The Wellington Files

  • TS

    The puzzle today contained a “checklist” of things you need to remember to bring with you when you go out, built into longer answers. So, e.g., there was KEYS built into “whisKEY Sour.” The other items were taxI Driver, volcaniC ASH, and keeP HONEst (ID, CASH, and PHONE).

    Commenter JD shared his mother’s “checklist:”

    My 89-year-old mother’s suitcase-size purse contains her checkbook-wallet (containing a checkbook, cash, credit cards, photos, and her probably-expired license since she shouldn’t be driving), lipstick, gum, coupons (those expired and those doomed to expire), numerous crumpled tissues that she swears are unused, a change purse that weighs at least a pound, and keys that she’ll take forever to find because they’re beneath all of the above. Her checklist is “purse.”

    We can be together now, Elias! I got legs!

    The New Yorker of June 19 has a review of Taylor Swift’s concert at Met Life Stadium in NJ by Amanda Petrusich, noting in the subtitle its “startling intimacy.” Here are some egg-zerpts.

    “My daughter, who is about to turn two, had picked out my socks, which had cats all over them — a little wink to the fans, I thought. (Swift loves cats.) Let me tell you: no one was looking at my socks.

    The pavement outside the stadium was dappled with thousands of fallen sequins. Forearms were wrapped in bracelets featuring Swift-isms spelled out in lettered beads. I was seated in front of two people dressed as fully decorated Christmas trees. (Swift was brought up on a Christmas-tree farm in PA.)

    When Swift addressed the seventy-four thousand people who had gathered to see her, I felt as though she was not only speaking directly to me but confessing something urgent. Maybe it’s her savvy use of what feels like the singular “you.” When I attempted to explain this feeling to other people, it sounded as though I had been conned. Yet I’d prefer to think of it as an act of kindness: Swift sees each of us (literally—we were given light-up bracelets upon entering) and wants us to know it.

    Swift’s voice has become richer and stronger over the years; its clarity and tone foreground her lyrics. 

    The camaraderie in the audience invited a very particular kind of giddiness. My best friend from childhood had accompanied me, and when she returned from the concession stand carrying two Diet Pepsis so enormous that they required her to bear-hug them for safe transport, I started laughing harder than I have laughed in several years.

    As the night went on, I began to understand how Swift’s fandom is tied to the primal urge to have something to protect and be protected by. In recent years, community, one of our most elemental human pleasures, has been decimated by covid, politics, technology, capitalism. These days, people will take it where they can get it. Swift often sings of alienation and yearning. She has an unusual number of songs about being left behind. Not by the culture—though I think she worries about that, too—but by someone she cared about who couldn’t countenance the immensity of her life. In her world, love is conditional and frequently temporary. (“You could call me ‘babe’ for the weekend,” she sings on “ ’tis the damn season,” a line I’ve always found profoundly sad.) On the chorus of “The Archer,” she sings, “Who could ever leave me, darling? / But who could stay?” Toward the end of the song, she adds a more hopeful line: “You could stay.”

    As she sang that “you” on Saturday, she raised an arm and pointed directly to the audience. Swift has written many songs that describe her devotion as a punishment to be endured. “I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” she bellows on “Cruel Summer.” She believes that the force of her affection will push people away. But her fans have remained. They have buoyed her; in turn, she has given them everything.

    I’ve seen some phenomenal concerts over the years. I’ve got no complaints. Wish I was there, though.

    See you tomorrow. Thanks for dropping by.

  • Dissing Pluto

    Professor Owen Gingerich, who taught astronomy and the history of science at Harvard for 37 years, thought Pluto should not have been deplanetized (my word). He considered its demotion a “linguistic catastrophe.” Prof. Gingerich died in Belmont, MA, on May 28th. He was 93.

    His view on the matter was significant because in 2006 he was chosen to lead a committee of the International Astronomical Union charged with recommending whether Pluto should remain a planet. Gingerich’s position did not carry the day. Pluto is now a “dwarf planet.”

    When Gingerich was 9, his dad bought him a book that included instructions for making a telescope using a mailing tube and lenses from a local optician. The eyepiece was a dime-store magnifying glass. It worked well enough for him to see the rings of Saturn easily. “So it was probably slightly better than Galileo’s telescope,” Gingerich said.

    From all accounts, he was a wonderful and lively professor. He sometimes taught dressed as a 16th-century Latin-speaking scholar. He sometimes shot himself out of the classroom on the power of a fire extinguisher to prove one of Newton’s laws. One year, when his signature course, The Astronomical Perspective, was under-enrolled, he hired a plane to fly a banner over the campus that said: “Sci A-17. M, W, F. Try it!”

    One of the major pursuits of his life was triggered by Arthur Koestler’s contention (in 1959) that Copernicus’s book on the Earth revolving around the sun (De Revolutionibus) was not widely read in its time. Eleven years later, Gingerich ran across a copy of it in Edinburgh that was heavily annotated, thus indicating that at least one person read it. Over the next 30 years, he travelled hundreds of thousands of miles to examine 600 Renaissance-era copies. It resulted in Gingerich’s 2004 book, “The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus.” It established that the Copernicus book was widely read, and showed how word of its theories spread and evolved.

    He also wrote two books on his belief that religion and science need not be at odds. Here’s what he looked like 50 years ago.

    Professor Gingerich is survived by his wife, three sons, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, all of whom would say, Wherever he is up there now, he probably knows his way around.

    From the “Monday is too easy camp,” I started off by posting: “Completed the puzzle on paper today with the grid and clues face down. Definitely more difficult. Took me forever to get GLBSWEZZY and MRKLLDRB.”

    My co-conspirator, JM, chimed in with: “From a blindfold-solving perspective, this is the toughest Monday puzzle in memory. I’ve spent over an hour on it so far and still don’t have a single answer. Maybe it’s because I used a double blindfold this time and couldn’t see any clues. However, I haven’t given up and will try again later after I figure out some new peeking techniques.”

    Picked Nit of the Day: The clue at 28D was “Buck ___, first Black coach in Major League Baseball,” and the answer was ONEIL.

    Commenter Evan said: “The clue on Buck O’Neil is a problem. There was no (capital M, L, B) Major League Baseball at the time (it only came into use in the 1980’s and was generally not capitalized in the NYT until the leagues merged at the end of the 20th century). The phrase ‘major league’ was only applied to baseball as an adjective at that time, which properly (and now widely acknowledged) applied to the Negro Leagues as well.”

    C’mon, man — it’s a crossword puzzle for cryin’ out loud, not a doctoral thesis.

    Here’s Buck:

    Anne Frank would have been 94 today had she lived. It’s her birthday. Of course, she was killed by the Nazis at Bergen-Belsen when she was only 14.

    Today is also the anniversary of the murder of Medgar Evers, in 1963, in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. He was 37. He served in the U.S. Army and participated in the Allied invasion in Europe. He was shot in the back at point blank range by a KKK member named Byron De La Beckwith. Evers was rushed to the hospital and was initially refused care because he was Black. He didn’t survive. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Two trials of De La Beckwith ended in hung juries, but he was convicted in 1994 at the age of 74 by a jury consisting of 8 Blacks and 4 whites and died in prison.

    See you tomorrow.

  • The Right to Remain Silent

    Happy Birthday, Sash! Sasha Obama turned 22 yesterday and appeared in the puzzle today, clued with “White House daughter whom the Secret Service called ‘Rosebud,’” at 19A. Her legal name is Natasha. Here she is wearing her Owl Chatter cap for this short feature on her.

    Sasha enrolled at U. Michigan after high school, but transferred to USC for reasons unknown, and earned her degree in Sociology from there last month. Her dad is the Kenya-born former pol Barack Obama.

    You probably know what an acronym is, but do you know what a BACKRONYM is? It was at 17A today, clued with “CARES, for Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, e.g..” An acronym is when you take the first letters of a phrase or name and create a new word out of them. So, e.g., North Atlantic Treaty Organization gives us the acronym NATO. A backronym is the same operation but in reverse. You start with the single word and name the item using those letters. In the puzzle clue, Congress started with CARES as the name of the legislation and used those letters to come up with Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.

    A great example is the USA PATRIOT Act, where that was the “shorthand” name Congress wanted to use, so they made up from it the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. Rolls right off the tongue, no?

    How about RED HOT POKER at 21A for “Flower whose name sounds like a branding iron.” Ouch. That’s new to me, although I think I’ve seen them. Their formal name is kniphofia, after Johann Hieronymus Kniphof, an 18th-century German physician and botanist.

    There was also a SEA LILY today, at 36D, “Marine animal that resembles a flower.” The sea lily is a “crinoid” that is attached to the sea bottom by a stalk. The unstalked forms are called “feather stars.” Here’s a sea lily.

    In the Midwest, fossilized segments of the columns of crinoids are sometimes known as Indian beads. A species of crinoid is the state fossil of Missouri. I didn’t even know states had official fossils. New Jersey’s is a lizard-like dinosaur, the Hadrosaurus. Cute!

    Today is King Kamehameha I Day, honoring the monarch who established the kingdom of Hawai’i. I’m not kidding — he has been in puzzles at least twice pretty recently, so I have heard of him. Here’s a poem in honor of the day, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. It’s From Understory, by Craig Santos Perez.

    For my wife, Nālani, and our daughter, Kaikainali‘i, on her first birthday

    nālani clips
    kaikainali‘i’s tiny

    fingernails while
    she sleeps —

    “the rape
    of oceania

    began with
    guam” — soldiers

    invade okinawa,
    hawai‘i, the

    philippines, and
    south korea —

    #yesallwomen
    how do

    [we] stop
    kaikainali‘i’s body

    from becoming
    target practice — 

    bullets fragment
    and ricochet — 

    nālani brushes
    kaikainali‘i’s hair

    when she
    wakes, sings

    the names
    of body

    parts in
    hawaiian language — 

    who will
    remember the

    names of
    girls disappeared

    from reservations
    and maquiladoras

    from villages
    and schools

    #mmiw #mmaw
    #bringbackourgirls

    nālani gathers
    the clippings

    because even
    [our] nails

    are ten
    percent water — 

    outside, mānoa
    rain falls

    as large
    as eggs — 

    inside, nālani
    lies on

    her side
    to breast-

    feed kaikainali‘i
    in bed — 

    they fall
    asleep facing

    each other,
    still latched — 

    i nestle
    with them

    and, for
    a moment,

    kaikainali‘i smiles — 
    what does

    she dream
    about? her

    deep breath
    rises and

    falls like
    king tides — 

    her fragile
    rib cage

    appears and
    disappears like

    a coral
    island crowning — 

    my daughter,
    i know

    our stories
    are heavier

    than stones,
    but you

    must carry
    them with

    you no
    matter how

    far from
    home the

    storms take
    your canoe

    because you
    will always

    find shelter
    in our

    stories, you
    will always

    belong in
    our stories,

    you will
    always be

    sacred in
    our ocean

    of stories — 
    hanom hanom

    OK — here’s the actual headline in the Times: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s Former Leader, Is Arrested in Financial Inquiry.

    Here’s what they should have used: Sturgeon Netted by Authorities; Accused of Fishy Behavior.

    C’mon, fellas — that’s low-hanging fruit.

    In March of 1963, Ernesto Miranda was arrested for the kidnapping and rape of an 18-year-old woman. The victim identified him as her assailant and he wrote out and signed a confession after he was interrogated. It was signed at 1:30 pm on March 13, 1963. A jury found Miranda guilty in June and the conviction was upheld on appeal by Arizona Supreme Court. It ruled the confession was admissible despite his not having a lawyer present.

    You may have guessed by now where we’re heading. The U.S. Supreme Court took up the case on appeal and reversed the conviction in 1966. It was a 5-4 decision. In so doing, it established the requirement for the police to provide suspects with certain warnings, which have become known as the Miranda warnings.

    Ernesto was retried in 1967 without the confession, and was found guilty again. He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death in a bar fight in 1976. He had been trading on his “celebrity” by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each. The price hasn’t gone up much over the years. You can get this one on Amazon for $1.74.

    Miranda was first taken into custody by Carroll Cooley, a detective on the Phoenix police force. Cooley played it by the book, as the book was written at the time. He was college-educated, a good cop, and a good man. He disagreed with the Supreme Court decision, saying it would hamper crime-fighting. He said Miranda was aware of his rights without receiving the specific warnings since he was an ex-con who had been through the process before. Cooley was promoted to captain and retired in 1978. He later taught as an adjunct prof in a police certification program at U. Illinois, and volunteered at the Phoenix Police Museum, which unveiled an exhibit about the Miranda case in 2013.

    Cooley died two weeks ago at the age of 87 in his home in Phoenix. He is survived by his wife, who is known as Glee, two children and two stepchildren, 12 grandchildren, and 18 great-grandchildren, every one of whom is well aware of his or her right to remain silent.

    And here’s Miranda:

    See you tomorrow!

  • Telescopium

    John Hawksley’s puzzle today had two five-answer stacks in the center, with each answer eleven letters. One stack ran across and the other down. Pretty impressive, IMO. One of the acrosses was “Blame-shifting words,” and the answer was HE STARTED IT. It called to mind this scene:

    One of the prettiest clues was “Who wrote ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’” Ring a bell?

    The author is Emily BRONTË, and the quotation is spoken by Catherine about Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” Here’s Kate Bush. (Brace yourself for her voice. It’s a good song once you settle into it (IMO).)

    14D was tough because I don’t know the constellations. The clue was “Constellation named for the instrument it depicts.” I kept thinking of musical instruments, but the answer was TELESCOPIUM. There was some griping, but it was gettable from the crosses, so all is well.

    Commenter kitchef added:

    As a general note, a lot of the Southern constellations are named for instruments. I swear I am not making these up:

    Microscopium (the microscope)
    Antlia (the air pump)
    Circinus (the drafting compass)
    Norma (the carpenter’s square)
    Sextus (the sextant)

    I posted that the Florida legislature voted to remove Sextus from the sky over Florida.

    At 32D, the clue was “Quoth the raven?,” but the answer was not Nevermore! Yikes — what to do? It turned out to be CAWCAWED. Good one!

    The commentariat erupted over 34D: “Prudent poker player perhaps,” and the answer was PASSER. Apparently, you pass in bridge. In poker you “check.”

    Commenter Jim led the seething chorus with “I was actually genuinely angry at PASSER. That is absolutely NOT A THING in poker. Unbelievably shoddy.”

    OK — take a breath.

    Here’s a still of Kate Bush.

    Hey, ladies — ever need to get away from it all? Seek refuge? That buffoon you married has his mancave — where do you go? How about 33D? — “Certain zen retreat.” Your MOM CAVE. What goes in there? Alcohol for sure. Chocolate? Playgirl magazines? Maybe you can find the one with George Maharis.

    At 53A we learn that a “Natural treatment for nausea” is GINGER. Here’s sexy Tina Louise (nee Blacker) from Gilligan’s Island, everyone’s favorite Ginger. Aren’t I right, Lovey? Looking good TL!

    Did you know Ginger’s last name in the show was Grant? Tina is the last living Gilligan Islander — she’s 89, kinahora. Her dad owned a candy store in Brooklyn before becoming an accountant. In 1958, the National Art Council named her “The World’s Most Beautiful Redhead.” Yup, we can see that.

    Tina was only married for five years (’66 to ’71) and it was to Les Crane, radio and TV announcer/interviewer. They had one daughter, Caprice Crane, an MTV producer and novelist. Caprice dedicated her first novel to her mom.

    Check this out: The clue at 31A was “Roman statesman for whom a Midwest city was named,” and the answer was CINCINNATUS.

    Carola shared this with us:

    “I learned about him on a visit to ‘his’ city, where there is a wonderful, full-building-sized mural dedicated to him. It’s a trompe l’oeil [fool the eye] tour de force. Take a look: none of the architectural elements are real; everything is painted on an unbroken flat surface.”

    Saul Bellow was born on this day, 110 years ago, in Lachine, Quebec. The Adventures of Augie March (1953) made him famous. Although Bellow’s family moved to Chicago when he was nine, not a word of the novel was written there. It’s worth a minute to read the opening sentences again.

     “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”

    Here he is, being disturbed at his breakfast by Owl Chatter photographer Phil. (Much better, Philly — no more wake-ups please!)

    Thanks for popping in. See you tomorrow!

  • Glum Drops

    Did you forget to send a card? Me too. It’s Bertha von Suttner’s birthday today. She may not put you on her sh*tlist, though — she’s been dead for over 100 years. She was a novelist and pacifist and was the second woman to win a Nobel prize — for Peace. (The first was Marie Curie for Physics.) What’s neat, though, is she knew Alfred Nobel personally, and it was her influence on him that convinced him to leave money in his will for the creation of the Peace Prize.

    Von Suttner is depicted on the Europe Taler, along with Martin Luther, Vivaldi, and James Watt. It’s the largest silver-medal coin in the world, issued in 2008, i.e., it is awarded in some competitions to the silver medal winner.

    I sent a selection to Frank Bruni for his “For the love of sentences” feature. It’s from Charles Blow’s Op-Ed piece in yesterday’s NYT.

    “These [anti-gay, anti-trans] politicians play to a segment of the population that sees any divergence from its primitive ideals as deviant. So they build boxes. But for too many people, particularly young people, those boxes can become caskets. . . “

    Blow goes on to note that, according to the CDC, one in five gay, lesbian, or bisexual high school students attempted suicide in the past year. Those are actual attempts, not just reports that they considered it. So, e.g., (check me on this, Judy), if a HS has a gay club with 20 members, statistically, four will have tried to kill themselves in the past year. Lianna has two good friends who are trans. They are wonderful young people and do not deserve to be the target of political and legislative attacks.

    In the puzzle today 58A was “Like some Brie,” and the answer was RUNNY. The question arose as to why Brie was capitalized. Commenter bocamp shared the following from ChatGPT:

    “The capitalization of ‘Brie’ cheese is a matter of grammar and style conventions. In English, proper nouns, which are names of specific people, places, or things, are typically capitalized. ‘Brie’ in ‘Brie cheese’ refers to a specific type of cheese that originated in the Brie region of France. Since it is named after the region, ‘Brie’ is considered a proper noun and is capitalized.

    “Capitalizing ‘Brie’ helps distinguish it as a specific cheese variety and emphasizes its connection to the region from which it comes. It follows the same convention as other proper nouns, such as ‘Camembert cheese’ or ‘Cheddar cheese.’ By capitalizing the name, it also adheres to grammatical rules for written English.

    “Capitalization conventions may vary in different languages or writing styles. Specific style guides or publications may choose to deviate from the general rules. However, in standard English, capitalizing “Brie” when referring to the cheese is the accepted practice.”

    But Joe DePinto chimed in with:

    “You don’t really have to capitalize cheeses that were named for locations if you are referring to them in a generic way. Almost no one capitalizes ‘cheddar,’ which is named for a village in England. The name comes to symbolize the taste, texture, look, etc., much more than where it’s actually from. Your runny brie cheese may not have been produced in the region of Brie or even in France.”

    Today’s constructor, Robyn Weintraub, is widely loved and respected in Crossworld. Here are some of her very clever clues:

    17A: “Animals that all share the same ‘birthday’ (January 1).” The answer is RACEHORSES. I think I may have heard this before. Whenever a racehorse is born during the year, it is considered one year old on the following Jan. 1. Setting a standard birth date for racehorses makes it easy to determine its acceptability for races based on age.

    25A: “Game you can’t stand to win.” ANS: MUSICAL CHAIRS. (Get it?)

    56A: “Alternative to an elbow.” ANS: PSST (Get it?)

    57A: How about this one? — “Contronym that means moving quickly or not moving at all.” A contronym is a word that means both itself and its opposite. The answer is FAST. To “hold fast” means to not move at all. Another example is to sanction. It means both to allow and to censure.

    And how about this lively cluing for some simple boring words:

    “Glum drops,” for TEARS.

    “65%, e.g.,” for MOST

    “Some queens but not kings,” for BEES.

    Here’s Robyn!

    Ted – can you help me close tonight? This is from Winter Morning Walks.

    An old moon, lying akilter
    among a few pale stars,
    and so quiet on the road
    I can hear every bone in my body
    hefting some part of me
    over its shoulder. Behind me,
    my shadow stifles a cough
    as it tries to keep up,
    for I have set out fast and hard
    against this silence,
    filling my lungs with hope
    on this, my granddaughter’s
    birthday, her first, and the day
    of my quarterly cancer tests.

    Thanks, Buddy. See you all tomorrow!

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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 gophers

    underground
    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 Dickinson

    The 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.