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The Cooper Do-nuts Uprising
So Abie runs into Max and Max says, “Oh my goodness — how did you get that black eye?” Abie says: “Bernstein gave it to me. He came up to me yesterday and said: ‘This is what you get for calling my wife an ugly pig,’ and he punched me!” Max says, “That’s terrible, but why are you laughing?,” and Abie says: “The joke’s on him – it wasn’t me!“
Owl Chatter’s favorite poet, Ted Kooser, has a poem in today’s Writer’s Almanac. It’s not from Winter Morning Walks, but I was familiar with it nonetheless. He wrote it in May, 1999. It’s from Delights & Shadows, and it’s called “Father.”
Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient, fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day — the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that at the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.
North Dakotan writer Louise Erdrich was born on this day in 1954. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a tribe of the Ojibwe people, and her books feature Native American characters and settings. Her mom was a Chippewa woman, and her maternal grandfather was a tribal chairman. In 2012 her novel The Round House won the National Book award, and in 2021, she won a Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman.
She was part of the first class of women admitted to Dartmouth in 1972 and earned her BA in English there. She went on to Johns Hopkins for her MA.
Here she is, below, with her baby Animikii Kiniins Erdrich in 2001. Her English name is Azure and she was born when Erdrich was 47. Animikii is a giant mythological thunder-bird common to the northern and western tribes. The beating of their immense wings causes thunder, which is sometimes mistaken for flatulence. [No it isn’t.] Erdrich had three children with her husband before they divorced: Persia, Pallas, and Aza Marion. Azure’s dad was a Native American healer and teacher.
In case you missed Tucker Carlson’s return to the airwaves (via Twitter) yesterday (a 10-minute video), the highlights included an expression of sympathy for Putin and mocking of Owl Chatter fave Zelensky. We were also told that UFOs and extraterrestrial life are “actually real.”
Did the charges read “Assault with Coffee and Donuts?” And why was a story about a “Gay Riot” on the front page of the NYT Food section today, of all places?
Let’s hearken back to May 1959, Los Angeles. Cops were routinely harassing gays and trans people at Cooper Do-nuts in the seedy gay area known as The Run. They finally had enough. Drag queens, hustlers and other customers pushed back, barraging officers with hot coffee and half-eaten crullers. Outnumbered, the police fled. Amazing. Author John Rechy recalls seeing coffee cups fly. Unfortunately, the cops returned with backup and arrests were made.
The uprising, occurring ten years before Stonewall, is part of LA gay lore, and the City Council is set to approve the installation of a street sign commemorating a Cooper Do-nuts shop for its historic role.
But now the very occurrence of the event is being called into question. There is no mention of it in the media back when it was said to have happened, even the underground tabloids that cover gay life. Research shows there was no Cooper Do-nut shop at the location! But Rechy, a leading source of the story, explained it was a different donut shop that people called “Coopers” because Coopers was synonymous with donuts back then.
Whether or not the incident occurred, Keith Evans, whose grandfather ran the shops, says the commemoration is not out of place because the shops were a friendly and supportive haven for the gay and trans communities. Many gays were offered jobs. Here are Keith and wife Jacquie, and then Grandpa Jack Evans. (Note how the C in Cooper is formed.)
Nancy Valverde, an activist who is also being honored, said she and her lesbian friends “always felt accepted” at Cooper Do-nuts during an era when it was dangerous to be openly gay. After classes at a barber school, she would walk to a Cooper Do-nut shop for a glazed doughnut, her favorite. “The minute we got a dime for cutting a head of hair, we’d go there and enjoy each other’s company,” said Ms. Valverde, who is 91 and in hospice. “Once we were together, people could be themselves.”
So let’s believe the uprising occurred. What’s the harm? And that somewhere, every once in a while, in the middle of the night, in the dark recesses of LAPD’s institutional subconscious, some young recruit is having a bad dream and yelling “Put down that donut! I’m warning you!“
Back to Dowd’s words, how about sillage? Sounds to me like some slop pigs would eat, but that’s way wrong. It’s the degree to which a perfume’s fragrance lingers in the air. You might say it’s the scent detected in the wake of the woman wearing it when she passes by. It comes from the French term for wake.
And then there’s remembrancer. It’s someone who has the job of reminding people of something, or more broadly, a chronicler. Here’s how it might be used:
Remind me to take my medication in the morning.
No way — I’m not your f*cking remembrancer.
Or:
Who was that on the phone?
It was Dr. Peterson’s remembrancer: I have an appointment tomorrow to have some unsightly moles removed from my tuchas.
OK.
See you tomorrow!
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Blackened and Blistered
It’s about time we got serious about pizza. And when better to do it — to celebrate it — then upon the passing of Andrew Bellucci. He was only 59. If you’ve had an unusually good pizza recently, there’s a damn good chance Bellucci had a hand in it (not literally).
OK — he wasn’t perfect. One day in 1995, two FBI agents walked into Lombardi’s, where he was working , ordered a pizza and ate it. They left with Bellucci in handcuffs. It stemmed from an earlier job he held as an administrator at a Manhattan law firm.
He was outgoing and popular, and he invited the lawyers and other employees to a party he threw in a restaurant on Christopher Street. There was an open bar and a live band. The wife of one of the partners looked around and said, “He must be stealing from you.” She was right. Bellucci eventually copped to 54 counts of fraud and was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison. In an interview from prison, he dismissed the seriousness of his crime, saying that his victims were just a law firm, an insurance company and a bank. “It’s not exactly like sticking up an old lady,” he said.
Happily, however, that’s not his legacy. His legacy is the pizza.
A review in the NYT in 1995 said: “The glory is the crust: light, thin, crisp yet elastic, blackened and blistered and full of the smoky flavor that comes from the coal oven.” Chef Nancy Silverton was especially impressed by a pie topped with fresh clams, garlic, oregano and olive oil.
When young, Bellucci spent hours at the public library, poring over old phone books, newspapers and advertisements. His reading convinced him that the first pizza in the U.S. was baked in a coal-fired oven on Spring Street by Gennaro Lombardi, an immigrant from Naples. Transfixed, he began nosing around Little Italy until, on Spring Street, he located a vacant bakery with a coal-burning oven. He kept searching until he found Mr. Lombardi’s grandson, also named Gennaro, and persuaded him to put the family name on a pizzeria with the oven he had found. Bellucci would make the pies.
His stories about pizza, pizza ovens, pizza families and pizza legacies, brought attention to styles and methods that other pizza makers would explore over the next few decades. “He helped usher in the revival of classic coal-fired New York pizza, which was really a return to the way pizza was before it became a slice-shop food on every street corner,” said one reviewer. He inspired the pizza universe we have now — a diverse pizza ecosystem in which even street-corner slices are considered worthy of serious attention.
After prison he had trouble getting back into the pizza business and ended up in Malaysia where American style pizza was being introduced. But the hours were long and he had no friends in Kuala Lumpur. One night, he swallowed 50 Vicodin tablets chased by Jack Daniels in a suicide attempt. He lived, although he was two hours late to work the next morning.
In 2017, he followed his pizza dream back to NY. The dream: a cathedral of pizza where clam pies would take up a full page on the menu, the clams shucked to order by a worker at a prominent station built to resemble a pulpit. That dream was never realized but he was hired to open Bellucci’s Pizzaria in Astoria, with a new $35,000 electric oven, and pizza coming in 25 varieties. His primary pizza obsessions were with the dough and with clam pizza, one of his pizza associates said. He saw that the clams were going on the pizza cold, so he figured he should sous vide them, heating them in a hot-water circulator for 45 seconds before baking. Bellucci was preparing clam pizzas as a surprise for some guests when he died of heart failure.
His obit in the Times says:
His return to the ovens as a celebrated old hand brought Mr. Bellucci into contact with a younger generation of bakers who are as obsessed with the minutiae of pizza as he was. He became a mentor to many of them, inviting them to work in his kitchen, sharing recipes and advising them before they went on to open their own pizzerias.
When Bellucci was just starting out, “nobody was trying to bring respect to pizza. It took a convicted felon to do that. That’s kind of crazy when you think about it.”
Mr. Bellucci is survived by his mother; his brother, Joel; and his wife, Geetanjali Peter, from whom he was estranged. His sister, Chantel, died of cancer at 14. He’s up in heaven now, working the coal-fired oven. He had no trouble getting in — St. Pete has a weakness for clams.
Could Trump have gotten some bad news from his crack law team after they met with the Justice Department? Here’s what he posted:
“HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S [sic] WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED”
How indeed? I ask you.
Today’s puzzle was pretty amazing, IMO, but Rex and many in the commentariat managed to be unimpressed. Every answer — 100% across and down — was symmetrically mirrored with an answer that exactly reversed its letters. So AVON had NOVA, SPEED had DEEPS, SPACER had RECAPS, etc. — for the entire grid. Here, take a look:
AMAL Clooney is in there at 5D — George’s wife. Boy does she look like Anne Hathaway, amirite? No one teases those smiles out of you like our Philly. Good catch, Buddy! Amal, which means “hope” in Arabic, and George have 5-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella.
The actress EVA Longoria is in there too, at 41A. I’m afraid to ask Phil if he woke her up for this shot. I don’t know what we’re going to do with him. Hi Eva! You look great in the morning!
Eva and ballplayer Evan Longoria are completely unrelated but have had to deal with the closeness of their names often in the media. When Evan was selected for the All-Star game in 2008, Eva sent him a bottle of champagne and a note thanking him for “doing the Longoria name proud.” In return, Evan sent Eva three signed jerseys. Is that a little obnoxious? Like sending photos of yourself as a gift? But what do I know?
Tired. See you tomorrow.
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Calico Roses
There was a time when, if you asked Roger Craig “What’s shakin’?,” he would’ve said “Everything!” Craig, who died yesterday at age 93, was the manager of the Giants in the 1989 World Series — the one that was interrupted before the start of Game 3 by an earthquake. That was on October 17. Both cities — Oakland and SF, whose teams were in the Series, suffered substantial damage.
Candlestick Park in SF suffered damage to its upper deck as pieces of concrete fell from the baffle at the top of the stadium and the power was knocked out. The game was postponed and Commish Faye Vincent said he didn’t know when play would resume. It finally resumed ten days later and finished the next day. Oakland swept the Giants in four games.
But Craig was best known (I only learned today) for the spread of the split-fingered fastball, the “pitch of the 80’s.” Craig didn’t invent the splitter — a coach named Fred Martin did. Martin taught it to Bruce Sutter, who rode it into the Hall of Fame. But Craig is credited with its spreading like wildfire. He taught it to Jack Morris, who also made it into the HOF, and whose pitching carried Detroit to the 1984 World Series title. And to Mike Scott who won the Cy Young Award with it in 1986 and said “God bless Roger Craig.” The pitch lost its popularity when it was suspected that the strain of its frequent use cost pitchers some velocity off their fastballs. But many pitchers today still include it in their repertoire, including Shohei Ohtani. David Cone, John Smoltz, and Curt Schilling used it often during their careers, and Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson adopted it late in theirs.
Craig is also two trivia question answers: (1) He started the last game for the Brooklyn Dodgers before they moved to LA. And (2) he started the first game ever for the Mets. (He lost both games.) He was the third player drafted by the Mets in the expansion draft (after catcher Hobie Landrith and infielder Elio Chacon). He lost 24 games for the Mets in 1962, when the team set the record that still stands of 120 losses for the season. He lost another 22 for them in 1963, including 18 in a row. Ouch.
But there were bright spots too. He beat the Yankees in Game 5 of the 1955 World Series — the only WS won by a team from Brooklyn. His best year was 1959 when he went 11-5 with the (LA) Dodgers and led the NL in shutouts with four. He started two games in the WS for them that year (one loss, and one no-decision), as they beat the White Sox in six games. In Game 4 of the 1964 WS, he beat the Yanks again, in relief, for the Cards, to whom he had been traded. The Cards won that series in seven games. His lifetime record was 74-98, with a solid 3.83 ERA.
Craig is survived by his wife, Carolyn; three daughters; a son; seven grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren, every one of whom throws a pretty mean splitter, you can be sure of that.
Here’s a shot of the autograph of his I have in my collection:
In the puzzle today 10D was MOONROOF. And a comment educated me, as follows: “In case you care, the difference twixt a Sunroof and a MOONROOF, — a Sunroof is the flip-up type, which doesn’t open fully, whereas the MOONROOF is the type that slides back into the roof. Trivia night stuff…”
At 39A, “Georgia who painted ‘Cow’s Skull With Calico Roses,’” was O’KEEFFE, of course. I had forgotten about that crazy second “F.”
“Calico” here clearly does not mean calico as in calico cat. You can see the rose is not mottled in color. It’s a fabric — these are “fake” roses. They were associated with death, since they were used to decorate graves in New Mexico. The painting draws from the devastation of a drought, so the association with death (along with the skull, of course), is appropriate.
Here’s the painting and Ms. O’Keeffe, when she was young.
Model/Mom/Baseball-wife Kate Upton paid a return visit to the puzzle and Owl Chatter today. Hi Kate! — thanks for stopping by again. Genevieve looks great!
Here’s the happy couple celebrating Justin’s 2017 World Series win with Houston. (We won’t spoil the moment by mentioning the Astros’ cheating.) Hey, get a room you two!
Last week DeSantis told an audience that “the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology leave it to the dustbin of history; it’s gone.”
Of course, he was ripping off WC’s historic speech: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Pretty cheap ripoff, DeSantis. You may fool the morons who support you, but you’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on Owl Chatter. Hrummmph — ain’t that right WC?
22A today was “100% behind,” and it turned out to be ALL FOR. Commenter JM said he thought it might turn out to be ALL ASS. Ha!
The clue for 16A today was “Eating utensil with a serrated edge.” Give up? GRAPEFRUIT SPOON, of course! I posted the following on Rex’s blog:
“Are the other fruits jealous of the grapefruit since it’s the only one with a special utensil devised for it? They must be, right?”
Thankfully, there was no response.
Don’t get up — I’ll let myself out. See you tomorrow.
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All rise!
When the answer to 1A today turned out to be DUNBAR, as in Dunbar’s number: “the cognitive limit to how many relationships a person can maintain,” my first thought was that it was some crackpot theory propounded by the character Dunbar in Catch-22. But it’s a real thing. It’s 150, BTW. It was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” It has become to be known as “Dunbar’s number.”
In David Wong’s 2012 novel This Book Is Full of Spiders, the character Marconi explains to David the effect Dunbar’s number has on human society. In Marconi’s explanation, the limit Dunbar’s number imposes on the individual explains phenomena such as racism and xenophobia, as well as apathy towards the suffering of peoples outside of an individual’s community.
Malcolm Gladwell discusses the Dunbar number in his 2000 book The Tipping Point. By trial and error, the leadership in a company discovered that if more than 150 employees were working together in one building, different social problems could occur. The company started building company buildings with a limit of 150 employees and only 150 parking spaces. When the parking spaces were filled, the company would build another 150-employee building.
In the modern military, operational psychologists seek info such as this to support or refute policies related to maintaining or improving unit cohesion and morale.
Here’s Josh Bolt. He played Dunbar in the 2018 mini-series version of Catch-22. It has nothing to do with Dunbar’s number, but he’s cute.
OK, I give up. I’m an Aaron Judge fan. Besides all the home runs, here’s a falling-through-the-fence catch he made yesterday against the Dodgers. I’ve held out against all the hoopla long enough. All rise!
Randall Goosby is a young violinist (26) who performed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto for us last night with the NJ Symphony and blew the roof off the house. Since Owl Chatter sits way up front it was quite an experience. He studied at Julliard and with Itzhak Perlman, and has already appeared with several major orchestras. His mom is Korean and his dad is African-American and he was born in San Diego. Here’s, first, what he looks like, and next what he sounds like. (He’s playing a jaunty “Louisiana Blues Strut,” which was the encore he performed last night after the Tchaikovsky, when the audience wouldn’t let him leave.)
Take care of yourself, Goosby. The future is bright.
The puzzle today, by Rafael Musa, threw itself into the battle for gay rights. Two linked answers were PRIDE FLAG, and it contained six colored “stripes” representing that flag. For example, a series of squares shaded orange were clued with “Olympics no-nos” and the answer was STEROIDS. Then, since steroids are also called “juice,” and the squares were shaded in orange, the answer next to it was ORANGE JUICE, clued with “Screwdriver component?” Get it? That happened six times so there were six colored stripes running across the grid to comprise the pride flag. (Also George TAKEI was a guest in the grid, the actor and gay activist.) Take that DeSantis! Crossworld rises against you!
Harummmmmph.
Thanks for popping in. See you tomorrow!
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The Nobody Bird
This is a nice story from The Writer’s Almanac stretching back 223 years. It was on this date in 1800 that John Adams (then Prez) arrived in Washington. It had been selected by GW to be the nation’s capital but it sort of didn’t exist yet: there were no schools or churches, just some housing for workmen and a few stores (IKEA, Bed Bath and Behind — stuff like that). It was swampy and mosquito-ridden. Adams had left wife Abigail back in Philly and, in the age-old tradition of lying to one’s spouse, he wrote to her: “I like the seat of government very well.”
The White House (then called The President’s House) was only ready for him a few months later. After spending the first night there (and thus becoming the first Prez to sleep in The White House), he wrote this in a letter to Abigail: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”
About 150 years later, FDR had the words from Adams’s letter to Abigail carved into the mantel in the State Dining Room.
Obviously, however, heaven had other ideas.
Have you heard of the actress Sadie Sink? She’s in Stranger Things and she visited the puzzle today. Hi Sadie! Very nice to see you! Sadie’s from Brenham, TX, and is only 21, but already has established herself nicely in show biz. We love the name. Her mom is a math teacher and her dad a football coach. When Sadie was in her teens and it was already clear she had serious talent, her family supported her by moving to Jersey so she’d be in reach of NY. Smart.
Woody Harrelson inspired her to become a vegetarian when they were working together, and she has stayed with it since 2015. That may explain the healthy glow. The pretty eyes must be from her folks.
Are you having a lazy Saturday like me? Hope so. If you’re sleeping in, you can relate to today’s poem in The Writer’s Almanac by Marjorie Saiser, called “Weekends, Sleeping In.” It’s from her collection with the wonderful title: Beside You at the Stoplight.
No jump-starting the day,
no bare feet slapping the floor
to bath and breakfast.Dozing instead
in the nest
like, I suppose,
a pair of gophersunderground
in fuzz and wood shavings.
One jostles the other
in closed-eye luxury.We are at last
perhaps
what we are:uncombed,
unclothed,
mortal.Pulse
and breath
and dream.* * * * *
I wasn’t planning on doubling up on poems — don’t want to overdo it. But when I googled Marjorie Saiser I ran into this one too. It’s called “The Nobody Bird.”
“I’m nobody! Who are you?”
— Emily DickinsonThe woman leading the bird walk
is excited because she thinks
for a minute the bird
is one she doesn’t have
on her life list
and then she says Oh it’s
just a dickcissel.I raise my binoculars
to bring the black throat patch
and dark eye
into the center of a circle.
I see how the dickcissel
clings to a stem
when he sings, how
he tilts his head back,
opens his throat.The group follows
the leader to higher ground.
The wind comes up; white blossoms
of the elderberry dip and
right themselves in a rocking motion
again and again. An oriole
flies into the cottonwood,
the gray catbird into
the tossing ripening sumac.The nobody bird
holds on,
holds on and sings.
Dickcissel June 7th, 2020 Near Corson, South Dakota
Have you heard of JUSTINIAN II? He was in the puzzle today, oddly clued with: Byzantine emperor known as “Rhinotmetos” (“the slit-nosed”)
Commenter Wanderlust did a little digging:
I looked up JUSTINIAN II to find out why he was called “the slit-nosed.” According to Wikipedia, he was a despotic emperor who was overthrown and had his nose cut off so that he could never rule again. (Apparently, the maimed were not considered fit to rule.) But he did win the throne back, wearing a gold replacement nose! Better than his first one! But he was just as despotic in his second rule, and his own army turned on him and killed him. Wonder who got the nose.
[That must be where the expression “to win by a nose” comes from, no?]
OC’s fave clue of the day: “Apple press release?” — answer: CIDER.
The centerpiece (or, if you prefer, centipede) of the puzzle was a “thing stack” of three answers right in the middle that spanned the entire grid, one on top of the other. They are “SOMETHING TO HIDE, ANYTHING YOU WANT, and NOTHING PERSONAL. And cutting through them from top to bottom was PUZZLING PROBLEM. That last one led Rex to reference the Talking Heads’ song “Puzzling Evidence” from their True Stories movie. Turn up the volume.
Et tu, Google? According to today’s NYT, YouTube (owned by Google) announced it will no longer remove content that claims the 2020 election was marred by “widespread fraud, errors, or glitches.” It had been doing so since a month after that election.
YouTube says its new policy is an attempt to protect the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.”
Wait, what?
Let’s slow down and go over that last bit again. . . . to protect the ability to debate political ideas based on disproven assumptions . . .
It did concede that removing such content would “curb some misinformation.” Ya think? But apparently that ain’t enough to sustain the policy.
BTW, Twitter and Facebook never removed election lies, they just “labeled” them. But they both long ago stopped doing even that.
It made me wonder how YouTube does on Holocaust denial. The answer: not so hot. The ADL issued a report card on social media platforms. While YouTube was found to have a good policy, it was not enforcing it. Holocaust denialism can be found on YouTube. Only Twitch and Twitter did well.
Yuck — we can’t end the day on election lies and Holocaust denial. 26A in the grid was KIM. So here’s Kim Basinger’s pretty face to close with, a little bleary. Is she having trouble getting that blouse on? Whatever. See you tomorrow.
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Silver Horses
Kudos and special thanks to Brooklyn (formerly Newton) Rachel for alerting her dad Don, and through him all of us, to a great story in the NYT on Emma Zack, daughter of Carl, the head of Owl Chatter’s Bad Pun Department (is there any other kind?). It’s by Anna Grace Lee and is dated 5/31. It raves about Emma’s very successful vintage clothing business for zaftig women, otherwise known as women who wear “plus size” outfits. Here’s a link to the story: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/style/berriez-vintage-plus-size.html.
The store and online business is called Berriez. It’s a very personal approach to clothes-buying. Emma sets up appointments to meet with women personally to assess their needs and wants. It’s also a traditional store and online biz.
“When I walked in, because it’s my first time, I was like, ‘I could cry,’” said Susie Mensah, a model in town from Toronto. “I’m like a size 4X. It’s really rare that I get to find articles of clothing that express who I am and also give me the space to explore and have fun with who I am.”
This past fall, Emma put on the store’s first runway show during New York Fashion Week.
Berriez is full of a rainbow assortment of clothing, art and accessories. The racks contain garter T-shirts, patchwork pieces, squiggly neon Popsicle-colored crochet dresses, shirts with simulated nipple rings, and patterned button-downs from the 1980s and ’90s. Emma convinced one customer to buy a metallic chain bra. “Knock on wood, I’ve never had someone come by and leave empty-handed,” she said. “So I think that’s pretty telling.” [Note to Emma: A “kinahora” is better than “knock on wood.” It protects you from the Evil Eye. Consider it Jewish insurance.]
Here’s Susie Mensah, the happy shopper, and then Emma herself, brilliantly attired (voo den?).
As a service to Owl Chatter readers, we sent crack OC photographer Phil out to conduct exhaustive research on metallic chain bras, which we were not familiar with before reading the Emma story — a yawning gap in our undergarment awareness. Here are two examples he came back with after, for once, not complaining about an assignment. Thanks, Philly!
The clue at 7D was “It’s an uphill climb from here,” and the answer ran up (or down) the entire central length of the grid: EVEREST BASE CAMP. Its top five letters (EVERE) were right next to PERIL (“Jeopardy”). Pretty clever! And the ASS you can haul up the mountain is right there at 57A, the clue for which was “Doofus.”
Another pair of Dowd words: First, sialoquent. A great one. It means tending to spray saliva when speaking. “If you have a meeting with Cohen, try to stand back — he’s sialoquent like a geyser.”
Next, anagnorisis. This is the moment in a play, novel, or whatever, in which the protagonist comes to a key recognition about himself, or something or someone else. In my “Story of Aram” from a few days ago, the anagnorisis came when I saw Aram do his happy dance towards the end. Another example — “OMG, FBI Agent Crabnick has been working with the kidnappers all along! He’s corrupt!”
The rock band Cream, comprised of Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce, came to perform at Brandeis (over 50 years ago), and I had a front row seat thanks to our friend Barton, who was on some committee. The concert gained some renown (infamy?) because the band was delayed for six hours or so. Instead of starting at 8pm (I think), it started after 2 am. Yet almost the entire audience waited. I guess that’s a sign of how stoned we all were. (Is time passing?) I think I may have gone back to my dorm for a while and then returned.
The front row seat was more of a curse than a blessing. The sound was so loud that even with keeping my fingers in my ears a lot, my ears were ringing for close to a week. (It led to the following common refrain: My ears are ringing. So answer them.)
I mention Cream because of the recent death of Pete Brown, at 84, the British poet who wrote the lyrics to many of their songs, including “White Room,” “I Feel Free” and “Sunshine of Your Love.” “Sunshine” reached #5 on the charts, and “White Room” made it up to #6. Some of you may recall these stark lyrics Brown wrote for “White Room.”
In the white room with black curtains near the station
Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentment
I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselvesBrown was Jewish — his dad was Nathan Leibowitz at birth, and his mom was Kitty Cohen. They sold shoes.
In 1965, Brown and more than a dozen other poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael Horovitz and Andrei Voznesensky, read their work at the International Poetry Incarnation, which filled Royal Albert Hall in London. After Cream broke up, Brown collaborated with Jack Bruce for close to 50 years and wrote for other bands as well. Here they are (Brown on the right, Jack Bruce on the left):
Pete Brown is survived by his wife, Sheridan MacDonald; his daughter, Jessica Walker; his son, Tad MacDonald; and a grandson, all of whom were thankful to have felt the sunshine of his love.
See you tomorrow, everybody.
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Marilyn and Ana
On this date, 97 years ago, Marilyn Monroe was born in LA. The Writer’s Almanac, in its very short write-up, includes this quote of hers: “I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.”
It made me search for others:
“Beneath the makeup and behind the smile, I am just a girl who wishes for the world.”
“If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.”
“It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.”
“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” [Amen to that!]
“I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.”
“All we demanded was our right to twinkle.”
Happy Birthday, Marilyn! Thanks for twinkling.
So this wife jumps out of the shower and her husband jumps in, just as the doorbell rings. So he says, “Can you see who that is?.” and she says “Okay,” and wraps herself up in a big white towel and opens the front door. It’s their neighbor Ted. He takes one look at her and says “I’ll give you $300 if you let go of that towel.” So she does and it drops to the floor. And he hands her the money.
She wraps herself up in the towel again, and goes back upstairs. The husband says, “So who was it?,” and she says, “It was Ted from next door.” And he says, “Good — did he say anything about the $300 he owes me?”
Here’s OC fave Ana de Armas recreating a Marilyn moment.
Ana received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn in Blonde. She was the first Cuban-born actor or actress to be nominated for a leading role. The film got a 14-minute standing ovation after its international premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. Viewers mainly applauded the emotional performance de Armas gave. The film itself received eight “Razzie Award” nominations, including for worst picture and worst screenplay.
Here’s another shot of her as Monroe:
As discussed in an earlier Owl Chatter, otters are known for their playfulness. Thus the cute clue for OTTER today was “River gamboler.” But here’s a cautionary tale from a comment in Rex’s blog.
Reading up on otters, I found this from Wikipedia, “Animal welfare groups say that, unless threatened, otters rarely attack humans. In November 2021, about 20 otters ambushed a British man in his 60s during an early morning walk in Singapore Botanic Gardens. Despite weighing over 200 pounds, he was trampled and bitten and could not stand up without help from a nearby rescuer. The man speculated that a runner might have stepped on one of the animals earlier, and wished that there could be more lighting installed at that location.”
Here’s a shot that’s otterly adorable, or, if you will, “totes adorbs.”
14D was “Racing boats,” and the answer was SHELLS, altho I and others thought it might be sculls at first. Commenter jcal said:
A note on sculls. I’ve admired this picture since I was a boy. It’s at the Met museum in NY: Thomas Eakins – “The Champion Single Sculls.”
Frank Bruni’s newsletter just arrived. I was happy to see that a quote featured in Owl Chatter made it into his “For the love of sentences” feature. It was Anthony Lane’s line: “As career moves go, the path from neo-Nazism to horticulture has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserves.”
Several others were good too. In The Guardian, Emma Beddington served notice to friends about just how much she enjoys their visits to her home: “We don’t have many guests, because I get funny when people use my mugs, and offer a welcome along the lines of the peregrine falcon nest boxes I watch on webcams: a few strewn pebbles, dismembered pigeon corpses, me hunched and glaring in a corner, covered in viscera.” [That gets funnier every time I read it.]
In The Washington Post, on whether a campaign’s choice of Veep is important, Matt Bai wrote: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”
Going her way?
A little baseball chatter. When the Nats won the championship back in 2019 two of their most electric stars were Trea Turner at short, and Max Scherzer pitching. The Nats traded both to the Dodgers the following year in a fire sale. Turner later signed with the Phillies for zillions of dollars, and Max is on the Mets, getting $43 million a year. Anyway, I had the Mets game on today. They were playing the Phils and Turner came up to face Max for the first time since they were teammates in 2019. Max struck him out with a brilliant slider.
The confrontation led Gary Cohen, the Mets announcer, to ask Keith Hernandez, also a Mets announcer and former star first-baseman, if he was ever in the same situation — facing a former teammate like that.
Keith thought for a while and then said: Roger McDowell. He said he knew McDowell had a great sinker, so he went up braced for it. In the middle of the at-bat McDowell stepped off the mound and moved his third baseman over a few yards. Hernandez said he then threw him a sinker that really took a dive or else was loaded (i.e., a spitter). In any case, Keith hit a line drive directly to where McDowell had just moved the third baseman.
Hernandez and McDowell figured prominently in an hour-long Seinfeld episode that he (Seinfeld) has said is his favorite episode. It’s a spoof of the famous Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. Jerry befriends Hernandez (who also goes out with Elaine), and Kramer and Newman accuse Keith of spitting at them near the players’ parking lot after a game. Jerry supports a “second spitter” theory, which turns out to be correct — it was McDowell, whom Kramer and Newman had taunted during the game.
Let’s finish with a pair of words off of Dowd’s list.
Chiasmus: It’s a rhetorical device in which two or more clauses are balanced against each other by the reversal (“crossing”) of their structures to produce an artistic effect. (Huh?) Wikipedia says the specific words in the first part cannot be reproduced in the second part, but other sources are not so limiting. So an example in Wikipedia is (from Othello):
But O, what damned minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strongly loves.The chiasmus appears in the second line with the cross from dotes/doubts to suspects/strongly loves.
This example is easier to see and it allows the specific words to repeat: Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you.
One more: Clinchpoop. What a great word! A clinchpoop is an uncultured, ill-mannered person. Example: It’s no longer unimaginable to have a clinchpoop serve as the President of the United States.
See you tomorrow!
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Wiener Schnitzel
Oy. Spent the morning with the lawyer going over our wills. Need a Kooser to get back on the planet. Here’s one from Winter Morning Walks.
Where two fences meet at a corner,
two thickets of bare plum bushes
also have met, and have blended
to soften the corner with clouds
of wine red canes and purple thorns.
Two weeks ago, they pulled a snowstorm
down out of the wind and spread
a long soft drift beneath their branches,
and though by this morning the snow
had melted away from the field,
the drift sleeps, long and white and cold,
rounding the corner, an L shape
that gracefully tapers out to its ends
like a boomerang, a new one that never
flew back to the hand of the wind.
Here’s a plum bush bloom.
In the puzzle today at 29D “They’re roasted at a roast” is WIENERS. I just applied the “i before e” rule, but if you’re wondering about its spelling (IE vs EI) check out this short video Rex shared on it:
Then Jim in Canada wrote:
“NO, you can never spell it WEINERS. It’s name derives from the Austrian spelling of Vienna, which is WIEN. WIENERS are ‘from Vienna’ such as Wiener Schnitzel.
“Likewise, frankfurters are from Frankfurt, which isn’t even in the same country as Vienna, but somehow we tend to use those terms interchangeably on this side of the world. Whatever.”
[Note: Since Jim in Canada wrongly inserted an apostrophe in “its,” above, you should take his point with a grain of salt.]
[BTW, the expression “to take something with a grain of salt,” comes from an old belief that a little salt can counteract the effect of poison (or help it go down better). Thus, the “poison” of an error, can be mitigated with a bit of salt.]
When I noticed that the answer at 40A turned out to be YEE (from the crosses), I wondered how that could be clued. It seems like a nonsense word. But constructor Brandon Koppy clued it nicely with “Start of a rodeo cry.” (Think “yee-ha.”)
And. speaking of rodeos, at 57A, BUFFALO BILL was clued with “Wild West showman who lent his name to an N.F.L. team.” It led Beverly C. to the following memory:
“I spent a couple of pre-teen years living in Cody Wyoming in the late ‘60s. It was Buffalo Bill Central. His grandson rode on horseback in the 4th of July parade looking just like him, lanky, with the beard and long white locks. After the parade I’d roam around the basement of the Woolworth’s store, eyeing the colorful plasticware like candy. Sometimes at the soda counter they had a collection of helium balloons. You’d pick one and the lady behind the counter would pop it. A little piece of paper fell out with your price for a banana split. Kept hoping for a free one, but liked them anyway.”
[That’s a perfect example of why I love the puzzles, and Crossworld. The little doors that open. What a sweet story.]
Walt Whitman was born on this date, 204 years ago. Yikes. He was living with his mom in Brooklyn when he read Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which said that America needed a poet to tell its story. Whitman felt it was he. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
So he began working on “Leaves of Grass,” and used his own funds to have 795 copies printed. He was 37. He was careful to make it small enough to fit in one’s pocket because he imagined its being carried out to be read in the open air. Since parts of it were openly erotic, some of the criticism was pretty harsh — “a mass of stupid filth.” Ouch! Willa Cather referred to him as “that dirty old man.” [Hey, what’s wrong with dirty old men??!!] Whitman responded by adding 146 poems to the next edition.
He left NY for Washington DC when his brother was wounded in the Civil War, and served as a volunteer Army hospital nurse. Towards the end of his life, when asked directly if he was gay he declined to answer but said sex was “the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood — that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world.”
You tell ’em Wally! Happy 204th!
That head-over-heels feeling — is it love, or is it limerence? (It’s the first word on Maureen Dowd’s list.) From what I can tell from my exhaustive research of about a minute and a half, if it progresses into a deep affectionate relationship, then it’s love. If it never gets beyond superficial obsessiveness with a tinge of lunacy, then you’ve got yourself a badass case of limerence.
This woman? I’m a little worried it’s limerence. It’s that little smidge of insanity in her gaze.
And this guy? — Fuhgeddaboutit.
See you tomorrow.
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Get Your Kicks on Route 66
The clue at 21D today was “Entire range,” and the answer was GAMUT. It led Barbara S. to this funny memory:
The word GAMUT always makes me smile because I had a colleague who used the expression “Throw down the GAMUT.” You’d think it wouldn’t come up much, but he found a surprisingly large number of instances in which to use it. To this day, if I ever use the expression (correctly, I hope) I always have to stop and think “GAMUT or gauntlet?”
Commenter jberg then wrote:
“Barbara, I always had that same GAMUT/gauntlet problem, mostly because I had no idea what a gamut was. Then I started reading some history of early music and learned about Guido of Arezzo, who drew a hand, marked the knuckles and fingertips with the names of all the notes within the range of human voices, and used it to teach singing. Apparently the lowest note was Gamma Ut, hence GAMUT. I never saw the use of it, but at least now I know what a gamut is, so I don’t confuse it with gloves anymore. But then there’s the ‘gantlet,’ something one is made to run, which also confused me.”
The following note from the Merriam-Webster folks fleshes it all out:
“With the song “Do-Re-Mi,” the 1965 musical film The Sound of Music introduced millions of non-musicians to solfège, the singing of the sol-fa syllables—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti—to teach the tones of a musical scale. Centuries earlier, however, the do in “Do-Re-Mi” was known as ut. Indeed, the first note on the scale of Guido d’Arezzo, an 11th century musician and monk who had his own way of applying syllables to musical tones, was ut. d’Arezzo also called the first line of his bass staff gamma, which meant that gamma ut was the term for a note written on the first staff line. In time, gamma ut underwent a shortening to gamut, and later its meaning expanded first to cover all the notes of d’Arezzo’s scale, then to cover all the notes in the range of an instrument, and, eventually, to cover an entire range of any sort.”
The puzzle today was pretty amazing, IMO. The theme was announced via two down answers: EIGHT and BIRDS. So in eight of the long across answers birds were embedded — and exactly in the center of each word. Our favorite, of course was scOWLed. The others were: bEAGLEs, fraTERNity, maLARKey, laWRENce, balLOONist, pROBINg, and rEGRETs.
BTW, the clue for PROBING was “Fun for a proctologist.” [No it wasn’t.]
How about this one: What a proctologist studies in med school: ANALOGY.
I sometimes request a proctor from my department to help administer an exam in my large class. When making the request, I always ask for a proctologist. It never gets old.
Suggestion from a commenter: Download the Merlin bird app which is supported by Cornell U. Then when you are on your patio drinking wine turn on the sound ID and see the list of singers you are hearing! Fun.
The “appraisal” in the NYT of the late Tina Turner by Wesley Morris was beautiful. He said her book “I, Tina” “always read like a recipe book to me. The ingredients include force, power, will, sex, might. Hence the shock at her death. They’re saying she was 83? Nobody’s buying that. The ingredients made her seem immortal. For seven decades of making music, it all sizzled in her. That energy. It shot from her — from her feet, thighs, hands, arms, shoulders, out of her hair, out of her mouth.” (See photo.)
He goes on:
“Adrienne Warren, who played Turner on Broadway, needed physical therapy and personal training to survive the part. For the Hollywood movie of Turner’s life, Angela Bassett essentially became all muscle. They both won acting awards. But the prize most fitting is probably a gold medal.”
Let’s go with these shots for now. I’ll find one with her electric legs later.
He tells this story.
“In 1982, her tour stopped in Onoway, Alberta. My friend James is from Edmonton, and Turner’s death on Wednesday shook loose a childhood memory of the time his parents drove to Onoway to see her play the Devil’s Lake Corral. He sent a video. It’s a mind-blowing feat of acrobatics, precision, adrenaline, heft, costuming. In other words, the usual. Turner is drenched before the halfway point. But the reason to bring this show up is how it starts.
“Turner blows onto the stage wearing a sandy top and tights and a silky golden wig that looks like a Shih Tzu’s rear. Her first song isn’t her redefinition of “Proud Mary” or her in-the-trenches urgent undoing of “Help.” It’s Rod Stewart’s wife-murdering nightmare “Foolish Behaviour,” and Tina rips its head off. Presumably, the Devil kept to his lake that night.”
Rest in peace, Ida Mae Bullock. Rest in peace, Tina.
In the first sentence of his obit in the Times, actor George Maharis is described as “ruggedly handsome.” He died last Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills at age 94. Most of us remember him for his role of Buz Murdock on “Route 66” in which he appeared from 1960 to 1963. It was said he left the show for health reasons, but the truth is the executive producer was angry and felt betrayed when he learned Maharis was gay.
Maharis was arrested in 1967 on charges of “lewd conduct,” and in 1974 on charges of “sex perversion” for cruising in men’s bathrooms. He did not discuss his sexuality in interviews, but in one with Esquire in 2017 he proudly described being the July 1973 nude centerfold in Playgirl magazine. “A lot of guys came up to me and asked me to sign it for their ‘wives,’” he said.
Maharis was well-respected for serious theater work before his TV show, and appeared in various movies and TV shows after it. He was born in the Astoria section of Queens [Hi Bob!] on Sept. 1, 1928, the son of a Greek restaurateur. He attended Flushing High School and later served in the Marines.
Here’s what ruggedly handsome looks like, ladies (and gents). Yup, I can see it.
On this day, 101 years ago, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. Here are some things I didn’t know about it.
Its 36 marble columns represent the 36 states that existed at the time of the assassination. There is a myth that one of the words in his inaugural address etched into the Memorial is misspelled, but that is not the case. Masons did accidentally carve an E instead of an F, but it was filled in. (That’s one serious-ass typo, gentlemen!)
One of Lincoln’s hands is in a fist and the other is relaxed. Some believe the hands are forming the letters A and L in sign language, but that was not the intent. The intent was to symbolize Lincoln’s mixture of strength and compassion.
The monument was dedicated in front of an audience of more than 50,000 people, and the audience was segregated! Keynote speaker Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute and an African-American, was not permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform.
God bless America.
Let’s end on a sweet note tonight. We are enjoying Shrinking on Apple+. Jason Segel and Harrison Ford are leads, but a central character is Segel’s HS-age daughter, played by Lukita Maxwell, a knockout. Lukita was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, and was raised in Bali and Utah. Hope you’ll be popping by Owl Chatter from time to time, LM. We’ll keep the door open, right Welly?
Good night, everybody. See you tomorrow.
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Take Two Hippos and Call Me in the Morning
Since HYPOTENUSE was in the puzzle today, commenter Lewis shared this with us:
Katie and Zachary [the constructors] had me at HYPOTENUSE – which has appeared in a Times puzzle but once before – a word I’ve loved since I was a kid, just for its sound and how it looks. It makes me smile because it shoots me back to the witty and magnificent Major-General’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” appearing in this snippet:
“I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.”I added the following note:
“If you take two hippos of equal length and a third that is longer, and arrange them (carefully and politely) to form a triangle, the longest will be the hippopotenuse.”
You can start with these:
Lewis is also wonderful for teasing little observations out of grids. Today he noted a pair of rhyming trios: UMA, IMO, and EMU, as well as DEBT, FETE, and BETE. He also paired yesterday’s excellent clue for PORN STAR (“One who’s barely acting?”) with today’s Line 7, which begins with the separate answers ACT and BARE. Adding to the excitement, today also had TOO HOT, nicely clued with “Goldilocks’s complaint about the first bowl of porridge,” and FAST AND LOOSE (“Reckless way to play things”).
While we’re mucking it up with those hippos, here’s another of Maureen Dowd’s words: leptodactylous. It means having slender toes or fingers. It’s also a species of frog, including ditch frogs or white-lipped frogs.
Here’s a frog cartoon from a recent New Yorker:
Three items in the NYT today from the You-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up Department:
The Dallas, TX, school district sent a Winnie the Pooh book home with elementary school kids (including pre-K) showing how to react to an active shooter situation. “If danger is near, do not fear. Hide like Pooh does until the police appear.” I wondered how they got the Pooh folks to go along, but that was easy — since Pooh was first published in 1926, it entered the public domain last year, i.e., it’s no longer copyright-protected.
Cindy Campos, a parent who complained about it, said “the book was not something I wanted. It’s unsolicited advice.” Other parents complained that the school district was “tone deaf” since the book was distributed so close to the anniversary of the Uvalde shooting that killed 19 students and 2 teachers, and a week after the shooting in Allen, TX, that killed 8 people, including 3 children. The book makes no mention of guns — only “danger.”
The district apologized for distributing the book without guidance or context. Bottom line, though — it is a lesson the kids need to learn.
Federal District Judge Nina Y. Wang sided with the school district in Colorado that told graduating senior Naomi Pena Villasano that she cannot wear a sash designed in the style of a serape that honors her Mexican-American heritage. It was a gift from her older brother that represents the U.S. and Mexican flags and says “Class of 2023.” Her family’s position: “The sash is a reminder that not all Mexican Americans, including her parents, have the opportunity to graduate from high school and to walk across a graduation stage. By wearing the sash, Naomi represents her family, her identity as a Mexican American, and her culture during this important occasion.”
The school did not allow the display of flags because “that would open the door to a student wearing a Confederate flag pin or another flag that would cause offense.”
OK, I hear ya, school. But get this: the school said it would allow other students to wear sashes celebrating their Native American or Pacific Islander heritage at graduation.
WTF??!!
Thomas Saenz, of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, said the prohibition violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Further, wearing the sash was private speech protected by the First Amendment. But Judge Wang disagreed and held:
“Although it is true that many pieces of regalia that complement the cap and gown are worn at the graduate’s option, in the context of Grand Valley High School’s graduation ceremony, any such expression is subject to the school district’s discretion and supervision as a matter of course.”
You are more than welcome to wear it here at Owl Chatter, Naomi. It’s gorgeous! And congratulations to you and your family on your graduation — Mazel Tov!
And, thirdly, lawyer Steven A. Schwartz submitted a ten-page brief in federal court with cites to a half dozen court decisions supporting his client’s position. The problem was Schwartz relied on AI, ChatGPT, for his legal research and the cases were just made up — they didn’t exist. Schwartz practiced law in NY for 30 years, but this was the first time he relied on AI for his research. He said he never intended to deceive the court — he essentially just f*cked up in relying on it without tracking the cases down. My favorite part: As part of his defense, Schwartz said he asked ChatGPT if the cases were “real,” and it assured him that they were. It’s a front page article in the Times and goes on at greater length. But that’s enough nonsense about it for Owl Chatter.
Let’s knock a couple more off of Dowd’s vocab list:
Paronomasia. It means punning – using puns. It’s what Shakespeare (and our friend Carl) did (does) a lot. An example is the headline “Otter Devastation” for a story on environmental changes affecting otters.
Aeternitatis. It’s from the expression, sub specie aeternitatis and means “in its essential or universal form or nature.” It’s linked to Spinoza: “There is no such thing, we have said, as an individual fact; and the nature of any fact is not fully known unless we know it in all its relations to the system of the universe, or, in Spinoza’s phrase, sub specie aeternitatis.
Yow — my brain hurts a little now. Enough of Dowd for today.
The puzzle said that write-INS are typically protest votes. I’m not entirely sure of that. Here’s a comment by jberg:
“As a political scientist, I’m here to tell you that the typical write-in vote is not a protest, but the result of an organized campaign by a candidate who hopes to win, and sometimes does. Here in Massachusetts we say that such a candidate “runs on stickers,” because they organize their campaign to hand out stickers with the name printed on them that can be stuck to the ballot. OTOH, my father was once elected Justice of the Peace as a gag, when some friends noticed that no one was running and all wrote his name in. It was fine with him, he got to marry people and collect a fee.”
Hey, it’s Bob Hope’s birthday today. He was born in 1903 and lived to be 100 years old (and two months). Hope was his real last name — he changed his first name from Leslie to Bob. He was born near London; his family moved to the U.S. (Cleveland) when he was four. He never won an Oscar for his acting. He said “Oscar Night at my house is called Passover.” But he received five special recognitions from the Academy. He also received 54 honorary doctorates in his lifetime and was knighted by England. In recognition of decades of entertaining the Armed Forces, in 1997 Congress named him the nation’s first Honorary Veteran, and he considered that his highest achievement.
Since Owl Chatter readers should already know what Hope looked like, here’s a sexy shot of Rosemarie Frankland, Miss World 1961, whom Hope called “the great love of his life.” She was born in Rhosllannerchrugog (pronounced just as it’s spelled), in Wales in 1943. Sadly, she died of a drug overdose when she was only 57.
Get this — she had an uncredited role as a showgirl in the Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night.
Hope you’re having a nice Memorial Day. See you tomorrow!
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The Wellington Files 