The Wellington Files

  • Two And A Half Pinkwaters

    Before we go any further, I need to inform you about something serious that involves me. Better to hear about it here, before you learn about it from other sources. I expect to be named in the Epstein files. Please don’t be too upset. It’s a different Epstein: Barry Epstein, a kid I went to high school with. Still, it may get pretty ugly.

    One of the children’s books Daniel Pinkwater wrote is called The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. That is really all you need to know to fall in love with him, but I am going to share the plot summary from Wikipedia.

    The main character, Arthur Bobowitz, is asked to pick up a reserved turkey for his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. However, the meat market has lost their reservation and has no unclaimed turkeys or any other type of bird available for purchase, nor does any other market in the entire city of Hoboken. Arthur eventually finds an eccentric old man, who sells him a live chicken named Henrietta that weighs 266 pounds. The Bobowitz family welcomes her with open arms and full hearts, but the neighbors are not so sure. Everyone in town is horrified after Henrietta escapes.

    Pinkwater wrote that book with his wife Jill.

    I was happy to learn Pinkwater is still among the living (age 84), but sad to learn Jill passed in 2022. It was his birthday yesterday! To 120, DP!

    I heard about him from his work on NPR, but don’t know much about him. I do know that the width of his tuchas was adopted as a unit of measurement by Tom and Ray of Car Talk, who would say, e.g., “the car’s backseat is 2.5 Pinkwaters wide.” (Another unit of measurement they used was “mothers-in-law.”)

    Pinkwater once described himself as: “Very fat. Medium height. Mostly bald. Likes television. Has owned several French automobiles, for which parts were seldom available. Likes sausage. Lives on a farm. Has a wife. Votes for fictional characters in elections. Finally quit smoking. Likes to write for kids because they are a more respectable audience than adults. Hates his own books. Expects to do better in the future.”

    Was it necessary for him to note that he likes sausage? Who doesn’t?

    His name at birth was Manon Pinkwater. He and Jill joined a cult. The guru lived somewhere in Asia and said he had the power to divine a person’s true name, so Pinkwater wrote to him about his name.

    The guru wrote back. “Your name should begin with ‘D.’” Pinkwater sent a reply suggesting some “D” names. He included “Duck” as an option, just to test the guru. [Note: I am not sure how that is a test.] The guru’s next letter said that his name would be Daniel. Pinkwater told his mother that his name was Daniel. She started calling him Daniel. So did everyone else.

    The cult had a certain vacuity that appealed to Pinkwater. “The thing seemed to be contentless. I just wanted the straight energy.” He got so good at meditation that he didn’t need Novocain at the dentist anymore. He figured there was some scam at the heart of the cult, but it didn’t bother him. “The quality of the rip-off was so minor you could ignore it,” he said. For example, notes in the cult newsletter asked members who happened to be traveling to the Asian country where the guru lived to bring along a spare muffler for the guru’s Mercedes. But they eventually quit. “The amount of superstition and nonsense got boring,” Pinkwater said. “I didn’t need them anymore.”

    They bought a farm in the Hudson Valley and moved there after they had this conversation in bed one night: Jill said “I bought the horses.” “What horses?” Daniel asked. “The mother and foal,” Jill said. “What are you talking about?” Daniel asked. “We discussed this,” Jill said. “When did we discuss this?” “The other night.” “Where were we when we were discussing this?” “Here in bed.” “Did I say anything?” “Yeah, you said it would be fine.”

    He still maintains a spiritual practice, decades after leaving the cult. “Every morning I have my breakfast and then I take my dog and we get in the car and we go to a lovely place,” he told me. “We see things and we experience movement. The dog pees, I don’t. The dog sniffs things. Me, not so much. And we look out over the river at some point, we look at the Catskills in the distance, and she gets a cookie. And we come home. Restored, refreshed, advanced, and having communed with whatever that thing is.”

    Have you ever had a baby fall asleep on your arm and you know if you move he or she could wake up, so you stay there, like, forever? That’s how the puzzle started yesterday. At 1A: “Unable to move while holding a sleeping baby, in slang.” NAP TRAPPED. Rex said it’s his experience more often to be “cat trapped.” Here he is with his cat Ida.

    But the stakes are much lower with cats. You move and wake the cat up, it just stretches a bit, yawns, and goes back to sleep somewhere else for another 15 hours. You move and wake the baby and you are f*cked up the kazoo, amirite?

    If you like babies, this was the puzzle for you. At 48D: “Like a baby’s fingers, perhaps.” PUDGY. Awwww.

    The puzzle also had a nice pair that involved something flat and something the opposite of flat. At 56A: “Bad way to be caught,” FLATFOOTED. And at 12D “Brand associated with push-ups,” WONDER BRA.

    My visit this morning to the Dull Men’s Club (UK) left me dismayed. This was Andrew Norton’s post: “Can anyone explain to me, in simple scientific terms, why we do not use tidal power rather than solar and wind? There must be a reason but I can’t find it.”

    It generated (pun intended) 148 comments (!) almost all of which were serious. What gives?

    One member said “It has its ups and downs,” and another said “You need wellies.” (Boots.)

    One member was even chided for “trying to be funny.” I replied: Isn’t trying to be funny good?

    I did post these two efforts at answering the inquiry:

    Hesitation to appear before others in a swimsuit?

    The Sea Cow lobby has been throwing its weight against it.

    Michael Winter posted: They don’t want to electrocute fish. To that I replied: The way my wife cooks, that would be an improvement. (Just kidding. Love you, Babe.)

    Here’s a brother/sister story. It’s the Tiny Love Story by Meredith Jewett from today’s NYT called “A Whisper in the Wind.”

    The beach where my brother and I spent our childhood is all driftwood and rocks — better suited to fort-building and crab-searching than to swimming. In our youth, we ran along the wave break, screaming while dodging the other’s volley of bull kelp. As adults, we walked his dogs in the cool morning fog. Last July, I stood ankle deep in the cold water, a fistful of his ashes in my hand. My older brother, Michael, taken by an aneurysm at 36. “I miss you,” I whispered as the wind swirled his ashes through my fingers, falling softly into the Salish Sea. 

    The photo is of the beach on Decatur Island, the last time Michael and Meredith were there together.

    Today’s puzzle was called “Misquoting Shakespeare” and it just threw some bad puns at famous lines, e.g., “a nose by any other name.” Pretty lame. Don’t get me wrong — I generally love bad puns, but these did lack zip. I posted the following for the gang:

    By the time my consistently late daughter showed up at the theater it was Thirteenth Night. Another time the performance was so bad, the audience changed the play’s name to All’s Well That Ends.

    Hey, you know why Hamlet never went hungry? There were always some Danish in the castle. It’s true — look it up.

    Yesterday’s UMICH-Northwestern game was held at Wrigley Field. They had to screw around with it to fit the field in, like remove a dugout. The game itself was a real nail-biter and it shouldn’t have been. We were favored by over ten points but committed five turnovers and barely eked out a win on a last-second field goal. It may sound crazy, but the offense and defense looked good. We’ll be big dogs against Ohio State in two weeks, but I’m not entirely hopeless.

    There was a lot of banter about the history of Wrigley, including talk about all those years before lights were installed and only day games could be played. It led me to wonder who got the first hit at Wrigley in a night game. I might want his autograph in my collection as a piece of baseball history. So I did a little digging and found out the first night game was scheduled for August 8, 1988: 8/8/88. The city of Chicago and the Cubbies really played it up big. Celebrities were in attendance; tickets were scalped for hundreds of dollars. Ernie Banks and Billy Williams threw out the first ball. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played. A local realtor paid $7,500 for the “honor” of being the bat boy.

    Phil Bradley got the first hit that night. He was the first batter up for the visiting Phils and hit a homerun. But heavy rains came and wiped it out. They waited for hours, but couldn’t get five innings in, so nothing counted. The first official night game was thus played on 8/9/88 and Mark Grace of the Cubs had the first hit, a single. I already had Grace’s autograph and was able to pick up Bradley’s for just a few bucks.

    Sticking with sports, I just learned that Jets cornerback Kris Boyd was shot in his abdomen at 2 am last night on W. 38th Street in Manhattan after a dispute turned violent. He’s 29 and is listed in critical but stable condition. Yikes. Of course, we wish him a complete and speedy recovery. Kris is from Texas and played college ball with the Longhorns. As always occurs when a member of the Jets is shot, the police have announced that every single Jets fan is considered a suspect.

    See you tomorrow Chatterheads. Thanks for dropping by.

  • Take Me Out To The Ballgame

    Readers of The New Yorker are familiar with the cartoons of William Steig, back from when their cartoons were wonderful and funny. Steig was born on this date back in 1907 in NYC and died at the age of 95 in Boston. His parents were Polish-Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary. His dad was a house painter and his mom a seamstress. It was she who encouraged his art. According to The Writer’s Almanac, Steig said:  “If I’d had it my way, I’d have been a professional athlete, a sailor, a beachcomber, or some other form of hobo, a painter, a gardener, a novelist, a banjo-player, a traveler, anything but a rich man.” He was the anti-Tevye.

    He is best-known as the creator of Shrek.

    Here’s a haiku I wrote yesterday.

    Eye exam: Is it
    Better this way or this way?
    Seems about the same.

    I watched the first half of the Jets game last night but didn’t need to see that much to realize how much better the Pats are than us. The Jets started well with an opening TD drive, but the New Englanders moved like a hot knife through butter in response. Their young QB Drake Maye is the real thing. He played college ball at UNC, not a traditional powerhouse, although Lawrence Taylor played there. Next Sunday the Jets face the Ravens in Poe-town, and Owl Chatter will be there. Oy.

    Oh, hi Joe! Hey, everybody, it’s Joe Namath with his beautiful daughter Jessica. Looks just like you, Dad! Thanks for dropping by. Grab a Diet Coke and settle in! See the game last night?

    Sydney Sweeney has taken her place among the great beauties of her generation. We don’t expect her to pop into the puzzle often: too many letters, but she was the focus of a boring Op-Ed piece by Ross Douthat in The Times today. He’s hoping her stardom can be a counterweight to cookie-cutter AI movies. Blah blah blah. We’re not going to worry about it.

    Phil says she’s taking it easy on us in this shot. A full blast could knock you backwards through a window.

    Remember that board game LIFE? I remember enjoying it. It first came out in 1860, a creation of the person Milton Bradley, the first ever board game for his company of the same name. It’s the modern version that I recall, and it came out in 1960, when I was ten. It was in the puzzle today at 41A: “Board game that begins with players choosing college versus career.” Here’s Rex on it: “I enjoyed remembering this game. Played it a lot as a child. It didn’t much prepare me for LIFE, though. For instance, I hardly ever drive around in a plastic six-seater convertible.”

    How about the spooky 50D? “Horror character known as the Mistress of the Dark.” Remember ELVIRA? She was pretty funny, as I recall. Here she is with her pet tarantula.

    Elvira was the creation of actress Cassandra Peterson, a redhead (vu den?)

    Per egs: ELVIRA always makes me shake my head in a gesture of awe and disbelief because a man named Dallas Frazier wrote a song which became a big hit for the Oak Ridge Boys and contained, in the chorus, the alleged rhyme, “My hearts on fire, Elvira.” I guess he didn’t think, “Don’t spend your IRA, Elvira” had the requisite zip.

    This poem by Natalie Diaz has a helluva name: “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation.” It was today’s poem of the day from Poets.org. I am shallow enough to be impressed that the first letter of each line works down the alphabet.

    Angels don’t come to the reservation.
    Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things.
    Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing—
    death. And death
    eats angels, I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel
    fly through this valley ever.
    Gabriel? Never heard of him. Know a guy named Gabe though—
    he came through here one powwow and stayed, typical
    Indian. Sure he had wings,
    jailbird that he was. He flies around in stolen cars. Wherever he stops,
    kids grow like gourds from women’s bellies.
    Like I said, no Indian I’ve ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel.
    Maybe in a Christmas pageant or something—
    Nazarene church holds one every December,
    organized by Pastor John’s wife. It’s no wonder
    Pastor John’s son is the angel—everyone knows angels are white.
    Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians.
    Remember what happened last time
    some white god came floating across the ocean?
    Truth is, there may be angels, but if there are angels
    up there, living on clouds or sitting on thrones across the sea wearing
    velvet robes and golden rings, drinking whiskey from silver cups,
    we’re better off if they stay rich and fat and ugly and
    ’xactly where they are—in their own distant heavens.
    You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they’ll be marching you off to
    Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.

    Here’s Natalie. She’s a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet and a prof at ‘Zona State. And get this: She was a point guard on her basketball team at Old Dominion and reached the Final Four of the NCAA tourney as a freshman and the Sweet 16 her other three years. She played pro ball in Europe and Asia.

    We rented Eephus from Amazon Prime this week and watched it twice. Bill Lee (yes, that Bill Lee, Red Sox fans) has a small but wonderful role in it. I don’t know how to describe the movie. To say it’s a baseball movie is to be entirely accurate and to completely miss the point at the same time. This is the premise as described in Wikipedia: “In a small Massachusetts town in the 1990s, the Adler’s Paint baseball team faces the Riverdogs in one last game before their ballfield is demolished to make room for a new school.”

    It’s the last game. The teams are a combination of middle-aged beer bellies with some college kids sprinkled in. Mostly white, but there is a Black player and when he hits a home run and they welcome him at the plate you can tell his teammates had long ago accepted him without the slightest trace of racism, as if they had no concept of what racism even is or could be.

    The whole movie is blue collar baseball banter. One team’s captain is dragged off midgame to attend his niece’s christening and another player says, “That’s why I’m never going to have a niece.” It’s a brilliant line, delivered as a throwaway.

    The game is constantly under threat: one team only has eight players and will have to forfeit, but they bat first and prolong their half inning just long enough for their ninth man to arrive. The umps refuse to stay beyond the allotted time, but the teams agree to continue under a modified honor system. The field descends into darkness but they arrange their cars and pickup trucks so the headlights cast just enough light to allow play. You see, the score is tied, and it’s the last game for them, like, forever, and they can’t let it end without a proper resolution.

    One of the young players on the Adler Paint team explains how the eephus pitch works. It’s super slow. It just hangs there. You get bored looking at it. You either lose your patience and swing too early, or you finally decide to swing later only to discover it’s gone past you. Bill Lee threw it in his later years in the majors, and he throws it here in his one inning, effectively.

    The family of only one player, Bill Belinda, comes to watch. His kids are in the short clip, below. (The daughter asks the quintessential question: “Why do they care so much?”) When his wife tells him it’s late and cold and they have to leave, he gets them to stay for one more at bat of his and he strikes out. He laments to a teammate that it was probably the last time his kids will see him bat and he struck out. The teammate says, “they’re kids, they won’t remember.” He counters: “they’re 10 and 12.” The teammate says, “then they’ll think it’s funny. It won’t matter to them.” And Bill says “It matters to me.”

    At another point, one of his teammates says, “Bill, how come you’re the only player whose family comes to the games.” Bill may not have realized it up till then, but it gives him a good feeling. At one point, when the consensus seems to be growing to call it quits, Bill’s daughter, on the field with him for some reason, sings “Take me out to the ballgame,” in her beautiful 12-year-old’s voice. The game continues.

    One batter hits a foul popup that the out-of-shape catcher lumbers over and catches. “I should be put down,” he mutters. Tell me about it.

    Enough. See you tomorrow.

  • The Making of Girona Martyrology

    Might the flatulence have played a role? The NYT says it might have: not actual flatulence in this case. It certainly didn’t help. The question is what led to the controversial firing of Sasha Suda from the Directorship of Philly’s Art Museum? First, let’s have a look at her. Seeing what she looks like might help us form a shallow, uninformed opinion on the matter.

    Sash (as Phil calls her), is 44 and was born in Toronto to parents who immigrated from what was then Czechoslovakia, one of the most difficult countries in the world to spell. (Would it have killed them to immigrate from Poland?) Her detractors are claiming they passed a bad Czech. Unable to get into good schools, Suda earned her degrees at Princeton (BA), Williams (MA), and NYU (PhD). No doubt you are familiar with her doctoral dissertation, “The Making of Girona Martyrology and the Cult of Saints in Late Medieval Bohemia,” published in 2016. Before assuming the position in Philly, she was the Director of Canada’s National Gallery, the youngest individual to obtain that post in a century.

    The flatulence issue arose from a rebranding campaign that she undertook without final approval from the trustees. It seemed harmless: she changed the museum’s name from The Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Philadelphia Art Museum. But it started getting called “PhArt!” Oops! (I’m not kidding about this.) It’s a little bit like when McDonalds called its new wrap the McWrap. “I’ll have some of that McCrap please.” I think the boys in marketing may have dropped the ball on that one.

    More serious complaints focused on charges that Suda misused Museum funds, her emphasis on DEI (horrors!), and clashes she had with Board members. She was a good fund-raiser, though, and often that’s all that matters.

    Suda is suing over her firing in state (PA) court. The suit claims the “final straw” was a dispute over a lobbyist (Heller) whom the Board chair (Caplan) wanted to recruit as a trustee, but who Suda claimed was abrasive. Caplan accused Suda of being the abrasive one. Owl Chatter has obtained an exclusive copy of the transcript of the decisive confrontation:

    Suda: Heller is abrasive. She can’t be on the Board.

    Caplan: No. You’re the abrasive one.

    Suda: You are.

    Caplan: No, you are.

    Suda: It’s you.

    Caplan: No. You.

    Suda: You’re being abrasive right now!

    Caplan: Am not.

    Suda: You are.

    Caplan. Am not.

    Suda: Yes you are.

    Caplan: Shut up.

    Suda: You shut up.

    Meanwhile, this little sweetie had a blast visiting the PhArt!

    Notice anything unusual about yesterday’s puzzle?

    Sure you do! By connecting the circled squares (in alphabetical order, btw) you form the outline of a duck, which is the answer at 38D. Or, wait a minute, is it a rabbit (the answer at 66A)? Hmmmmm.

    Apparently (pun intended), there is a famous duck/rabbit illusion. Take a look at this better version of it. Facing right it’s a rabbit. Facing left, it’s a duck. (Can you see it?) Either way, pass the ketchup!

    In the puzzle, two more theme answers hint at the “drabbit:” At 17A the answer that spanned the grid is OPTICAL ILLUSION, and at 59A, it’s AMBIGUOUS FIGURE. It’s a very ambitious feat of puzzle construction. Bravo, Brad and Nicole Wiegmann. You may have also noticed the “EYE” in the square contained in both 30D and 37A, as a rebus (when more than one letter is smushed into a single square). M[EYE]RS crossing [EYE]MASK.

    The rabbit-duck illusion goes all the way back to 1892, when it appeared in a German humor magazine. (Hysterical!) It became famous in the hands of Ludwig Wittgenstein who used it to distinguish between perception and interpretation. I’m far too stupid to go any deeper than that. With apologies to the Wiegmanns, it’s better described as an ambiguous image than an optical illusion. Or maybe we can call it an “optional illusion.”

    At 32D yesterday, the clue was “Excuse me,” and the answer was SORRY. This song is by Caitlin Cary. I was glad Son Volt shared it with us. Beautiful voice.

    Here’s Caitlin.

    I majored in Economics a hundred years ago but had no idea this was the case: At 10D today the clue was “Nobel Prize category, for short,” and the answer was ECON. No big deal, right? But Commenter Trinch posted the following: “Not to nitpick, but there is no such thing as a Nobel prize in economics. There is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Despite incorrectly being called a Nobel Prize, it is not. Ok fine. Definitely nitpicking. But I stand by my facts.” [OC Note: Sveriges Riksbank is not a person. It’s Sweden’s central bank.]

    Back when Nixon’s presidency was unravelling, the Comedian David Steinberg observed: “The word CROOK could suddenly materialize emblazoned on Nixon’s forehead, and you’d still get some of his supporters going ‘Well, not necessarily . . . . ‘” Let’s keep an eye on Trump’s sexy press sec’y Karoline Leavitt as the delicious Epstein situation unfolds. Yesterday she explained that the emails showing Trump knew about the girls being abused proved his innocence. Okey dokey.

    From the Dull Men’s Club (UK). Jane Sutherland posts: So here’s a dilemma – is it ‘which’ or ‘what’?  ‘What’ seems to get much more use than ‘which’ nowadays but to me, it’s very often used in the wrong context.

    For example, we have to watch Mastermind, which personally I find extremely dull 🥱 and I’ve noticed Clive the host often starts his question with ‘what’, as in – ‘what book, what film, what actor’ etc… Surely this should be which not what? It sounds grammatically wrong to me! 🤷‍♀️Thoughts anyone, or am I just being pedantic?

    Tony Ross: They burned so many at Salem, there’s a surfeit of whats about these days.

    Ken Irvine: “What” is an open question while “which” would be asking one to choose from a defined group of choices.

    Stuart Parr: Which is a selection from a defined list of options, what is a selection from broad criteria.

    Andy Spragg: Thank you! Every day is a school day.

    Jennifer Brand: Do I get a gold star from Miss Susan if I know the answer?

    Stuart: You can have glitter too.

    Brad Smith: Here’s another thing. I think this is the most commonly misspelled word in English. Most people incorrectly spell it Dilemna. Never understood why? Is it the 2 ms look like mn?

    Mik Shaw: American import.

    Avi Liveson: American here. I’ve never seen dilemna. Seems an easy word to spell to me.

    Murray Atkinson: Language evolves because people are lazy and poorly educated. The ‘grammar and spelling police’ get laughed at because if the meaning is clear what does it matter? Apparently. Keep fighting!

    Avi Liveson: I’m lazy and well-educated.

    Jem Giles: Which genre of film does this programme most likely occur? And then, what director would place the actors on set..?

    Avi Liveson: What??

    At 19D today, the clue was “Things caddies carry,” and the answer was TEAS. (Get it?)

    Anony Mouse asked: When do caddies carry teas? I feel like I’m missing something.

    SJ responded: A TEA caddy is a box (or other receptacle) to store tea in.

    Another Anony Mouse wrote: A “tea caddy” holds teas.

    And I posted: Serious golfers often like to take a break during play and enjoy a small muffin or scone with some tea. So their caddies carry a selection of teas and pastries with them.

    Just back away slowly, Phil. You must have said something.

    See you tomorrow Chatterheads! Thanks for popping in.

  • Earth To Eartha

    When I joined the law firm in Norristown PA as my first job out of law school one of the partners ducked into my office one morning and said he needed me to cover an appointment for him because a family crisis was calling him away. One of the firm’s clients was facing criminal charges and was being evaluated psychologically. A lawyer from the firm had to be present but would just have to sit there. I said, “Sure.”

    So I met the client at the doctor’s office and she explained she would be asking him a series of questions and recording his responses. The questioning lasted about an hour and a half. At that point, the psychologist left, saying she’d return in about fifteen minutes. When she returned, she said the client’s responses revealed a deep-seated psychosis and that he posed a danger to himself and others. He was being remanded to a psychiatric facility for further evaluation and would be held until it was determined it was safe to release him. She gave us five minutes to confer and left the room.

    At that point, the client turned to me, terrified, and said “They’re taking me to the fucking nuthouse — why didn’t you say anything??!!” And I said “I’m not opening my mouth — my answers were all the same as yours!”

    I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to be Trump. Well, maybe I can see one piece of it – the pardons. He must flip through magazines and stuff going — yeah, “pardoning him would be nice,” or “no pardon for that schmuck!” And so I see in today’s NYT that, out of the blue, great ex-Met, ex-Dodger, and ex-Yankee Darryl Strawberry was pardoned! What was the crime — striking out with men on second and third? Dropping a pop-up in the ninth against Boston? Nope: tax fraud and drugs. Boring. Here’s how Straw tells it:

    “Half asleep, I glanced over and saw a call from Washington DC. Curious, I answered, and to my amazement, the lady on the line said, ‘Darryl Strawberry, you have a call from the President of the United States, Donald Trump.’ I put it on speakerphone with my wife nearby, and President Trump spoke warmly about my baseball days in NYC, praising me as one the greatest player of the ’80s and celebrating the Mets. Then, he told me he was granting me a full pardon from my past.”

    Maybe it wasn’t entirely out of the blue. Darryl appeared on Trump’s idiotic Apprentice show back in 2010. Must have made a good impression.

    Love you, Straw!

    Answers in today’s puzzle included SNOW and HAIL CAESAR. The following dreadful/wonderful explosion of puns, courtesy of egs made me wonder if he might be a distant relative of Owl Chatter friend Brookline Carl.

    Julius: Hey Cleo! What is that stuff coming down? SNOW?
    Cleopatra: HAIL CAESAR
    Julius: Thanks, but I was hoping for a report on weather conditions.
    Cleopatra: Can’t help you there. You hungry?
    Julius: Yeah, I think I’ll get a Gallic pizza. It gives me bad breath, but I can eat a whole pie and still want more. Brutus claimed to have had doubles the other day! I didn’t believe him. I said “Ate two, Brute?”
    Cleopatra: He has lot of Gaul! What’d he say?
    Julius: Something about me joining his friends, the Idesofs, for a walk. I think he said “Be where the Idesofs march.”
    Cleopatra: Sounds weird but you might take a stab at it.

    De ball has been taken out of Daboll’s hands. In a move that can only be called Kafka-esque, the Jints fired their head coach Brian Daboll after blowing another fourth quarter lead on the way to their 2-8 record, an incredible half game worse than the Jets! Why “Kafka-esque?” Because Daboll will be replaced by assistant coach Mike Kafka.

    Remember Eartha Kitt, old timers? She popped by for a visit today, even though she’s been dead since 2008. She was at 20A: KITT, and her clue was “‘Santa Baby’ singer, Eartha.”

    An activist for peace and civil and gay rights, she is famously remembered for taking the Johnsons to task during a White House visit in 1968 over the Vietnam War. She said: “The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. . . . They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons – and I know what it’s like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson – we raise children and send them to war.” Kitt’s remarks reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears. It ended Kitt’s career in the U.S. but she continued to perform in Europe and Asia. The CIA branded her a “sadistic nymphomaniac.” Ouch! She returned to the White House in 1978, accepting an invitation from President Carter who, apparently, was not averse to sadistic nymphomaniacs.

    Kitt married John Macdonald and they had a daughter they named Kitt. John was white and Kitt came out white too. Here’s a shot of Kitt (Eartha) and Kitt together.

    They lived near each other in Connecticut and had a very strong bond. Kitt said this about her mom’s death: It was just the two of us hanging out [during the last days] and she was very funny. We didn’t have to [talk] because I always knew how she felt about me. I was the love of her life, so the last part of her life we didn’t have to have these heart to heart talks. She started to see people that weren’t there. She thought I could see them too, but, of course, I couldn’t. I would make fun of her like, “I’m going to go in the other room and you stay here and talk to your friends.”

    She was 81 when she died. In her youth she was, well, here, take a look.

    Story of Local Interest from The Onion:

    Area Dad Needs More Time With Museum Plaque

    NEW YORK—Leaning in close to the paragraph of text as his family continued on to the museum’s other exhibits, area dad and Frick Collection visitor Phillip Schermeier, 58, reportedly needed more time with the plaque beside Rembrandt’s 1626 painting Palamedes In Front Of Agamemnon Thursday. “We were already heading over to the Goya stuff, but then we looked back and saw Dad still standing next to the first Rembrandt painting, staring pretty hard at the description on the wall,” said Schermeier’s daughter Laura, noting how her father at several points glanced back and forth between the plaque and the painting as he took in facts about the scene depicting the mythological warrior Palamedes, who helped lead the Greek forces in the Trojan War, genuflecting at the feet of the legendary king of Argos. “His face couldn’t have been much more than a foot away from the plaque, and I think he may have even started nodding a little as he read. I honestly don’t even know how long he was there, because by the time he finished up, we had already moved on to another room.”

    If you watched the World Series, you may have noticed a small number 51 added to the sides of some players’ baseball caps. It’s not unusual for someone in an organization or an organization’s past to pass away and be honored in that fashion by the players, more often with a number on a shirtsleeve. I hadn’t heard what it was about and thought nothing of it. But today I learned #51 is the number worn by Dodger relief pitcher Alex Vesia. Before Game 1 of the Series, the Dodgers announced Vesia would be away to attend to a “deeply personal family matter.” As a show of support, the other Dodger pitchers played the Series with Vesia’s number inscribed on their caps.

    Sadly, Vesia and his wife Kayla announced that their baby daughter Sterling Sol Vesia passed away on October 26. They offered their deepest thanks to the doctors, nurses, and countless well-wishers. They said there were no words to describe the pain of their loss.

    Dodger outfielder Kiki Hernandez was walking back to the dugout after striking out in the ninth inning of Friday night’s Game 6, and when he glanced up at the big scoreboard screen he noticed a little “51” on the side of Toronto pitcher Chris Bassitt’s cap. He wasn’t aware that the Blue Jay relief pitchers had also inscribed their caps with Vesia’s number. “For those guys to do that [with all the pressure they were under from the Series], it’s incredible,” Hernandez said.

    The Vesias included this photo of Sterling’s little hand in their announcement. May her memory be a blessing.

  • Green Peppers

    Princeton Women’s Ice Hockey. What an intense game! These ladies really go at each other – in a good way. Only two penalties called the entire game and the action was fierce throughout. Princeton took 44 shots on goal, but only, let’s see — zero got through! Yikes! St. Lawrence won 1-0 on a breakaway in the second period.

    OK, fellas — ease up now. I know how sexy those unis are. Try to maintain composure.

    Alexa Davis scored the lone goal for SLU, a grad student from Philly who went to Cornell undergrad. Hey, Lexy — great shot!

    Goalie Emma-Sofie Nordström was a goddamn boulder in goal. It felt like they could have played for another hour without beating her.

    George noticed proudly that a banner draped over the boards listed our Sarah (Fillier) as an alum who was an “Olympic champion (2022).” Brava, SF!

    The puzzle today took an interesting (for me) little turn in the clue for the word DOT at 31A: It engaged in a little Hebrew School lesson. The clue was “What distinguishes ‘bet’ from ‘vet’ in Hebrew.” When reading Hebrew, if the script contains “dots” it guides your pronunciation. If not, you just better know it. The dot is called a “dagesh.” Anony Mouse helped with this comment:

    Here’s some pedantry: “bet” and “vet” are not two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. They are the same letter, one with the dagesh and the other without, and there to tell you how to pronounce the letter (sort of like an e or i after a g tells you how to pronounce it). With the dot: hard b, without: soft (or v). The diacritical does not appear in the Torah scrolls. Only the undotted version shows up there; in fact, it’s the first letter in the Bible–beresheet (in the beginning), not veresheet. The way the rabbi explained this to me when I was a wiseass bar mitzvah boy was that when Hebrew made the transition from oral to written, everyone knew what the word was so they could infer the hard or the soft version of bet. But in later years, as knowledge of ancient Hebrew receded, the diacritical were added to assist readers. And evidently, crossword constructors.

    Oy. Stay away from the herring.

    The answer at 41A reminded me of a joke Dan Reynolds told me, alav hashalom. This 97-year-old man goes to a lawyer and says he wants to divorce his 94-year-old wife after 70 years of marriage. The lawyer asks “Why now?” and the man says, “Enough is enough.” (The clue was “I’ve had it!”)

    Ashley Punter, of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) posts: I just ate a green pepper that tasted like an orange pepper.

    Nick Renouf: That’s the problem with society today.

    Paula Adams: They taste different?

    Ruth Hunt: It’s a cross-dressing orange pepper which “identified ” as a green pepper?

    Avi Liveson: You’re giving new meaning to the concept of “salad dressing.”

    Lewis Ewan Jones: Finally – Armageddon!

    Avi Liveson: It’s like that riddle: What’s blue and smells like red paint? Answer: Blue paint.

    Phil Goodchild: Funnily enough I had a similar but amazing experience with my dinner last night. In the past, one of my favourite vegetables, that being Brussel Sprouts have over the time seemed sweet and some have tasted like Tangerine. I can only presume they have been altered in the crossing of varieties to be less Brusselly. At a local farm shop where I now get my veg, the recent Brussels have that traditional Brussell Sprout bite and they are not sweet like they have been sugared or taste like Tangerine. Last night’s dinner of beef steak pie I made with spuds and Brussells was superb due to the traditional proper Brusselly Brussells.

    Avi Liveson: Not sure how that’s similar. In your case, the item in question tasted as it was supposed to taste. Happy for you, though.

    Phil Goodchild: Ah yes but my point was a lot of Brussel Sprouts in recent years do not taste like real Brussel Sprouts should so it was a pleasure to find a farm shop that had some proper traditional tasting ones.

    Avi: Well put. I withdraw my point.

    Jason Andreoli: Pepper varieties are weird, while the red ones start off green, some green peppers never go red, yellow and orange can start green and ripen but others are brightly coloured all along. Been growing them from seed for 20 years and every years crop is different.

    Phil Rogers: Are you sure it wasn’t a toilet pepper?

    Avi Liveson: I saw no mention of that in the newspepper.

    Break up the Jets!! New York 27, Cleveland 20. Two in a row. Woohoo!

    Baby steps. We’ll take it.

    See you tomorrow!

  • This Is Fine

    The following was posted by Jose Rodgers of the Dull Men’s Club (UK), for obvious reasons:

    But Robert Haggar threw us all in a tizzy:

    As someone who uses and orders a lot of fixings and fittings, they’re not called those names at all.

    Jonathan Page: Go on then!

    Robert: [Examples provided.]

    [Arrrrgh! The post was removed before I could mine it for more dull matter. This happens sometimes. It’s very upsetting. I had posted the following comment: A friend went on an all-nuts diet. Now he’s a shell of his former self.]

    Happy Birthday to the Indian-American novelist Raja Rao who was born in India on this date in 1908 and passed away in Austin Texas at the age of 97. Wikipedia notes that his works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. I am too stupid to know what that means, and, of course, I have not heard of him. But the Writer’s Almanac shares this opening of his first novel Kanthapura written when he was just 21:

    Our village — I don’t think you have ever heard about it — Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara. High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian seas, up the Malabar coast is it, up Mangalore and Puttur and many a center of cardamom and coffee, rice and sugar cane. Roads, narrow, dusty, rut-covered roads, wind through the forest of teak and of jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellowing gorges and leaping over elephant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and now to the right and bring you through the Alambè and Champa and Mena and Kola passes into the great granaries of trade.

    It’s the prettiest time of the year here at Owl Chatter headquarters in Chatham NJ. I wrote this haiku:

    Red and yellow leaves
    Against the blue of the sky
    Good to take a walk

    Today at 3pm the Princeton Women’s Ice Hockey team will face off against St. Lawrence, and we’ll be there to cover it. I checked the roster and found a defensewoman for Princeton from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, with the great name of Brooklyn Nimegeers. Don’t let the sweet smile fool you — you’ll be picking up your teeth with broken fingers if you look at her funny.

    The puzzle today was slammed as way too easy for a Saturday, and I agree. But 58A was an outlier, and then some. “Mali Empire ruler who single-handedly made the value of gold almost worthless by giving away so much of it.” Answer: MANSA MUSA. Makes you wonder: If he was a little tight, would Mansa Musa take Metamucil? (Asking for a friend.)

    Right above that the clue for ROOT CANAL was “Job for a driller?”

    At a ROOT CANAL I had years ago, before the doc started drilling, the assistant placed a tissue in my left hand and explained that they called it the “white flag.” I was supposed to wave it if I felt “discomfort,” and the doc would pause. I asked: Won’t the shrieking tip him off?

    A couple of Big Ten states crossed right at the start. Caitlin Clark’s college was tapped for IOWA right at 1A. And I missed the baseball reference in the clue “Red state?” The answer was OHIO and the “Red” was a Cincinnati Red, the consensus was: not politics.

    Hi Caity — good to see you again! Put those million dollar legs up and relax with a Diet Coke. George is back so we’re well stocked. You’re looking great! Folks okay?

    Another guest today was Liz Olsen, clued via her role in Wandavision. Gorgeous. Grab a cold one, Babe. Cait — shove over. You know each other? Loved Wind River, Liz.

    Liz, 36 now, is sister to the Olsen twins, of course, Mary-Kate and Ashley, and has an older brother Trent, who apparently can go f*ck himself for all anyone cares. She’s from California, but went to school at NYU, and has been married to the musician Robbie Arnett since 2019. They live in LA.

    11D was interesting. The clue was “Phrase spoken by a dog in a burning room, in a 2010s meme,” and the answer was THIS IS FINE. Apparently, there was a cartoon in which a dog is having coffee while the room is in flames and he’s saying “This is fine.” It became a popular meme for obliviousness, I guess, or the phrase was used to mean its opposite.

    At 26A, the clue was “John Coltrane album whose title suggests making major progress,” and the answer was GIANT STEPS. I’m not a big jazz fan, so I’m going to opt for this Taj Mahal tune Rex shared along with the Coltrane.

    Good luck getting your food stamps. See you tomorrow, Chatterheads!

  • Mr. Mojo Risin’

    From The Onion, for our Society department:

    Alarmed Taylor Swift Watches As Travis Kelce Prints Out Buffalo Wild Wings Catering Menu

    LEAWOOD, KS—Her eyes widening at the sight of the piece of paper moving inch by inch out of the machine, an alarmed Taylor Swift reportedly looked on Tuesday as her fiancé, Travis Kelce, printed out the Buffalo Wild Wings catering menu. “Babe, what’s that?” said the 35-year-old billionaire recording artist, taking a step closer to where the Kansas City Chiefs tight end sat in front of his laptop, and nearly dropping a mug after she noticed he was zoomed in on a picture of pretzel knots. “So, is this for your bachelor party? Because I thought we already agreed we were using that French chef for the wedding. ‘Chicken dipper?’ I don’t even know what that is. Yes, Travis, I’m sure they have salads too, but I don’t why you’re telling me that.”

    [Ease up, Babe. We’ll have Phil and Ana talk to him.]

    Do you know anyone named Vanessa? Caity had a close friend growing up by that name. She accompanied Caity to the dentist once (for fun, I guess) and when I brought her back, I told Vanessa’s mom that he filled a small cavity in Vanessa’s mouth. She was aghast and I had to convince her that I was kidding, which wasn’t easy since it’s hard to see what’s funny about it. Vanessa’s dad was Italian and a little scary. We were having dinner out with them once and the mom reminded the dad that he had to pick up a small table they ordered. The dad said, “I’m not sure it will fit in the trunk” and I almost said “Just push the bodies to the side.” Glad I didn’t.

    Anyway, at 63A today, the clue was “Woman’s name invented by Jonathan Swift,” and the answer was VANESSA. After extensive research (you know, a minute or two online), I was able to add that it’s from the Greek root for butterfly. The young woman subbing for Rex on his XW blog today went off on a tangent, noting that on the puzzles she constructs she tries to clue women without reference to a man, i.e., in their own right. Here’s what she said:

    “I have heard people comment that the NYT puzzle will rarely clue an entry that is a woman’s name by simply mentioning a real, famous woman. (Alternatives would include using a noun (like ‘dawn’ as a noun rather than a person), using wordplay (‘Name that anagrams to xyz’), or describing the woman via her relationship to a man.) This is not a trend that has stood out to me while broadly solving (which is not to say it does or doesn’t exist, just that I haven’t noticed!), but I did notice it with this clue, and it’s feedback that I think about when I write my own puzzles.”

    ********

    I suggested the clue today could have been “Woman’s name associated with butterflies.”

    Anony Mouse commented that I would be the only one who’d get it right, and I replied: “I’d probably forget.”

    And then Commenter Anoa Bob wrote: “Per xwordinfo.com, VANESSA has appeared in the NYTXW 31 times over the years. It has been clued as a specific woman 19 times. In its first appearance, Sun Feb 7, 1943, it was clued ‘Butterfly genus.’” [So there.]

    Here’s a pretty VANESSA. How pretty? Well, she divorced that clown on the left and hangs with Tiger Woods now.

    Hey, did you know this? Trump Jr. proposed to her with a $100,000 ring ($161,000 in 2024 dollars) that he received as a gift from a jeweler in exchange for proposing to her in front of paparazzi outside of the jeweler’s store at the Short Hills mall in New Jersey! Not a bad deal. How’s that for romantic?

    Their daughter Kai is a knockout too. Careful with those hands, Grandpa. You’re in enough hot water already with that Epstein business.

    I like anagrams. Did you know the lyric from The Doors’ song L.A. Woman “Mr. Mojo Risin’” is an anagram of “Jim Morrison?” (Morrison only told the band about it after the song was recorded. Blew them away.) Anyway, in today’s theme answers, the constructor takes the name of a language and anagrams it into a word in that language. E.g., CROATIAN anagrams to RAINCOAT. (Also FLEMISH to HIMSELF, and LATVIAN to VALIANT.)

    Egs, who never fails to impress, wrote: “I once knew a VALIANT LATVIAN who was FLEMISH HIMSELF but wore a CROATIAN RAINCOAT, so this puzzle really brought back some great memories.”

    There was a bit of a hoo-hah over whether Flemish is actually a language or merely a dialect. I added my two cents with: “I hope no one phlips me the phinger over this, but I’m phlegmatic over whether Flemish is a language for these purposes. Seems close enough for crosswords.”

    From The Onion sports pages:

    Self-Conscious Sumo Wrestler Wears T-Shirt Into Ring

    This poem by Martín Espada is today’s poem of the day from The Poetry Foundation. It rings a faint bell for me, so I might have shared it before. But so what? It’s called “The Monster in the Lake.”

    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.

    It has happened more than once that a baseball fan became torn between watching a key at-bat and rushing off to the bathroom to take care of business. Such a fan will appreciate Classic Auto Group Park in Eastlake OH, just 18 miles from Progressive Field (where the Guardians (nee Indians) play). The High-A Lake County Captains (the “Caps”) play in Classic Park. And in Classic Park you can watch a game from Toilet Row:

    Only in America!

    See you tomorrow Chatterheads! Thanks for popping by.

  • Hold The Sauce

    Election Day went well in Jersey for us lunatic Communist radicals bent on destroying America. All hail Mikie Sherrill, our congresswoman, now our Governess. Her ads all tarred her opponent as a tax raiser: how many Repubs face that charge? But everyone knew it was a case of her representing all that is good in the world and him representing all that is evil.

    Here’s Mikie (on the right) hangin’ with the cool Deputy Mayor of Asbury Park, Amy Quinn, in her Stone Pony tee.

    Is Bill Maher being snippy for dissing Kimmel for not thanking him? “Look, Jimmy apparently doesn’t like me too much anymore because he thanked everybody but me. And I was adamant, adamant, about supporting him that week and the next week,” Maher said.

    How does Maher know “he thanked everybody but me?” Anyone else who wasn’t thanked wouldn’t have been thanked, no?

    Kimmel was Sarah Silverman’s partner from ’02 to ’09. She was entering a pool in a fancy resort once and noticed a sign that said: “Do not enter if you have diarrhea or have had diarrhea within the last 14 days.” She said, “Why don’t they just come out and say it: No Jews allowed. She found a Jewish woman in the audience who claimed not to have had diarrhea for two weeks and likened it to the miracle of Chanukah. “She only had a three-day supply of Immodium . . . “

    Does she look sweet here? Don’t tangle with this woman — you will not come out alive.

    The Jets traded two of their best defensive men for draft picks yesterday. I’m too numb from all the years of torture to care anymore. May be a good move, what do I know? They certainly weren’t winning with them. Sauce Gardner has the best ever nickname, though. I’ll miss that.

    Dig in, Buddy. Good luck in Indy.

    Do you know who Anna Lee Fisher is? I didn’t either until she showed up in the puzzle today. She’s a doctor and chemist but gained fame as an astronaut who was, as the clue states, “the first mother to fly into space.” She was married to fellow astronaut Bill Fisher and had two kids with him, but they divorced in 2000. They are the only couple ever to have had sex with each other while in their space suits. If you think those ice hockey uniforms are sexy, get a load of Annie Lee in this hot get-up. No wonder Fisher couldn’t hold back.

    At 38D, the clue was “Dinner order request on a first date, perhaps.” Answer: NO ONIONS. Here’s Rex on it:

    Calling “NO ONIONS” an “order” is a stretch, and a big one. It’s an order specification—a part of an order, but not the order itself. And anyway, do people really avoid onions on “dates?” I never really understood the whole onions/bad breath connection. Bad breath is a very specific thing that has much more to do with mouth hygiene than anything you ate. If you’re gonna make out with someone right after dinner, you’re gonna have the meal on your breath to some extent. Who cares!? You want the damn onions, eat the damned onions! Life’s too short to be gaming the situation much.

    Turn it up!

    At 37D, the clue was “Prop in a comedy club,” and the answer was STOOL. Here’s egs: “I quit my traveling salesman job selling furniture to bars. Just so unpleasant having to drag STOOL samples from town to town.”

    Here is a Green Bee-Eater, showing how it got its name.

    And here’s a poem with the same name, by Pascale Petit from The Poetry Foundation.

    More precious than all
    the gems of  Jaipur—

    the green bee-eater.

    If  you see one singing
    tree-tree-tree

    with his space-black bill
    and rufous cap,

    his robes
    all shades of emerald

    like treetops glimpsed
    from a plane,

    his blue cheeks,
    black eye-mask

    and the delicate tail streamer
    like a plume of smoke—

    you might dream
    of the forests

    that once clothed
    our flying planet.

    And perhaps his singing
    is a spell

    to call our forests back—

    tree
    by tree
    by tree.

    OMG, this visit to the Dull Men’s Club (UK) got me laughing out loud. I mean it: I was sitting at the keyboard roaring. See if you can tell what set me off.

    Matt Hale posted: Just picked up the TV remote in an attempt to answer a phone call. Stared at it for a good 10 seconds trying to find the answer button. Going to bed now.

    Timothy Franklin: I took a remote to work instead of my phone.

    Tracy Lightfoot: I have tried to change a tv channel with my cordless phone.

    Alan Hunt: Over 60 by any chance? If ‘yes’ you are normal, if ‘no,’ what was the question? 

    Leon Cowan: I tried to open my front door with a Greggs sausage roll this morning. You’re not alone.

    Diane Reed: Can you let me know if you see my specs please?

    [OC note: It was Leon Cowan’s note, with the sausage roll. Too funny.]

    No way to top that. Might as well shut the store. See you tomorrow Chatterheads!

  • Janis Joplin Tattoo

    I popped by the Dull Men’s Club (UK) this morning and found this post by Dave Walsh with the photo:

    Coffee

    On way to recycling centre picked up my afternoon hit by drive thru. At the window the server informed me “just a wee second.” Now I’m well aware this is not meant to be taken literally and just means there will be a short delay.

    But is this not the worst idiom? 46 seconds later I got my drink. Surely a “wee minute” would be more literally right. The delay was apparently because they had to get a carrier for my single cup (double no less) Despite me not needing a carrier as I use the built-in holder in car. They said legally they had to pass it over in a carrier. This is no doubt mitigating legal risks from hot drink spills. At least I was able to dump the cardboard carrier at the recycling centre.

    And I commented: “I’m impressed your car knows your name. Unless it thinks everyone is named Dave.”

    That’s what my life is like now. That’s what I do.

    At 52D in the puzzle today, the clue was “Metaphor for a bad goalie,” and the answer was SIEVE. Pretty good.

    My comment: That SIEVE at 52D reminded me of the poor minor league hockey goalie who gave up eleven goals as his team lost an important playoff game. He was so despondent that on his way home from the arena he threw himself in front of a bus. Luckily, it went through his legs.

    That’s my favorite hockey joke. I told it in class several times and it never got a laugh.

    While we’re on the topic, did you know that a woman goalie signed a professional ice hockey contract to play with an NHL team (Tampa Bay)? She appeared in exhibition games back in ’92-’93 and played minor league hockey in men’s leagues? It was Manon Rhéaume. Her first husband was a minor league hockey player. She had a son with him who was a goalie for Michigan State. She has a son from her second husband too who plays now for UMich! Go Blue! Playboy invited her to pose for them. She said “No thanks.” I don’t see why they asked her to pose — there’s nothing sexier than those hockey uniforms.

    From The Onion:

    Man Hopes Nicely Dug Grave Will Get Him Back In Captors’ Good Graces

    Here’s something for our Math Dept (Hi Judy!), I think. The clue at 15A was “Like the number ‘i’” and the answer was NONREAL.

    Commenter SJ posted: I enjoyed the way they clued “i” as a NONREAL number. I always get a kick out of the nomenclature there as “i” is no more or less REAL than any other number. To further complicate matters, “i” is also referred to as an “imaginary” number when, again, it is no more or less “imaginary” than any other number.

    And tht came back with:

    “Hey, proud of you for saying that about the number i! Of course those are technical terms, real and NONREAL, and they are terms used by mathematicians, but I think you’d be very hard-pressed to find a mathematician who assigned a higher ontological priority to real numbers than to (nonreal) complex numbers.”

    “A more subtle sort of misconception can arise when people speak of ‘the’ square root of -1. There are two square roots of -1, notated as i and -i, but it would be a severe error to think that one is the ‘positive’ square root of -1 and the other the ‘negative’ square root. There is no property or characteristic of i that cannot be equally asserted of -i. (This recognition is a point of entry for what is known as Galois theory.) So you could say that i and -i are distinct but indiscernible. Metaphorically, if one of them walked into a room, you would never be able to identify which one of them it was by the way they look or act.”

    OK, thanks, but now my brain hurts. Not about a number walking into a room. That part’s okay.

    The puzzle’s theme today was COLORTV. The four theme answers were INDIGO GIRLS, GREENHOUSE, BLACK SUITS, and WHITE CASTLE. Each has a color followed by the name of a TV show. A little blah if you ask me. Word of the Indigo Girls reached me under my rock, but I am not familiar with their work. This song’s nice.

    Rex said when he saw them perform back in 1990, he was dating the sister of one of them. They are Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, both in their early 60s now. They met in elementary school in Atlanta and have been performing together since high school. Hey, don’t look at me in that tone of voice!!

    Caity asked us to take Robin to urgent care a while back, I think for strep throat. Robin is pretty wild in terms of how she dresses and on that day part of her outfit was a pair of gloves from which her fingers protruded and which showed (skeletal) bones on the nonprotrudive parts. (You may have to read that twice for coherence. Sorry.) The doc or RN who was doing the examination took a swab of her throat and asked her a bunch of questions. Then I asked: “Is it normal for us to be able to see the bones of her hands like that?” And she said: “No, it is not,” pretty emphatically.

    I spoke with someone from Verizon today, who was very helpful with a problem on my phone. Then he found me a new $15 a month discount I qualified for! Two for two. Then he tried to sell me on some security package for $10 a month. He went over the benefits it offered, like if my TVs or devices go bad, they will fix them for me, or help me install certain things in the house. I thanked him and said I’ll pass it up. He seemed incredulous and asked me “Why?” I said because it costs $120 a year, why else would it be? In fact, he really didn’t know me. I’d have turned it down if it just cost $1 a year. A dollar is a dollar. Damn right it is.

    Hard to imagine a song more well-known than “When A Man Loves A Woman,” by Percy Sledge, amirite? Well, Donna Jean Godchaux sang backup on it, as she did on a #1 hit by Elvis, “Suspicious Minds.” That was before she was introduced to the Grateful Dead and sang with them from 1972 to 1979. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll HOF with them in 1994.

    Sadly, Donna passed away Sunday, at the age of 78.

    Let’s hear it again.

    So if Percy Sledge married MC Hammer, would he be Percy Sledge Hammer? Asking for a friend.

    Rest in peace, Donna.

    I watch the news less than I used to because I’m not an idiot. And besides sports I often watch a food show. To show you how low I have sunk, I recently watched an episode of Man vs. Food that I had seen before. (It’s the one where he eats an enormous slice of pizza with thick levels of increasing hotness.) Anyway, I had it on some “best food ever” show and was surprised to learn from the discussion that a pork “butt” comes from the pig’s shoulder, not the rear! Did you know that? How can that be? Looks like the rear is the “ham.”

    Okay, Barbra Streisand, Paris Hilton, and . . . Tom Brady??? What in the world could be the connection? Woof, woof! TB just revealed that his beloved dog Junie was cloned from his former dog Lua who died two years ago. Creeped out? Streisand and Hilton also had their dogs cloned. Colossal Biosciences is the company Brady used and he’s also an investor in it, not just a customer. It’s a noninvasive procedure: A blood sample from Lua was used to “produce” Junie. The company gained some fame for “de-extinction” efforts, i.e., it brought back “dire wolves” via cloning.

    Now the Patriots, Brady’s old team, are suddenly winning again with a new QB who seems to have emerged from nowhere. Could it be Brady himself was . . . ? Nah.

    Here’s Paris. Phil — how many phones does she use?

    Let’s close today with this poem by Avia Tadmor, called “Nothing Promised.” It was the poem of the day from poets.org last Friday.

    You drag the boat across the tallgrass, shake out 
    the black snakes that made a provisional home under the bow 
    through the length of winter. The rope undone 
    for the first time in months, it slews behind you 
    through dirt, then shallow water, a thin trail 
    that follows you deeper into the afternoon, submits to the pull 
    of you, or perhaps the pull of the other shore. So sure you are 
    in your solitude, and I am startled to sit here, witness it. 
    How smooth is your sailing away, this measured 
    but steady drifting under pink, penumbral light. When we first met
    you portioned your stories, or they came brash, a light tower’s 
    unpredictable beam. Resolving to muteness the year your father 
    could no longer hear you, then woodwork, then a decade
    of travel. Tulum. The Mont Blanc where the five-foot two French guide 
    hauled you out of a crevasse. The Norwegian girl you met at a bar 
    in Cambodia who followed you back, wanting 
    to show you the ring on her labia. Her Janis Joplin tattoo. I follow you now 
    with my late summer eyes. Why do I love watching you like that, 
    cruising away from me? As if you are teaching me something 
    about love and distance. Two red-tailed hawks surrender 
    their shadows to the thicket of spruces. You stare up, 
    then past your left shoulder. I think, at me. The wind tugs at every 
    boat in our world. A hushed push and pull, a measure of faith 
    travels the distance between us. Buoyant as day, thin as light.

    See you tomorrow!

  • Southern Kisses

    All hail the conquering Dodgers. Very painful loss for Toronto. A classic lesson not to leave the door open for the enemy even an inch even with that chain thingie on, for they will kick it down. In 2019, when the Gnats went up 3-2 in the seventh inning of their Game 7 against the hated Astros, they knew better than to try to bring the baby home in the shaky stroller through the rain and bad neighborhood. They got another run in the 8th, and two more in the 9th. Case closed. Toronto had so many chances to add on, but came out empty-handed. You need to drive a stake through the heart with a team as deep and good as LA. Loved Dave Roberts’ reaction to Rojas’s improbable game-tying dinger with one down in the ninth. He threw his head back and grabbed it with both hands: “Is this really happening?”

    Here is a picture of joyfulness Phil caught for us.

    So, yup, LA dropped a PEOPLE’S ELBOW on the Jays Saturday night. I learned what that is from Saturday’s puzzle. It’s a wrestling term. The clue was “The Rock’s signature W.W.E. move.” This is from the Urban Dictionary: The people’s elbow was one of the signature moves of The Rock (Dwayne Johnson). First he would look at the crowd, then pull off his elbow pad in slow motion and throw it into the crowd. Then he would run left, bounce off the ropes then over the guy on the ground, bounce off the ropes again. Then he would kick his right leg up and drop his elbow on to the man’s heart. Ouch. By then, the crowd would have judged the poor slob to be evil, so DJ was administering the people’s justice in that fashion.

    At 17A, the clue was “Controversial Richard Serra sculpture once seen in N.Y.C.’s Foley Square.” I don’t recall seeing it, but Riverdale Joe did. It’s the TILTED ARC. Foley Square is south of Chinatown and east of Tribeca. It was on display from 1981 through 1989. It was a 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high solid, unfinished plate of rust-covered steel. Critics called it ugly and saw it as ruining the site. Following an acrimonious public debate, it was removed in 1989 as the result of a federal lawsuit and has never been publicly displayed since, in accordance with the artist’s wishes. And get off my lawn! Hrummmmph.

    At 15A, the clue was “Gift of Athena to Athenians,” and the answer was OLIVE TREE. Her original idea was a blender.

    Like a peanut, a puzzle can either be fresh or stale. If it’s fresh that means there are neat words, phrases, and concepts in it, as opposed to a pile of CAT, TABLE, OREO, etc. Saturday’s was beyond fresh, all the way to wonderful. It was by Michael Lieberman. In addition to the items discussed above, which you’ve already forgotten, it included MAYBE PILE, MOM FRIEND, and BEYOND PARODY, clued respectively with “‘I’ll think about this and decide later’ grouping,” “Acquaintance made at day care drop-off, perhaps,” and “Superlatively absurd.”

    Last — did you know that “the one mammal that can crack a Brazil nut with its teeth” is the AGOUTI? (What about us humans?) It’s a rodent, but so what? Who among us is perfect? (Well, maybe Armas, but even there — her choice in men?)

    Speaking of puzzles, here’s a Halloween costume photo Cody P. sent to Rex who posted it for us. Note the OREO on the front, and the scary face grid on the back. Regarding the crosswordese on the front, Cody wrote: “From left to right / top to bottom, the decorations are: ELM/ASH/TREE, EEL, EWE, OGRE, OREO, EAR, ALE/IPA, TEA, ALOE, APE, TEE, AXE, ANT, EYE/ISEE, EMU, and LEO” (represented by her friend’s dog, Leo). And get this — The grids are NYT crosswords from previous Halloweens.

    Per egs: People often say my blood classification is a mistake, but it’s just a TYPEO.

    Ever get the wrong thing in the mail? Here’s a true Halloween story from a woman in Hopkinsville, KY. “We were expecting a delivery of urgent medication that was flown in on like a Nashville airport thing, and they delivered two boxes,” she said. BTW, those “airport things” are called “planes.” But go on. “We opened one box and it turned out to be human body parts.” Yikes! Two arms and four fingers, if you must know. She called 911 and turned the items over to the county coroner, except for one “because I always wanted to give my mother-in-law the finger,” she explained (no she didn’t). As a good illustration of TMI, the coroner stated the items came from four different bodies. They were supposed to be delivered to a school or hospital for surgical training.

    Hard to imagine that anyone noticed, but Owl Chatter went into radio silence for two days. This is because our headquarters were invaded by around ten of the most fearsome folks known to mankind: teenage girls. We turned our house over to Robin (the artist formerly known as Lianna) and her buddies for a birthday (Sweet 16, kinahora) sleepover party. Mom Caitlin was in charge (like anyone could be). All went well!!

    We fled down to a dingy motel in Bordentown (see room, below), and took in a nice concert in Princeton on Sunday, as well as Saturday dinner at one of our favorite spots, Destination Dogs in New Brunswick; breakfast at one of our favorite spots, Chesterfield Bagels (their tobacco bagel is to die for) near Bordentown, and lunch at a great new (to us) pizza place in Skillman NJ, with Owl Chatter friend Jersey Mary, Beniamino’s (wow – out of this world).

    We watched Toronto fall on this TV.

    And here’s Beniamino, our new best friend!

    If you’re looking to hear two cute girls sing a great old Steve Forbert tune, you’ve come to the right place. (Happy Birthday Peyton, whoever you are. To 120!) See you tomorrow, Chatterheads! Thanks for stopping by!