The Wellington Files

  • The Sky Above; The Furbelow

    What would you use as the clue if the answer is MAP? At 46A yesterday the clue was “Mercator projection, e.g.” Pretty heady for a Tuesday. If you have any idea of what that is, that makes one of us. But I looked it up — it’s the traditional world map we use today.

    The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for navigation because it is unique in representing north as up and south as down everywhere while preserving local directions and shapes. As a side effect, the Mercator projection inflates the size of objects away from the equator. This inflation is very small near the equator but accelerates with increasing latitude to become infinite at the poles. As a result, landmasses such as Greenland, Antarctica, Canada and Russia appear far larger than they actually are relative to landmasses near the equator, such as Central Africa.

    Some folks think this has had sociological effects and prefer an alternative: The Gall-Peters projection that “undistorts” the area sizes. It’s catching on a little. Maps based on this projection are promoted by UNESCO, and they are also widely used by British schools. The State of Massachusetts and Boston Public Schools began phasing in these maps in March 2017, becoming the first public school district and state in the U.S. to adopt Gall–Peters maps as their standard.

    This scene from The West Wing tells the story pretty well (and it’s fun). It also shows you the various maps — very helpful.

    It was the 17th anniversary of Rex’s blog on the NYTXW a few days ago and he received many nice notes of congratulations. Then, yesterday, this beautiful post appeared at 6:49am, by “anonymous.” (OFL stands for “our fearless leader,” i.e., Rex.)

    “I wonder if OFL has any idea of what this blog means to some of us. I have a large supportive family. I have life-long supportive friends. Yet while I’m sitting here in Sloane-Kettering, the one thing that can completely distract me is this blog. I know, it makes no sense at all. But often times life does not. So to OFL, and the regular folks who take the time and energy to contribute , thank you. Life is good.”

    Rex rarely responds to a note. Maybe once a month. But he responded to this one with:

    I have some idea 😊 but thank you for saying so, and all my warmest wishes ~RP

    I am including today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac for two reasons. It’s nice, and there’s one word in it that is new to me and I’d like to share it. The poem is called “Flamingo Watching,” and it’s by Kay Ryan.

    Wherever the flamingo goes,
    she brings a city’s worth
    of furbelows. She seems
    unnatural by nature—
    too vivid and peculiar
    a structure to be pretty,
    and flexible to the point
    of oddity. Perched on
    those legs, anything she does
    seems like an act. Descending
    on her egg or draping her head
    along her back, she’s
    too exact and sinuous
    to convince an audience
    she’s serious. The natural elect,
    they think, would be less pink,
    less able to relax their necks,
    less flamboyant in general.
    They privately expect that it’s some
    poorly jointed bland grey animal
    with mitts for hands
    whom God protects.

    A “furbelow” is a gathered strip or pleated border of a skirt or petticoat. Here’s a close-up of a flamingo showing hers (or his) off.

    And here’s one of my tax students wearing a dress festooned with a furbelow, and then a twosome going a little nuts with them.

    Most cruciverbalists, I would say, have some black holes in their universes — areas of weakness. I’m usually thrown by rap stars and current pop singers, except for Adele, who is very often the answer. Unlike some who shrink in terror at Simpsons references, I’m pretty strong in that area. But there was one today that threw me, to my great shame.

    The clue was “Steamed ___,” classic “Simpsons” sketch, and the answer was HAMS. It turns out it’s a scene that has gone beyond viral. It’s been recast into many different variations. Rex was kind enough to share the original with us:

    If you search “steamed hams” on Youtube you will find, literally, dozens of variations, including one with Nazis, and one that uses only consonants. [Where else but in Owl Chatter will you find out vital information like this?]

    Last weekend, the Pirates were in Cincy to play the Reds for whom the game was crucial because Cincy is in a very tight race for the last NL playoff spot. It was a meaningless game for the Pirates; they had long ago abandoned their playoff hopes.

    Things were looking good for the home team, as the Reds jumped off to a 9-0 lead by the third inning. In their 137-year history, Pittsburgh had never come back from such a deficit. You want details? Their record was 0-819 when trailing by nine or more runs. You can probably see where this is heading: Final score: Pitt 13, Cincy 12. Ouch.

    Brooks Robinson, the brilliant Hall of Fame third-baseman whose defensive prowess earned him the nickname “The Human Vacuum Cleaner,” died yesterday at the age of 86. He played his entire career with the Orioles, The cause of death was choking on a big clump of hair and dirt. [No it wasn’t.]

    He was an All-Star 18 times and he won 16 Gold Glove awards. His 2,870 games played at third base exceeded the closest player by nearly 700 games when he retired, and remain the most games by any player in major league history at a single position. His 23 seasons spent with a single team set a major league record since matched only by Carl Yastrzemski. He won the World Series twice and was the WS MVP in 1970. In 1964 he was the AL MVP.

    Harold ‘Pie’ Traynor, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Hall-of-Fame third baseman said, “I once thought of giving him some tips, but dropped the idea. He’s just the best there is.” At a lunch meeting during the ’70 World Series, Sparky Anderson, the (losing) Reds’ manager said, “I’m beginning to see Brooks in my sleep. If I dropped this plate, he’d pick it up on one hop and throw me out at first.”

    Robinson was very particular about his glove. He would try the gloves of different players and trade two of his own for theirs if he really wanted it. Once he found one he liked, he would take a year to prepare it. When he felt it was ready for game action, he would use it exclusively during games, using others for batting practice and infield workouts.

    He met his wife Connie on an Orioles team flight where she was working as a flight attendant for United Airlines. He was so smitten with her that he kept ordering iced teas. After drinking his third glass, he returned it to her in the galley and said: “I want to tell you something. If any of these guys, the Baltimore Orioles, ask you for a date, tell ’em you don’t date married men. Understand? I’m the only single guy on the team.” Actually, nearly half of the Orioles were single. Before the plane landed in Boston the two had made a date to go out. They got married a little over a year later in Windsor, Ontario, Connie’s hometown.

    Robinson is survived by Connie, their three sons and one daughter, none of whom had to help with the vacuuming.

    Rest in peace Brooks.

    Thanks for dropping in! See you tomorrow.

  • Fast and Low

    Today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac is by Jim Harrison, who holds a special place in Owl Chatter. OC poet laurate Ted Kooser wrote his Winter Morning Walks poems on postcards and sent them to Jim Harrison, his close friend. This one of Harrison’s is called “Peonies.”

    The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
    slump to the ground. I had hoped
    they would live forever but ever so slowly
    day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
    with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
    Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
    a little trick we have or have not learned.

    My thoughts upon reading that poem were (1) I loved “too heavy with their beauty,” and (2) if I ever had to read it aloud I would, without question, trip over “deliquescence” and say delicatessen instead. And now I’m thinking of corned beef. All great poems get you thinking of corned beef, I’ve noticed.

    Can you handle two today? This one is from the Poetry Foundation. It’s called “Real Estate” and is by Richard Siken. It doesn’t make me think of corned beef, but I liked it.

    My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter something under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. The man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after his funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.

    Speaking of the dead, Linda and I met with a lawyer we really liked and had our wills drawn up. I told Sam about it and he asked if he was the executioner. I told him the term was executor.

    General Mark Milley is the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our highest ranking military officer. He has served in the military with great distinction for 44 years. He holds a degree in political science from Princeton, a master’s in international relations from Columbia, and a master’s from the U.S. Naval War College in national security and strategic studies.  He’s retiring.

    You know, these days, if you surf the internet you can find so much hateful bullshit it’s ridiculous. For example, this letter popped up referring to Milley as “the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs,” a “deviant” who “was coordinating with Nancy Pelosi to hurt President Trump, and treasonously working behind Trump’s back. In a better society,” he wrote, “quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung. He had one boss: President Trump, and instead he was secretly meeting with Pelosi and coordinating with her to hurt Trump.”

    But, of course, if you read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, you know that this was not the product of some random internet troll. It was a letter you and I paid for that was sent out by Republican Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona to his constituents. (His newsletter is taxpayer-funded.)

    Trump weighed in on Milley too, calling him a “woke train wreck” who should be executed for treason. Milley has told friends that if Trump is re-elected, “he’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list.” But Milley is confident Trump will not be re-elected because he has faith in the American people. From your mouth to God’s ears, General. Amen and kinahora.

    Jango Edwards passed away last month. He was a wonderful, groundbreaking clown, who was born in Detroit but trained and mostly worked in Europe after selling his share in his father’s landscaping business to his brother. He liked to say he got rich selling grass. We are inducting him into the Owl Chatter Hall of Fame, posthumously, today, for reasons that will be obvious, below.

    In 1981, the NYT wrote: “For sheer theatrical energy, for schmutz as well as chutzpah, he makes John Belushi look like Charlie Brown.” He was always in character: When leaving the restaurant after the Times interview, he kissed a restaurant patron, bonked another on the head, and flipped the “open” sign on the front door to “closed.”

    In one of his bits he played a goggle-eyed magician doing a card trick but instead of cards he used a “deck” of about eight uncooked hot dogs. He picked a gorgeous woman from the audience to assist him. He asked her if she was married and when she said no, he grabbed her and kissed her. (This was many years ago.) He “shuffled” the hot dogs and had the woman pick one. Meanwhile, of course, he’d be doing all sorts of lewd stuff with the hot dogs as the audience convulsed with laughter. He had her place “her” hot dog back in the “deck” and gave them all to her to “shuffle.” As she was shuffling them, he said, “I can see why you’re not married.” Then he grabbed them all back from her (“Gimme those!”), picked one out and asked her, “Is this your hot dog?” (OMG — too funny!)

    His given name was Stanley, but he took the name Jango when some children in Morocco said he looked like Django, a character in a spaghetti western film. He dropped the D.

    In 1975, he co-founded the International Festival of Fools, a street fair in Amsterdam, which became the centerpiece of the movement called Nouveau Clown. They took as their central tenet a quotation from Erasmus, in his 1509 essay “In Praise of Folly”: “They’re the only ones who speak frankly and tell the truth, and what is more praiseworthy than the truth?”

    His fan base in Europe was broad and included the Rolling Stones and Federico Fellini. He performed relentlessly — multiple 90-minute shows six nights a week. He semi-retired in 2017 and worked on a memoir/training guide “The Clown Bible,” which he completed a few days before his death.

    He is survived by his wife, Christi Garbo, also a clown, three children, his brother, and three grandchildren, all of whom appreciate to their core the importance of laughter in our lives.

    The first photo, below, is of Jango in his early years. In the second one, he’s in the center, flanked by his two sons.

    Rest in peace Jango.

    In the puzzle today (Dirty Old Man Dept.) the answer at 43A is SAG, and the answer at 51A is BRA. Commenter egs noted: “You’ve gotta love that BRA is positioned to be holding up SAG.” (And they are both right above GOAL SETTING.”)

    The clue at 70A was Boy band with the hits “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me,” and the answer was NSYNC. egs noted: The Pope is rumored to be working on a letter to all Bishops concerning Justin Timberlake’s former band. It’ll be an NSYNClical.

    Ba da boom.

    See you tomorrow! (Unless I’m too tired from my classes to crank out the usual nonsense.)

  • That Was a Human Being

    Today’s puzzle was called “Rebrandings” and it took names of well-known companies and re-worked them with comic effect. For example, a company that now sells tiny tongs is LITTLE SEIZERS. (Get it? From Little Caesars.) It was a Sunday-sized grid 21 x 21, so the constructors were able to fit in ten of them. A company that switched to sell bagels and donuts was HOLE FOODS. A company that does genealogy for the U.S.’s rich and famous is AMERICAN HEIR LINES. Candy for diplomats? EMBASSY SWEETS. The most controversial, in terms of it “working,” was a company that produces a “Beauty and the Beast”-themed podcast. That was TALK O’ BELLE.

    But my favorite by far was one proposed by egsforbreakfast, who came up with a company that now markets butt-enhancement products: FILLUPMOREASS.

    egs! Too funny!

    My favorite non-theme clue/answer was at 9D where the clue was “Drops like flies?,” and the answer was UNZIPS.

    This poem from the Poetry Foundation today, is called “The Monster in the Lake.” It’s by Martin Espada (pronounced Martine) and it rewards repeated readings.

    A city boy, I always wanted to go fishing. The DiFilippo brothers brought me
    to a secret lake where we cast our lines into the dark, the barbed lures
    spinning. I snagged a monster in the lake. I fought the monster and my reel
    jammed. One of the DiFilippo brothers said: That’s not a fish. We waded
    into the water and dragged a rusty box spring onshore, festooned with
    the lures of failed fishermen. We plucked them off the coils and dragged it
    back. Whenever we went fishing, we would have more treasures to collect.

    Late that night, I felt the monster swimming beneath my feet. I walked
    down to the basement and saw my father hunched over a table in his white
    T-shirt and boxers. He flinched as if I’d caught him whispering on the phone
    to a woman who was not my mother. What are you doing? I asked. I saw
    the pages of a Spanish dictionary and a legal pad where he had copied down
    the meaning of the words in longhand. I’m learning Spanish, he confessed.

    My father the rabble-rouser with the bullhorn, my father the Puerto Rican
    who spoke for other Puerto Ricans in the papers, my father who left his island
    at age eleven and kissed the runway when he flew home at age thirty-eight,
    my father who had the Spanish slapped from his mouth like a dangling
    cigarette by teachers and coaches in the city where I grew up, could feel
    his Puerto Rican tongue shriveling, coated with gravel, drained of words.

    I left him in the basement, riddled with the hooks no one else could see.

    *********

    Espada’s many books of poetry have been highly acclaimed. He is Brooklyn-born, and teaches English at UMass Amherst. He also has a law degree from Northeastern and has spent his life working for social justice, having been raised that way by his dad.

    There’s an excellent article in the NYT Opinion section today by Jennifer Finney Boylan on trans rights. She is a professor of English at Barnard.

    It starts and ends on personal notes.

    Here’s how it starts.

    We were at the sinks in the ladies room, the stranger and I, washing our hands, when a trans woman came out of a stall, looked in the mirror and sighed. After she left, the stranger turned to me and said: “Can you believe that? A man, in here!” She shook her head disapprovingly.

    This was 20 years ago, but I’ve never forgotten that stranger’s disdain. It has stayed with me, because the moment called for me to respond to her with courage. What I delivered instead was cowardice.

    “I don’t think she’s doing anybody any harm,” I said, quietly, and then rushed out.

    What I didn’t say was, “I’m trans, too.” I didn’t tell her that I knew firsthand what it was like, in the early stages of transition, to face the constant threat of judgment, and cruelty, even violence. Or, that I knew all too well how much difference a touch of kindness could make during that very hard time.

    Boylan goes on to explain that the GOP is finding that marginalizing and demonizing abortion no longer favors them after Dobbs. They’ve determined that demonizing the 0.6 percent of the population that is trans is their hate-ridden ticket to electoral success. They exaggerate minor issues such as bathroom and team sports concerns, and portray “detransitioning” and “transition regret” as commonplace, but they are very rare (around 1%).

    She writes:

    All these stories leave out the happy and successful trans folks I’ve met over the course of my life — doctors, airplane pilots, a small-town manager, a fire captain, even an astrophysicist — whose primary desire has always been to simply get on with their lives, and to spend their days in peace.

    So many brave trans people are living out and proud, and so many have faced dire societal consequences for doing so. It can be scary to be out in this political/social environment. But perhaps more of us need to find the courage to do the thing I failed to do in that bathroom long ago, and turn to a stranger and say something stronger than, “I don’t think she’s doing anybody any harm.”

    What I should have said was: “That was a human being. That was a person deserving kindness, and protection, and love. That was a person like me.”

    This week’s “Tiny Love Story” is by Kathryn Talalay.

    A man with a charming accent was fixing my uncharming TV. “Where are you from?” I asked. “Haiti.” “Oh! I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for your country!” He paused and then said, “I’ve never met one of you, but we learned about you in high school.” An almost invisible footnote to history: Throughout the 1930s, Haiti issued passports to Jews escaping the Nazis. My father was among the recipients. To my surprise, this charming man began to cry. “Can I hug you?” I asked shyly. He nodded. I felt as if a whole country were embracing me.

    There’s a nice image to end on. See you tomorrow!

  • Like a Vision She Dances Across the Porch

    Can you listen to “Thunder Road” one more time? C’mon, it’s his birthday today: He’s 74, kinehora. Clarence is alive again, and his wife Patti is playing one of the guitars. The band is in fine fettle. Happy Birthday Bruce!

    It’s also the birthday of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, born in 1838 in Homer, Ohio. I hadn’t heard of her, but, boy, was she something. Stand back, fellas. Let her through.

    Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee, founded a radical publication that was the first to publish an English translation of The Communist Manifesto, and espoused the virtues of free love, birth control for women, and equal rights. (Abbie Hoffman said he opposed women’s rights: “Why, if women had rights, the next thing you know men would want them too!”)

    Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency of the U.S. This was in 1872. Women couldn’t vote, but they could hold office. She formed the Equal Rights Party and it chose Frederick Douglass as her running mate, but he never acknowledged the nomination and he supported Ulysses S. Grant. I’m no expert in politics, but I’m going to go out on a lamb here and say it’s probably not a good sign when your own running mate doesn’t support you. BTW, the S doesn’t stand for anything — it comes from an application to West Point his uncle filled out incorrectly. Grant’s middle name at birth was Ulysses, and his first name was Hiram.

    Back to Woodhull. Her views on sexuality and women’s rights were lambasted in the media. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe called her “an impudent witch.” She was depicted in a popular cartoon as “Mrs. Satan,” not a good look if you’re running for office. She and her sister were jailed on Election Day for running an article accusing Beecher’s brother, a prominent preacher, of lascivious conduct. A religious figure, misbehaving sexually? — preposterous!

    She was on the ballot in a few states but no one even bothered to count her votes. She once wrote if all women refused to cohabit with men, they would win their rights in a week. That’s like the line on abortions: If men could get pregnant, abortions would be legalized in ten minutes.

    Happy Birthday, Woodhull!

    This story by Sharyn Wolf is in tomorrow’s Met Diary.

    I was crossing the Bow Bridge in Central Park with my dog when I noticed two young women walking back and forth repeatedly from one spot to another,

    A photographer was following them, so I figured there was going to be a proposal. I waited a few minutes, but noting happened.

    “If this is a proposal,” I finally interjected, “what’s the holdup?”

    They told me they couldn’t decide on the right spot.

    “Where you are right now, that’s the right spot,” I said.

    They looked at each other, one started to cry, and they both pulled out rings.

    I continued on, and I must have walked a quarter mile when I heard them running up behind me and yelling for me to stop.

    They said they had been very nervous and didn’t know how long it would have taken them to decide if I hadn’t said something.

    They asked if their photographer could snap a photo of the three of us, plus my dog.

    This poem by Eavan Boland is in today’s Writer’s Almanac and is called “This Moment.”

    A neighborhood.
    At dusk.

    Things are getting ready
    to happen
    out of sight.

    Stars and moths.
    And rinds slanting around fruit.

    But not yet.

    One tree is black.
    One window is yellow as butter.

    A woman leans down to catch a child
    who has run into her arms
    this moment.

    Stars rise.
    Moths flutter.
    Apples sweeten in the dark.

    I have never encountered any group of individuals quite like the community of commenters (the “commentariat”) on Rex Parker’s NYTXW puzzle blog. He started the blog back in ’06, and I’ve been enjoying it for over a year now. I consider myself a noob, though I am comfortable enough to post a joke or a few words from time to time. My favorite commenter by miles was LMS, a teacher of problem students in NC. She’s been silent lately and is very much missed. When someone notes an illness or a loss, there is invariably a nice outburst of support. One of the folks, bocamp, just this week said he was cutting back on expenses, so he was dropping his puzzle subscription so he would no longer be following the blog. A flurry of “Oh, nos!” convinced him to change his mind in short order.

    Then today, Joaquin, who is often very funny, wrote:

    “I’m old and dealing with some serious health issues and find the constant negativity of this blog a depressing impact on my life which I don’t need at this point. Therefore, I am taking a break from reading and posting here and will return if/when I get stronger.

    “Happy solving. Enjoy these puzzles for what they are – entertainment and exercise for the brain.

    “Hope to see you later.”

    Many folks wished him well and hoped to see him return soon.

    I posted the following:

    Joaquin:

    From one old-timer to another, two points:

    1. Please come back when/if you feel up for our nonsense again.

    2. Don’t consent to a rectal MRI no matter what they tell you.

    The clue at 14D today was: Classic song with the lyric “Girl, you made me love you / And now, now, now your lovin’ man has gone”

    To my shame, I could only get it via the crosses. It’s CC RIDER. That may have been a harbinger of my puzzledoom today. I crashed around Texas. I didn’t know Queen of Naboo, in “Star Wars” was AMIDALA (WTF?) or that the National park in southwest Texas was BIG BEND. I got tricked by “Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You,’ originally.” The answer was SIDE B. D’oh! And who knew “Cretaceous critters” was DINOS? But I was happy with getting as much of it as I could. The clue at 55A was “Bonebreakers, perhaps,” and the long answer turned out to be STICKS AND STONES.

    Please enjoy this sweet version of the song. Thanks for popping by. I’ll see you tomorrow.

  • Einstein and Farah

    That expression, “Things will look brighter in the morning” doesn’t get the respect it deserves, it seems to me. It’s amazing. For example:

    My brain at 2 am: Lianna’s on her phone too much. Her grades slipped last year. Should I get involved with her homework more? Is her after-school program helping enough — should we spring for a private tutor? Why didn’t she do better in Spanish? She seems a little thin, too. Is she eating enough?

    My brain in the morning: Ah, it’ll work out.

    At the Summit (NJ) train station this morning, I saw a woman in her 30’s wearing a long black dress carrying a cup of coffee, her phone, and her bag. She wanted to insert an ear-thingie in her ear, so she knelt down and used the floor as her desk. She placed the phone and coffee on the ground, took the thingie out of her bag and put it in her ear, then picked up the coffee and phone and stood back up. It reminded me of when I used to be able to bend over.

    Part of the art of constructing a puzzle is to come up with a sparkling clue for an otherwise pedestrian answer. Today, the answer was FRANCE. Here’s how it was clued:

    “Country described in ‘One can’t impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.’”

    But my favorite clue/answer comes from raising two kids through the teen years [insert Munch’s shriek emoji]. Any of you been there? You go off to work — they are going to be home all day with absolutely nothing to do. So you ask them for one small very easy favor — “Sometime during the afternoon, take the meat out of the freezer and put it in this bowl on the counter.” That’s it. That’s all.

    So, — express as a percentage, the odds that when you get home the meat will be on the counter. I can’t assign an exact number to it, but it surely is something way less than 1%, amirite?

    That’s why my favorite clue today was “All I asked for was that simple thing!” And the answer was: YOU HAD ONE JOB!

    Michael Faraday was born on this day in London in 1791. With little formal education, he made several of the major discoveries in physics and is responsible for everything we know about electromagnetism, which, in my case, is nothing. Einstein only kept two pictures on his wall: those of Isaac Newton and Faraday, although later he added that Farah Fawcett poster that was as popular as breathing back in the late ’70’s.

    Just to take a short side-trip, for old times’ sake, that poster sold 12 million copies, more than any poster ever in the history of planet Earth. The photo was taken by Bruce McBroom. FF was 29 at the time. For some reason, I thought she was living, but she died in ’09 at the age of 62 from cancer. She was married to Lee Majors for nine years, but had her one child (a son, Redmond) with Ryan O’Neal. Redmond O’Neal is pretty good-looking too. He’s 38 and an actor. He’s had drug problems, unfortunately.

    Here’s that poster.

    Where were we? Oh, yeah, Michael Faraday. He refused many of the honors that came his way, e.g., he declined knighthood on religious grounds and said he just wanted to stay plain old Mr. Faraday. He turned down the presidency of the Royal Society (of eminent British scientists), and burial in Westminster Abbey, although he has a plaque there, near Newton’s tomb. He was married to Sarah Barnard, whom he met through his church and found to be very magnetic, for 46 years, until his death. They had no children.

    Happy Birthday, Faraday!

    The musical guest in the puzzle today is LANA Del Rey. She’s 38 and was born in NYC and raised in Lake Placid. She earned a BA at Fordham. She’s had six No. 1 albums in the UK and has won many awards. Rolling Stone placed her in their list of 200 Greatest Singers of All Time (2023), and Rolling Stone UK named her The Greatest American Songwriter of the 21st century (2023). Her greatest honor, of course, was her appearance in today’s puzzle.

    Good night, everybody — see you tomorrow.

  • Joan’s Knives

    You’re always welcome at Owl Chatter, Volodymyr! Don’t wait for an invitation.

    Missing no opportunity to exhibit his moral depravity, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy refused to grant Owl Chatter Hall-Of-Fame inductee Volodymyr Zelensky an opportunity to address the House on his visit to DC. Here’s what McCarthy was quoted in the NYT as saying: “Is Zelensky elected to Congress? Is he our president? I don’t think I have to commit to anything. Where is the accountability on the money we already spent? What is the plan for victory? I think that’s what the American public wants to know.”

    It also wants to know how a jackass like you could rise to such prominence. According to the Times, it was just a few months ago that McCarthy spoke forcefully about his commitment to Ukraine.

    So stop by if you’re in Jersey, VZ — have some borscht with us! Please bring Olena if she’s with you. And, BTW, how did you ever get such a hot babe to fall for a slob like you??!!

    So, you all know Hasan Minhaj, right? The comic?

    He has a bit in which he says that after the government passed the Patriot Act in the wake of 9/11, an undercover F.B.I. informant named Brother Eric infiltrated his childhood mosque and had dinner at his house. Minhaj recalls how he sniffed him out and, in a prank, asked about getting a pilot’s license, which led to a police officer throwing him against a car.

    The New Yorker found that there was such a man working in counterterrorism but that Minhaj never met him. So Minhaj has been getting sh*t for lying about it. He defended his fabrications as fibs in service to “emotional truth.” I think a better defense would be:

    “Hello? I’m a comedian, remember? I’m going for laughs: this isn’t the nightly news.”

    There’s a story in today’s Times by Jason Zinoman about the “muddy relationship between comedy and truth.”

    C’mon, folks — believe me — as someone who tries to get laughs while teaching Federal Income Taxation to accounting students — it ain’t easy. Lying about stuff, making a fool of yourself, insulting people — you grab at anything to get a chuckle. And if you get one, maybe out of ten tries — it makes it all worth it. So let’s give Minhaj a break, shall we?

    To her credit, the story states: “Amid plenty of critics online, Whoopi Goldberg was one of the few major figures who spoke up for Minhaj, saying on ‘The View’ that embellishing in the name of a larger truth is what comics do.” And Jerry Seinfeld has said that all of his comedy is made up — even his opinions. Zinoman writes: “Stand-up comedy was never expected to be factually accurate. Rodney Dangerfield, to be clear, got respect.”

    Today’s poem in The Writer’s Almanac is by Mary Oliver and it’s called “Don’t Hesitate.”

    If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
    don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
    of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
    to be. We are not wise, and not very often
    kind. And much can never be redeemed.
    Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
    is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
    something happens better than all the riches
    or power in the world. It could be anything,
    but very likely you notice it in the instant
    when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
    case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
    of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

    In the Style section of the Times today, Dilara Findikoglu, a name that you might think was arrived at by randomly pounding on a keyboard, was described as London’s “buzziest young designer.” Margot Robbie wore a pink minidress by Dilara at a Barbie premiere after-party, and Hari Nef wore a nonpink dress of hers at a Barbie premiere (see the latter, below). But the story was all about how Dilara had to cancel out of a major London fashion show due to financial difficulties after months of preparation. Her plight highlights how hard it is to survive as an independent fashion designer in the current climate, even if you’re “buzzy.”

    The dress Nef wore is called the Joan’s Knives dress because it’s inspired by a vision of Joan of Arc returning from the dead for revenge, and because it’s festooned with knives “painstakingly set onto a curve-hugging black sheath.” She said the hardest part was packing it into a bag that fit into the overhead compartment. [No she didn’t.]

    After Nef wore it, Emma Corrin wore it on the cover of ES magazine, with a fork sticking out of her hair. ES Magazine is an iconic brand designed for sophisticated, culturally-aware Londoners published by the Evening Standard, hence the “ES.” What’s the sophisticated part here — the fork?

    Some commenters on Rex’s blog are asked to check off a box stating that he or she is not a robot. Commenter B$$$ asked today how checking off the box proves that you are not a robot. I try to be helpful when I can, so I posted the following response:

    Checking off the box saying you are not a robot proves that you are not a robot because if you were a robot you would not check off the box saying you are not a robot because you are a robot. At least no self-respecting robot would. That leaves open the possibility of a rogue robot. But that’s too dispiriting to contemplate — let’s not go there.

    The puzzle was wonderful today, although Welly and Wilma have bones to pick. The revealer was “Seasonal phenomenon depicted six times in this puzzle,” and the answer was WINTER MIGRATION. Then, at six places, an answer going across suddenly turned downwards (or “south”) and that part of the answer was a type of bird. Everybody’s favorite was “Infamous presidential denial,” which was Nixon’s I AM NOT CROOK. And it turned down after the C to finish up with ROOK. WES CRAVEN turned after the C to finish with RAVEN. DICK CLARK, finished with the LARK. IN ESCROW finished with CROW; MOHAWK with HAWK, and HALF INCH with FINCH. Get it? Those birds were all heading south for the winter.

    Some of the nit pickers noted that not all of those birds are migratory. And it’s a fall migration. But as the saying goes: it’s close enough for crosswords. The more important complaint was Welly’s and Wilma’s — would it have killed them to fit in an owl? So many words end in OWL. Maybe next time, kids.

    It was a rare “two-post” day for me on Rex’s blog. In addition to the robot post, above, one commenter (egsforbreakfast) used the “I don’t want to harp on it” pun. So my second post was:

    egs — you reminded me of a visit I paid to my sister in Boston during which she took me to a harp recital. We were chatting with the harpist afterwards and I told her the one harp joke I know — that harpists spend half their lives tuning their harps, and the other half playing them out of tune.

    She may have heard it before. How else to explain her failing to explode with laughter?

    One clue/answer I didn’t understand until Rex explained it was “Capital of Washington,” and the answer was ONES. Think money for “capital,” and George for “Washington,” not DC — so Washington is on the one-dollar bill, hence ONES.

    “Desert near Sinai” was NEGEV. I knew the answer but I didn’t know (or forgot) that NEGEV means “south.” So it subtly fits in with the puzzle’s theme.

    At 27A, “Rubber overshoe” was GALOSH. Some folks said it looked funny as a singular and they had only seen it as galoshes. But the dictionary has it in singular form. I’m not going to quibble.

    Gotta keep those footsies dry!

    Enough nonsense for today? See you tomorrow!

  • The Infantile and Ignoble Joy

    Are you familiar with the word SESQUIPEDALIAN? It was the answer yesterday at 15A and spanned the entire grid. The clue was “Having many syllables.” So it’s self-descriptive, unlike “monosyllabic.” It was the theme for the puzzle, which also had OBSTREPEROUSLY right below it, clued with “In a noisy and unruly manner.” But the puzzle’s showpiece was a 28-letter word that spanned the grid twice, with the second half right below the first. It was our old friend ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM. The clues were (53A) “Opposition to the removal of …” (57A) “… state support from the church.” I was familiar with the word from childhood, but never knew what it meant.

    Getting back to sesquipedalian, the prefix sesqui means one and one half, so, e.g., sesquicentennial means 150 years. Sesquipedalia means a foot and a half long, and Horace, the Roman poet, cautioned young poets against using words a foot and a half long: sesquipedalia verba.

    No doubt you’d like to hear it used in a song lyric. OK.

    One commenter noted: I had always thought that pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was the longest English word, but after checking Google it seems it was a word made up in 1935 by Everett Smith, the president of the National Puzzlers League. 

    Smalltowndoc chimed in:

    The world of medicine is often accused of creating unnecessarily long words, but I’m pretty sure “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” isn’t one of them. We call it “silicosis”.

    But, “pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism”? Yeah, that’s a real thing.

    Another one said: I’m happy Rex didn’t engage in floccinaucinihilipilification of this puzzle because I liked it.

    Today’s puzzle at 10D was “Canine warning” and the answer was ARF. But several folks noted: “Arf” is not a canine warning. It is a canine “hello.” “Grr” is a canine warning.

    I don’t speak Dog, so I don’t know what to believe.

    You never know what will set someone off in Crossworld. Yesterday, at 9D, the clue was “Johnnie Walker or Jim Beam,” so I filled in WHISKEY and moved on. But it spawned much disgruntlement, e.g., this heated comment (Will is Will Shortz, of course, the NYT puzzle editor):

    I call major error on the clue for 9 down: WHISKEY with an E is only used for the American and Irish versions; the Scottish and Canadian versions are spelled WHISKY. And it’s Johnnie Walker whisky, not Johnny Walker whiskey! Dammit Will, Johnnie not Johnny, plus whisky not whiskey, what a bullshit clue: go to your room and stay there! An acceptable clue for the answer would be “Jameson or Jim Beam.”

    Hrummmmph!

    After a good half dozen of those, I posted:

    Another reason to prefer bier (or ail) to whisky — they’re easier to spell.

    Wait, what?

    Laura Cantrell has a very sweet voice. Here’s her song about whisky.

    It was the late Roger Angell’s birthday yesterday, born in 1920. How’s this for a writer’s ancestors: he was the son of Katharine Sergeant Angell White, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, and the stepson of E. B. White. But he was mostly raised by his dad, Ernest Angell, an attorney who headed the ACLU.

    Angell was married three times and had three children. His daughter Callie, an authority on the films of Andy Warhol, died by suicide in May of 2010, in Manhattan, where she worked as a curator at the Whitney Museum; she was 62. In a 2014 essay, Angell mentioned her death – “the oceanic force and mystery of that event” – and his struggle to comprehend that “a beautiful daughter of mine, my oldest child, had ended her life.”

    He was unquestionably the best writer on baseball who ever lived. I would wait eagerly each November for the New Yorker issue containing his write-up on the season and the World Series. It was in 1975 that his essay “Agincourt and After” appeared, containing the following passages that start with a description of Carlton Fisk’s game-winning home run in Game Six of the Boston/Cincy World Series.

    He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” fortissimo, and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them—in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all four Manchesters; and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway—jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on backcountry roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy—alight with it.

    It should be added, of course, that very much the same sort of celebration probably took place the following night in the midlands towns and vicinities of the Reds’ supporters—in Otterbein and Scioto; in Frankfort, Sardinia, and Summer Shade; in Zanesville and Louisville and Akron and French Lick and Loveland. I am not enough of a social geographer to know if the faith of the Red Sox fan is deeper or hardier than that of a Reds rooter (although I secretly believe that it may be, because of his longer and more bitter disappointments down the years). What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

    Thanks for dropping in!

  • G.

    The anagramatically great Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson), was born on this date in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1905. Her mom worked in a jam factory and her dad was a laborer, and together they produced “the most beautiful woman who ever lived,” according to The Guinness Book of World Records in 1954. Here’s how critic Kenneth Tynan put it: “What when drunk one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.” When she kissed actor John Gilbert with an open mouth in Flesh and the Devil, the movie was banned in some places for “moral turpitude,” but ticket sales soared.

    Her silent films were very popular, with her playing the mysterious femme fatale. Then, in 1930, sixteen minutes into the film Anna Christie, people first heard her husky voice: “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby,” a line I’ve used myself numerous times, to no effect. The headlines screamed “Garbo Talks!,” and she became an international star. She is still regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time. Director Clarence Brown, who made seven of her pictures, said, “Garbo has something behind the eyes that you couldn’t see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other. And nobody else has been able to do that on screen.”

    Garbo made 28 films and retired at age 35. She became famously reclusive, was often depressed, and may have been bipolar, although she had many friends, socialized, and traveled. In 1951 she became a U.S. citizen, and in 1953 she bought a seven-room apartment at 450 East 52nd  Street in NYC where she lived for the rest of her life. Her buzzer was identified by a solitary G. She walked eleven miles a day in the city in white clothes and sunglasses, and “Garbo watching” became sort of a sport.

    Remember Gilbert from that hot kiss, above? Well, he was her most serious romance. He proposed to her numerous times and she accepted occasionally but backed out at the last minute. “I was in love with him,” she said. “But I froze. I was afraid he would tell me what to do and boss me.” In later years, Garbo said of Gilbert, “I can’t remember what I ever saw in him.” She never married and had no children. But she had romantic relationships with both men and women, including Leopold Stokowski and Erich Maria Remarque.

    She was a dinner guest at the Kennedy White House, nine days before he was killed. She died herself of renal failure and pneumonia in a NYC hospital on April 15, 1990 at the age of 84. She left her estate of $72 million (in 2002 dollars) to her niece. Garbo was cremated in Manhattan, and her ashes were interred nine years later at Skogskyrkogården Cemetery (pronounced exactly as it’s spelled), just south of her native Stockholm.

    Happy Birthday, G. You came a long way from your mom’s jam factory.

    To hell with the war, let’s party! According to a front-page story in today’s NYT, over 35,000 Hasidim made their annual pilgrimage to Uman in central Ukraine this week, where Rebbe Nachman of Breslove died in 1810, a great-grandson of the man widely considered the founder of Hasidism. It is also the site of terrible Nazi atrocities: 1,000 Jewish children were gunned down there and thrown into a pit.

    The tradition of the pilgrimage goes back 200 years and there’s no way a small matter like a Russian invasion could put a crimp in it. The pilgrimage remains pious, but it is also wild. The Breslovers, as followers are called, are known for exuberant worship. Maybe a little too exuberant: dozens have been arrested in Uman in past years for drug possession, drunkenness and brawling. But Breslovers are also known for being open-minded. Men in black hats and sidelocks prayed next to men in T-shirts and tattoos. Most come from Israel, with the second biggest contingent from the US. With Ukraine’s airspace closed, most made overland trips from Poland, Moldova, Hungary or Romania that were long, exhausting, and expensive.

    President Zelensky didn’t stop by Uman this week but a small contingent of Ukrainian Jews joined the festivities, which have fueled a bustling economy. Entire 10-story buildings are hired out, taxi drivers get dream fares and vendors do a brisk trade in T-shirts, books, amulets and other Breslov merch.

    Sadly, our dear Yevgeny can no longer score any catering gigs in Uman, since he was brutally murdered. His pierogis were to die for (perhaps not the best choice of words). Dig in, everybody!

    An extraordinary oyster farmer, Jules Melancon, died on August 31 at his home in Cut Off, Louisiana, 25 miles south of New Orleans. (English and Cajun French were spoken at home.) He was only 65 and his father and mother both survived him.

    Most of his life he farmed oysters the old-fashioned way, dredging the shallow, brackish waters of the lower Mississippi River Delta, as captain of his own boat, My Melanie, named after his wife. Times were good and he was able to sell 400 bags of oysters a day at $15 a bag. But he just about gave up the business when the oyster population started taking hits from rising sea levels, pollution and erosion, and then from Katrina and the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill which coated the Louisiana coast with millions of gallons of crude. No question — it all combined to put the Oy in oyster.

    Then Melancon learned from a friend about a new type of oyster farming being tested by Auburn U. researchers. They were growing immature oysters (“spats”) from pinhead-size seeds in drums on land. When they grew to the size of a quarter, they were transferred to cages suspended in shallow water. Instead of taking five years to reach full size, they could be exposed to a rich flow of nutrients and become big, meaty, and delicious in just ten months. Plus the shells looked gorgeous on a raw bar. He was a pioneer in the field, and was back in business, although not as lucratively as before.

    Along with his mom and dad, he is survived by his wife Melanie, four sisters, and 500 pounds of raw oysters, fresh and delicious like you wouldn’t believe. Here he is — Phil tracked him down to a joint in Lafitte, Louisiana. They both ate well that night.

    Rest in peace, Buddy.

    Good night everybody! See you tomorrow.

  • The Corner of Morning

    In Owl Chatter’s college football roundup, let’s applaud this agile Iowa cheerleader, who, . . . . oops, never mind folks — nothing to see here.

    The game we had our eyes on — well, at least until we fell asleep during the first half at around 11pm — saw OC’s beloved Colorado Buffaloes barely eking by State in double overtime, 43-35. Yikes! We were heavy favorites — wha hoppin’, mon?

    It was an ugly game, with two-way star Travis Hunter rushed to the hospital after a late (dirty) hit to his midsection. Deion says he’ll miss a few weeks. Ouch. He also said, resorting to Coachspeak — what matters is we won. State Coach Norvell is taking heat for taking the low road. 17 penalties for 187 yards. Like he cares. Next up for the Prime Timers — a very tough Oregon team up in Eugene.

    Eyes will also be on the Notre Dame/Ohio State game next week. And Michigan plays Rutgers in Ann Arbor, their first game that matters.

    BTW, Portland State who lost last week 81-7 in a game in which one of their players lost an ear, beat North American U (I know — who?), yesterday 91-0.

    Today’s puzzle was amusing, taking pretty famous songs from our youth and putting them into a mythological context. For example: HERE COMES THE SUN, was a “warning to Icarus,” the guy whose wings melted when he got too close to the sun. Cute, right? YOU’RE SO VAIN was a “criticism of Narcissus.” LIGHT MY FIRE, — “request to Prometheus.” OH, PRETTY WOMAN was a “comment to Aphrodite.” I bet you didn’t know that “Oh” was part of the title. DON’T BRING ME DOWN was an “entreaty to Hades,” king of the underworld.

    Commenter Andrew added these twists:

    Birdseye request? – GIVE PEAS A CHANCE
    Varicose diagnosis? YOU’RE SO VEIN
    End of sitting shiva? MOURNING HAS BROKEN
    Pillow preference? DON’T BRING ME DOWN

    (Love the last two.)

    “Oh, Pretty Woman” was written by Roy Orbison. Here he is performing it. A couple of kids are backing him up: Bruce, and Elvis (Costello), inter alia.

    Today’s “Tiny Love Story” is by Joanna Good and is called “Two Sides of the Moon.”

    The tattoo machine buzzes as I remember the night I had my first child at 17. I’d stared out the hospital window at the moon, a luminous crescent in the clear winter sky. The following day, I handed my daughter over to her adoptive parents. The moon comforted me during our years of separation. When my child came out as transgender at 15, his adoptive parents proved too rigid in their beliefs to accept him fully. My mothering arms had grown by then, and I reached out to my son. Now, we proudly compare our matching crescent moon tattoos. 

    *******

    Pete Rose, who is a complete idiot who cares only about winning, money, and women, once remarked on racism something like, “How can anyone be so stupid to care about what color you are? What does that have to do with anything?” He got that one right. In that spirit, how in the world does a parent reject their child, adopted or not, because they are transgender? How can that matter more than their being your child? As Denzel said — Explain that to me like I’m a three-year-old.

    I googled “crescent moon tattoo” for the above story. Meow.

    To conflate the Jewish New Year with the other one, here’s Ted Kooser’s poem from Winter Morning Walks that he dated January 3 — the first one he wrote in that new year.

    All through the night,
    the deeply troubled, sighing furnace
    has tried to console one whimpering floorboard
    that wants to return to its tree.

    Beyond the walls, milky, translucent snow,
    brushed into drifts
    by the long blue fingers of shadow.

    The snow has gathered as much of the light as it can
    from the stars, but that’s not enough warmth
    to kindle the eyes of even one rabbit,
    frozen still as a stone at the corner of morning.

    See you tomorrow!

  • Rowdy Utterances

    Years ago, we were on line at the nurses’ station to have some gifts okayed and we witnessed a very dramatic scene. But, wait, I should back up a little. Caity was in the hospital for a few days (she’s fine now, kinehora) and they gave her the choice of being in a regular room, with some old woman wheezing all night, or on a mildly restricted floor with young women closer to her age. She chose the latter (duh). Since some of the patients on that floor were at risk for harming themselves, there were some restrictions in place, like anyone who brought gifts had to clear them first at the nurses’ station: no sharp objects, e.g.

    We were bringing her a few small items (blow torch, cleaver), so we were waiting on line and were the next ones to be seen. The couple in front of us (husband and wife) were bringing a whole bunch of little toys for their daughter, who must have been pretty young, judging by the nature of the gifts. They were little inexpensive items designed to give a moment or two of amusement.

    But one by one, the nurse was rejecting them for some safety reason or other. You could tell each rejection was a blow to the mom — not for the loss of the toy itself but for what it said about how troubled her daughter must be if it was dangerous for her to play with the little thing.

    After about three rejections, the mom exclaimed “Be nicer!”

    The nurse was totally taken aback. “What do you mean?,” she asked. “I’m being nice.”

    The mom said, “No you’re not — this is very hard for us.”

    And the dad said: “You’re being very cold.”

    The nurse was deeply struck by the charges and just said, “But these rules are important.” She ran through the remaining items quickly and the couple left to see their daughter.

    That’s when Linda and I stepped up to face her. She was devastated; near tears. Nursing is a caring profession, and she was just charged with about as serious a charge as a nurse can get — hardness; not caring.

    She looked up at us, pained to her core, and I said “It’s okay — you don’t have to be nice to us.”

    That’s a true story — every piece of it, including my line, which I will go to my grave proud of. It’s the sort of line you think of too late. But it came to me in time, and I damn well said it. (We also reassured her that she was doing fine and shouldn’t be upset.)

    Now bend over for your shot.

    Lauren Boebert apologized for her behavior in a Denver theater last weekend that included vaping and rowdiness leading to her getting kicked out. She later denied vaping but was caught on tape. By all accounts she was quite obnoxious. Boebert is a Republican Congresswoman from Colorado and a right-wing monster of epic proportions. She has yet to apologize for everything else she has done since birth. I will spare you her photo — Phil refused to waste film on her.

    I don’t usually pay attention to how long it takes me to complete a puzzle, but one feature of the on-line puzzle is you get your time. It took me 41:30 today, but I nailed it! Very satisfying. It’s hard to explain to someone who has no interest in crosswords how they’ve become such a pleasure for me, but this paragraph in commenter Lewis’s note today is apt:

    “I want the Saturday puzzle to shift my brain into first gear and keep it there from start to finish, grinding and doing heavy lifting – a high-intensity workout ending with me in a puddle of happiness and satisfaction, bolstered by the knowledge that I did my brain a solid and that it is happy as well. And this is what I got today.” 

    One of my favorite clues/answers was “Component of a Mr. Clean costume, say,” and the answer was BALD CAP. I commented that I thought it would be funnier if the clue referenced Dr. Phil.

    Another one I liked was “They might make it difficult to compare notes,” and the answer was TIN EARS. (Think musical notes.) My comment was: The tin man must have had tin ears, no? A better clue might have been: “Why a Wizard of Oz character was not musical.”

    The last clue I solved (and only by “running the alphabet” to get the A), was “Credit lines?” The answer was HAT TIPS. It turns out it’s a thing — if you compliment something or someone, you have “tipped your hat,” i.e., given “credit.”

    Did you know that “tittle-tattles” means CHATS. I didn’t. I thought it had something to do with ratting somebody out: tattling. But if you look it up you’ll see it means idle talk or gossip.

    Another toughie was 14A: “What cucumber slices and seaweed can be part of.” If you’re thinking of the last time you had a cucumber salad around 8 years ago, you’ll never get it. You need to think of those slices over a pair of closed eyes. The answer was SPA TREATMENTS. D’oh!

    Two other good clues in this very clever puzzle by Jonathan Kaufman were “Barn locks,” for MANE (think hair for locks), and “Move more” for OUTSELL.

    NINA Hoss from the movie “Tar” visited the grid today. She was born in Stuttgart, West Germany on July 7, 1955, so she’s 48. Hoss received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013, and was appointed a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2015. She’s been wasting her time doing crossword puzzles since then. [No she hasn’t.]

    In a review of her 2009 film A Woman in Berlin, The NYT said Hoss, “whose strong frame and graceful bearing suggest both old-style movie-star glamour and Aryan ideals of feminine beauty, is an actress of haunting subtlety, and the film, episodic, ambitious and a few beats too long, is held together by the force of her performance.” She later made her name in Hollywood playing a German agent in three seasons of Homeland (2014–2017).

    Nice shot, Phil. Very Aryan.

    A little three-letter answer opened a door today: ABA. It’s usually clued with lawyers (the American Bar Ass’n) but today it wasn’t. Rex started the discussion:

    Hey, what does the “B” in ABA stand for today (I mean, since it doesn’t stand for its more customary meaning, “Bar”) (21A: “Trade org. of interest to publishers and authors”)? I think it’s “Booksellers” but I’m gonna have to check … Whoa, I just googled “ABA” and apparently in the real, i.e. non-crossword world, everyone thinks ABA = “Applied Behavior Analysis” (whatever that is). My god it is hard to find today’s ABA … searching [ABA books] and [ABA library] is useless … I’m getting American Beverage … American Bankers … ah there we go. I was right: American Booksellers Association. Man, google really Really doesn’t want you to find this particular ABA. The quality of google as a search engine has so horribly degraded in recent years, and somehow the fact that it’s hiding booksellers from me today feels ominously on-brand.

    Later, Ted commented: Applied Behavioral Analysis is an autism therapy thing. It’s a gift not to have to know “whatever that is.”

    And Dr. A added:

    Applied Behavioral Analysis is a very popular “therapy” for people with autism that treats them like trained dogs and makes me more than a little sick. I have a kid with autism and when it was super popular it just didn’t appeal to me and now it’s being berated by the autistic population. It probably has a place for the more severely affected but for anyone who can be reasoned with, it’s pretty insulting. Anyway that’s my rant du jour!! 

    My ears perk up at that topic — Linda taught autistic children for quite a few years. I’m very proud of her for working so hard to bring light and warmth to them.

    Those of us who take great joy in expressing ourselves in speech can only marvel at folks who struggle so hard with stuttering. I sometimes run across one in class and always try to give them the space they need. They seem so brave to me to open up with their difficulties to make a point in class. I appreciate any contributions to the class discussion, and those are a little extra special.

    Here’s a poem called “When I Stutter,” by Elizabeth Meade from the Poetry Foundation today.

    Sometimes, m’s elongate,
    grow long tongues to taste the last bit
    of breath my body has to offer.

    Sometimes, i’s echo
    like the harsh cries of a seagull,
    try to fly far away from the nest of my mouth
    only to circle the ocean of my uncompleted sentence.

    Sometimes, my breath becomes caught
    in the chamber of my throat, my head cocked back
    until the word —at last— launches out of my mouth like a bullet.
    or a punch.

    (Sometimes, my soft, raspy voice
    provides no balm to soothe the ear.)

    Sometimes, I remember Daddy said my voice
    sounds like Mommy’s. I rejoice then, as syllables
    trip over one another like eager children
    rushing toward the playground
    with all the freedom her voice no longer has.

    All that remains is the deep ache in my throat,
    vocal cords like mud stomped flat
    under the feet of my rowdy utterances.

    Okay, everybody — see you tomorrow!