The Wellington Files

  • 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 themselves

    Brown 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.

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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:

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is hippos.jpg

    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:

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is frogs1-edited.png

    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.

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is pooh.jpg

    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!

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is naomi.webp

    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.

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is frankland.webp

    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!

  • The Refrigerator Light

    After a day off to refresh ourselves, Owl Chatter is back with the usual nonsense, I hope. We flew the owl coop and ran down to Baltimore, which called itself Charm City (in the past) — and we were charmed. Stayed in a neat historic downtown hotel — The Ulysses, and the folks were very nice. It was a real neighborhood with lots of hip young people around, music in the air at night, and interesting restaurants.

    It was a 30-minute walk to the ballpark and we took in a game. Great scene — big crowd, gorgeous stadium (see pic). I wore my bright orange rugby shirt and an O’s cap. Unfortunately, the Baltimore bats were moribund, with the sole blip on the EKG being a solo dinger by Austin Hays after the birds were already down 4-0 — until there were two outs in the ninth. Then a walk and two scorching doubles brought the tying run to the plate! But a strikeout ended the game. Texas 5, Birds 3.

    We popped out onto the street to go to dinner at the Nepal House, an Indian restaurant across from the Ulysses which got excellent reviews. Suddenly, this young gentlemen appeared before us and said: “Are you from around here? Is the Ethiopian restaurant on Maryland Avenue? I just told that couple it was, but I’m not 100% sure.”

    I said, “No, we’re not from around here, but wait – there’s an Ethiopian restaurant nearby?” He said, “Yes, just a few blocks away.” We thanked him, I located it on my phone and we had a great Ethiopian dinner – how’s that for blind luck? Breakfast today was even better — a little cafe with tables outside. Linda’s omelet was excellent, and I had a scrambled-up egg-and-veggie thingie with Maryland crabmeat mixed in. Wow.

    We were enjoying a cup o’ coffee at S’bux this morning, when I noticed this billboard right across the road:

    Setting aside the glaring who/whom error, what a nice job by someone! I sent a photo of it to Owl-Chatter-friend Norrie (who eats that stuff up) and she told me she was posting it on facebook. I replied that I’m posting it on my fat tuchas, so it’s getting some good exposure.

    Will the Maureen Dowd word-list become famous? Here’s what she wrote in her column today:

    My most precious possession from my time at Columbia University is a green Patrón box stuffed with slips of paper on which I scribbled the new words I learned.

    Limerence. Peloothered. Clinchpoop. Chthonic. Sillage. Agnation. Akratic. Leptodactylous. Chiasmus. Caesious. Pythoness. Pettifogger. Paronomasia. Dithyramb. Propugnaculum. Adumbrate. Remembrancer. Meridional. Prehensile. Aeternitatis. Scrupulosity. Supererogatory. Anagnorisis. Spatiotemporal. Sialoquent. Alterity. Floccinaucinihilipilification.

    Yikes — that’s one hell of a list. I’m going to start with the last one because it’s so out there.

    Floccinaucinihilipilification means the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. I think it could work like this: “Ned’s floccinaucinihilipilification of Owl Chatter was getting tiresome. So I shot him.”

    Let’s take propugnaculum next. It means bulwark, rampart, defense.

    Peloothered? That means totally intoxicated. How did I end up sleeping in that dumpster last night? You were peloothered, you moron.

    One more tonight (and we’ll save the rest for later).

    Akratic. This is a great word. “Characterized by weakness of will, resulting in an action taken against one’s better judgment.” “Felix wondered if his akratic lending of $10,000 to his deadbeat brother-in-law might somehow be claimed on his tax return.”

    Or — how about — raising a teenager is just one akratic act after another.

    Taking a walk today, I couldn’t get All Too Well, by Taylor Swift out of my head. So I tracked it down for you (and me) — the version she sang at the Grammys. (You’re going to want to skip it if you’re a hater.)

    ‘Cause there we are again in the middle of the night
    We’re dancing ‘round the kitchen in the refrigerator light
    Down the stairs, I was there
    I remember it all too well.

    A little tired from the long drive. Good to be home with Welly and Wilma though. Good night folks.

  • Deliberate as a Bride

    I was watching the Nats game last night, and an unusual play occurred; something I had never seen before. The Nats batter hit a low liner to third. The fielder dove for it and appeared to catch it. But when he landed, the ball fell out of his glove. No problem — he just picked it up and fired to first, in time to beat the runner. But the first baseman was not on the bag — he was nowhere in the picture frame — he was in absentia! So the ball rolled all the way to the fence and the batter/runner wound up on second.

    What happened was the first baseman, like the rest of us, thought the ball was caught. He was blocked from seeing it roll out of the third baseman’s glove when he landed from his dive. So there was no need for him (he thought) to cover first. It was his blunder, but the third baseman was charged with the error. (I guess maybe he shouldn’t have made the throw?) BTW, the first baseman was Jake Cronenworth, an excellent ballplayer who played college ball at UMich.

    OK, so you’re getting ready for a big date. Remember those? And you’re getting good and ready — it takes time. The hair, the clothing, the face. And then, Oh no! he or she suddenly shows up way too soon!! You’re still a mess —- everything’s ruined.

    According to the NYT today, that’s exactly what’s happening to arctic squirrels, and it’s a bigger problem than just for the squirrels.

    Here’s the deal. The male squirrel comes out of hibernation early so he can prepare for the mating season. It’s not just that he buys a new outfit and some hot cologne, his testosterone levels drop way off in the winter and it takes time for him to get them back up. Generally, the lady sleeps long enough for him to be ready. But not anymore! Due to climate change she’s getting up as much as ten days earlier. And things are not going well on those dates.

    For now, there are plenty of squirrels around. There’s one now! But if their population starts to decline it could send shock waves through the animal world — they are a popular food source for many predators like eagles and wolves. Yum! Here’s a tasty little fella (or gal).

    On this date way back in 1521 — yes, 502 years ago — a photo of Martin Luther went up in the Post Office — well, he was declared an outlaw. And just like Amanda Gorman’s poem, his writings were banned. Even outside of Florida. It all happened in the Edict of Worms. Gross. Of course, just like Trump’s indictments, it only made him more popular.

    Did you know how ML (no K) decided to become a priest? He was caught in a terrible storm and promised God that if he survived he would pursue a religious life. Seriously? You have to honor those? All those promises I made to God for parking spots in Manhattan — I’m supposed to do that stuff?

    Lots of good stuff in the puzzle today. Here’s a sampling of things I learned:

    36A: “Shared a workspace, in modern parlance,” HOT DESKED.

    23A: “Ones who live large, in slang,” BALLERS.

    11D: “Nonmelodic genre,” NOISE MUSIC.

    21D: “Jealous critics, in slang,” PLAYER HATERS.

    Also, loved these:

    30A: “Youth sports mismatch ender,” MERCY RULE.

    5D: “Words from one extending an olive branch,” I COME IN PEACE.

    54A: “Like some land no longer good for livestock,” OVER GRAZED

    27D: “Inelegant way to solve a problem,” BRUTE FORCE.

    Here’s a poem by Ted Kooser, from late December in Winter Morning Walks:

    A little snap at one side of the room,
    and an answering snap at the other:
    Stiff from the cold and idleness, the old house
    is cracking its knuckles. Then the great yawn
    of the furnace. Even the lampshade is drowsy,
    its belly full of a warm yellow light.

    Out under the moon, though, there is at least
    one wish against this winter sleep: a road
    leads into the new year, deliberate as a bride
    in her sparkling white dress of new snow.

    Good night, everybody. OC is heading down to Baltimore tomorrow for a few days. Special birthday for Linda! Thanks for dropping in.

  • Delusions

    If you need a clue for EMILY in your puzzle, there are various directions to choose from. Poetry? There’s Emily Dickinson, of course. Hotties? There’s Emily Ratajkowski, the model/actress/writer/entrepreneur who spoke at Hunter’s graduation last year.

    Phil!! Did you wake her up? We’ve spoken to you about that! You’re going to get in hot water someday. Sorry Emily! Go back to sleep. Phil will come back later and give you time to get ready.

    Or you can really class it up by going with Emily Greene Balch, as today’s constructors did. Balch was born on Jan. 8, 1867 and died one day after her 94th birthday. She was awarded the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), to which she donated her prize money. Although she was a long-time pacifist, she did not criticize the Allied war effort in WWII. She was an Economics professor at Wellesley College for 23 years and never married.

    Emily’s corner in the puzzle (NW) was pretty dramatic. Right next to her at 3D came the “International Day of Peace month,” which is SEP. But over at 1D was AT WAR, darkly clued with “Like much of Europe beginning in 1939.” And 26D was WWII, clued with “JoJo Rabbit setting,” and ELIE Wiesel was at 58D.

    Anthony Lane, the movie critic for The New Yorker, is often very funny. Here’s how his review of “Master Gardener” starts: As career moves go, the path from neo-Nazism to horticulture has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserves.

    In the same column, he also reviews “You Hurt My Feelings,” where the main plot revolves around a married couple. The wife has written a novel that she overhears the husband saying he doesn’t like. Ouch! Lane writes: Delusions of creativity are always funny, because they rely on such a spectacular lack of self-knowledge.

    I like that phrase “delusions of creativity.” It pretty much sums up the force behind Owl Chatter, no?

    Oooh, Emily R. is out of the shower, and she threw something on and is ready for you now, Phil. Let’s see what you got.

    Wow — gorgeous! Thanks, guys.

    Two writers were born on this date. First, Raymond Carver, back in 1938, in Clatskanie, OR. Never heard of it? It’s a bit southwest of Inglis. In 1957, he married his 16-year-old girlfriend Maryann Burk right out of high school (Carver was 19), and took a series of low-paying jobs. They had two kids. Working as a night janitor in a hospital, he wrote stories of the working poor: his people. But 20 years later, in 1977, he fell in love with Tess Gallagher, a poet, and divorced Maryanne. This is what it says on his tombstone (from his poem, “Late Fragment”):

    And did you get what
    you wanted from this life, even so?
    I did.
    And what did you want?
    To call myself beloved, to feel myself
    beloved on the earth.

    Here’s Tess.

    The second one is novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid, born in Antigua in 1949. Since she was a girl, she was less favored by her mom than her two brothers, and she took refuge in books. (She was able to read at age 3.) She read every sentence of Moby Dick twice because she couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. As a writer, The Talk of the Town columns she wrote for The New Yorker were greatly admired. She was married for over 20 years to Allen Shawn, son of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, and brother of actor Wallace Shawn. They have 2 kids: Harold and Annie.

    Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., said of her writing:

    “She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it’s a distinct departure that she’s making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does. So that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.”

    Kincaid converted to Judaism in 2005. Mazel Tov, JK!

    I learned something new in baseball yesterday. I was watching the Nats playing San Diego, and the Padres had runners on first and second. The batter bunted, and the Nats’ third baseman, Jeimer Candelario, pounced on the ball and threw it to second, to cut down the middle runner. So the lead runner advanced from second to third, and the batter made it to first.

    What I learned was, in this case, the batter does not get credit for a sacrifice bunt. He needs to advance both runners to get credit. Did you know that?

    Here’s Ty Cobb doing it. Is he wearing a scarf and a sweater? Was it chilly?

    See you tomorrow!

  • Spanish Leather

    When’s the last time you were swept off your feet? And don’t count that high school girl (or boy) on the subway whose button popped open.

    Here’s what Bob Dylan said about meeting Suze Rotolo in 1961:

    “Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard… Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness—a Rodin sculpture come to life.”

    She’s the girl on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin’ album. She became pregnant with his baby in 1963, but had an abortion. They broke up in ’64. The breakup is credited with inspiring several love songs, including Boots of Spanish Leather.

    Well, if I had the stars from the darkest night
    And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
    I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
    For that’s all I’m a-wishin’ to be ownin’

    The breakup also led to his angry and bitter Ballad in Plain D. Twenty years later, when asked if he had any regrets about Ballad In Plain D, Dylan said: “Oh yeah, that one! I must have been a real schmuck to write that. Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.” Here’s how she looked when she was young.

    Rotolo, an artist, married Enzo Bartoccioli, a film editor who worked for the UN, and they had a son, Luca, who’s a guitarist in NYC. She was only 67 when she died in NY in 2011.

    It’s Dylan’s birthday today. He’s 82, kinahora. 

    Here’s a depressing comment by Jacqueline Donnelly on the puzzle today. (FYI, the clue at 51A was “Rapper with the 2010 hit ‘No Hands’” and the answer was WAKAFLOCKAFLAME. It ran across the whole grid.)

    Sadly, at 81, I’m beginning to feel I have aged out of the NYT crosswords, dependent as they have become on words from a pop culture I have zero familiarity with or interest in. That might be OK or even instructive if the crosses could lead to solution. I have trusted my kids (three of whom are rock musicians) to keep me “kinda hip,” but now that they are all in their fifties, even they probably wouldn’t know stuff like WAKAFLOCKAFLAME. And PACMAN is a game I’ve heard of but never played. Maybe my kids did, though. But they don’t live here anymore.

    Jeez Louise! Lighten up, will you? It’s just a crossword puzzle.

    Gary Jugert posted this reply:

    {Getting out soapbox.} Uh, you’re not supposed to know everything. It’s supposed to have a challenge. You’re supposed to fail sometimes. We’re supposed to be curious about words we’ve never seen and maybe go look them up and try to get smarter about the ever changing world around us. We ask young solvers to know Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi, so isn’t it fair to ask us to know something about Pac-Man? And when we don’t, we can open up our good buddy Go-ogle and a robot will help us for free. We have an enormous encyclopedia set sitting on our digital shelves.

    Sometimes, the crosses allow you to figure out an answer, but you don’t usually learn anything when you get the answer that way. It’s a normal occurrence for daily posters to say they’ve never seen a specific word, even though that word was in a puzzle last week or last month. They got it off crosses, they’ve seen it, but they learned nothing. I personally hate TV stars and Asian cooking ingredients in puzzles, but it’s not because I am aging out of the puzzle, it’s because Will Shortz hates me. Kidding of course. I need to learn that stuff, or go look it up. Many here would rather die than look up something, but that’s because they’re playing a weird game of chicken with the possibility they might be losing their minds. Be okay with not knowing once in awhile. There’s lots of beautiful things waiting for us to discover. {Descends from soapbox.}

    BTW, here are Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney. (Maybe not Chaney.)

    Remember Amanda Gorman, the young Black poet who impressed the nation at Biden’s inauguration? The poem of hers that she read was “The Hill We Climb.”

    Well, not everybody was impressed. A mother of two in Florida’s Miami-Dade school system, Daily Salinas, complained about the poem’s being available to elementary school students in the library. Salinas wrongly listed its author as Oprah Winfrey, not Amanda Gorman, and claimed the function of the work is to “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” Salinas is clearly what anyone with a working brain would call “an idiot.” So what did the school district do? It capitulated. The poem is no longer available to elementary school kids in the district. (They can see it in middle school.)

    Here’s Gorman’s response:

    “I’m gutted. Because of one parent’s complaint, my inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

    She continued:

    “Book bans aren’t new. But they have been on the rise–according to the ALA, 40% more books were challenged in 2022 compared to 2021. What’s more, often, all it takes to remove these works from our libraries and schools is a single objection. And let’s be clear: most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves. The majority of these works are by queer and non-white voices.

    “I wrote The Hill We Climb so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment. Ever since, I’ve received countless letters and videos from children inspired to write their own poems. Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”

    I like to think of the little coincidences the universe sends our way as little messages, — maybe signs that things will be okay. About 35 years ago, we were panicked about a little bump on Caity’s belly that the docs couldn’t explain. At the height of our worrying, I was riding home on a bus from the city, sitting up front, and the driver suddenly screeched to a halt for no apparent reason. The traffic coming towards us stopped suddenly too. The driver said “Look,” and what I saw was a Mommy Duck safely crossing a very busy Main Street in Chatham (NJ) with her little ducklings tootling behind her. I took it as a good sign. A few weeks later, a hot-shot surgeon in NY assured us Caity’s bump was harmless.

    So today it’s worth noting that the clue in the puzzle at 47D is “Bit of hair,” and the answer is HANK. I don’t recall HANK ever popping up in the grid before, though he may have. In any event, I’m taking it as a sign that he’s doing okay on his journey. Is it crazy to think he’s reaching out in this way to give us a thumb’s-up? Of course it is. But we don’t mind a little crazy from time to time at Owl Chatter. Hi Buddy — safe travels.

    Quack! Quack!

  • Meow

    Oh, it’s already a good day today! Rex, who makes no secret of being a cat lover, posted these beautiful pix of his duo on his site today:

    I miss our cats, Hank and Sophie. Still have Zoey’s Emily, who is beautiful.

    As regular readers of Owl Chatter will recall, the Monday puzzle is too easy for some of us. Rex solves it using only the down clues, and others of us struggle to come up with creative ideas for ramping up the challenge. Here’s an exchange I had yesterday with commenter Joseph Michael:

    JM: Since someone stole my eye patches and my blindfold is at the dry cleaners again, I had to do my Monday solve the old fashioned way with a grocery bag over my head. I used to use Jewel bags for this but decided to try a Trader Joe’s bag instead because 1) it’s larger, and 2) it’s easier to breathe inside of. I’m grateful for the challenge this added to the solve, but I should have looked at the bag more carefully before putting it on. Now I have to figure out how to get this pumpkin butter out of my hair.

    Me (Liveprof): JM – Glopulene Propanol is an excellent pumpkin butter remover. It’s available at most sex shops for just about $5,000 an ounce. No need to rush, though. If you can get your head into an airtight container, the PB should last for up to two weeks. If you have a walk-in freezer, that would be better — it would buy you six months.

    JM: Liveprof, thanks for the tips. I’ll keep the Glopulene Propanol in mind if this ever happens again. For now, I just took a shower and that seemed to do the trick, except that the Trader Joe’s bag is ruined. There must be an easier difficult way to do Monday crosswords.

    At 41D today, the answer was EPITAPH, about which I posted the following comment on Rex’s blog:

    “Steve Post, my favorite radio personality (WNYC) who died in 2014 said he planned to have his tombstone say ‘He didn’t wanna,’ because whenever his wife said there was some event for them to attend, his reply was always a whiny ‘I don’t wanna.’

    “And he invited his listeners to send in their planned epitaphs. He said he would read them over the air. I wrote the following to him: For many years, I was planning for my stone to say ‘Struggled with his weight his whole life,’ but more recently I’ve switched to ‘Suffered from rectal itching.’ He saved it to read last, laughed when he read it, and murmured ‘I can relate to that.’

    “It’s my one claim to fame in seven decades of living. And it’s enough.”

    After way-too-long a hiatus, Owl Chatter’s favorite commenter, LMS, returned this week, and in rare and wonderful form, to no surprise. This is from her post today:

    I haven’t been to many cemeteries, but do people still have EPITAPHS on their tombstones? I would want something funny on mine, maybe acknowledging my JESTERery. I resurrected my yogurt-in-the-mayonnaise-jar prank yesterday, and the response was electric. Kids gagged. Questioned me.

    Kid: You’re eating mayonnaise?
    Me: Yeah. I forgot my lunch, and I’m starving.
    Kid: But out of the jar?
    Me: [takes a huge spoonful] Sure. Why not? Want some?
    Kid: [gags]

    A couple of students came to my door during transition to ask if it was true, that I was eating mayonnaise straight from the jar. Ariyana tried to grab the jar to throw it away. Ms. Smith, I’m worried about you. Hah. I privately told Cyrus the truth, and he was delighted. So in front of other students, I gave him a spoon, and he took a bite. More gagging. I’ve refilled the jar, so Cyrus and I are gonna have us some more fun today.

    46A was ESCAPEE. It led LMS to share the following:

    On ESCAPEE, I have little posters with sentences like

    Nia Vardalos is full of envy.
    Don Knotts’ teeth were full of decay.
    Quentin Tarantino is a cutie.
    Irene Cara’s driveway is icy.
    Steven Karl Pifer is an ESCAPEE.

    When a student finally sees it, they’re like, Oh. Ms. Smith, you cringey.

    Two, Four, Six, Eight . . . What number comes next? There was a whole page in the NYT science section today devoted to “integer sequences.” A famous one that has even appeared in XW puzzles is Fibonacci’s. It’s 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. Starting with the third number, each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.

    This is the “eban” sequence, which is pretty neat: 2, 4, 6, 30, 32, 34, 36, 40, etc. I bet even our Owl Chatter mathematician can’t see why the next one is 42. [Judy — stumped?]

    It’s an ordered list of all numbers that lack the letter “e” in them when written out. (Eban — The “e” is “banned.”) You may note that all of the numbers are even — that’s because every odd number has an e. onE, thrEE, fivE, sEvEn, ninE, and so on. But not every even number makes the list — e.g., eight, ten, and all the teens, have e’s.

    If you are a sequences freak, you will be pleased to learn that there is an Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) that contains 362,765 of these (and counting). Neil Sloane, a mathematician (duh), of Highland Park NJ, is the founder, and it’s celebrating its 50th anniversary, thus the NYT story. When it started, there were “only” 2,372 entries.

    It’s run by about 170 international volunteer editors who “wrangle” 50 or more submissions a day. It’s seeking funding to hire a full-time manager.

    Sloane showcases his favorite “fun” sequences on Numberphile, an educational math YouTube channel. They include this one: 1, 4, 8, 48, 88, 488, etc. Give up? It’s a sequence counting the “holes” in numbers. An 8 has two “holes” in it, one on top and one on the bottom. A 4 has just one. So in 4 there is one “hole,” in 8 there are two “holes,” in 48 there are 3 “holes,” 88 has 4, 488 has five, and so on. Insane, right?

    One of Sloane’s current faves is the Sisyphean sequence. Here’s how it starts: 1, 3, 6, 3, 8, 4, 2, 1, etc. What’s next? Give up? Well, the deal is, if the number is even, divide by two, if it’s odd, add the smallest prime number not yet added. So the next number would be 8 (1 + 7), then 4, then 2, then 1, then 12 (1 + 11).

    Some numbers appear more than once, as you can see. But does every number appear at least once? Sloane says they don’t know, but there was a massive struggle over “36.” The sequence was carried out to a billion terms but there was still no 36. Sloane said this was “really worrying.” If 36 were missing it would be like a flaw in the universe. Thank God, it was eventually discovered to pop up as the 77,534,485,877th term. Whew.

    When Sloane’s not in pursuit of important issues like that, he’s working on his book: “The Joy of Seqs.” (not kidding)

    Stunning actress Lupita Nyong’o was in the puzzle today.

    Lupita is Kenyan-Mexican and lives in Brooklyn. She’s 40 years old and not married. She won an Oscar in 2014 for Best Supporting Actress for her work in 12 Years a Slave. In April of 2014 she was named People magazine’s “Most Beautiful Woman,” and in November was named Glamour’s “Woman of the Year.” She has appeared on the cover of Vogue numerous times, as well as on the covers of leading magazines such as Vanity Fair and Elle.

    In November 2017, she appeared on the cover of Grazia UK magazine, but expressed her disappointment with them for altering her hair to fit European standards of what hair should look like. Photographer An Le later apologized, saying it was “an incredibly monumental mistake.” [Owl Chatter photographer Phil was aghast at the chutzpah.] They’re lucky she didn’t sue their white asses.

    In October 2017—in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal and the MeToo movement—Nyong’o wrote an op-ed for The NYT divulging that Weinstein had sexually harassed her on two occasions when she was a student at Yale. She vowed never to work with him and turned down an offer to star in Southpaw, a Weinstein film. Nyong’o’s op-ed was part of a collection of stories by The Times and The New Yorker that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

    See you tomorrow folks.