”

    And in The Athletic, Jason Lloyd described how Kevin Stefanski, the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, almost — but not quite — continued that pro football team’s magic streak of improbable victories in a game last weekend against the Seattle Seahawks: “He nearly had the lady sawed in half when he hit an artery.”

    And, speaking of hitting arteries, — on the medical research front, The Onion reports: Study Finds Drinking Children’s Blood No More Effective Than Regular Blood At Achieving Eternal Life.

    If you’ve heard of “Boolean” algebra but have no idea what it means or that it was named for some guy named Boole, welcome to the club. But, then again, I’m the guy who doesn’t know what a logarithm is.

    Today is the birthday of George Boole (1815, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England), the mathematician responsible for Boolean algebra, whose three basic operations of AND, OR and NOT, became the basis of comparing sets of things mathematically. He also composed all-important algebraic identities like: (X or Y) = (Y or X); not (not X) = X; not (X and Y) = (not X) or (not Y), which became the stuff of nightmares for many teenagers. I had no idea the word “not” could be indecipherable.

    He also came up with the expression: “That’s Boole-shit!” for ideas with which he strongly disagreed. [No he didn’t.]

    Boole was self-taught; the son of a shoe-maker. He was the first math professor at Queens College, in Cork, Ireland. He met Mary Everest there, whom he married. [Editor’s note: Several dreadful jokes on “climbing Everest” have been removed, for obvious reasons. Don’t ask.] They had five daughters. The oldest, Mary Ellen, had four sons, the youngest of whom, Sebastian, invented the jungle gym. The fourth daughter, Lucy, was the first female chemistry professor in England.

    Boole was only 49 when he died in Cork, Ireland, falling off a jungle gym.

    Special thanks to our incredible photographer Phil and the entire Owl Chatter staff, who work tirelessly, wait — make that tiredly — to crank out this nonsense. This is our 350th post! Kinahora!

    See you tomorrow.

  • Granddaddy’s Money

    Today’s poem by Gayle Brandeis from The Writer’s Almanac is called “Feeling East.”

    I used to think East
    was wherever I pointed my right
    hand. I was six, my body
    the center of space, the axis
    on which directions turned.
    When I learned directions
    are fixed, that our bodies
    move through space
    like fish, East became
    the sunrise, but, even more so,
    the lake. Around Chicago, Lake
    Michigan is what is East,
    and my body could always feel
    its presence. Riding home
    from the city, dozing
    in the back seat, I always knew
    where we were.

    Living out West now, I find
    directions hazy as smog. My right
    hand points to mountains, to palms,
    but their presence looms light
    in my body. When I get lost,
    and I do, I close my eyes
    and try to feel East,
    tracing sharp shores of memory,
    the pull of the lake in my blood,
    following the three right turns home.

    Sunrise over Lake Michigan

    It’s not enough to lose the game? Seriously. During Saturday’s 28-16 loss to UCLA at the Rose Bowl, multiple Colorado players and program staff had jewelry and money stolen from the locker room. Pasadena police are investigating.

    Colorado coach Deion Sanders said people online arguing that players shouldn’t have valuables in the locker room bothered him. “So they shouldn’t be blessed? They shouldn’t be blessed? That’s crazy. That’s like if you have a car in your driveway and somebody come and steal your car. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have a car.’ That’s how stupid that sounds. These are young men that worked their butts off or were blessed and gifted by family members whatever was stolen.”

    “All that stuff should be replaced. This is the Rose Bowl. They say the Granddaddy of them all, right? I’m sure Granddaddy has some money,” Sanders said Tuesday. “Grandpa should have some money to give these kids.”

    You tell ’em Prime Time!

    In today’s puzzle “Six Flags ride named for a powerful animal,” was EL TORO. When they just had E–OR-, someone said they thought it was EEYORE. Ha!

    Several posters said what their costumes were for Halloween. Wanderlust said: We had an alien-themed Halloween party and I went wrapped up in dying vines and gourds and other autumnal detritus, playing a denizen of a planet that plants seeds on their bodies so they always have food at hand. My people live for only a year, and I told everyone I was nearing my death and invited them to eat anything they wanted from my body. Some did pick Brussels sprouts off a stalk hanging from my neck.

    At 34A, “Little shots?” was HYPOS. Malaika, who subbed for Rex today, asked for someone to explain it to her — she didn’t know what a hypo is. So many explained it was short for hypodermic (needle). Then I posted: “That’s odd, I thought HYPO was what you get when you hit the wrong key on your hypewriter.” (Weak tea, I know, but someone has to do it.)

    Remember Theda Bara? I barely heard of her. She was part of a theme answer today. The theme was three five-letter words that are anagrams of each other. So for the clue “Silent film star Bara didn’t want to leave us,” the answer was THEDA HATED DEATH.

    One poster noted Theda Bara’s name was arrived at as an anagram of “arab death,” and Wanderlust added: I looked it up on Wikipedia, which says the origin of her stage name is disputed, but publicists for her 1917 film Cleopatra noticed the anagram to Arab Death and claimed she was “the daughter of an Arab sheikh and a Frenchwoman, born in the Sahara.” She was actually the daughter of a Jewish businessman, born in Cincinnati.

    But dgd sort of ended the fun:

    “Origins like you claimed for Theda Bara are usually fake and so it is with this one. Her first and middle names at birth were from the daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia Burr, and it was made shorter and more exotic for her screen name. Arab Death was invented after the fact as is common to create the false origin. Her sister also took the screen last name of Bara.”

    Any way you slice it, she was pretty hot for her day: One of cinema’s first sex symbols. She never appeared in a film with sound. She married film director Charles Brabin, who survived her. They never had children. She died in 1955 at the age of 69.

    The eyes of all gay ice hockey fans were on Travis Dermott of the Arizona Coyotes last Friday night. The NHL banned the use of “pride tape” on hockey sticks, but Dermott defied the ban a week earlier. Friday was Pride Night for the Coyotes and gay fans were hoping to see Dermott defy the ban again. Unfortunately, he couldn’t play due to illness, and none of the other Coyotes took up the cause. Boo. But it was Pride Night, and signs of support for the LGBTQ+ community were highly visible elsewhere inside the arena. Sean Durzi and Liam O’Brien of the Coyotes walked into the arena before the game wearing the Coyotes’ Pride-themed jerseys. And Matthew Spang-Marshall — who is the president of the Arizona Legacy Pride Hockey Association — dropped the ceremonial puck prior to the game.

    Lyndsey Fry (below), the Coyotes’ radio analyst, is the only openly gay member of an NHL broadcast team. She says Pride Nights are important steps forward. “There are cities where I don’t feel comfortable holding my wife’s hand. We have a long way to go, so that’s what these nights are for.” Back in 2000, two women were kicked out of Dodger Stadium for kissing each other to celebrate a home run. [Jeez Louise!] The Dodgers started hosting a Pride Night in 2013. 

    One hour before puck drop on Friday evening, fans walked into the Arena with a welcome message on the main scoreboard that read, “Pride Night,” with logos of the Coyotes and Kings against a colorful, rainbow-themed backdrop.

    The national anthem was performed a cappella by four members of the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.

    Howler, the Coyotes mascot, wore a rainbow headband as he tossed T-shirts into the crowd.

    And the league has since reversed itself and removed the ban on pride-taped hockey sticks. They look pretty cool.

    See you tomorrow!

  • The Salsa Dip Controversy

    As an addendum to yesterday’s discussion of Greg Bukata’s helicopter heroism, dad Chris tells me: “The incredible thing was they were the only helicopter in Houston for at least 24 hours and they rescued those 108 people on the first day.”

    We know what to get him for his next birthday: a good hair dryer and some towels.

    On the World Series, this is the first time two states are competing: Texas and Arizona. It has always included at least one city. [Where else but in Owl Chatter can you get searing analysis like that?]

    Without the major markets like NY, LA, Chicago, or Boston involved, national interest in it may be low, but Arizona and Texas both distinguished themselves so nicely in the playoffs, the series has a nice feel to it.

    I was too tired to last beyond the third inning last night (as was Max Scherzer, apparently), but I did catch the three Texas runs and one crucial defensive play. (Texas won 3-1.) In the bottom of the second, Chris Walker led off for ‘Zona with a double, and Tommy Pham singled to right. Adolis Garcia, who has so distinguished himself at the plate, fielded the ball on the run and made a perfect throw on one hop to the catcher (Jonah Heim) who tagged Walker out easily. Instead of ‘Zona having men on first and third with no outs, there was one out and only one runner on base. Max got the next two batters out; no runs scored. The play altered the trajectory of the game.

    Did Walker run through a red light? That is, was the third base coach (Tony Perezchica) signalling for him to stop at third? Well, yes and no. The replay showed Perezchica was waving him in at first, but then changed his mind and held up a clear stop signal. Walker explained that he got a “bad read” on the ball. That is, he couldn’t tell at first whether it was a hit or would be caught so he hesitated briefly. When he finally started to run, he saw Perezchica’s initial signal waving him home and put his head down “to make up time” and focus on getting a good turn at third. He missed the stop sign. Walker took the blame, but not enough credit was given to Garcia’s brilliant throw. Walker missed the stop sign, for sure, but he would’ve been safe had it not been for that throw.

    Here’s the play from a few different angles.

    At 16A today “Less cooked” was RAWER, and at 7D “Washing machine setting” was PRE-SOAK.

    Seemingly innocent words. But I like Anoa Bob’s take on them:

    “PRESOAK reminded me of George Carlin’s PRE- send up. Would that not simply be SOAK? How can you PRESOAK anything? And 16A RAWER clued as ‘Less cooked?’ I can hear George saying ‘If RAW is uncooked, how can you get more uncooked?’”

    I miss George Carlin. I went to see him live once, in New Brunswick, I think. Pennsylvania Nancy — was it with you? He wanted the audience to stay in touch afterwards and was going to assign “row monitors” to be in charge of the effort.

    He died fairly recently (2014) at the age of 71. I often think of him when I’m in an elevator, which is all the time at Hunter. He had this bit about how you have to share elevator space, and rearrange it when someone gets off.

    Phil got this wonderful shot of him right after he must have inadvertently said one of those seven dirty words.

    On Monday, 4D had Crossworld all aflutter. The clue was “Accompaniment for a tortilla chip,” and the answer was SALSA DIP. Rex started it with: “I continue to not believe that SALSA DIP is a thing. It’s just called SALSA. Yes, you can ‘dip’ your chip in it. Still, just SALSA.”

    Anoa Bob “chipped in” with: Hereabouts in Tex-Mex Land, SALSA is something you spoon onto your taco or enchilada while a SALSA DIP would be SALSA in a bowl with tortilla chips nearby for DIPping. SALSA DIP is usually thicker than SALSA to make it easier to get a nice big dollop of it to remain on your tortilla chip. 

    Jon P made a similar point and even shared a recipe:

    “Salsa is a condiment that can itself be a dip.

    “Salsa, the condiment, can also be an ingredient in a Salsa Dip. (Betty Crocker has a recipe: https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/so-simple-salsa-dip/fdacd856-8640-40aa-be97-c51a219229a1)

    “The closest analog I can think of is ranch dressing. It’s a thing. You can put it on salads or even dip your vegetables in it. But you can also make a ranch dip out of it.”

    Then Bruce R said: “There is no defense of SALSA DIP. It’s redundant and cringeworthy. Anyway, on a completely different note, I believe that for lunch today I will have a hamburger sandwich.”

    And Bob Mills chimed in with:

    “Is the phrase ‘hamburger sandwich’ redundant? It depends on whether a serving of chopped beef on a plate is called a hamburger. If it is a hamburger, then ‘hamburger sandwich’ is OK…because you’ve added two sides of bread or a roll. Now, I think I’ll open a bottle of carbonated soda.

    [At this point my brain started to hurt so I set it all aside.]

    See you tomorrow! Thanks for popping in.

  • Where’s the Fork?

    If you like malapropisms (and who doesn’t), then you should celebrate the birthday of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was born on this date in Dublin back in 1751. His play The Rivals was not well-received when it opened — a member of the audience even threw an apple at the main actor. But after he shut it down and rewrote the script it was a huge hit — George Washington said it was his favorite play. One of the characters was Mrs. Malaprop. She used malapropisms, and thus the term was coined. For example, she referred to someone as “the very pineapple of politeness.” He also wrote The School for Scandal.

    Get this — Sheridan went into politics and entered Parliament in 1780. He sided with Charles James Fox, who supported the American Revolution and tried to persuade King George not to go to war over it. He was giving a speech once and Edmund Burke, to dramatize a point, threw a knife onto the Parliament floor. Sheridan looked at it and asked “Where’s the fork?” [Ha!]

    Later in his life, the U.S. Congress offered Sheridan £20,000 in gratitude for his efforts to avoid the Revolutionary War, but he refused the money. He is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey along with Chaucer, Spenser, and other pathetic ne’er-do-wells.

    Happy Birthday, Sheridan.

    OMG — I’m full of pride when Sam successfully gets his oil changed — how in the world did Chris and Ann stand it when son Greg got inducted into the U.S. Coast Guard’s Hall of Heroes, for acts of extraordinary bravery. Here’s how the Coast Guard tells it:

    When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in late August 2017 it arrived as a devastating Category 4 hurricane that caused catastrophic flooding and more than 100 deaths.

    One of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history, Harvey caused a staggering $125 billion in damage throughout Southeast Texas and the Houston metro area.

    On August 26, as part of the initial Coast Guard response to the hurricane Lieutenant Gregory Bukata ‘11, an MH-65D Aircraft Commander, and his crew conducted some of the first rescues that night, in 80-knot winds and torrential rain.

    As the response continued, during one notable mission Bukata worked to place a Coast Guard rescue swimmer between tall trees and high voltage power lines to reach a critically-ill pregnant woman who was trapped by rising waters in the attic of her home.

    An award citation describing the arduous mission reads, “Due to massive amounts of water intrusion, the crew endured multiple aircraft emergencies during the rescue of additional family members. The loss of critical avionics, internal communication, and aircraft stabilization systems coupled with the violent motion of the aircraft from 60-knot gusts made just hovering an arduous act and hoisting a true aeronautical feat. Following a hoist failure on the subsequent rescue, the crew was forced to leave the swimmer on scene. As the only available resource at this early stage of the response, the crew returned with a new aircraft to complete the rescue.”

    During the seven days Bukata was part of the response, he and his crew were instrumental in the rescue of 108 people and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for extraordinary achievement in aerial flight.

    ******

    Greg went to school with our Sam and they were good buddies. Greg loved it when I teased him for laughs, pretending to confuse him with his sister Claire. He always had a gleam in his eye, part mischief, part joy. Still has it.

    In the puzzle today, “Seeing Eye dog, e.g.,” was GUIDE ANIMAL. And it set Rex off, to wit,

    Wait, is “Seeing Eye dog” a brand name? Why is “Eye” capitalized? I would’ve written it without a capital “E,” and possibly with a hyphen. Wow, yes, it’s trademarked. Well, you learn something new every day. Or maybe not every day, but occasionally, anyway. I didn’t have any problem with the capitalization, but I do have a problem with the answer, GUIDE ANIMAL, which … are there Seeing Eye warthogs? The only GUIDE ANIMAL I’ve ever seen or heard of is a Seeing Eye dog. I guess the dogs that don’t learn the trademark method can’t be called that, is that the deal? Anyway, GUIDE ANIMAL feels … off. The internet is telling me that a “miniature horse” might also serve as a GUIDE ANIMAL, but I resolutely refuse to believe this. Thumbs down to GUIDE ANIMAL.

    But an anony-mouse poster shared the following:

    I actually worked with a woman who had a guide horse: a miniature horse that worked like a guide dog for the blind. You can Google it. She had previously used a dog to help her navigate, but dogs have relatively shorter working lifespans, and a lot of it is spent training them. I haven’t worked with her for ages, but I used to see her and her horse out and about in town and even at the mall, and think, “Yup, that horse is still at it!”

    From the Borowitz Report today: Mike Pence Returns Four Dollars to Donors.

    Good night everybody! See you tomorrow (if I’m not too tired from my classes).

  • A Business of Ferrets

    Was Chandler your favorite? Of the guys, he was mine, and I’m sad that he passed away at only age 54. He struggled terribly with drugs. At one point he was taking 55 Vicodin a day. He credited having the role in the show and the support of his castmates (his “Friends”) with saving him.

    Matthew Perry was born in Williamstown, MA, where we hang out every July 4th, but raised in Ottawa. He went to school with Justin Trudeau, and his mom was Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary. Justin issued a statement honoring his memory.

    Take care, Chandler. Thanks for all the good work, and for so many laughs. Hope you find peace.

    This story, by Evelyn Saphier, is from today’s Met Diary.

    I am remembering with nostalgia a bakery on East Ninth Street near First Avenue that I used to frequent in the 1970s.

    It was run by two brothers who sold bread by the pound in loaves they stored in large drawers.

    “Hello, dear,” they would say when I entered. “If you eat this bread, you can live forever! You never need to eat anything else!”

    They would cut a slice from a loaf, put it in my hand and direct me to taste it on the spot to make their point. There were lots of rye and dark pumpernickel loaves.

    One brother began to lose his memory, and it was touching to see the other care for him as they carried on the business.

    Eventually, the brothers died, and I heard on the news that one had secretly built up a small fortune that he passed on to a nephew.

    To this day, I think I could live forever if I could have that bread again.

    If a group of lions is called a pride, what is a group of ferrets called? Well, I learned from today’s puzzle at 16D it’s called a “business.” A business of ferrets.

    I also learned that the “HODGE conjecture” is one of math’s Millennium Prize Problems. Having never heard of it, I sought out some info in Wikipedia. Note that this discussion starts with the phrase “in simple terms.”

    In simple terms, the Hodge conjecture asserts that the basic topological information like the number of holes in certain geometric spaces, complex algebraic varieties, can be understood by studying the possible nice shapes sitting inside those spaces, which look like zero sets of polynomial equations. The latter objects can be studied using algebra and the calculus of analytic functions, and this allows one to indirectly understand the broad shape and structure of often higher-dimensional spaces which can not be otherwise easily visualized.

    Okay, thanks!

    The clue at 11D was “Famed NYC deli” and the answer was ZABAR’S. It led me to post the following story on Rex’s blog. Some of you have already heard it, and some of you were at the wedding!

    To me, “deli” means The Carnegie or Katz’s, but I guess technically Zabar’s qualifies. When my wife and I got married nearly 40 years ago (to each other), we broke up the reception into two pieces: A more formal sit-down lunch with the families, and then, at night, a looser party with our friends.

    Part of the food for the latter was lox from Zabar’s. The bagels were from our favorite bagel place in Brooklyn. We figured we’d need about 100 which, translated into bagelspeak, is 8 dozen. So we went to the bagel place a week ahead of time to see if there was anything special we had to do for an order that large. (My wife still laughs at this.)

    I approached the counter like I was a big macher to let them know I would be ordering “8 dozen bagels” in a week, but I must have been a little nervous because what I said was: “Next Sunday I’m going to be needing 8 bagels — is there anything special I should do in advance?” I had left out the word “dozen.” He looked at me for a few seconds before saying “It won’t be a problem.” (Fortunately, my wife cleared things up, as she has continued to do for close to 40 years, kinahora.)

    In the puzzle today, “Philadelphia special,” was CREAM CHEESE. But, get this — it was actually invented in Chester NY by a dairyman named William Lawrence in 1872. In 1880 he took on a partner and they adopted the name “Philadelphia” because that region had a reputation for high-quality dairy farms and creamier cheese products. Good move.

    In 2019, an advertisement for it in England that portrayed an absent-minded father was banned under a British law that forbade gender stereotyping on TV advertisements. Owl Chatter was able to obtain a copy.

    The Z in Zabar’s was also the Z in ZEBRAFISH, clued with “Striped minnow used in drug development.” Let’s take a look at one.

    Rex poster Barbara S., after noting that it’s National Cat Day today (meow), shared this info from the website yourgenome.org, explaining why Z-fish are so useful in drug trials:
    * Zebrafish have a similar genetic structure to humans. They share 70% of genes with us.
    * 84% of genes known to be associated with human disease have a zebrafish counterpart.
    * As a vertebrate, the zebrafish has the same major organs and tissues as humans. Their muscle, blood, kidney and eyes share many features with human systems.

    I’ll never look at a herring the same way again.

    Here’s an interesting linguistic matter that arose. At 15D the clue for the simple word ATE was “Did a great job, in Gen Z lingo.” So, apparently, if Tom does a great job, you can say he ATE. But that usage is not original to Gen Z — it was appropriated from AAVE. What’s AAVE, you may ask? It’s Black English (African American Vernacular English).

    AAVE can be traced all the way back to slavery and has been used by Black people for centuries. It’s a big issue as to whether some phrases are AAVE or just “Twitter slang.” As one article in a student paper put it, “If we look at AAVE as just slang, then there isn’t a problem with people adopting and using it. But it’s so much more than that. It’s an actual dialect that people use to communicate. When a non-Black person uses it, with no regard to where and from whom it actually came, that’s just a form of cultural appropriation. I understand that like every other dialect or language, people do have access to it, but what non-Black people in Generation Z could do is at least learn the history behind it and respect AAVE before they use it.”

    Rex poster Seth asks:

    How long after a slang term is coined can a clue stop having to recognize the origin of the word and can just call it “slang?” There are tons of words that appear in crosswords now that originated in AAVE, but it’s been so long that no one would think to clue it in reference to AAVE — it’s just common slang now. (For example: dig meaning appreciate, crib meaning house, lit meaning exciting, bae meaning significant other, etc.) Granted, ATE is very new slang, so maybe it’s new enough that recognizing it comes from AAVE is appropriate. But at some point slang stops being attributed to its origins, and just becomes generalized slang.

    In some cases, a “culture clash” involving something as seemingly harmless as language or pronunciation can have real-world consequences.

    It’s the birthday of Harriet Powers today (1837) — quiltmaker and folk artist. She was born into slavery and emancipated after the Civil War. She married and had nine children before her husband abandoned the family. She survived as a seamstress.

    Through her quilts, she recorded legends and biblical tales of patience and divine justice. Only two have survived: Her Bible quilt of 1886 which she sold for $5 in the aftermath of the war now hangs in the Smithsonian. (She asked for $10 but the buyer bargained.) Her Pictorial quilt of 1888 is displayed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Powers’ work is considered among the finest examples of Southern quilting from the 19th century.

    In 1992 the Smithsonian hired a Chinese company to make reproductions of the Bible Quilt, along with several other quilts, and it aroused much controversy. The quilting and arts communities were extremely upset. And you don’t want those thugs coming after you, believe me.

    They claimed that it was disrespectful to make money off the Bible Quilt and similar works without exploring who might own the familial rights to the works and who could receive some of the royalties from reproductions.

    Many felt so passionately about this cause that they canceled their Smithsonian memberships, contacted their congressmen, signed petitions, and protested on the National Mall. The Smithsonian greatly altered its policies as a result. So there.

    No need to bring up today’s Jets game. Too painful. Oy. No, wait!! There was a miracle overtime win after we went to press!! All is forgiven, Zach! You da man!

    See you tomorrow.

  • Fergie

    This lovely post by CDilly52 appeared earlier in the week in response to NEW MATH:

    As the first generation (victim?) of that curriculum, I remember listening to all the chat at home (in a house full of teachers) antecedent to its introduction. Those were such exciting years, from Sputnik on through the Apollo program. I was never a good math student but space exploration excited me. Such fertile ground for my very active imagination! My earliest “viewing” experience was standing outside in the alley between my house and Mrs. Lewis’s using my thumb and first finger as demonstrated on the “Today” show to keep my eyes on the right place in the sky to find and track the movement of the satellite Echo I. It looked just like a star, but once I figured out how to hold my hand once I saw the satellite, I was truly in awe being able to see the movement and watch what looked like a tiny twinkling star move slowly across the night sky.

    That experience created an aerospace fan. If I had had a better attitude and better teachers I might have had more success with mathematics and gone deeper into the sciences. To this day though, I enjoy following space exploration thanks to my husband’s avid interest in astronomy, his degree in math but mostly his true gifts as a teacher. He lit the learning fires for his most math-averse students, several of whom were among the many former students (math and music) who so kindly communicated their appreciation of his teaching skill to me after his passing. We need to attract, train, and provide wonderful learning facilities and materials for exceptional teachers in this country.

    And Nancy, a much beloved curmudgeon (not to be confused with our own beloved Pennsylvania (nee Delaware) Nancy), writes:

    Didn’t realize that NEW MATH came about because of Sputnik. I wasn’t taught NEW MATH; I was taught OLD MATH, and when NEW MATH came along I was out of school and it was incomprehensible to me. Problems that were once duck soup to me became Einsteinian. It’s the same way I thought I understood chess notation back in the 50s and 60s and then they changed it and now I don’t even understand which piece is being moved. Also there’s the matter of how they now predict who will win football games. They used to write things like “49ers favored by 14 points” and now they write some sort of gibberish where I can’t even tell which team is favored. (-7.5). (-3). From my Sunday NYT Sports Section. Do you have any idea which team is favored from THAT?

    Rant over. 

    Hey Nance — It says Jets (-3). That means the Jets are favored to beat the Giants this week by 3 points. Kinahora. From my keyboard to God’s ears. It’s a big game.

    Here’s Robert Saleh, the Jets head coach, in a moment of unbridled joy. He’s been on suicide watch since accepting the position.

    Let’s get lurid.

    Read any books by Anne Perry? I haven’t. It’s her birthday today, she was born in London in 1938 with the name Juliet Hulme. She formed an unhealthy friendship with Pauline Parker, a classmate, and when Pauline’s mom stood in the way of it, they murdered her. It was not the most brilliant of schemes. They invited the mom to take a walk in the park that turned out to be no walk in the park. They bashed her head in with a brick. The one flaw in their otherwise perfect crime was they returned home all covered in blood. D’oh! Those pesky little details always burn you.

    It was a sensational trial and the girls were sentenced to indefinite prison terms. They were released after five years on condition that they not resume contact with each other and stay away from bricks. Juliet changed her name to Anne Perry and has published over 50 novels that have sold over 250 million copies. The film Heavenly Creatures was based on the murder case. Kate Winslet played Juliet and Melanie Lynskey played Pauline. Here’s the real Juliet/Anne, and then Kate and Melanie.

    Today’s puzzle was a real bear and it defeated me. Small solace: Rex also struggled and rated it “Challenging.” Right off the bat at 1A, the clue was “Had kids on a farm?” and the answer was LAMBED. I was sure it started with a W from my crossing answer so I started thinking it was WOMBED, awkward, or eventually WAMBED, which is worse. And 1D was “Ultimately arrive (at)” which I thought was WIND UP but turned out to be LAND UP, as in “land up in jail.” Ouch — just couldn’t get to those two. Also, at 10A “Scan in neuroscience research, in brief,” was FMRI. What the f*ck is that F doing in there? It stands for “functional.” An FMRI measures brain activity via blood flow.

    Also had trouble with “Oratorio highlight in A-B-A form:” ARIA DA CAPO. No chance. A Saturday grid for sure.

    Otherwise, it was a satisfying puzzle to hammer out. CORNEL WEST was in it. He has only one “L” but has had five wives! His current one is Annahita Mahdavi, a 38-year-old Iranian woman who is a political science professor.

    All four of his previous marriages ended in divorce. He has two kids.

    Looks like we don’t have Mike Pence to kick around anymore. His campaign was not going well, so he decided not to hang around. Oops — sorry Mike — forgot you’re still a little sensitive about that word. It’s just a little gallows humor.

    Here he is with his wife Karen (whom he calls “Mother”), dancing off the campaign stage. Philly — can you make up a bunch of wallet-sized for us? I have a feeling they’re going to be in high demand.

    Owl Chatter is very happy to report that the great Canadian-born HOF pitcher Ferguson Jenkins is looking and sounding great at 80. He’s down in Texas for the World Series and we caught up with him doing an interview for MLB-TV. He pitched for Texas back in 1974-75. He was proud to note he was a good hitting pitcher: he hit 13 home runs. The interviewer asked if any were off of Hall of Famers, and he said “Two: Seaver and Sutton. Seaver tried to sneak a fastball by me, but ‘Thou shalt not pass.’”

    Jenkins, fellow Cub Greg Maddux, Curt Schilling, and Pedro Martínez are the only major league pitchers ever to record more than 3,000 strikeouts with fewer than 1,000 walks.

    But there was also much sadness in Fergie’s life. He had five children, but one, Samantha, was killed when she was only three when his girlfriend at the time killed herself with carbon monoxide poisoning with the little girl in the car. And Fergie’s mom lost her sight during her pregnancy with him, her only child. She would attend his Cubs’ games when she could, and bring a transistor radio into the stands with her. He participated in the making of a documentary film about his life in 2021. As he watched a screening of the final version, he wept.

    Baseball was still overtly racist during the early part of his career. When he was in Florida for Spring Training in 1962 he couldn’t eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as the white players. Blacks were forbidden to use the beach in Miami Beach. He was okay with that. “I don’t need a tan,” he said.

    A statue honoring him is in place at Wrigley Field. Canada issued a stamp in his honor. The Owl Chatter doors are always open for you, Fergie — we could use a good right-handed starter.

    See you tomorrow, everybody. Thanks for stopping by!

  • Tamar

    Does the name Grzegorz Kaszak mean anything to you? Half of the letters are K, G, and Z. Anyway, Grzegorz is the ex-bishop of Sosnowiec in Southwestern Poland who quit on Tuesday on account of a sex scandal. I know, right? — Hard to imagine a sex scandal involving the Church even making the news anymore, — if a day goes by without one it’s a miracle — but this one is juicy. One of the priests organized a gay sex party during which a male prostitute lost consciousness from an overdose of erectile disfunction pills. [We’ve all been there, right fellas?] So one of the priests called an ambulance but the others prevented the paramedics from treating the poor unconscious guy. So the paramedics called the cops and finally the priests relented. “Okay, Okay — go ahead and save his sexy little ass if you’re gonna get all pissy about it.”

    The priest who set it all up defended himself by quibbling over how many priests were present and stated: “it is worth reading what the definition of an orgy is.” Jeez Louise: even the Giants can come up with a better defense than that.

    According to the NYT, the resignation came less than a month after the Polish Catholic Church, in a lengthy report on the state of its affairs, warned that priests needed to get a grip on “crimes of sexual abuse of minors by some clergy” and other misbehavior.

    You tell ’em, Polish Church!! Get a grip, guys!

    Here’s our hapless Bishop, who still hasn’t quite gotten his game face on yet.

    Chatting with a nurse in a doc’s office today, we casually mentioned seeing Taylor’s concert movie and it unleashed a torrent. Turns out she is a major-league Swiftie. Saw the ERAS Tour concert live twice and movie once. Has been a fan since TS was 16. Has a tattoo (on upper chest) of a song verse in Taylor’s handwriting, another tattoo (on leg) of some insignia with TS significance, won a contest sponsored by Pepsi years ago that netted her a trip to Nashville for a concert and a personal brief meeting with TS herself (showed us the photo on her phone), and almost flew to Norway for a concert but the pandemic hit. I think that may be about it.

    Hi Taylor — remember Chelsea? An RN — dark hair?

    Headline in The Onion: Exhausted Doctors Pronounce Patient Dead Enough.

    This unusual poem is today’s Poem of the Day from the Poetry Foundation. It’s by Thomas Lux and is called “The People of the Other Village.”

    The people of the other village
    hate the people of this village
    and would nail our hats
    to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
    or staple our hands to our foreheads
    for refusing to salute them
    if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
    mix their flour at night with broken glass.
    We do this, they do that.
    They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
    We devein one of their sisters.
    The quicksand pits they built were good.
    Our amputation teams were better.
    We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
    They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
    They do this, we do that.
    We canceled our sheep imports.
    They no longer bought our blankets.
    We mocked their greatest poet
    and when that had no effect
    we parodied the way they dance
    which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
    was leprous, hairless.
    We do this, they do that.
    Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
    (10,000) brutal, beautiful years.

    In the puzzle today “Bottoms out?” was MOONS. (Get it? Tee hee.)

    And “Curriculum overhaul triggered by the Sputnik crisis,” was NEW MATH. Remember that? Part of it was learning bases other than ten. An uproar from parents and teachers (never mind the poor students) resulted in its rapid abandonment.

    Wikipedia explains: In his book Why Johnny Can’t Add: The Failure of the New Math (1973), Morris Kline says that certain advocates of the new topics “ignored completely the fact that mathematics is a cumulative development and that it is practically impossible to learn the newer creations, if one does not know the older ones.” Furthermore, noting the trend to abstraction in New Math, Kline says “abstraction is not the first stage, but the last stage, in a mathematical development.”

    “New Math” is now used as a phrase to describe any fad that burns out quickly.

    Here’s a shot of Niece Tamar with the birds and us. We had a blast. See you tomorrow!

  • Got A Light?

    Condolences go out to all the disappointed Phillies fans, done in by those pesky ‘Zona snakes, in a tense and very enjoyable Game 7. Wow, what a catch by Trea Turner to help keep it close.

    Kudos to the brilliant young bullpen that throttled those expensive Philly bats. I’ll be pulling for Texas in the World Series, but won’t mind at all if Zona slips by them.

    BTW, remember Adolis Garcia from yesterday’s post? He has a brother named Adonis Garcia. Adonis also played pro ball, for the Braves from 2015 to 2017.

    There were two answers in today’s puzzle that got me to do a little digging: CO-PARENT and EGOTISM. How is a co-parent different from a parent? And what’s the difference between egotism and egoism?

    On the former, apparently (ouch), co-parenting is when a child’s parents are living apart but work together pretty closely on the child rearing: keeping him or her to the same schedule, pushing the same activities, etc.

    And on egotism vs. egoism: With a T it’s believing you are better than everyone else — not a nice quality. Without the T it just means you look at things from a self-centered perspective — not necessarily obnoxious.

    I’ve read a few books by Anne Tyler and liked them. I’ve always thought of her as sort of suburban/cosmopolitan. I correctly associated her with Baltimore, where she lives and about which she often writes. But The Writer’s Almanac wrote about her today (her birthday), and said this about her upbringing: “She spent most of her childhood in the mountains of North Carolina. Her family raised milk goats and grew their own food, and she learned folk crafts and traditional music. Eventually, they moved to Raleigh, where she felt like a total outsider — she had never used a telephone, and her feet were so calloused from going without shoes that she could light a match on her bare feet.”

    Ever see someone light a match with their bare feet? Me neither.

    Lubbock County Texas includes Lubbock (duh) and Texas Tech and has a population of over 300,000. It’s near the New Mexico border. Now, Texas has a Catch-22 abortion ban which essentially says abortions are legal for women who don’t know they are pregnant, but once they learn they are pregnant, they are illegal. (It’s the six-week abortion ban.) So those women would need to go to New Mexico or another state where abortions are legal for women who know they are pregnant. That’s where Lubbock County comes in — it just made it illegal for anyone to transport a pregnant woman through the county or pay for her travel for the purpose of seeking an abortion out of state.

    Owl Chatter hats off to Gilbert Flores, a county commissioner, who abstained from the vote. “I am 77 years old,” he said, describing times in his life when his rights were violated. “Now, what’s in front of me right now is, do I have the right, do I have the power, do I want the authority to tell these women what to do, violate their rights?” he said. “I have a difficult time with that.”

    Some legal scholars said the ordinance may violate constitutional protections. “Even Justice Kavanaugh, in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, noted that a state would be violating the constitutional right to interstate travel if it sought to prohibit women from traveling out of state to seek a lawful abortion,” said Jeffrey B. Abramson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

    But proponents say the ordinances are enforceable because they apply to someone assisting a pregnant woman with travel and do not prohibit a woman from driving herself or traveling by other means. “We don’t see this as a travel ban,” they say.

    Okay. I guess it’s not a problem then. Whew.

    Give the lady a lift, Phil — we’ll cover your bail.

    If you are a Fran Lebowitz fan like we are, you should get your long black coat, white shirt, scarf, glasses, and dour disgusted expression on, and head over to the Holiday Cocktail Lounge in the East Village for this year’s Fran-Con tomorrow night — her birthday eve. No need to bring cigarettes, real or otherwise, the organizers have bought a shitload of candy cigarettes.

    Fran won’t be there, BTW. Are you kidding? — she wouldn’t be caught dead at something like that. Hey, I see she was born in Morristown NJ (in 1950). That explains some of it.

    Niece Tamar is visiting from CA tonight for a few days. We’ll be having split-pea soup, a salad, and Thai Sea Burgers. Yum.

    We’re going to send you off tonight with a Nick Cave song: “Nature Boy.” It rhymes hysteria with wisteria, which was in the puzzle today at 38D, clued by “Flowering plant that lent its name to a lane on ‘Desperate Housewives.’” Good enough reason for me.

    See you tomorrow!