The Wellington Files

  • Bouillabaisse

    Do you ever do something “bad” while driving, like run a red light, and then start making up a story in your head to try to weasel out of a ticket in case the cops stop you? Me neither. The story makes perfect sense to you, but a little guy in the back of your brain knows you wouldn’t have a chance. Anyway, there was a GEO METRO in yesterday’s puzzle, and I love this story posted by whatsername:

    A former coworker got stopped for “attempted speeding” in a GEO METRO. This guy commuted 125 miles each way, much of which was through the mountainous areas of northern Arkansas where he was pulled over. He explained to the patrolman that he had to go as fast as he possibly could on the way down the mountain; otherwise he wouldn’t have enough speed to make it back up the next one. The cop stepped back, looked at the vehicle, shook his head, and sent him on his way without so much as a warning.

    The clue for OTTER yesterday was: “Animal that might make a waterslide to play on.” Otters are notoriously playful. They may construct a slide to get from point A to point B, but if it’s fun, they will keep going down it over and over again before continuing on. The writeup on otters in Britannica notes in the very first sentence that otters are known for their playful manner. Adorable. I don’t know what our photographer Phil did to get this one to wave to us. You’re incredible, Philly! We don’t pay you enough.

    Mary Quant died in her home in Surrey, England yesterday. She was 93. The headline in the Times obit called her a British fashion revolutionary. We live in the world of our vision; who knows how profound the changes she brought to our world really are?

    Quant opened a boutique called Bazaar on King’s Road in London in 1955, and started selling the outfits that she and her bohemian friends were wearing, “a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories,” — short flared skirts and pinafores, knee socks and tights, funky jewelry and berets in all colors. She made some of the clothing herself, and the store became a hangout like a coffee bar.

    A decade later, Mary Quant was a global brand, with licenses all over the world — she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1966 for her contribution to British exports — and sales that would soon reach $20 million. When she toured the U.S. with a new collection, she was greeted like a fifth Beatle; at one point she required police protection.  In 2009, she was honored by the Royal Mail with her own postage stamp, featuring a model wearing a black Mary Quant flared mini. In 2015, Ms. Quant was made a dame.

    It’s not clear who actually “invented” the miniskirt, but Quant as much as anyone brought about its explosion, and she has been called the “mother” of the miniskirt. Here’s a young Mary herself, and then one of my tax students modeling a mini.

    OBOE is a common answer in Crossworld; it shares three letters with our favorite snack treat OREO. But the clue for it today was new to me: “Heckelphone relative.” Any of you hear of a heckelphone before? It was developed by Wilhelm Heckel at the suggestion of Richard Wagner. It’s larger than an oboe and is an octave lower.

    The first annual meeting of the North American Heckelphone Society took place on August 6, 2001, at the Riverside Church in New York City, with six heckelphonists in attendance. Later meetings have included as many as 14 instruments.

    Good night readers! Sweet dreams!

  • More Kiviaq Anyone?

    I’ll spare you a photo on this, but not the discussion. If you’ve been to Greenland, have you tasted (or heard of) kiviaq? It’s a staple at celebrations among the Inughuit, a distinct Inuit culture indigenous to Greenland. The ingredient list includes one seal carcass (hollowed out, of course), and 300 to 500 dovekies. These are small birds, also called little auks.

    You take your 300 to 500 whole dovekies (beaks, feathers, and all) and cram them into the seal carcass. You then sew up the opening and seal it with seal fat. One nice thing (perhaps the only one) is that seal fat repels flies. On the other hand, you may wonder about a “delicacy” that even flies don’t want any part of.

    Hopefully, you’re not too hungry at this point in time because the next step is to bury the whole mess under rocks for a few months to ferment. When it’s dug up, and opened up, you skin the little birds and eat them one at a time. Yum.

    Our friend Pam has made recipes that have appeared in Owl Chatter before. Let us know how the kiviaq turns out!! Maybe you can bring a few dovekies on the Fourth. You should have enough time for the fermenting, no?

    Alicia “Lisa” Shepard died on April 1; she was only 69. (Anyone dying within five years of my age in either direction gets an “only.”)

    She was at the center of some controversy when she was the ombudsman at NPR, a post she held for nearly 4 years. It was back when the Bush administration (W’s) was using waterboarding to elicit information from detainees (or to force them to finish their kiviaq). NPR was using language such as “enhanced interrogation tactics” instead of labeling them torture, and it was accused of serving as a right-wing apologist. Bush would not refer to waterboarding as torture, but Obama did.

    Shepard personally believed it was torture, but felt an obligation for NPR to be neutral. So her position was to have the practice described and let the listener decide. E.g., to report that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds.” But she and NPR were accused by some of misleading its listeners and adopting “Orwellian government euphemisms.”

    She also wrote a book on Woodward and Bernstein, “Life in the Shadow of Watergate.” She revealed in it that Woodward and Bernstein greatly angered Barry Sussman, an editor at WAPO with whom they worked very closely on the Watergate story. Sussman felt he should have been listed as a third author on “All the President’s Men.” He told Shepard: “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.” Ouch.

    The cause of death was lung cancer. She is survived by her husband, their son, and a grandson. When asked how it was raising her son through his teen years, she just shook her head. “It was torture,” she said.

    The puzzle today was by Robin Yu. Yeah, Yu. It had several phrases that did something weird until you found the “revealer.” E.g., for the clue “Dangerously near,” the answer should have been TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. But the answer seemed to start with CLOSE and the entire phrase wouldn’t fit in the spaces allotted to it. The same thing happened later with TOO HOT TO HANDLE — the answer started with HOT and couldn’t fit.

    Cleverly, the revealer turned out to be TOO LITTLE TOO LATE, and what you had to do was shift the TOO to the end of the answer (“too late”) and squoosh it into one square (“too little”). Neat.

    It earned a rare nod of approval from Rex on his blog — he is famously critical. And among the comments was this from Constructor Yu:

    “Wow, I got a rave review from Rex! I’ve been reading your blog for years and this absolutely made my day. Thank you!”

    There were some bruisers in it. 27D: “Romantic music genre originating in the Dominican Republic.” WTF? Turns out to be BACHATA. Gimme a break! And there was a cross that defeated me: 71A was “Some compound gases,” which was MONOXIDES, and I couldn’t get the I from the crosses because 58D was “Singer Zayn,” with the answer MALIK. Never heard of him. He’s a good-looking kid. Thirty-years old and British. His mom’s British/Irish and his dad’s Pakistani.

    He has a daughter with model Gigi Hadid, but they broke up in 2021. There was some abuse/violence involved, sorry to say. He especially had problems with Hadid’s mom.

    Here’s the lovely Ms. Hadid. Is that a wrist watch down there?

    Last, do you know the difference between comfits and confits? The clue today was “Candied fruits or nuts,” and that’s COMFITS. As for confits, Barbara S. kindly explained:

    Confit is any type of food that is cooked slowly over a long period as a method of preservation. Confit, as a cooking term, describes when food is cooked in grease, oil, or sugar water, at a lower temperature, as opposed to deep frying.

    Both differ quite a bit from the fermentation of dovekies sealed up in a hollowed-out seal carcass buried under rocks for a couple of months. But you already know about that.

    See you tomorrow.

  • All That Glisters

    Hobie Landrith was missing. Well, he died last week, but I mean he was missing from my autograph collection. He was a good example of the type of player I would not care about having in the collection — a back-up catcher for a variety of teams over a respectable but unspectacular 14-year career. But his obit today made him a “must get” in my eyes: He was the first ever Met!

    When the Mets (along with the Houston Colt 45’s) were formed in 1962, an expansion draft was held. Each Major League team could protect most of its roster, but the new teams could draft unprotected players. Houston went first and grabbed shortstop Eddie Bressoud from the Giants. Then the Mets made Landrith their first choice. When Manager Casey Stengel was asked why they chose Landrith, he said you gotta have a catcher, or else you’re gonna have a lot of passed balls. Landrith was the catcher and batted eighth in the Mets first regular season game. He went 0 for 4, made an error, and allowed three runners to steal. Oh, well. It’s baseball — not a fairy tale.

    On May 12, 1962, Landrith came up to pinch hit in the bottom of the ninth with the Mets down 2-1. Rod Kanehl was on base, having pinch run for Gil Hodges. Before Landrith stepped into the box, Stengel called time and whispered something in his ear. The great Warren Spahn was pitching for the Braves. Landrith sent the first pitch over the fence for a game-winning home run. When Stengel was asked later what it was he whispered, he said “I told him to hit a home run.”

    It was almost negated. Kanehl failed to touch third base. Luckily, third base coach Solly Hemus noticed and stopped Kanehl in his tracks and had him go back and touch third before Landrith did. Had Landrith touched the base first, Kanehl would have been called out and the Braves would have won the game on a walk-off home run by the opposing team.

    [Side note: I rode the subway home from a Mets game once along with Solly Hemus. That’s how I got his autograph. He was very friendly.]

    One of the other teams Landrith played for was Cincinnati. According to Wikipedia, it was during the height of anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S., and the Reds officially changed their name to the Cincinnati Redlegs to remove any potential “confusion” between the baseball team and Communists.

    Let’s just tip-toe away from that. Comments could only diminish its luster.

    When I noticed that Landrith was missing from my collection, I went on eBay and picked up a nice signed card by him for under $10. It’s pictured below. The lack of monetary value is more than made up for by the story, the historic value.

    Landrith is survived by his wife, six children, his brother, 11 grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren. He was 93. He’ll be settling in behind the plate once he gets through those pearly gates. Even Heaven can always use a solid back-up catcher.

    “Weezie” had a perceptive and heartfelt comment on today’s puzzle, IMHO. The puzzle included Toni Morrison, Nat King Cole, Langston Hughes, stuff from India (tandoori oven and atta flour), and Ravi Shankar. Also Michaela COEL, British actress and screenwriter.

    Weezie noted: I really appreciated how non Eurocentric/white-centric this puzzle was. It is a great example of how much more inclusive crosswords can be while still being accessible. Another fabulous example in another dimension of inclusion was cluing STEER as “Use a wheelchair’s push rims, for instance.” Seeing that casual inclusion of disabled people’s experiences – not in any kind of exceptionalizing, pitying, or “inspiration porn” way – feels like it normalized disability, much like it normalized decentering whiteness.

    Wow — a lot of attention on Tennessee lately. Last month, during deliberation on a bill to allow the use of firing squads as an execution method, GOP State Representative Paul Sherrell suggested adding an amendment that would allow lynching as well: “hanging by a tree.”

    In response, Democrat Justin J. Pearson attempted to read out the names of lynching victims in Shelby County, where the majority of the lynchings in Tennessee took place, but was cut off by House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who stated he was “out of line,” the “he” being Pearson, of course, not Sherrell. Sherrell apologized for the remarks two days later. Members of the Tennessee Black Caucus criticized his apology for being “insincere.” Sherrell was removed from the Criminal Justice Committee. Yup — that probably wasn’t the best committee for the guy.

    The theme for Sunday’s puzzle was aphorisms where only the first half is given and the remainder can be omitted because it’s understood. A BIRD IN THE HAND is all you need to say, right? Similarly, WHEN IN ROME, or IF YOU CANT STAND THE HEAT. Some took issue with the inclusion of SPEAK OF THE DEVIL, claiming that it has no second part. But the consensus was that it does – something like Speak of the devil “and he appears,” or the more lurid “and you see his horns.”

    Each of these is an example of an “anapodoton.” That’s what they are called. Another example from the puzzle was ALL THAT GLITTERS, and one person corrected that, claiming it should be “all that glisters.” WTF?? Can’t be! But it sort of is. The saying predates Shakespeare by several hundred years, but his version of it (in The Merchant of Venice), was “all that glisters is not gold.” It changed to glitters by the time Dryden used it in 1687, and that’s the current common usage. Both words mean the same thing.

    Three cheers for Ronnie Gajownik, first female manager of a High-A level minor league ballclub, The Hillsboro Hops, in the Diamondback farm system. Hillsboro is in Oregon, in the Portland area.

    She’s gay too! Here’s a sweet shot from her wedding. Owl Chatter will be pulling for the Hops bigtime this season! So far, so good — they are 3-1.

    Let’s close on that nice note — see you tomorrow!

  • A Chicken Giraffe

    Hi everybody! We haven’t been chattering as much as usual of late because we’ve been out visiting our boy, Worthington, in Michigan. That’s him in the middle, with Wilma on the left, and (me) Welly, on the right. We just got home so we’ll be starting up again soon!

    In today’s puzzle, 3D was Misunderstood song lyric like “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.” The answer was MONDEGREEN. I hope you’re familiar with the term — it’s when you mis-hear a song lyric with amusing results. In the puzzle clue, of course, the actual lyric was “kiss the sky.”

    The commentariat was rife with examples. From Silent Night: Round John Virgin.

    From Bad Moon Risin’: There’s a bathroom on the right.

    From Pabloinnh: Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with the light from a bulb.

    Lewis chimed in with: The mondegreen of my early early youth was in the song “Runaway” by Del Shannon, where what I heard was, “I’m a walkin’ in the rain / Through the groin I feel a pain”.

    From Barbara S.: Petula Clark: “Listen to the rhythm of the crackers in the city” or sometimes when I really heard the F-sound “Listen to the rhythm of the catfish in the city.”

    From JonB3: “Now that you’ve gone, all that’s left is a xylophone”

    From Carola: Heard in church as a child: In “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “Christ the royal master leans against the phone” (= leads against the foe). Obviously from the olden days of wall phones. [very olden]

    “Hold me closer, Tony Danza.”

    From egsforbreakfast: My favorite Mondegreen came from a neighbor kid who thought that “She’s got a ticket to ride” was “She’s got a chicken giraffe” (and she don’t care!).

    Burtonkd had a good one: “The girl with colitis goes by.” (kaleidoscope eyes)

    Personally, I like the line from Dylan’s Jack of Hearts: “Rosemary combed her hair and took a cabbage into town.”

    Taylor Slow explained where the term comes from: The word originates with journalist Sylvia Wright, who wrote a column in the 1950s in which she recounted hearing the Scottish folksong The Bonny Earl of Morray. Wright misheard the lyric “Oh, they have slain the Earl o’ Morray and laid him on the green” and thought it was “Oh, they have slain the Earl o’ Morray and Lady Mondegreen.”

    Did you know the difference between a mondegreen and an eggcorn? A mondegreen is a misconception based on a song lyric. An eggcorn is when it derives from anything else.

    Did someone say Del Shannon? Remember this look?

    See you tomorrow!

  • Not Tonight, Dear. I Have A Headache.

    It’s the birthday today of Eadweard Muybridge. He was born in 1830 in Surrey, England, moved to California in the 1850’s, and became one of the first internationally known photographers. From 1883 to 1886 he was based at the U. of Pennsylvania and produced over 100,000 photos of animals and humans in motion.

    He designed a camera that could take a picture in one-thousandth of a second. He set up 24 of them along a racetrack with trip wires to pull the shutters. The resultant series of pictures of a horse galloping proved for the first time that all four of a horse’s hooves will sometimes be off the ground at the same time.

    He died at the age of 74, never having completed his centipede project.

    Do you ever “misread” an event and show up “underdressed?” On this day in 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his 28,000 troops to General Ulysses S. Grant, thus ending the Civil War. The night before, Grant was having a rough time of it. He knew the Union army had Lee’s troops fucked, but Lee wasn’t giving up the fight.

    Grant went to bed dirty, tired, and miserable with a bad migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” It didn’t work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before, and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.

    An escort from Lee met up with Grant and handed him a note. It essentially said, We’ve had it — it’s over. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

    Grant allowed Lee to choose the location for the surrender, and Lee’s troops found the homestead of Wilmer McLean. When McLean showed them to a run-down unfurnished house on his property, they said What the fuck McLean — don’t you know what’s going down here today, you idiot? So he let them use the main house.

    Lee showed up in a new uniform, silk-stitched boots, a felt hat, and a jewel-studded sword. Grant arrived in a mud-splattered uniform and boots, with tarnished shoulder straps. “Shit, Lee,” Grant said, “Would it have killed you to let me know I was supposed to dress up for this? Look at me. And the goddamn Owl Chatter photographers are here.” [See photo below.]

    Instead of taking Lee’s troops into custody, Grant allowed them to return to their homes with their weapons and horses, and with their pride. Lee had told Grant that his men were starving. Without hesitation, Grant told Lee he could have all the provisions he wanted. For the rest of his life, Lee never allowed an unkindly word to be said about Grant in his presence.

    Our lunch at the Gandy Dancer in Annie Arbor did not disappoint. Sam and Sarah ordered different treatments of salmon, Linda went with the scallops, and I had the snapper — all excellent. The calamari appetizer was even better. Here are some shots. Can you find Sam and Linda dining?

    After our meal we took a long walk around Ann Arbor. We found this poem posted in a cafe window. It’s by Ellen Stone, and it’s called If You Don’t Think You Do Anything Right — for John Prine.

    Make beer w/one can of cheap lager.
    Consider becoming more flavored yourself.
    Eat more bone marrow. Reduce cruciferous
    vegetables especially cabbage. Soak your feet
    in well water centered with rind of blood orange.

    Remember clubs of cheery types of people who
    gather in groups like knitters, coin collectors
    and those who like old dolls. Do more meditation
    when recycling & garbage has finally been collected.
    Sing at sunrise or when the dew comes off the grass.

    Embrace your household of living beings —
    mice, squirrels or your offspring. Find
    a handful of fountain pens, freaks & curlers
    or the right side of the bed. Ask everyone
    one song that makes them cry every day.

    Thanks for dropping in. See you tomorrow, if we can get onto the internet in Greensburg, PA.

  • Yow!

    An important rule of Owl Chatter is, if you are confused about something, rather than calmly thinking it through, say something as quickly as possible to make it clear what an idiot you are.

    Here’s an example. Linda and I drove 300 miles to Dubois PA yesterday and settled into a nice restaurant called Station 101. (It’s off of Exit 101 on Route 80 — what are the odds?) We sat down, decided what we wanted to have, and I dashed off to the men’s room. When I returned, Linda got up to go to the ladies’ room while a woman was dropping off some napkins or something. So I said to her: “I can order.”

    Now here’s where things got sticky. She asked me, “You’re not waiting for her to get back?”

    The thing is, I didn’t know whom she meant by “her.” It didn’t occur to me that she meant Linda. Because it had to be clear that by saying “I can order” I wasn’t waiting for Linda to get back, right? It seemed (to me) to be “baked into” my statement, that I was able to order without Linda. So it had to be, I reasoned, that this woman was not our waitress — she was a hostess or something. And our waitress must have come by to introduce herself while I was in the men’s room. So when the hostess asked me “You’re not waiting for her to come back?” the “her” must have referred to our waitress, and the hostess was asking me if I wanted to wait till our waitress came back to place my order. So I said “You mean our waitress?” And she said “I am your waitress.”

    D’oh!

    When three Democrats were up for expulsion from the Tennessee legislature this week and the two young Black men were expelled while the white woman wasn’t, Owl Chatter grew concerned that race might have been a factor. After all, all three engaged in the exact same action — protesting the legislature’s refusal to act on gun control after the shooting deaths in Nashville earlier in the week. But Jody Barrett who only voted to expel the Blacks cleared this up when asked by NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. He said “It had absolutely nothing to do with race.” Absolutely! He went on to clarify his position:

    “I’m an attorney, and Ms. Johnson was the only representative that showed up with legal counsel, and their legal counsel made an opening statement pointing out deficiencies in the resolution that had been filed that we were voting on. And once those deficiencies were pointed out, in my view as an attorney, then it was incumbent upon the debate to present evidence to correct that and to establish clearly what it was that Ms. Johnson did to rise to the level of expulsion. I just don’t think that we established that during the debate.”

    Convinced?

    At least Barrett stuck around to spout that bullshit. When CNN’s Van Jones asked Jeremy Faison, Chair of the Republican Caucus, repeatedly why they didn’t bring the matter up before the Ethics Committee, he fumphered around a little and then said he had a long commute home and bolted.

    God Bless America.

    I had to have my bladder checked out for reasons too disgusting to go into. Everything is fine, kinehora. But let me tell ya, folks, if you need to have one thing checked out — try for it to not be your bladder. Because, fellas, the way they get in to check it out is through the exact last thing you want them messing with. When I awoke from the procedure, the doc explained that she placed a stent somewhere in there for some reason I have no idea about. I trusted her, so I wasn’t paying attention. She said to come back in a week and she’ll just pull it right out, like it’s nothing.

    When I came back a week later, Allison the assistant told me to remove all my clothing from the waist down and to lie back on the examining table. She gave me a flimsy little paper blanket to cover up with. Then she walked out of the room after telling me: “Don’t go anywhere.” Funny.

    A few minutes later she came back with the doc. How to describe it? Well, first of all, it’s not nothing. It’s the extreme opposite of nothing. Here she is talking to Allison while poking around in me. “There it is. Okay, so now I just need to angle it to guide it out. There it . . . ” and I missed what she said next because I was going Yow Yow Yow pretty loudly, and I vaguely recall kicking out with my left foot. Like that could help. But the pain and my yowing just lasted a second or two. It was out. She wanted to show it to me but I closed my eyes and said, “No, I don’t want to see it!” Like I’m supposed to be friends with it now?

    TMI? Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the rectal MRI I had about ten years ago. You don’t want one of those either. No sir. No ma’am. Get that thing away from me.

    In Brookville PA, where we stayed last night, in our favorite dump off Route 80 on the way to Michigan, there are only two FM radio stations in reach overnight. So I could not resort to my usual sports-talk nonsense to get back to sleep after a bathroom run. One station plays country music, and the other an endless string of soft rock songs. I went with the latter. I recognized about half of them. One was a Taylor Swift song, I Knew You Were Trouble. Here’s her acoustic version. If you can take your eyes off of her for a second, what’s with the hair on the guy on the right?

    We had a great meal today with little grandson Morris at Gandy Dancer, the classy Annie Arbor eatery discussed in Owl Chatter a while ago. Loved it! When the photos get back from that little orange shack in the K-Mart parking lot, I’ll post a couple.

    Thanks for popping by!

  • The Color of News

    Columnist Frank Bruni is back after a month away. His “For the love of sentences” includes Peggy Noonan’s note on the chilliness of Ron DeSantis who gives her the feeling “that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone.” Well put, Noonan.

    And Nathan Heller in The New Yorker said this about the declining attention spans of college students: “Assigning Middlemarch is like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.”

    Here’s some wisdom from the internet: It’s just as hard to try to lose at Rock, Paper, Scissors, as to try to win.

    Yesterday was the wedding anniversary of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Mazel Tov kids! They married in 1614. He was 29 and she was only 18. Her real name was Moataka. Pocahontas was a nickname that means “playful one.” She was kidnapped by the English who intended to swap her for prisoners held by her dad, the Chief. While captive, she learned English, converted to Christianity, and changed her name to Rebecca. What is it with this girl and names? And she and Rolfe fell in love, which seemed to nix the swap plan.

    He asked her dad the Chief for permission to marry and then asked English Governor Tom Dale also. “It is Pocahontas,” he wrote, “to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have been a long time so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I (could not) unwind myself thereout.” Not exactly a Shakespearean sonnet, but love is love.

    They later toured England with their infant son Thomas. Pocahontas grew ill and died there, in an inn in Gravesend. John left Thomas behind to get an English education, and returned to Virginia. They never saw each other again.

    It got as high as 74 today at Owl Chatter Central. Winter is on the run, no question. One of our favorite songs about the changing seasons is Urge For Going, by Joni Mitchell. Tom Rush does a great version of it.

    I had a girl in summertime, with summer colored skin
    And not another man in town my darlin’s heart could win.
    But when the leaves fell trembling down
    And bully winds did rub their faces in the snow,
    She got the urge for going, and I had to let her go.

    And she got the urge for going, when the meadow grass was turning brown
    Summertime was falling down, and winter closing in.

    So I’ll ply the fire with kindling, pull the blankets to my chin
    I’ll lock the vagrant winter out, and bolt my wandering in.
    I’d like to call back summertime
    And have her stay for just another month or so
    But she’s got the urge for going, and I guess she’ll have to go.

    Here’s a poem by Ted Kooser, from Winter Morning Walks to send us on our way.

    There are days when the world
    has a hard time keeping its clouds on,
    and its grass in place, and this
    is one of them, tumbleweeds
    huddled up under the skirts
    of the cedars, oak trees
    joining hands in the windy grove.
    Even the dawn light, blocky
    with pink and yellow and blue
    like a comics section, quickly
    fluttered away, leaving a Sunday
    the color of news.

    Good night everybody! OC is heading out to Detroit tomorrow, God willing. First stopover — Brookville, PA.

  • Unpoetical Carrots

    Owl Chatter congratulates Janet Protasiewicz who won a fiercely contested race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday. In a state renowned for extremely close elections, Ploprazyiwcs won by an impressive eleven percent. The win by Prepotwizzes means the dreadful gerrymandering that gave the GOP a stranglehold over Wisconsin elections can be overturned. Judge Pleepzoowies has also made it clear she is a strong supporter of abortion rights.

    In an unusually gracious concession speech, Daniel Kelly stated “I wish that I’d be able to concede to a worthy opponent, but I do not have a worthy opponent,” and labelled Judge Pnewlersippie’s campaign as “beneath contempt.” As of this writing, Kelly has not called Peeprewzitsy, although, in his defense, this may be due to an inability to pronounce her name.

    Way to go, JP! OC loves the pearls!

    Acerbic comedian Marc Maron is in the puzzle today! Hey Marc — we’re a big fan. Watched your series a while back. Good stuff!

    Maron was born in Jersey City and will be 60 in September. He’s Jewish (voo den?) and his dad was an orthopedic surgeon. He was married twice for about 4 years each time, the second time to very pretty humorist Mishna Wolff, pictured below. And he dated Moon Zappa for five months, Frank’s little girl, who is only five years younger than Maron, and whose birthday is just one day after his. Here’s Mishna.

    Here are some quotes:

    I’m not for everyone. I’m barely for me.

    Left wing, right wing, I am wingless and tired of trying to fly. Here comes the ground.

    Maybe depression is the most reasonable response to all the crap around us. Maybe it’s the happy people who need medication.

    That’s the big challenge of life—to chisel disappointment into wisdom so people respect you and you don’t annoy your friends with your whining.

    Buying my wife a gun is sort of like saying, “You know, I kinda want to kill myself, but I want it to be a surprise.”

    And for Owl Chatter readers curious as to what Moon Unit Zappa looks like, take a peek:

    Can you see her dad in there? Hi Frank! Saw you over 50 years ago in Central Park — great concert! Moon Unit is an actress, singer, and author and is doing okay. She is divorced and has one daughter, Mathilda Plum Doucette.

    According to The Writer’s Almanac, it’s the birthday of English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, born in London in 1837. His cousin said of him: “He was strangely tiny. His limbs were small and delicate; and his sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled mass of red hair standing almost at right angles to it. Hero-worshippers talk of his hair as having been a ‘golden aureole.’ At that time there was nothing golden about it. Red, violent, aggressive red it was, unmistakable, unpoetical carrots.” 

    At Oxford he was a good friend of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. They were roommates and kept a pet wombat. (Not kidding.)

    Here’s Rosetti’s painting of Swinburne. Yup, there’s the hair.

    3D today was “It may be bottled for a caretaker.” Tough clue. Ten letters. Give up? BREAST MILK. It led LMS to post the following before sharing a short Borat scene with Bob Barr.

    “I’m a bit buttoned-up, so BREASTMILK makes me feel embarrassed. I can’t explain it, but someone starts talking about their BREASTMILK, pumping, nursing what not, I just want to crawl under the couch.”

    Another clue was “What a pocket protector may protect against,” and the answer was INKSPOT. Again, here’s LMS:

    “What a pocket protector may protect against” – dating? Just kidding. I embraced my inner nerd in 10th grade and have never looked back.

    Her stories about her students never fail to resonate. There was an answer today GAME ON, and she shared the following. (Note the word “hoodla” at the end as a plural form of hoodlum.)

    Yesterday I had a new kid. But when he gave me his name, I realized he has been on my roster all semester but has been suspended. (Since it’s been so long, I had asked about him and was told that he had tried to sneak a knife into school, and he’d be out for the rest of the year.) So hearing his name startled me and I surreptitiously considered him more closely. Just seemed like a normal kid. As we chatted, I picked up on a twinkle in his eye and realized that several times he was pulling my leg with some outrageous story. I told him that he didn’t really know me but that he couldn’t have chosen a more deserving teacher to “have on” because I spend the majority of my day pranking kids. I deserve it. But then I leaned over and said, Be warned, Mister. GAME. ON. Who knows what the truth is about his lengthy suspension. All I know is that most of the kids at my school are bright and delightful, not the hoodla everyone expects of alternative school populations.

    Who says the puzzle isn’t timely, or, in this case, untimely? 41A today was “Diaper bag supply,” and the answer was TALC. And it was reported today that J&J reached an $8.9 billion settlement in the lawsuits over the talc-cancer link. Ouch!

    OMG! Get this, readers!! A comment by Barbara S. today on 1D blew my head open. The clue was “Faline’s sweetheart in a Disney classic.” So that’s impossible, but it turns out to be BAMBI. Very few of us had heard of Faline. In any event, in discussing it, Barbara S. referred to Bambi as “he.” What??!! Bambi is male?? No way, right? So I googled it and, sure enough, Bambi is a young male deer!! Bambi’s appearance in the film leads us to believe Bambi is female, but the novel makes it clear Bambi is male. Any of you out there know about this before? Is it just me, living under my rock?

    The poem of the day from the Poetry Foundation ends on such a pretty image. It’s by Ha Jin and is called “Ways of Talking.”

    We used to like talking about grief
    Our journals and letters were packed
    with losses, complaints, and sorrows.
    Even if there was no grief
    we wouldn’t stop lamenting
    as though longing for the charm
    of a distressed face.

    Then we couldn’t help expressing grief
    So many things descended without warning:
    labor wasted, loves lost, houses gone,
    marriages broken, friends estranged,
    ambitions worn away by immediate needs.
    Words lined up in our throats
    for a good whining.
    Grief seemed like an endless river—
    the only immortal flow of life.

    After losing a land and then giving up a tongue,
    we stopped talking of grief
    Smiles began to brighten our faces.
    We laugh a lot, at our own mess.
    Things become beautiful,
    even hailstones in the strawberry fields.

    Thanks for dropping in! See you tomorrow!

  • Hey Ho, Let’s Go

    In the puzzle today, 60A was “Frozen waffles since the 1950s” and the answer, of course, was EGGOS. It led egsforbreakfast to note:

    I knew a guy who thought he was Mr. Cool because he took two months off to travel the whole country eating frozen waffles. He was on a real EGGO trip.

    For a blog devoted to nonsense, it’s hard to imagine a better opening.

    The puzzle theme was certain movies. There was DELIVERANCE, and then movies in which certain things are “delivered,” i.e., ROSEMARY’S BABY, BROADCAST NEWS, and MYSTIC PIZZA (baby, the news, and pizza, respectively).

    LMS shared this wonderful banjo scene with us from Deliverance:

    Mystic Pizza, which has nothing to do with mysticism — it takes place in Mystic, CT, — was the first movie in which Julia Roberts was a critical success. Roger Ebert called her “a major beauty with a fierce energy.” That’s a good way to put it. She was very young in MP.

    JR was born in Smyrna, GA, near Atlanta. Her parents, one-time actors and playwrights, met while performing in theatrical productions for the armed forces. They later co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop, and ran a children’s acting school while expecting Julia.

    The children of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. attended the school; JR’s dad was the acting coach for their daughter, Yolanda. As a thank-you for running the only racially integrated theater troupe in the region (and due to the Roberts’ financial difficulties), Mrs. King paid Mrs. Roberts’s hospital bill when Julia was born. Technically, that means Julia Roberts is Black.

    You don’t need Owl Chatter to tell you how successful she has been. She was the first actress to be paid $20 million for a film. It was for Erin Brockovich, and she won the Oscar for Best Actress for her work in it. Her husband since 2002 has been cameraman Dan Moder, whom she met on a movie set. They have three kids. Roberts converted to Hinduism in 2010, for spiritual reasons.

    Sticking with the arts, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, the much-beloved Seymour Stein, died in LA on Sunday at age 80. Stein wasn’t a performer: he was a producer. And he was a co-founder of the HOF.

    Stein’s label was SIRE Records and he worked with many stars. To describe Stein as a music lover, would be laughably insufficient. Here’s a note from the NYT obit:

    He could rattle off the lyrics, chart positions and B-sides of seemingly any notable record going back to the 1940s, and lovingly sing their hooks in a nasal whine. A champion of punk rock in the 1970s, he would also tear up over “La Marseillaise.” “He knows all the lyrics to every song you’ve ever heard,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once said.

    He worked with so many great artists and bands: Lou Reed, the Ramones, The Talking Heads — just to name a few. He was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, and some of it stuck with him: He would fly to Europe loaded down with NY cheesecakes packed in dry ice to hand out to drooling execs and artists, and return with signed contracts.

    His most successful signing was of Madonna at his bedside in Lenox Hill Hospital where he was recovering from a heart ailment. She was a struggling unknown at the time, and he snapped her right up.

    “Words cannot describe how I felt at this moment after years of grinding and being broke and getting every door slammed in my face,” Madonna said of her signing after Mr. Stein’s death. (“I am weeping as I write this down,” she said.) “Not only did Seymour hear me,” she wrote, “but he saw me and my potential. For this I will be eternally grateful!”

    Stein’s wife Linda was a co-manager of the Ramones and later a successful real estate agent. In 2007, she was killed by her assistant who was convicted of second-degree murder. Stein’s sexuality was fluid; he was attracted to men and the gay subculture. He once remarked of his marriage to Linda: “I somehow knew we’d make a rock-and-roll king-and-queen combo, — even if the roles were a little confused.”

    He is survived by his daughter, his sister, and three grandchildren. The cause of death was the Blitzkrieg Bop.

  • No Excuses, No Egrets

    If you frequently confuse herons with egrets, you are not alone. They are not biologically distinct and they have the same build. It was an EGRET you might have seen in the puzzle today: “Wetlands wader.”

    The distinction between a heron and an egret is rather vague, and depends more on appearance than biology. The word “egret” comes from the French aigrette that means both “silver heron” and “brush,” referring to the long, filamentous feathers that seem to cascade down an egret’s back during the breeding season. Just to confuse you further, those feathers are also called egrets.

    At 25A, the clue was “Option in a ‘no strings attached’ relationship,” and the answer was CASUAL SEX. Is there such a thing? I don’t think there is such a thing for Jews. It never gets below frantic. In any event, if your footsies tend to get cold, you can throw on some of those TUBE SOX at 50A. And you can hang out IN PJS afterwards (46A) — maybe scrounge up some EDIBLES (10D)?

    There was some consternation about 43D. The clue was “Crept,” and the answer was SNEAKED. Some thought SNUCK would be better. Technically, both are correct. Pabloinnh said:

    I believe it was Dizzy Dean who used “slud,” as in “He slud into third.” Goes nicely with “snuck.”

    At 62A the answer was THAT SUCKS, for “Oof, sorry to hear it.” Kitchef shared this example of its usage from the movie Top Secret:


    Dr. Paul Flammond: “The secret police broke into my house. They tore me from my family, ransacked my laboratory, and brought me to this dungeon.”

    Nick Rivers: “That sucks.”

    Let’s close on that eloquent note. See you tomorrow!