The Wellington Files

  • Slices of Quince

    Let’s say, hypothetically, that your weight has drifted up a smidge, and you decide to cut back on the calories and ramp up your exercise program. Of course, you will need constant positive reinforcement. You adjust your diet to cut out everything bad and increase the vegetables. You drink tons more water. Everything feels good. You suit up in your shorts and your good-luck tee shirt. You climb on your exercise bike for a good first-day workout. And the seat post breaks under your fat tuchas and you fall to the floor in tears. Can the Haagen Dazs be far behind?

    According to today’s NYT, Peloton is recalling over 2 million of its exercise bikes due to numerous reports of breaking seat posts. Ouch! Not only are all the fat tuchases tumbling to the ground — the company’s stock price plunged 9% immediately, and more than 20% over the past month.

    In today’s puzzle, the clue at 55A was “Portmanteau structure built from discarded cans,” and the answer was BEERAMID. Here’s one (burp!).

    Edward Lear was born on this date in 1812 in a suburb of London. He wrote a nonsense book (!), and was considered a master of limericks. Master schmaster — I checked on the limericks and they’re just not funny. He seems not to appreciate that the last line is supposed to be a kicker of some sort. Here’s a typical pair:

    There was an Old Person of Dean,
    Who dined on one pea and one bean;
    For he said, “More than that
    Would make me too fat,”
    That cautious Old Person of Dean.

    There was an Old Person of Dover,
    Who rushed through a field of blue Clover;
    But some very large bees,
    Stung his nose and his knees,
    So he very soon went back to Dover.

    Amirite?

    Alright, so to hell with the limericks. He also wrote The Owl and the Pussycat. Here are lines 27-33. They contain the word “runcible,” which he just made up (he did that a lot), and is now included in many dictionaries.

    They dined on mince and slices of quince,
    Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
    And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand
    They danced by the light of the moon,
    The moon,
    The moon,
    They danced by the light of the moon.

    Lear was so good at drawing animals and birds that he got a job with the London Zoological Society. Here’s one of his works.

    He lived on Lord Stanley’s estate and entertained the children with his silly stories and verses. That’s how his Book of Nonsense came about, which was published in 1846 and sold very well. According to Wikipedia, Lear was known to introduce himself with a long pseudonym: “Mr. Abebika kratoponoko Prizzikalo Kattefello Ablegorabalus Ableborinto phashyph,” or “Chakonoton the Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla Polentilla Battledore & Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps.”

    Lear never married. The closest he came was two marriage proposals he made, both to the same woman, who was 46 years younger than him. Seriously, Lear? Later in life he relied for companionship on his Albanian chef, Giorgis (who he said was a terrible chef), and his (Lear’s) beloved cat Foss. Lear died in Sanremo, Liguria, Italy, in1888 at age 75, when the seat post on his exercise bike broke. [No it didn’t.]

    It is also the birthday of Rosellen Brown today: Happy 84th! Brown attended Brandeis as a Woodrow Wilson fellow after graduating from Barnard in 1960. She met her husband at Brandeis, on the kosher line. [I made up that last part.] They were both strongly motivated by humanitarian concerns and moved down to Mississippi to teach at Tougaloo College near Jackson, a mostly Black school, for a while.

    Much of Brown’s writing concerns race. Her most successful novel, Civil Wars (1984), features an unlikely pair of civil rights activists—wife Jessie, a Jewish New Yorker, and husband Teddy, a renegade liberal Southerner—whose lives are altered when they take in Teddy’s spoiled and bigoted nephew and niece after their parents die when the seat posts on their exercise bikes break. [I can’t seem to let go.]

    Her novel Before and After was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson.

    It was a long day. Good night! There will be more nonsense to mine tomorrow, God willing.

  • Mayor Wu

    A couple was caught smuggling 70 pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into Israel recently, according to Israeli tax authorities, and another airline passenger was caught with over 143 pounds. Overall, Israeli authorities confiscated 661 pounds of Roll-Ups in a recent week. Do the math, folks — since a single Roll-Up weighs only 0.5 of an ounce, that would be over 200,000 individual packets. [If one packet is 0.5 oz., then each pound is 32. 661 x 32 = 219,452.] Bottom line: we’re talking about shitloads of Fruit Roll-Ups.

    How has this come to pass in the Holy Land? Well, a few months ago, a video posted on TikTok showed how to wrap a scoop of ice cream in a Fruit Roll-Up. What happens is the Roll-Up freezes instantly, making it easy to handle and giving it a surprisingly wonderful crunch. It’s become a craze, and the Roll-Up people are happy to roll with it.

    With Roll-Up demand soaring, Israel soon faced an unprecedented Roll-Up crisis. Individual Roll-Ups started selling for $8 each, compared to a box of ten going for around $3 in the U.S. Hence, the smuggling. An individual entering Israel can bring in no more than 11 pounds of any specific food product.

    Last week, Israel’s Health Ministry took a stand and issued a warning against Fruit Roll-Ups. The agency called the frenzy and the smuggling attempts “madness.” It noted that Roll-Ups are full of unhealthy sugar and oils. It offered an alternative: cucumber rolls. (Not kidding.] As of yet, they have failed to catch on. Hard to imagine why.

    Here’s a woman wearing a dress made out of Fruit Roll-Ups. It must be worth a fortune in Tel Aviv. If she dyes her hair, she can give new meaning to “strawberry blonde.” She had to switch flavors because the last time she tried this, she was arrested and charged with grape. OK, I’ll stop.

    Vague word had reached even me under my rock about Boston’s first female, and first minority-group-member (Asian-American), mayor Michelle Wu, but I was only today year’s old when I learned she is an accomplished pianist, and, as a nod to how shallow we are, very pretty.

    She performed as the soloist in the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra last Sunday at the free Concert for the City in a packed Symphony Hall.

    According to the NYT, “she captured more of the composer’s characteristic elegance than an amateur might. And she barely missed a note.” She’s been playing the piano since she was four. Music played a large role in her family’s assimilation to America. Brava, Mayor Wu!

    Music plays a role in the poem featured in today’s Writer’s Almanac too. It’s called To the Woman at the Retirement Center, and it’s by Phebe Hanson.

    You tell me when you were eight, newly arrived
    from Czechoslovakia, your teacher made you memorize
    a poem that began “I remember, I remember
    the house where I was born.” Stranger
    to our language you proudly learned all the verses,
    practiced them over and over in front of your mirror,
    but at the program when you stood to recite
    in front of all the parents and other students,
    you got as far as “I remember, I remember,”
    and forgot all the rest and had to sit down shamefaced.

    Now you live in this ten-story retirement center
    where you cried most of the first month, so lonesome
    for your son, transferred to another city, who couldn’t
    take you with him because his new house wasn’t
    big enough. Sometimes, you tell me, you slip away
    from the recreation director who wants to teach you
    how to turn plastic bleach bottles into bird feeders,
    sneak up to your room, turn on the Bohemian radio station,
    dance barefoot all by yourself, as you used to

    years ago in the house where you were born.

    CUNY was in the puzzle yesterday: City University of NY. It prompted Weezie to post the following paean:

    “I’m always happy to see my beloved and beleaguered CUNY – City University of New York -mentioned. My mother dropped out of college at 19 to marry her first husband and follow him back east. The only nice thing I can say about him is that once divorced, he was a good father to my older brothers.

    “Anyway, thanks to the CUNY system which was basically free back then, when my mom wasn’t waiting tables, she was able to go back to school part time, get her BA, and then eventually got her PhD in psychology. The CUNY preschools were a life saver for my mom and dad (husband #2) when my younger brother and I were little. And as adults, my little brother went to Hunter for his BA, I went there for social work school, and my second eldest brother went to Brooklyn College for his masters in mental health counseling, with honorable mention to my eldest brother and his SUNY New Paltz BA. It’s not nearly as financially accessible as it used to be, and it’s woefully underfunded by the state and city, but these schools have such a beautiful history of creating opportunities for moving out of poverty for working class New Yorkers, especially New Yorkers of color. I will always feel tremendous pride in and gratitude for our being a CUNY family. Here’s to public education!”

    The clue today at 18A was “Onetime extravaganzas that included diving displays and water ballets.” AQUACADES. New to me, they were very popular water-based big-time musical shows back in the day. An aquacade was the most successful production at the 1939 NY World’s Fair. Folks like Johnny Weissmuller were in them. If you enjoy the Olympic competitions in synchronized drowning, I mean swimming, you would have enjoyed them. Here’s a short news clip:

    I still have the program from when Linda and I attended:

    See you tomorrow, everybody! Thanks for dropping in.

  • A Hundred Thousand Wishes

    Dear American Owl Chatter Friends,

    I am happy to take a little time off from saving my glorious country of Ukraine from the brutal Russian monsters who commit war crimes against us every day.  Congratulations Owl-Friends Wilma and Welly on your 200th post – a great achievement.  As you know, before I was President, I was a comedian.  So I love the bad jokes!!  The worse they are, the better! 

    The brave fighting men and women of Ukraine read Owl Chatter every day – it lifts our spirits.  Our men especially enjoy the sexy American women – more Taylor Swift please!! 

    Long Live Ukraine!

    Your friend,

    Volodymyr

    Thank you for that beautiful message, VZ! Not a day goes by without you in our thoughts. Long Live Ukraine! And, as you requested — here’s our next surprise guest!

    Hey Owl Chatter! — Wow! 200 posts! It is such an honor to be invited today. With President Zelensky and all the other guests!! It’s humbling. Thank you so much for featuring me and my music as much as you do — always tastefully and respectfully — you guys are the best. I love the photo shoots with Philly — he’s a “hoot!” Too bad he’s married! (He is, right?)

    I brought a special song for you. It’s a break-up song (voo den?). I hope you like it. There’s a line about crossword puzzles in it!

    Best wishes and much love from a big fan,

    Taylor

    Hello Welly and Wilma — So nice to be here for this celebration. It’s just one Taylor after another today. You know, Taylor S. was named after me — right? It’s true. Well congratulations on your 200th post, Owl Chatter! To be honest, you know, I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain, but I never thought I’d see 200 posts devoted to nonsense, bad jokes, crossword puzzles, birthdays, sports, and obits!! Keep it up guys! I’ll circle back for #300, if not sooner.

    James

    Next, what would an Owl Chatter celebration be without the breathtakingly beautiful Ana de Armas? Come on out Ana — we are so happy you could make it today. OMG — spectacular as always!

    I wouldn’t miss this for the world, guys. Thank you so much for all the attention! I’m in the puzzles a lot, as you know — me and my dear friends Bobby Orr and Met Ott. It’s great to be noticed! And, for the record — you’re the real beauty, Wilma — love those sexy purple feet!

    With love,

    Your friend,

    Ana

    Ted! — you made it! Ted Kooser is here, everybody! I can’t tell you how much we enjoy your Winter Morning Walks. We are so glad you could join us for our 200th Post celebration. This has been the best party — have you met Ana? Taylor? Ladies, this is Owl Chatter’s favorite poet, Ted Kooser — he came in all the way from Nebraska.

    I’m very happy to be here — I don’t get around as much as I used to — I just turned 84 you know. I do a lot of looking back now. I’ve been so fortunate.

    Let me share this poem of mine with you, in honor of the occasion. It’s also from Winter Morning Walks.

    I saw a dust devil this morning,
    doing a dance with veils of cornshucks
    in front of an empty farmhouse,
    a magical thing, and I remembered
    walking the beans in hot midsummer,
    how we’d see one swirling toward us
    over the field, a spiral of flying leaves
    forty or fifty feet high, clear as a glass
    of cold water just out of reach,
    and we’d drop our hoes and run to catch it,
    shouting and laughing, hurdling the beans,
    and if one of us was fast enough,
    and lucky, he’d run along inside the funnel,
    where the air was strangely cool and still,
    the soul and center of the thing,
    the genie who swirls out of the bottle,
    eager to grant one wish to each of us.
    I had a hundred thousand wishes then.

    Please, everybody — have some cake. So many candles! Don’t let the owls catch fire. And Zelensky brought some fine Ukrainian vodka. Treat yourselves — life’s too short!

    Thanks for coming to the festivities folks. We’ll see you all tomorrow for Post#201 if the hangover’s not too bad!

  • Boo’d Up

    Owl Chatter was contacted early this afternoon by staff members of former President Trump’s office. They asked us to release the following statement of Mr. Trump’s responding to the verdict against him on sexual assault and defamation.

    And now we return to our usual nonsense.

    Today’s poem in The Writer’s Almanac is by Rosie King and it’s called In Spring. It’s a nice way to start us off.

    I’m out with the wheelbarrow mixing mulch.
    A mockingbird trills in the pine.
    Then, from higher, a buzz, and through patches of blue
    as the fog burns off, a small plane pulls a banner,
    red letters I can’t read—
    but I do see, over the fence,
    a man in a sky-blue shirt walking his dog to the beach.
    He says he missed it, will keep an eye out.
    Four barrows of mulch around the blueberry bushes,
    I’m pulling off gloves, and he’s back, beaming.
    “It says, I LOVE YOU, MARTHA.
    Are you Martha?”

    Rosie was born in Saginaw, MI.

    Today is the birthday of poet Charles Simic, born in Belgrade in 1938. He died at age 84 in Dover, NH. Here is the final stanza from his poem, Autumn Sky:

    Come, lovers of dark corners,
    The sky says,
    And sit in one of my dark corners.
    There are tasty little zeroes
    In the peanut dish tonight.

    He said: “I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can’t get it right. I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love with me.”

    I have a vague recollection he’s been to Owl Chatter before. Good to see you again, CS.

    Ella Mai was in the puzzle today. Have you heard of her? She’s a British singer/songwriter. Her song Boo’d Up was nominated for two Grammys and Song of the Year. It’s very likable. Joyous.

    The puzzle had some nice combinations: An ALTOID (mint) was placed right next to a CLOVE of garlic. In its snack drawer, POPTART was right next to NACHOS. One portion of the grid was hot to trot – it had: IT’S A GO, OK BY ME, and GAME ON. (Okay, okay, calm down.) And in the SW corner there was FOOT and BEER. So, I ask you, is a foot of beer one-third of a yard of ale?

    Phillipa SOO was in the puzzle too. You may recall her as Eliza Hamilton in Hamilton. She was born in Libertyville, IL, and will be 33 at the end of this month. She is half-Chinese (her dad’s side). She won a Grammy for her work in Hamilton and was nominated for a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for it as well. Here she is, trying to get up off the floor. Oy, I’ve been there. Philly — help her up!! Put the damn camera down!

    Friends, you have just read Owl Chatter’s 199th post. Welly and Wilma are trying to put together a group of special guests for #200. We’re still waiting to hear back from a few. Hope you can make it tomorrow!

  • The Minnow

    Let’s start with the romance. Vida Rochelle Blue, Jr., who died on Saturday at age 73, married Peggy Shannon, nine years his junior, on the pitcher’s mound at Candlestick Park on Sept. 24, 1989. Orlando Cepeda escorted Peggy to the mound; Willie McCovey was Blue’s best man. The marriage lasted only seven years, but they had twin daughters to whom Vida was a loving father.

    In High School, in Louisiana, Blue’s athletic prowess was so impressive, it prompted the school to establish a baseball team. It didn’t even have a team before him! His teammates complained that he was too good. The catcher’s hand hurt for days after a game, and the outfielders didn’t think they should bother to take their positions — no batter ever hit a ball out to them.

    Blue’s rookie year in the pros was 1971 with Oakland and he exploded. After losing on Opening Day, he won 8 in a row. Out of his first 12 games, five were complete game shutouts. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and Time before he turned 22. He was a dynamo — he ran to and from the mound and ended each delivery with a leap. In that rookie year, 1971, he won both the Cy Young award and the AL MVP. He was 24-8 with an ERA of 1.82. The next three seasons, Oakland won the World Series. Pete Rose said Blue was the hardest throwing pitcher he ever faced.

    While 1971 was officially Blue’s rookie year, he was called up to the majors in September of 1970 and made a couple of starts. His first was a one-hitter against KC, and his second a no-hitter against Minny. He was the fourth youngest pitcher ever to pitch a no-hitter.

    Even so, in 1972, Oakland owner Charles Finley f**ked Blue over. Blue was only paid $14,000 in 1971 and he wanted $92,500 in 1972, but Finley wouldn’t agree and Blue sat out for much of the year. President Nixon called Blue “the most underpaid player in baseball.” They finally settled on $63,000 and Blue went only 6-10 for the year. Blue never forgave Finley and it left scars that never healed. “That man soured me on baseball,” Blue told the NYT in 1973. “I’ll never forget that he treated me like a damn colored boy.”

    Other demons began to undermine him. Drugs. In 1983 he was part of baseball’s cocaine scandal, spent 81 days in jail, and was suspended for a season. He finished his career at 209-161, with a 3.27 ERA, and 2,175 strikeouts. It was a fine career, with 6 All-Star appearances, but in the end, it fell short of its initial promise. He was never seriously considered for the Hall of Fame, in his mind due to the drug issue. Rest in peace, Vida Blue.

    Also passing on Saturday was Newton Minow, at age 97, former head of the FCC. In 1961, speaking before 2,000 broadcast executives, he excoriated the industry for the “vast wasteland” of American television they created. The charge hit like a bomb and changed the cozy relationship of the industry with the FCC into an adversarial one. They were pushed to do better, and responded to some degree. But the execs maintained they were only giving the audience what it wanted. Sadly, they were mostly correct.

    Amusingly, the industry took subtle little digs at Minow reflecting the ongoing animosity. For instance (and I’m not kidding), the boat in Gilligan’s Island that was supposed to be on a mere three-hour tour but ran aground was called “The Minnow.”

    After leaving the FCC, Minow joined a Chicago law firm. In 1988, he recruited Barack Obama to work as a summer associate at the firm. It was there that he met Michelle.

    Since today was Monday, several of us cruciverbalists continued our struggle to make the puzzle more of a challenge. Joseph Michael started things off with this comment:

    “This was the hardest puzzle of the year so far. Tried solving it not only blindfolded, as usual on Monday, but also with my hands tied together behind my back. I was not able to get even one answer.”

    I replied with:

    “I admire your spunk, JM! Sorry to hear about your DNF. At the risk of overstepping my bounds, is it possible that, in your effort to increase the Monday challenge, you are ‘overshooting?’ Could you dial it back a smidge? Perhaps instead of the blindfold, an eye patch or sunglasses?

    “I’m having trouble at the other end. For example, today I had a friend translate all the clues into Serbo-Croatian, a language I don’t speak, and rearrange their numbers randomly. But I was still able to finish in 11/16 of a second – not a Monday best for me, but close.”

    He went next:

    “Liveprof, thank you for the advice. I’m not sure that an eye patch would provide enough of a challenge, but two eye patches might do the trick. Maybe I’ll try that the next time my blindfold is at the dry cleaners.

    “Meanwhile I admire your creativity in translating the clues into a foreign language, but I can see how Serbo-Croatian might be too easy to figure out during that 11/16 second. May I suggest that you try a more archaic language, such as Sanskrit or Mycenaean Greek?”

    I had the final word:

    “Two patches — of course! Your suggestion about those languages is excellent — I may have trouble sleeping until next Monday from the excitement. I just have to make sure I don’t accidentally attain fluency in them during the week.”

    Good night, everybody! Thanks for stopping in.

  • The Ship of Theseus

    So let’s say George Washington really did chop down that cherry tree many years ago. And the axe was saved and continued to be used. After a few years the blade wore out so it had to be replaced. And after a few more years, the handle wore out and had to be replaced. So none of the original parts remained in the axe. Could it still be called “Washington’s axe” if none of the original parts were in it?

    That’s the “thought experiment” posed by today’s puzzle. It’s called the Ship of Theseus. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians commemorated this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship? Plutarch wrote it up in his “Lives” (in the one on Theseus, duh), and said philosophers were split over whether it was still the same ship.

    Hobbes expanded the issue. He said, suppose each time a part of the ship was replaced the old part was saved. And when all of the parts were replaced, the old parts were put together to form a “new” ship out of all of the original parts. Which of the two ships is the Ship of Theseus – the one with the new replacement parts and none of the original parts, or the one made entirely of the original parts?

    It raises questions of “identity.” Hobbes said his two ships represent two concepts of identity. If the identity of the ship is the idea or form of it, then the ship with the new parts has never stopped being considered the Ship. But if identity is comprised of specific “matter,” then the ship remade out of the original discarded parts is the Ship.

    The way it was used in the puzzle was brilliant IMHO. SHIP OF THESEUS was the answer for 22A, clued by “Thought experiment that asks whether an object remains the same object if its parts are replaced one by one.” And the word SHIP appears in shaded squares. Then, the grid works you down a “word ladder.” Do you know what that is? You change one letter at a time to form new words of the same length. So working down the grid, the theme answers give you a series of shaded words that replace SHIP one at a time, but then build back up to SHIP. It goes: SHIP CHIP CHOP CHOW SHOW SLOW SLOP SLIP SHIP. And the clue for that last SHIP (at 121A) is the same as for the first one: “Thought experiment that asks whether an object remains the same object if its parts are replaced one by one.”

    So it’s posing the question: Is that SHIP at the end the same as the SHIP at the beginning, despite all the parts (i.e., letters) having been changed?

    Here’s an image of the ship:

    What was your favorite part of Trump’s deposition? Lemme guess. Was it when he mistook the plaintiff for his ex-wife Marla Maples after reiterating that she wasn’t “his type?” Was it when he called Roberta Kaplan (the questioning lawyer) a disgrace and said she wasn’t “his type” either? Or was it when he doubled down on his Access Hollywood statement that stars like him can do anything — even grab women by the p***y? He said that’s been the case for millions of years “unfortunately, or fortunately.”

    Owl Chatter is having a tough time choosing a favorite between “or fortunately,” and gratuitously noting that Kaplan was not his type either. Each one is classic A-plus material. Delicious.

    FYI: On the left, not his type; On the right, his type.

    For a good rat’s nest of misogyny, the South Carolina Senate will do nicely. For three years Katrina Shealy was the only woman Senator, a Republican, and the leadership continued to address the body as “Gentlemen of the Senate.” One “colleague” said “women should be barefoot and pregnant, not in the legislature,” and said women are a “lesser cut of meat.”

    Kudos then to Ms. Shealy who now has four other Senators who are women and all five are refusing to go along with anti-abortion legislation, even the Republicans. It’s enough to defeat it. They do not accept the men’s nonsense about protecting women — it’s about controlling women. Republican Sandy Senn addressed her male colleagues (while wearing flip-flops for comfort) saying: “We the women have not asked for, nor do we want, your protection. We don’t need it. We don’t buy into the ruse that what you really want is to take care of us.”

    Here is the fivesome. Whaddya think — any of these Carolina babes Trump’s type?

    Yesterday’s puzzle had some unusual items. “What a helicopter might fly out of?” was MAPLE. WTF? It’s one of those little twirly helicopter thingies that fall to the ground. They come from maple trees (ash and elm too). Their official name is samaras.

    Next the clue was “Takes off, with ‘it’” and the answer was BOOKS. That was new to me. A slang meaning for book as a verb is to take off quickly. “With the cops on the way, we booked out of there.”

    Then there was “Extremely hot peppers named for their scythelike tails,” and the answer spanned the grid: CAROLINA REAPERS. They sound “grim,” and look scary.

    Owl Chatter looks forward to celebrating its 200th post this week. Yikes! Special invitations have gone out to Taylor Swift, Ana de Armas, Ted Kooser, and other OC faves. Zelensky may stop in too, if the offensive hasn’t started yet. Volodymyr! — we’ll try to scrounge up some rocket launchers for you — can’t send you back empty-handed!

    We hope they can all make it. Hope you can too!

    See you tomorrow! Thanks for popping in.

  • Woven Hearts

    Here are the first six lines in the first sonnet by Dylan Thomas from Altarwise by Owl-Light.

    Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
    The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
    Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
    And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
    The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
    Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.

    I can’t make any sense of it. I thought abaddon might be a typo (for abandon or a bad one), but it isn’t. (It means Hell or the Devil.) Hangnail? Atlas-eater? Why is “to-morrows” hyphenated?

    Anyway, the only reason I dug it up was the puzzle yesterday had the unusual clue “owl-light.” It means DUSK. Nice, right?

    While we’re here: A mandrake is a plant of the nightshade family, with white or purple flowers and large yellow berries. It has a forked fleshy root that creepily resembles the human form and was formerly used in magic. Legend has it it shrieks when pulled from the ground (thus, the “scream” above?).

    Here are some mandrakes. Yeah, I can see it.

    This is the lead item in Met Diary tomorrow. It’s by Esther K. Smith.

    After we wove paper hearts at the Met Museum
    on that cold, cold Friday night
    we took the subway home.

    A woman was singing a Beyonce song
    and I asked if she was Beyonce
    and she said she was.

    Another woman was folding red foil paper.
    I saw she was making an origami heart.
    So I took her one of our woven hearts
    and she gave me hers.

    In his daily post on the puzzle, Rex Parker sometimes lets spill a left-leaning comment. E.g., if MUSK is an answer, he’ll register some level of disgust. (Owl Chatter readers may recall his loathing of J. K. Rowling for her anti-trans comments, and the discussion it engendered.) I mostly agree with him, though I may not mind a reference in a puzzle as much as he does (it’s just a puzzle). But once in a while it elicits some right-wing blather in response. That occurred two days ago, when “Andrew” let loose in a fairly obnoxious post. Here’s how he started: “Rex never fails to put his extraneous neoliberal politics into any apolitical xword. Along with his squeamish take on people, places or things he finds objectionable.” It got smarmy pretty quickly and left a bad taste.

    Rex’s defenders mobilized immediately. Here was a nice response from whatsername:

    “Andrew — I always take the time to read your comments because I enjoy hearing your take on the puzzle. But I don’t really like to be lectured about politics from either side of the house. In that vein, I do not wish to debate with you but just feel the need to say a few words in defense of our blog host.

    “Rex Parker has his views, you have your views, and I have mine. We come here to express those views, and we have the right to say what we please about the puzzle because it’s a product we pay money for, like writing a review about a book purchased on Amazon. But no one is required to pay for what Rex Parker faithfully produces every single day of the year without fail. Not only that, but he also generously provides this forum – again, free of charge – so that we may all share our common love of crosswords. In doing so, he generally allows a wide range of opinions, even political ones, with very reasonable moderation and rarely a censure. I believe at the very least, we should afford him the same courtesy.

    “I don’t know about you but I think of this group as a community of friends. Being able to share my thoughts with them feels like a bonus gift that comes with my subscription. And it seems to me that when someone consistently offers me a free gift every day without expecting anything in return, I can either graciously accept it or politely say no thank you. But it really isn’t my place to critique them on how they package it.”

    Someone else said when she sees Andrew has posted she just says UGH.

    And then, yesterday, Andrew posted an apology. In this age where it seems like everyone “doubles down,” and no one ever relents or re-thinks, it was lovely. Here it is:

    “After reflecting on yesterday’s comments, I want to apologize for making so many of my posts political – and highly contentious at that.

    You’re right, this is Rex’ blog. It’s also not an appropriate forum for politics from the peanut gallery (me being front and center).

    It’s about crosswords, not cross words! Sorry I sent out the latter.

    “Ugh, it’s Andrew” is a phrase I never want to read – or cause – again. Will try to send cyber hugs – not Ughs – going forward.

    Again, I’m sorry. Mea culpa.”

    It was very well received.

    “It’s Siggy’s birthday today!! On this day in 1856 Freud was born, the revolutionary women’s fashion designer. His “slip” is still popular today, both full and half. Here’s one of my tax students modeling a fairly modern one. Thank you, Ms. Peters!”

    So this woman is at her shrink and he asks her if anything noteworthy happened since he last saw her. She says “Yes, I had a Freudian slip that you might find interesting. I was having dinner with my mother last night, and at one point, I nodded at the basket of rolls on the table, and what I meant to say was ‘Would you please pass the rolls, Mom,” but what came out was “You ruined my life, you f*cking b*tch.”

    Yesterday’s puzzle had the cute pairing of TATTOO and TATOOINE. TATTOO was clued with “Needle work.” TATOOINE is the fictional planet in the Star Wars series, a desolate desert planet. It’s the home planet of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

    In August 2019, rapper Kanye West announced that he was designing prefabricated homes inspired by the settlements on Tatooine to serve as low-income housing. His prototypes in Calabasas, CA, were torn down after he was cited for not obtaining the proper permits and receiving complaints about the “gumdrop-shaped” structures.

    When Sam graduated from UMich in 2012, Sanjay GUPTA gave the address in The Big House and did a very nice job (he’s a Michigan man: Go Blue!). Sanjay’s in the puzzle today. He told us how his parents met. As soon as his mom arrived in Ann Arbor, her car broke down. (It was a ’63 Nova.) She had very little money and knew no one. She went to a phone booth and looked through a phone book (remember those?) for an “Indian-sounding” last name. She picked one and called. The person she asked for wasn’t home, but the fellow who answered the phone had graduated from U. Mich Engineering and loved cars. Of course, he was happy to help. It was love at first tow.

    In the photo, the parents are on the right, and Sanjay’s brother Suneel is in the center. Sanjay’s wife, lawyer Rebecca Olsen, and two of their three daughters are next to him. Suneel has a law degree and ran for Congress from Michigan in 2018, but lost in the Democratic Primary.

    In 2007, Sanjay got into a fight with filmmaker Michael Moore over Moore’s film Sicko. Gupta reported on CNN that Moore’s film “fudged facts.” Moore said that Gupta’s report was inaccurate and biased, and posted a detailed response on his website.  He accused CNN of bias in favor of the drug industry because most of the sponsors for their medical coverage were drug companies.

    Gupta debated Moore on Larry King Live after which CNN apologized for a transcription error in their on-air report, having stated that in the film Moore reported Cuba spends $25 per person for health care when the film actually gave that number as $251. But CNN defended the rest of Gupta’s report responding point-by-point to Moore, contending that the comparison of data from different sources in different years was “cherry picking,” at the cost of statistical accuracy.

    Let’s close today with the Poem of the Day from the Poetry Foundation. It’s by the current Poet Laureate of the U.S., Ada Limon, and is called “How to Triumph Like a Girl.” Limon is Mexican-American, and the first Latina U.S. Poet Laureate. She grew up in California but earned her MFA at NYU.

    I like the lady horses best,
    how they make it all look easy,
    like running 40 miles per hour
    is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
    I like their lady horse swagger,
    after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
    But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
    that they’re ladies. As if this big
    dangerous animal is also a part of me,
    that somewhere inside the delicate
    skin of my body, there pumps
    an 8-pound female horse heart,
    giant with power, heavy with blood.
    Don’t you want to believe it?
    Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
    the huge beating genius machine
    that thinks, no, it knows,
    it’s going to come in first.

    Here’s a shot our Phil snared of Ada. He’s a genius at getting the nicest smiles. Good work earlier with my tax student too, Philly – we don’t pay you enough! See you tomorrow, everybody!

  • Cheese Sticks

    ERIN was in the puzzle today at 63A, as in ERIN Burnett of CNN. Burnett is not only good-looking, she has many “good looks.” Ever get one of these?

    Or this?

    Or how about this?

    You’ve been there.

    Also in the grid today was ELI Apple. Even if you’re a sports fan there’s a chance you haven’t heard of him. Here’s what I posted on Rex’s blog:

    “When Eli Apple (5D) was drafted tenth in the 2016 NFL draft by the NY Giants he became the latest in the short line of professional fruit athletes. Before him were Milt Plum and Raymond Berry of the NFL, Don Cherry of the NHL, baseballers Chet and Bob Lemon, and, of course, Daryl Strawberry. Their mascot is Otto the Orange, of Syracuse U.

    “Eli was actually born Eli Woodard, but adopted the surname Apple to honor Tim Apple, the man who raised him from infancy and married his mom. Apple is a Jersey man and was all set to attend Rutgers when its coach (Schiano) left for the pros, so he went to Ohio State instead and had an outstanding college career, which included winning the National Championship in 2015. As a pro, he had some behavioral/personality issues with the Giants and no longer plays in the ‘Big Apple.’ He’s with the Bengals now.”

    Here’s Eli, and then Daryl, watching one of his shots sail into the stratosphere.

    Sending a special Owl Chatter thank you to Delaware Nancy for help with the “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” material yesterday. Back in 1969 (’70?) we took each other (and another Nancy) out to a Senators-Yankees ballgame in DC. It lasted 18 innings and the Yanks won 2-1. We stayed for the whole game and had a million laughs.

    One of the cute clues in the puzzle was at 44A: “You might calmly tell someone not to do this.” The answer was WORRY. But it led LMS down a different path:

    “You might calmly tell someone not to do this.” Hmm. DON’T YOU THROW THAT CHEESE STICK ACROSS THE ROOM! I could see it in her eyes – when someone asked her if he could have it – she was gonna throw it. (The background story is that she is at my school for attacking a teacher. And she towers over me.) Not taking her eyes off mine, she winged it across the room. Shit. Now what. Our eyes were still locked as I walked over to her, looked up, and said I’m so disappointed and hurt that you just threw that. She was still. I went on, fanning my face, I think I’m gonna cry. She said, Don’t cry, Ms. Smith. I sniffed, Wanna hug it out? She laughed, Oh God, no. I just said, Don’t do that again or we’re gonna have a real problem. I know I handled it wrong; I should have written her up and kicked her out as a message to her and the other kids, but, well, heck. Baby steps and all that. She’s been good for me ever since.

    Hard to imagine there’s a better teacher on this planet. How would she have written it up anyway? — Assault with cheese stick?

    She chimed in on another clue/answer. The clue at 62A was “Lead-in to goblin,” and the answer was HOB. Here’s LMS:

    I misread 62A as “lead-in to globin.” When my daughter started a blood-borne pathogens class in vet school, we had an exchange that kind of went like this:

    Me: Sage, here’s what you have to do. You might want to get a pen to write this down. At some point, you have to raise your hand and say, “Professor? These are pretty bad actors, these pathogens, right?” She’ll agree that, yes, they’re bad. So then you have to tilt your head, squint your eyes a little but not too much and say, “So you could argue that they’re, well, hemogoblins.”

    Sage: I’m not gonna do that, Mom.

    Owl Chatter: Worth a try.

    Here are some cute cheese sticks. Go ahead: fling one.

    Pamela Turnure Timmins died of lung cancer last week at age 85 at her home in Edwards, Colorado. Back in 1961, when she was only 23, she was hired to be the press secretary to Jackie Kennedy, the first time a First Lady had one. She was hired at JFK’s behest, at least in part because he was having an affair with her. (Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and others alleged that JFK and she were having the affair. She had worked for JFK when he was a senator. Timmins seldom discussed the matter and maintained her relationship with JFK was platonic.)

    As Jackie’s press secretary she did everything for her and went everywhere with her. When tragedy struck with the death of their infant son, Patrick, Timmins was crucial in handling the media barrage.

    JFK expressed concern one day that their ride in a motorcade could ruin Jackie’s hair. Timmins suggested they not ride in a convertible, but JFK insisted the people wanted to see them. It was the Dallas motorcade and it was their last ride together. Timmins was on Air Force One when LBJ took the oath of office. At one point after the shooting, LBJ turned to Timmins and kissed her on the hand.

    After the assassination, Timmins helped Jackie through all of the difficulties, including dealing with the tens of thousands of letters that arrived daily. She continued to work with Jackie until 1966, when she married investment banker Robert Timmins. She had previously dated Prince Aly Kahn who had been the third husband of Rita Hayworth. (You following this?) After her stint with Jackie, Timmins worked as an interior designer in Manhattan.

    Here’s Pamela with Caroline’s cat, Tom Kitten.

    Frank Bruni’s newsletter this week included the following in its “For the love of sentences” feature:

    In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead wondered at King Charles’s verbal stumbles: “He is notoriously hostile to modern architecture, and, in a vitriolic 1987 speech to a gathering of distinguished British planners and designers, he proclaimed, ‘You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe — when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.’ Charles’s remarks bring to mind the internet era’s Godwin’s law, which holds that once an argument escalates online someone inevitably invokes the Nazis; usually, though, the comparison is not in the Nazis’ favor.”

    Yesterday’s puzzle reached back for a throb from the past: Britney Spears. The theme answer crossing the entire grid was OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN.

    At 47D, “Metal bars” was INGOTS, and it led pabloinnh to post the following: My favorite answer was INGOTS. It made me think of old friends Bob and Ray again, one of whose “sponsors” was The Monongahela Steel Foundry, Makers of INGOTS for the Home. They were always reminding housewives that their old INGOTS were getting dusty and it was time to replace them with some new and shiny ones.

    Here’s a taste of Bob and Ray from an appearance on The Tonight Show back when Johnny Carson was the host. And then we’ll close with Ms. Spears.

    Good night everybody. See you tomorrow!

  • A Vibrant Patience

    Albert Von Tilzer was born on March 29, 1878 in Indianapolis. His family name was originally Gumbinsky (they were Polish-Jewish immigrants), but even when it was changed to Gumm he eschewed it. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) So he took his mom’s maiden name, Tilzer, and added Von to make it seem classier. He was a songwriter, pounding out tunes by the hundreds, such as: “My Cutie’s Due at Two-to-Two,” “Put on Your Slippers and Fill Up Your Pipe, You’re Not Going Bye-Bye Tonight,” “Oh How She Could Yacki-Hacki, Wicki-Wacki, Woo,” “Au Revoir But Not Good Bye, Soldier Boy,” “Chili Bean,” “I Used to Love You But It’s All Over Now,” and, of course, “The Moon Has His Eye On You.”

    But none of those made Albert’s place in history. For that we have to go back to 1908 and take a subway ride with Jack Norworth, who was also a songwriter. Norworth saw a sign that said “Baseball today — Polo Grounds.” It got him thinking about a girl who was asked out on a date and said yes, but only if the fella took her to the ballgame. Here are the original lyrics he came up with:

    Katie Casey was baseball mad,
    Had the fever and had it bad.
    Just to root for the home town crew,
    Ev’ry sou
    Katie blew.
    On a Saturday her young beau
    Called to see if she’d like to go
    To see a show, but Miss Kate said “No,
    I’ll tell you what you can do:”

    Take me out to the ball game,
    Take me out with the crowd;
    Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
    I don’t care if I never get back.
    Let me root, root, root for the home team,
    If they don’t win, it’s a shame.
    For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
    At the old ball game.

    There was a second stanza before the famous chorus was repeated:

    Katie Casey saw all the games,
    Knew the players by their first names.
    Told the umpire he was wrong,
    All along,
    Good and strong.
    When the score was just two to two,
    Katie Casey knew what to do,
    Just to cheer up the boys she knew,
    She made the gang sing this song:

    Norworth took the lyrics to Von Tilzer who put them to the tune we all know. Neither Tilzer nor Norworth had attended a baseball game before writing the song, and they only attended their first games decades later. The first time the song was sung at a game was in 1934 in LA at a high school game, but it was also sung in St. Louis at the 4th game of the World Series that year between Detroit and St. Louis. In 1927, Norworth revised the lyrics, but the chorus wasn’t changed.

    In the 1935 Marx Brothers’ film A Night at the Opera, in one of the more unusual uses of the song, composer Herbert Stothart arranged for a full pit orchestra to segue seamlessly from the overture of Il Trovatore into the chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

    In 1955, in an episode of I Love Lucy guest starring Harpo Marx, Harpo performed a harp rendition of the song.

    In 1994, radio station WJMP, broadcasting to the Akron, Ohio market, played the song continuously during the Major League Baseball players’ strike of 1994 as a protest.

    In 1995 in the ER Season 2 episode “Hell and High Water,” the character Doug Ross tells a child to keep singing the song to keep himself conscious.

    The 2001 children’s book “Take Me Out of the Bathtub and other Silly Dilly Songs” by Alan Katz and David Catrow, recast the end of the chorus as “I used one, two, three bars of soap. Take me out…I’m clean!” in its title number.

    In the series Homeland, Nicholas Brody teaches the song to Isa Nazir to help him learn English.

    In 2001, Nike aired a commercial featuring a diverse group of Major League players singing lines of the song in their native languages. The players and languages featured were Ken Griffey Jr. (American English), Alex Rodriguez (Caribbean Spanish), Chan Ho Park (Korean), Kazuhiro Sasaki (Japanese), Graeme Lloyd (Australian English), Éric Gagné (Québécois French), Andruw Jones (Dutch), John Franco (Italian), Iván Rodríguez (Caribbean Spanish), and Mark McGwire (American English). C’mon, man — you couldn’t get Max Fried to sing it in Hebrew? Well, he was only 7 years old.

    Tilzer died in LA at age 78 in October of 1956. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is listed at #8 in Songs of the Century.

    Here’s Harpo’s version. It’s beautiful.

    Today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac is by Dorianne Laux.

    Girl in the Doorway

    She is twelve now, the door to her room
    closed, telephone cord trailing the hallway
    in tight curls. I stand at the dryer, listening
    through the thin wall between us, her voice
    rising and falling as she describes her new life.
    Static flies in brief blue stars from her socks,
    her hairbrush in the morning. Her silver braces
    shine inside the velvet case of her mouth.
    Her grades rise and fall, her friends call
    or they don’t, her dog chews her new shoes
    to a canvas pulp. Some days she opens her door
    and musk rises from the long crease in her bed,
    fills the dim hall. She grabs a denim coat
    and drags the floor. Dust swirls in gold eddies
    behind her. She walks through the house, a goddess,
    each window pulsing with summer. Outside,
    the boys wait for her teeth to straighten.
    They have a vibrant patience.
    When she steps onto the front porch, sun shimmies
    through the tips of her hair, the V of her legs,
    fans out like wings under her arms
    as she raises them and waves. Goodbye, Goodbye.
    Then she turns to go, folds up
    all that light in her arms like a blanket
    and takes it with her.

    In today’s comments on the puzzle, Weezie said she liked its “contemporary/pop culture bent.” It includes Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa, for example. She noted the coincidence of its appearing the day after the posh Met Gala in NY. Then she confessed to being “obsessed with Jenna Ortega’s look.” We sent our photographer Phil to check it out. Yup. Good shot, Philly. It’s Jenna at the Gala. Matadorial.

    There are some other nice pairings in the puzzle: MT RAINIER and SUMATRA, two gorgeous sites; CABANA and HUT; AMOROUS right next to ROM-COMS; BURRATA and BURRITOS; and the sexy DOMINATRIX with MADAMS and CUFFS (!) — pretty hot for the NYT. Constructor Aimee Lucido put a nice grid together.

    Burrata is an Italian cheese made from cow or buffalo milk combining mozzarella and cream. The outer surface is solid cheese and the inner part is cream mixed with bits of mozz. It dates back to around 1900, but only became more widely available in the 1950’s. Here, try some.

    And here’s a shot of Sumatra. You may have had some coffee from the island. There’s a strong Starbucks blend that features it.

    The puzzle’s theme today was based on James Bond’s famous drink order: “Vodka martini, shaken not stirred.” But several commenters came down hard:

    First, for a guy who’s supposed to be classy and sophisticated, he orders a completely blasphemous cocktail. For starters, real martinis use gin, not vodka. Vodka is a cheap booze, lacking nuance. Second, never ever shake a martini. It over dilutes, creates ice shards and the drink loses complexity during the tasting. The very request would indicate a person lacking knowledge of potent potables, and not in line with our Mr. Bond.

    Next, shaken, not stirred, will get you cold water with a dash of gin and dry vermouth. The reason you stir it with a special spoon is so not to chip the ice. James is ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it.

    And, finally, Ian Fleming was a fine writer, but he created a character who didn’t know what a martini is. It is 3 parts GIN, 1 part dry vermouth, optional bitters – STIRRED with ice (to minimize air bubbles so the end product is a lovely crystal clear), served in a cocktail glass with a garnish of seeded green olive(s).

    Hrrrrumph!

    Question from Joaquin: If James Bond sleeps through an earthquake, can you say he was shaken but not stirred?

    Enough nonsense for now. More tomorrow.

  • Bear Crawl

    Today is the birthday of Joe Heller, author of Catch 22. He was born to poor Jewish Russian-immigrant parents in Coney Island, Brooklyn, in 1923. He met his first wife Shirley Held at a dance contest at Grossinger’s Hotel. They were married for 38 years and had two kids, but it was a stormy marriage that ended in divorce. After the divorce Heller begged his daughter Erica to get his ex-wife’s secret pot roast recipe, even offering Erica $10,000 in cash for it. She refused and Erica said that on her deathbed, her mother extracted a promise from her: “No matter what, don’t ever give him the pot roast recipe.”

    Erica recalls that during the era she calls “B.C.” — that is, Before “Catch” — she would receive a kick under the table if she tried to order a shrimp cocktail at the local Italian restaurant. “After the publication and eventual success of ‘Catch-22,’ ” she reports, “the kicks under the table at Tony’s suddenly stopped. It was in this way that it dawned on me that my father’s book must have been successful.”

    Osner’s typewriter repair shop at 79th Street and Amsterdam Avenue was very important to Joe and was part of a ritual. “Typewriters there were a religion, and the shop had cared for the machines of Isaac Bashevis Singer, David Mamet, Alfred Kazin, Erich Maria Remarque, Roger Kahn, Philip Roth, Howard Fast, and Murray Schisgal,” Erica recalls. “Dad always went there when a book was finished to announce that he was done.”

    In 1981, Heller was stricken with Guillain-Barre Syndrome and was in a very weakened condition for about five years. He was greatly helped through it by close friends Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo, and Dustin Hoffman. After he pulled out of it, Heller married Valerie Humphries, a former nurse of his, and they were together until his death did them part, in 1999.

    Heller wrote other books and a play after Catch 22, but none as successful. When asked (as he often was) why he never wrote another book as good as Catch 22, his answer was “Who has?” I was today years old when noodling around for this short piece that I learned that Yossarian’s first name was John. Was that in the book? I don’t remember.

    Here he is with daughter Erica and his typewriter.

    Happy 100th Birthday Joe!

    Since it’s Monday, when Rex and several others do the puzzle “down clues only,” the rest of us cast about for other ways to increase the challenge. Joseph Michael posted: “This puzzle was nearly impossible, especially for a Monday. I was solving blindfolded while doing a bear crawl and I couldn’t get a single answer.” [Bear crawl was an answer in the puzzle.]

    I took issue with that, posting the following (under my posting name, Liveprof): “I disagree on the level of difficulty, JM! — I solved it using only every third letter in the clues. (So, e.g., “Rower’s implement” becomes WSPMT.) I was still able to finish in 5/8 of a second — close to my best for a Monday.

    JM shot back: “Congratulations on your impressive time, Liveprof. However, it’s not a fair comparison. I do every-third-letter solving now and then and it has never had much impact on my solving time. Try a blindfolded bear crawl next time and perhaps you’ll understand the difficulty I experienced.”

    My last word was: “Excellent points, JM. On the BBC (blindfolded bear crawl), I’m a little concerned about things like wrenching my back, tumbling down stairs, or falling off buildings. But I’ll check out some youtube videos on techniques. Thanks!”

    Whatsername chimed in with a very nice note saying that JM and I had her “snorting helplessly.”

    Here’s a joke from Vermont Lizzie’s daughter Bridgette. (Lizzie tucked it into an email she wrote me responding to my email to her complaining about my bladder. How I have any friends left is a mystery.) Anyway, Lizzie described B’s joke as a “groaner.” I’m afraid that’s way too kind, as you’ll see. It goes without saying that I love it, but I must confess I didn’t “get it” at first, and, too embarrassed to admit that by asking Lizzie, I emailed Boston-friends Don and Jenny to see if they could help me. While in the act of drafting my email, the light dawned. (Don got it too.) Here it is:

    What did one egg say to the other egg two hours into the keg party?

    Ahm lit!

    So, here’s the joke — the two of them are eggs and “Ahm lit” is omelet.

    Leonard Cohen used to say if he knew where the great songs came from he’d go there more often. Where do these jokes come from? I wanna move there!

    Thanks Lizzie!

    Ooooooh! — and this one looks great! Berries!

    There were two dances in the puzzle today: RUMBA and FOX TROT. Here’s what LMS had to say:

    “I liked seeing RUMBA sharing the grid with FOXTROT. I took ballroom dance lessons for a while and let me tell you – the RUMBA is way harder than the FOXTROT for a buttoned-up non-dancing Capricorn. The RUMBA is slow and sultry, and you have to do dancerish stuff with your arms when they’re not connected to your partner. Like, sexy come-hither stuff. With faster dances like the FOXTROT, it feels like you can disguise your ineptitude more easily in the bouncy happy steps. With a slow dance like the RUMBA, Everything is exposed. Doing a FOXTROT is like wearing an oversize clunky sweater; doing the RUMBA is like wearing a wet TEE shirt.”

    We sent our intrepid Owl Chatter photographer Phil down to Miami to sort out the Rumba scene. Wow! — good work Philly — as usual! Hot stuff! Whose shoes are hotter — hers or his? Don’t let go, Miguel!

    See you tomorrow!