The Wellington Files

  • Cheap Thrills

    There is a whole crapload of words the NYT allows in its puzzles now that it didn’t used to allow. CRAPLOAD, for example. The clue for 32D was “Crazy amount,” and I filled in “cartload” first (when I had the C and LOAD), but it was CRAPLOAD, for sure.

    Here’s how Rex started off today: “Look, it’s a SHIT-LOAD and a CRAP-TON and I will die on this (filthy) hill! Actually I don’t care that much, but those are the expressions that feel right to me, and they both google better than their oppositely-suffixed counterparts (well, ‘crap-ton’ does … there are issues with whether you do or don’t include a hyphen in your search term). I think ‘shit-ton’ (hyphenated) is probably what I’d say soonest, of the whole lot, followed by ‘shitload’ (unhyphenated) … I think I have largely phased ‘crap’ (and its assorted variations) out of my life, as it feels like a euphemism that has somehow over time come to sound more vulgar than the thing it’s a euphemism for (namely shit).”

    Surprisingly, I had not heard of the -ton ending for either of them. But I do love the idea of a euphemism becoming worse than whatever it’s euphemizing. (Spellcheck is accepting euphemizing, BTW.)

    I shared the following joke with the gang, and have received no response yet (which may be for the best):

    This guy’s wife dies and he’s depressed, so a friend suggests he get a pet for companionship. He goes to a pet store and explains his situation to the store-owner. The owner says, “Sure, take a look around, I’m sure you’ll find something. And check out the dog in the backyard. He’s very unusual – he can talk.”

    So the guy looks around the store and finds a couple of possibilities, and then he glances out the window and sees the dog in the yard. So he goes up to him and says, “I feel funny about this, but the owner said you can talk. Is this true?”

    And the dog says, “Yes, I can talk. When I was born I was a regular dog like my brothers and sisters, but around my first birthday I suddenly became able to talk. When word got out, the CIA took me on for special projects. For example, I’d slip into meetings and listen to what was said and report back to my handlers. But after a few years they started worrying I’d be caught, so I got transferred to the State Dept. I’d go on goodwill trips, you know, if a head of state was a dog lover, they’d bring me along and introduce me. I did that for a few years, but now I’m perfectly happy just relaxing out here in the yard.”

    The guy goes back into the store, and the owner says, “Did you find anything?” And he says, “Yes, a few, but let me ask you — Is that dog out back for sale?” The owner says, “That dog in the back? — Yeah, you can have him for $10.” The guy says, “Just $10 for that amazing dog?” And the owner says – “Aw, he’s full of crap — he didn’t do any of those things.

    The clue at 6D was “Something simple done for pleasure,” and the answer was CHEAP THRILL.

    Here are some examples of what LMS said qualify for her:

    -Sliding down a staircase banister on my fanny
    -Spotting the local weatherman out in the wild
    -Throwing up a helicopter leaf and watching its descent
    -Petting a Newfoundland, any Newfoundland
    -Pogo sticking
    -Getting a student to bite on the old “henway” joke (see below)
    -Blowing every single white fluff thingy off the dandelion so my wish will come true

    Ms. Smith, what’s a vestibule?
    Well, hmm. It’s a lot like a henway.
    What’s a henway?
    A little over 3 pounds.
    [Pause] Ms. Smith, you cringey.

    I’m trying to think of what a cheap thrill for me would be. I do get a kick out of it when the conductor fails to ask for my ticket. Now that I’m a senior, though, it just saves me $4.90. It used to be around $10. Finding money on the street is always good. If it’s a penny, I adhere to the goodluck/badluck rule and only pick it up if it’s heads-up.

    When I was teaching CPA Review classes I saved up all the lucky pennies I found and gave them out to the students to bring with them when they took the test. I also encouraged them to email me if any questions arose after our classes ended. And I remember once a young lady sent me an email saying she was taking the test in a week and she had a few questions for me. I answered them and wished her luck, and she wrote back to thank me and she said “I have the lucky penny.”

    Other cheap thrills I can think of off the top of my head:

    Zoey’s smile
    Leon’s knock-knock jokes
    When I get back to the car after the meter has run out but have not gotten a ticket.
    When the pint of beer I ordered comes perfectly filled all the way up to the top of the glass.
    When I tell a joke in class and it gets a good laugh.
    When Taylor Smith is in the puzzle so I can search through photos and videos of her again. (Ana de Armas works for this too.)
    When a train I am waiting for comes — the subway, NJ Transit — any train.
    When anything I have ordered online is delivered.
    When Karen the dental hygienist says, OK, we’re done, you can rinse now.

    At 8D, “Annual competition that starts on the first Saturday in March,” was not Rabbi Heskel’s kishka-eating contest, which, seriously, you should stay away from (don’t ask). It was the IDITAROD. LMS shared this note on it (on the iditarod, not the kishka contest).

    “Dad and I volunteered once at the IDITAROD, and it was a hoot. We did all kinds of stuff to help – erected a fence downtown Anchorage for the ceremonial start, took a dog-handler course so we could help a musher at the start, got to check the microchips on the dogs the morning of the race to make sure all the dogs were who they said they were.

    “Our last job was to wait at the hotel headquarters for the small planes bringing back dogs who’d been disqualified by a vet for some injury, some reason it wasn’t healthy for them to continue. We’d stand out on this frozen lake (I think it was) and watch the planes materialize. As they got closer, we could see the little dog faces staring out the window, dejected. We’d get them off the plane, set them up on some straw with water and food, and then try to comfort them ‘cause every single one of them wanted to still be running with their buddies.”

    Remember the “Big Dogs” t-shirts that were popular for a time? I had one that said: “If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.” On the other side it just said “Big Dogs.” Looks like they’re still in business at bigdogs.com.

    Wow, 3D really got me. The clue was “Praise for a queen,” and the answer was YAS. You hear of that? I hadn’t. It turns out it has nothing to do with, like, the Queen of England (aleha hashalom). It’s slang in the LGBTQ community, used for encouragement during the performances of drag queens. Hence, “queen” in the clue.

    And how about “Pinched pasta” at 41A? Unrelated to shoplifted fusilli. The answer was FARFALLE. It’s pasta sometimes known as bowties or butterflies. It’s “pinched” in the center to form its shape. (In the puzzle, it was crossed by NERVES, clued with “Butterflies!” Well done!)

    In Yiddish, farfel is small pellet- or flake-shaped pasta made of egg noodle dough and used in soups or as a side dish. The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, is said to have eaten farfel every Friday night because the word was similar to the word farfaln which means “wiped out, over and finished.” He considered the noodles symbolic of the end of the old week. It’s sort of a Yiddish food-based TGIF.

    I’m more familiar with matzoh farfel at Passover, which is just matzoh broken up into little pieces mostly to be used in soup or baked into kugels.

    And then there’s Farfel the Dog who was created by ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson and used in Nestle’s Quik ads from ’53 to ’65. Quite a run! An original talking Farfel can be seen at the Chocolate Experience Museum, located in Burlington, Wisconsin. Woof woof! Until you get out there, you can enjoy this funny ad.

    14A was “Jumble of speech,” and the answer was WORD SALAD. So I’m thinking we’ll start with a word salad, followed by alphabet soup, but what else is on the menu? Synonym rolls would be good. And maybe whip up an omelet with a few items from the verb garden. We’ll manage.

    1D was “Who reinvented the wheel in 1893?” Did you know the FERRIS wheel was invented by George Ferris, Jr. What are the odds? (That was a Robin Williams line. When he heard that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, he said “Wow — what are the odds?”)

    It was designed and built by Ferris for the 1893 World Expo in Chicago. It was meant to rival the Eiffel Tower that took the world by storm in the Paris Expo of 1889. It wasn’t the first wheel of its type, but they are all known as Ferris Wheels now. That one was 264 feet tall. The tallest today is in the United Arab Emirates and is 820 feet tall.

    The one in Chicago was quite a feat of engineering and was very popular. There were 36 cars, each fitted with 40 revolving chairs and able to accommodate up to 60 people, giving a total capacity of 2,160. The wheel carried some 38,000 passengers daily and took 20 minutes to complete two revolutions, the first involving six stops to allow passengers to exit and enter and the second a nine-minute non-stop rotation, for which the ticket holder paid 50 cents.

    Let’s close today with a pretty majorette, in honor of Super Bowl Weekend.

    See you tomorrow!

    ATLANTA, GA – DECEMBER 31: An Alabama majorette performs at halftime of the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl between the Washington Huskies and the Alabama Crimson Tide on December 31, 2016. Alabama defeated Washington by the score of 24-7 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Michael Wade/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

  • Zeke Midas Wolf

    Did you know that the Big Bad Wolf had a name? I guess that’s good, so his buddies didn’t have to call him “Big” or “Biggie” or “Big Bad,” as in “Hey Big Bad — What’s up with the Grandma suit?” He pops up all over the place, most notably in his ridiculous Grandma disguise in Little Red Riding Hood, and tormenting the Three Little Pigs. He also drops in at the end of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and in the Russian Peter and the Wolf.

    Disney’s version was introduced in 1933 in the cartoon short The Three Little Pigs, and it was in the comic strip incarnation that he was named: First name Zeke (1946), and middle name Midas (1949). Full name: Zeke Midas Wolf. I learned about this because today’s puzzle asked for ZEKE (Midas Wolf), described as the “Three Little Pigs” antagonist.

    BTW, Zeke had a son, L’il Bad Wolf, who disappointed his dad by wanting to do good. (I’m not kidding.)

    While we’re on the topic of names, Alex Rosen, today’s constructor, apparently expects us to know the names of the Magi, even though they are not named in the Bible. Tradition has them as Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. Caspar is the one in the puzzle, and one fellow noted he was the “friendly” one. Owl Chatter was able to snare a shot of him for you.

    It was a great puzzle. The trick was that every two-word clue had to be reversed in order to get the correct answer. And they were clever. So, e.g., for the clue “Pan Asian,” you had to think Asian pan, and come up with WOK. For “Water buffalo,” you had to think “Buffalo water,” and the answer was ERIE (i.e., Lake Erie in Buffalo NY). My favorite was “Does not.” So reverse it to get “Not does.” The answer was BUCKS. Get it? “Doe” as in female deer. Deer that are not does are bucks (male deer).

    The clue at 8D was very good. It was “Only human, briefly.” The answer was ADAM, who for a short time (briefly) was the only human. And at 16D “Went to third, say,” was SHIFTED. You had to think of shifting gears, not baseball.

    One of the switcheroos was “Young musician.” You had to go with Musician Young, and the answer was NEIL, as in NEIL Young, one of Owl Chatters’ favorites. Here’s a little-known tune of his: “Falling Off the Face of the Earth.”

    Neil Young is 77 now. He’s Canadian, and became a U.S. citizen in 2020. Welcome, Old Timer!

    OMG, I had forgotten he’s been married to Daryl Hannah since 2018. Daryl is 62 in real life, which is about 40 years older than she is in my head. Young’s first marriage, to a restaurant owner, Susan Acevedo, lasted less than two years. He then had a five-year relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Diary of a Mad Housewife in 1970. They have a son Zeke who is 50 now (no relation to the Big Bad Wolf, see above), and who has cerebral palsy.

    Young next married Pegi Young in 1978. He first met her in 1974 when she a waitress. They divorced in 2014 after 36 years of marriage, and she died in 2019. They had two children together, Ben and Amber. Ben has cerebral palsy, and Amber is epileptic. I don’t mean to define the kids by their conditions, only to note that parenting for Neil Young must not have been easy.

    He’s a model train freak. He was part owner, and is now on the Board of Directors, of Lionel trains, and is named as co-inventor on seven patents related to model trains. Here’s a great “get off my lawn” shot of him. Then the missus, after a rough night.

    This sentence is from Frank Bruni’s “For the Love of Sentences” feature this week. It was written by Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic in an article about Pamela Anderson:

     “In the ’90s, Anderson was one of the most famous women in the world, the highest-paid actress on the most-watched television show (that would be ‘Baywatch’), her scarlet swimsuit and box-blond curls covering more bedroom walls than Sherwin Williams.”

    The story of Caresse Crosby, born Mary Phelps Jacob, is pretty amazing. I’m not sure Owl Chatter will be able to do it justice. She was known as Polly Jacob when she married Dick Peabody in 1915. The ceremony was conducted by Endicott Peabody, founder of the Groton School. The Peabodies, some said, had by then supplanted the Cabots and the Lodges as the most distinguished family in the Northeast. Still Dick was a loser — he drank and was a bad dad to their two children. He spent as much time away as possible, mostly on military assignments.

    Into the story steps Harry Crosby, a war hero who, after completing his studies at Harvard, met Polly on July 4, 1920 at a picnic. Polly was 28 with two small children and Harry was 22, but KABOOM! Within two hours he confessed his love for her, appropriately, in the tunnel of love at an amusement park. He pursued her like Zelensky going after a shipment of rocket launchers. Polly said, “Harry was utterly ruthless. To know Harry was a devastating experience.” By July 20th, they were sleeping together, and after a night in NY’s Belmont Hotel she said, “For the first time in my life, I knew myself to be a person.” It was a massive scandal for the families involved.

    Eventually, Polly and Dick divorced, and she married Harry, but it devolved into an open marriage with many affairs and much drugs and drinking. At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name. They briefly considered Clytoris before deciding on Caresse. [You cannot make this stuff up.] Her Wikipedia entry is “Caresse Crosby.”

    When he was 30, Harry met 20-year-old Josephine Noyes Rotch and fell in love with her, despite her funny-sounding last name. They had an affair that ended after about a year when she married, but it was soon rekindled, with deadly consequences. On December 9, 1929 Harry was found in bed in New York’s Hotel des Artistes with a bullet in his head. He was in an affectionate embrace with Josephine who also had died of a gunshot to the temple. In case this is all not striking you as unusual enough: Both were dressed but had bare feet. Harry sported red-painted toenails and tattoos on the bottom of his feet. [I guess he wasn’t ticklish.]

    The coroner determined that Josephine died two hours before Harry. It was never determined whether it was a murder-suicide or a double suicide. No suicide note was found. (As Larry David remarked when someone he knew committed suicide without leaving a note: “No note? Would it have killed him to leave a note?”) Harry left Caresse the equivalent of $1.5 million, but his parents had the will invalidated.

    Owl Chatter fell down this rabbit hole because the clue in the puzzle today, smack in the middle at 38A, was “Garment patented in 1914 by Mary Phelps Jacob.” The answer was BRA. She wasn’t the first to come up with the concept, but she was first to go for a patent. I might have clued it with “What men have been desperately fumbling with since 1914.” Here’s Caresse.

    That will do it for today. See you tomorrow!

  • Fred Terna

    We continue to be surprised that China’s spy pinata is still wafting across the states. Here it is, sighted by Owl Chatter in the sky above New Mexico.

    Maybe Biden was too busy with his big important speech to take a swing at it? Anyway, I can’t recall anything like this happening since the Israelis released their spy knishes over Lebanon back in 1982. Here’s one just before launching.

    Fred Terna’s last name at birth was Taussig, but his parents adopted the name Terna and assumed false identities to hide from the Nazis in the Czech countryside. It worked for awhile but they were discovered in the fall of 1941 and sent to concentration camps. In Theresienstadt, Fred began to draw, using any materials he could find. He drew scenes of everyday life in the camp, like people lining up for soup. He buried his drawings in a tin box under the barracks floor. Before he was transferred to Auschwitz he turned the drawings over to another prisoner. He had not signed them in case they were found by the guards. After only two months, he was transferred again, to Dachau and was liberated by U.S. troops on April 27, 1945. He was ill and weighed 70 pounds but was alive. No one else in his family survived.

    Terna said the prisoners made a promise to each other — if they lived they would “tell what it was like.” Terna honored the promise through his art. He studied art in Paris after the war, “informally,” he said, and eventually moved to NY where he supported himself with his artwork. Whenever possible, he also searched libraries and archives for the drawings he left behind. You can see his paintings and read about him on his website: fredterna.com, and a book was written about his work and life by Julia Mayer, “Painting Resilience.” His work is in the Holocaust Museum in DC, Yad Vashem, and other sites devoted to the Holocaust.

    Below is one of his works, many of which portray the flames of the incinerators.

    He died last December 8, at age 99, survived by his son Daniel, and his second wife Rebecca, a child of survivors. They married in 1982 and honeymooned in Israel. They visited a kibbutz that had a museum dedicated to the memory of the victims of Theresienstadt. The curator allowed them to look through boxes of material from the camp. One box contained a file of unidentified art, in the middle of which they found six of Fred’s drawings from the camp.

    This poem by Ted Kooser is from Winter Morning Walks.

    The long, December shadows
    of bare trees
    run far away from the woods.

    At sunrise, they cross a red pasture
    and, though softened and torn
    by stones and weeds,
    strike out into the trees
    on the opposite side,
    leaving dark trails through the forest.

  • Bang Bang

    China explained today that their spy balloon was inadvertently set adrift over the U.S. when they bent over to tie their shoe and let go of the string momentarily. Their Minister of Defense added: “C’mon fellas, you’ve all been there.” Biden, who has seven grandchildren, noted: “He has a point.”

    Yesterday’s puzzle included the dating app GRINDR. One comment noted that there are other new terms that drop the final E, e.g., TUMBLR. He said it’s called “disemvowelment.” I had heard separately that when an E or an A shifts position in a word, it’s a VOWEL MOVEMENT.

    Which reminds me of one of the funniest things our friend Carl ever worked on me. It was back during the era of “born agains,” during which many people wore pins that said things like “Ask me about the Good News.” I made the mistake of asking a young lady at our food coop about the Good News once while she was checking out my groceries at the register. She said the “good news” was that Jesus loved me. Good news, indeed. Hard to dispute. I thanked her, checked my change, and made a note never to ask anyone that again.

    Anyway, so Carl was visiting a few weeks later and we were having a little brunch, and he excused himself at one point to use the rest room. When he returned I noticed he was wearing a little pin. It said “Ask me about my bowel movement.” Seriously, I had to be helped off the floor and back into my seat.

    Today’s puzzle contained Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” at 6D. It led “Taylor Slow” to share a modern rag with us: William Bolcom’s “Graceful Ghost Rag.” It is lovely.

    Harry Whittington died on Saturday in Austin TX. He was 95. He’s lucky he lasted that long — he’s the fellow Dick Cheney accidentally shot on a hunting trip back on Feb. 11, 2006. A little-known fact about that incident is that after shooting him, Cheney bent over and bit off part of his ear. [That last part is not true. I went for a cheap Tyson-Holyfield joke. Once it came to me, I had to go with it. Long-time readers of Owl Chatter will understand.]

    Here’s how the NYT described the shooting in Whittington’s obit: “In the encroaching dusk, Mr. Cheney abruptly wheeled around to shoot a quail and instead shot Mr. Whittington in his face and upper body. He suffered scores of birdshot wounds.”

    The two had met only briefly before the outing. Surprisingly, it was Whittington who apologized — for stepping into Cheney’s line of fire. At the time, Cheney acknowledged only that he was responsible for pulling the trigger. (Huh? Let me tell ya, folks — that’s one hell of an “only.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen an “only” stretched that far. “We only hit the iceberg, Captain.”))

    Five years later, in his memoir, Cheney offered what The Times termed “an apology of sorts.” He wrote: “I, of course, was deeply sorry for what Harry and his family went through. [Of course.] The day of the accident was one of the saddest of my life.”

    Whittington’s wounds were more serious than was revealed at the time. He had a mild heart attack after birdshot moved into his heart, and he suffered a collapsed lung. About 30 pieces of shot remained in his body, including one near his heart.

    During his lifetime, Whittington was an effective prison reformer and worked to combat corruption in Texas. He was sensitive to the needs of the developmentally disabled, since his daughter Claire was in that condition, and he successfully pushed for the creation of a separate unit in prisons for them. He urged Gov. Rick Perry to sign a bill banning the execution of developmentally disabled people. Perry vetoed the bill, saying it would diminish the power of juries, and noting that Texas did not execute such people anyway. (The U.S. Supreme Court later banned the execution of the developmentally disabled. So, fuck you, Perry.)

    Whittington is survived by his wife Mercedes whom he married in 1950, three daughters, six grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Sadly, his daughter Claire passed away last year.

    Whittington kept the blood-stained vest he was wearing when he was shot, and used it to teach children the dangers of firearms. He hunted only infrequently after the shooting. He said “Some of my enthusiasm is gone.”

    Ya think?

    And Charlie Thomas died, at 85, last Tuesday. He was with The Drifters. They had some terrific hits and are in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Who doesn’t recall Under the Boardwalk, There Goes My Baby, and This Magic Moment? Classics all. Their only song to reach #1 was Save the Last Dance for Me.

    Oh, I know
    Oh, I know
    That the music’s fine
    Like sparkling wine
    Go and have your fun . . .

    But don’t forget who’s taking you home
    And in whose arms you’re gonna be.
    So, darlin’,
    Save the last dance for me.

    I wonder how it would sound if Leonard Cohen sang it, don’t you?

    Here’s a shot of Charlie Thomas, beltin’ it out — thanks for all the great tunes! — Rest in peace.

    Sheldon “Shel” Silverstein was in the puzzle today. He was born in Chicago back in 1930. Has it really been over twenty years since he died? He was 68. He never married, and was quite a ladies man: a frequent guest at Playboy clubs and Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Mansion. He had two children, Shoshanna (which is Hebrew for Rose), who died of an aneurysm when only eleven, and Matthew, 38, a songwriter and producer in NYC. A Light in the Attic is dedicated to Shoshanna.

    The Giving Tree was one of Caity’s favorite books when she was little. She knew it by heart. To say it’s a classic doesn’t say enough. He was a songwriter too. He wrote “A Boy Named Sue” which Johnny Cash turned into a huge hit.

    Here are three samples of his writing:

    Listen to the mustn’ts, child.
    Listen to the don’ts.
    Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts.
    Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me…
    Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

    How many slams in an old screen door?
    Depends how loud you shut it.
    How many slices in a bread?
    Depends how thin you cut it.
    How much good inside a day?
    Depends how good you live ’em.
    How much love inside a friend?
    Depends how much you give him.

    If you are a dreamer, come in.
    If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
    A hoper, a pray-er, a magic-bean-buyer.
    If you’re a pretender come sit by my fire
    For we have some flax golden tales to spin.
    Come in!
    Come in!

    Silverstein also wrote this wrenching song, “Sylvia’s Mother,” nicely performed by Doctor Hook. Remember pay phones?

    Whew. I’m pretty much wrung out now. See you tomorrow.

  • Earthrise

    Take that, China! So much for their f**king balloon. We’re going to beat the crap out of their pinata next.

    In a clear case of anti-Semitism, pitcher Max Fried lost his arbitration case against the Braves and will be pitching this year for an insulting $13.5 million, and not the $15 mil he demanded. Considering that he had a better year than the other Max, Max Scherzer (whom we also love), who is getting paid $43 million, this is clearly a shonda! Your day will come, Maxie — hang in there. We love you!

    Max keeps his private life private. Owl Chatter was unable to confirm if he’s still dating USA soccer star Rose Lavelle. She’s lovely, as you can see, but Max has been complaining that, in bed, she doesn’t let him use his hands.

    While we’re on the topic of star pitchers, supermodel/actress Kate Upton was in the puzzle today — wife of three-time Cy Young Award winner Justin Verlander, who will pitch for the Mets this year. They have a daughter Genevieve. Kate was born in Michigan, and her grandfather was co-founder of the Whirlpool Company. What in the world does Verlander see in her?

    Born dead. Wait, what? You heard me — Bob Born is dead. He died at age 98 in Conshohocken PA and there won’t be another Peep out of him. He was a confectioner, head of Just Born Quality Confections, the candy company started by his dad in Brooklyn, but greatly expanded in Pennsylvania via automation by Bob. The company’s best seller is Mike and Ike, but the most loved items are Peeps, of which they make 5.5 million a day, and close to 2 billion a year. Most are sold around Easter, of course.

    The record for Peeps consumption is held by Matt Stonie, a competitive eater from San Francisco, who ate 255 in five minutes. Stonie also won the Nathan’s hot-dog eating contest in 2015 and is ranked fifth among competitive eaters. Apparently, they are ranking eaters now.

    How Peeps are eaten by the general public is a personal thing. Some folks pop them into their mouths right out of the package, but others let them age a few days, use them in s’mores, or even put them on pizza or infuse them into vodka. A company survey found that 30% of Peeps are not eaten at all — they are used in floral centerpieces, or as chess pieces or jewelry. Some are woven into clothing or wreaths.

    In 2004, The St. Paul Pioneer Press sponsored a competition for “Peeps-based displays,” e.g., dioramas, and 80 papers around the country picked up the idea. The Washington Post runs the largest, often getting 600 or so entries. Past “themes” have included: “We Come in Peeps,” “The Ides of Marshmallow,” and “Sweety Todd: The Demon Barber of Peep Street.”

    The company has fitted out two school buses with giant fiberglass Peeps that tour the country. “Peepsfest” is celebrated annually in Bethlehem, PA, where the company headquarters are. It culminates with the dropping of a giant Peep on New Year’s Eve.

    Bob’s dad, Sam, was an innovator. He developed the process for attaching lollipop sticks to their candy tops, and invented chocolate that would harden quickly around ice cream, as in Klondike bars and pops. The company prospered even during the Depression.

    Rest in Peeps, Bob Born.

    Here’s a photo of Bob, on his way to work. That must be the Peepmobile, no?

    OMG, it’s Babe Ruth’s birthday today, born George Herman Ruth, Jr., in Baltimore in 1895. Only he and a sister survived out of eight children born to his mom. His parents struggled to eke a living out of a seedy neighborhood bar and he rarely saw them. I knew he grew up in an orphanage but I wrongly thought it was because he was an orphan. Not so — his father didn’t think he could raise the Babe so he signed custody over to the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys when he was seven and he spent twelve miserable years there.

    On the other hand, one of the priests at St. Mary’s — Brother Matthias — taught him how to play baseball, and a scout for the then-minor-league Orioles saw him play one day, and signed him to a contract for a then-whopping $600. In training camp, the players referred to him as one of the scout’s “babes,” and it stuck.

    I’m not going to throw stats at you (much), but I would like to note that in 1920, when Ruth led the majors with 54 home runs, that was more than the next three hitters combined: George Sisler (19), Tilly Walker (17), and Cy Williams (15). By contrast (not to diminish Aaron Judge’s impressive season), Judge’s 62 homers last year were less than half of the next three hitters combined: Schwarber (46), Trout (40), and Alonso (40).

    I bought the item pictured below from another collector for $25 when I was in high school. It’s a deposit slip signed by Ruth. Good move.

    In the puzzle today, the clue for IVANA at 17A was “The first Mrs. Donald Trump.” Here’s what Rex had to say: “Are there no other IVANAs in the world? Truly? And did the clue have to write out the entire full-ass name of that creep that used to be president?” I guess Rex isn’t a fan.

    Nine down had me confused today. The clue was “Ancient tool for hunters or warriors,” and the answer was SPEAR THROWER. But isn’t the tool the spear, and the thrower the hunter who uses it? NO! I had not heard of a tool called atlatl (also known as a “spearthrower”) that enables the spear to be thrown at greater velocity and for a greater distance, by employing leverage. So the ancients did use such a spearthrower as a tool. Here’s a picture:

    And commenter Joe Dipinto noted there are also mini-spearthrowers for when you have the urge to hurl asparagus at your enemies.

    Rex has taken to solving Monday puzzles via the down clues alone. Others have too, feeling that the puzzle is too easy otherwise. And they sometimes seem a little too full of themselves when they crow to the rest of us mortals about it. There was a comment today spoofing them: “I solved using diagonals only. Backwards and reflected in a mirror. With the cyrillic alphabet.”

    The theme of today’s puzzle by Taylor Johnson was “Earthrise,” the famous picture of the Earth taken by astronaut William Anders from lunar orbit during the Apollo 8 mission on Dec. 24, 1968. MOON was the answer in the lower left corner, and the word EARTH was contained within three long down answers (e.g., in HEART HEALTHY) in such a way that it “rose” across the grid. Here’s the famous photo.

    CDilly52 shared the following on Rex’s blog:

    We in the “older” category remember the “space race” that started in earnest in 1957 when, despite the US touting its plans to launch satellites in 1955, the USSR sent Sputnik up and followed that by being first to achieve manned space flight with Yuri Gagarin.

    We cheered when Kennedy achieved Congressional backing for the goal of getting a man on the moon and safely home again by the end of the decade. Those were heady times indeed. We were awestruck as we followed the highs and lows and all of the excitement and gut wrenching fear of every flight. No internet or cell phones and three television stations – maybe four with public tv. And Walter Cronkite. And real news.

    Until this Christmas, a stunning color print of EARTHRISE has hung in my husband’s office since Christmas 1986. Our daughter was hooked on space travel and all things “space” when Sally Ride became the first woman to “slip the surly bonds of earth” in 1983. Our Kate was only four.

    My husband, ever a teacher and a lifelong student and aficionado of all things astronomy, aerospace and space exploration was thrilled when Kate showed interest. They made drawings of the solar system and went out to look at the stars. With every issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, he would distill the complex information for her and many bedtime stories were about our astronaut heroes and their adventures.

    The Challenger tragedy of early 1986 was traumatic. Millions of us watched in real time as the day so many children were celebrating the “First Teacher in Space” ended in tragedy.

    Still participating with her dad in their mutual interest, they spent extra time talking about the sacrifices made for progress and specifically about Challenger and the hope that things the scientists learned would help make the next mission that much better.

    As their exploration continued, the Apollo program caught her interest. She loved thinking about walking on the moon. I only recently tossed her shoebox diorama of a toothpick and aluminum foil “LEM” on the mostly sand and spray painted styrofoam lunar surface.

    The year came to an end and Christmas became the focus. The Smithsonian catalog landed in our mail box. One of the available items was a beautifully matted and framed color reprint of the iconic EARTHRISE photo from 1968. Kate showed it to me and said we “have to get this for Daddy.” We did, and it has been the focal point of his office ever since.

    My daughter has since become a dedicated teacher of very challenged fourth through sixth graders. Her twelve students this year are all boys, and she says it is a completely new dynamic. At Thanksgiving, she said “All they want to talk about is evil aliens.” I asked her if they showed any interest in the factual side of space travel. She said she’d think about it.

    I packed up EARTHRISE and sent it to her. She was thrilled and hung it in her classroom. None of her kiddos had ever seen anything like it. At first they didn’t believe it was taken from space. That was all she needed to get them wanting more. She started with the clip of the Apollo 8 crew seeing EARTHRISE for the first time and taking the pictures that became the photo on the wall.

    We talked last weekend and she said they were demanding to see more actual “movies” from the NASA archives. She said she was so happy to be able to pass on all her Dad taught her about space.

    If we’re lucky, we actually get glimpses of things that turned out well.

    I’m in my office at Hunter today, waiting for my 4 pm tax class to start. I’m looking out my 15th-floor window, north up Lexington Avenue. Hey, there’s that goddamn Chinese pinata drifting across Northern Manhattan!! C’mon Biden, bang the crap out of it!! What the hell are you waiting for??

    Good night, readers. See you tomorrow.

  • If You Say Run, I’ll Run With You.

    OK if we start today with a poem?

    It’s by Gail Mazur and it’s called Ice. It reminded me how much I love my incredible daughter Caitlin.

    In the warming house, children lace their skates,
    bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

    A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
    it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,

    clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
    December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove,

    the first sheer ice, black, then white
    and deep until the city sends trucks of men

    with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
    hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

    of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour
    of distances moved backwards without falling,

    then—twilight, the warming house steamy
    with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

    aching. Outside, the hockey players keep
    playing, slamming the round black puck

    until it’s dark, until supper. At night,
    a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

    Although there isn’t music, they glide
    arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

    braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never
    be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

    find her perfect, skate with her
    in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

    Today’s puzzle, by Jeremy Newton, was right up Owl Chatter’s alley. Bad puns! It took Oscar-winning (for sound) movie titles and played with their names. So one clue was: “Why the Devil was forced to pay ‘The Greatest’” was HELL OWED ALI. Say it out loud: Hello Dolly! My other fave was: Bronzed NY basketball player from Bangkok.” That was THAI TAN KNICK.

    That last one led one commenter to share this SNL bit that was pretty good and new to me: an interview with the (very defensive) iceberg.
    (“First of all, you hit me.”)

    Aside from the themers, some of the regular cluing was terrific. “Therein lies the rub” was the clue for SPA.

    “End of a flight, in two senses,” was the clue for LANDING (plane and stairs).

    “On display, as a painting,” was the clue for WALL HUNG. Several folks noted one small change in a crossing clue could have made it WELL HUNG. Darn! So close.

    Curmudgeon Rex did not like the puzzle, which led LMS to refer to his negative writeup as a “Rexcoriation.”

    The clue for ALOHA at 10D was “Greeting that means, literally, ‘love.’” LMS said she was jealous of the way other cultures greet each other. E.g., Konnichiwa (Japanese) – kinda like, “And what about today?” And Sawubona (Zulu) – “I see you and value you.”

    She went on: “We get stuck with “How You Doin’?” And pray pray pray the person recognizes the question as the phatic communion that it is and not an actual inquiry into their well-being. This is especially true when running into one of Mom’s friends at the mailboxes. Safer to lead with Hey! Nice weather, huh? or How ‘bout them Panthers! than to ask how they’re doing ‘cause let me tell you, They. Will. Tell. You. After impatiently listening about their latest doctor visit, MRI, fall, rash, ache, I leave hating myself for being so indifferent to their loneliness.”

    I didn’t know the word “phatic.” Here’s what the dictionary says: denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions. Utterances such as hello, how are you? and nice morning, isn’t it? are phatic.

    David Bowie’s 1983 hit LET’S DANCE was in the puzzle. Here’s a good video performance of it.

    David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in London on Jan. 8, 1947 and died in NY two days after his 69th birthday in 2016. He shares his birthday with Elvis. By age 6, in nursery school, he developed a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child, and as a defiant brawler. When he was nine, his dad brought home a bunch of American 45’s, including Little Richard’s Tutti Fruitti, about which Bowie said it was like “hearing God.”

    For the financiers among you, in 1997 “Bowie Bonds” were issued, the first modern example of celebrity bonds. By forfeiting 10 years worth of royalties on 287 songs, Bowie received $55 million up front from Prudential. The bonds liquidated in 2007 and the rights to the income from the songs reverted to Bowie.

    In 2016, filmmaker Michael Moore wanted to use Bowie’s song Panic in Detroit for one of his films. Denied at first, Moore was given the rights after calling Bowie personally, recalling: “I’ve read stuff since his death saying that he wasn’t that political and he stayed away from politics. But that wasn’t the conversation that I had with him.”

    His sexuality was fluid. Bowie was married to his first wife, Mary Angela Bassett, for ten years, and they had a son, Duncan. Bowie said “living with her is like living with a blow torch.” He was married again twelve years later to Somali-American model Iman, and they had a daughter Lexi.

    You don’t need Owl Chatter to tell you how successful he was artistically and commercially. Let’s put it this way: He has a spider and an astral constellation named after him. He’s on postage stamps and local currency. There is a statue of him in Aylesbury, where Ziggy Stardust debuted.

    He was cremated in New Jersey, and his ashes were scattered in a Buddhist ceremony in Bali, Indonesia.

    Here’s a shot of David, Iman, and the two kids.

    Owl chatter took a rare outing to the movies yesterday, to see The Banshees of Inisherin. Loved it. Very beautiful and very unusual. Four members of the cast received Oscar nominations.

    Against the backdrop of the 1922-1923 Irish Civil War, the film centers on the relationship between two men. The older of the two, Colm, decides to end their friendship, and, to say the least, the younger, Padraic, has trouble understanding or accepting that. Colm concedes Padraic is “nice,” but says he’s dull and would rather spend his time devoted to his music. As the old song says, “breaking up is hard to do.”

    Colin Farrell’s sister was played by Kerry Condon, whom some of you may recall from Better Call Saul, where she plays Mike’s daughter. She’s up for Best Supporting Actress in Banshees.

    Born on January 9, 1983 in Thurles, in County Tipperary, Condon is Irish through and through. She has a soulful, intelligent, haunting beauty that is hard to capture in a photograph. This is the best I could do.

    Here are the last two paragraphs in today’s Modern Love column in The Times. If you haven’t read it yet, it won’t ruin it for you.

    “But if you lose someone you love, as I may soon lose Kevin, you will kick yourself for missing out on the five minutes you could have spent standing outside of a hospital entrance in the freezing cold among the smokers and the security guards.

    “So, find the people you want to be around and be around them. Invent a ridiculous excuse to spend an afternoon in their company: Go shopping for Scotch tape, watch them buy groceries, whatever. Call the person you love most, right now, and say: I have to buy ink cartridges for my printer. Would you like to come along?”

    Or invite them to read Owl Chatter with you!

    See you tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by.

  • Noisy Confidence

    Yesterday’s puzzle answer OAST (Outbuilding that’s sometimes converted into a dwelling), inspired a few poets. A new one was just posted that earns the Owl-Chatter funny-poem hat today:

    Kevorkian’s just-opened Oast
    Is not for patrons milquetoast.
    If thrombosed or sclerosed,
    diagnosed tuberculosed,
    they’ll be necrosed as a ghost by the host.

    I commented that I liked that one the moast. (Please see yesterday’s Owl Chatter for another oast limerick and a nice photo of an oast.)

    Today’s puzzle had a lot of neat phrases and expressions. For “Line at the door of a bar,” the answer was LET ME SEE SOME ID. It was nicely crossed by BESOT (“inebriate”). It evoked the following note from our favorite commenter, LMS:

    “OK – I have one LET’S SEE SOME ID story. When I was a cocktail waitress, I hated when people whose age looked iffy came in. If they ordered, say, Dewars on the rocks, I let it go. But order a strawberry daiquiri, buddy, and I have to see some ID. One early evening these two guys came in, and one looked iffy, so I approached bracing myself for the ID confrontation. Happily, the youngish one just ordered an OJ and then asked about the piano that was sitting there and could anyone play it. I shrugged and mumbled something about our having rented it for New Year’s Eve. I was at the bar getting their order when all hell broke loose – even the cooks came out of the kitchen to gape. I’ve never seen anyone assault a piano like that. Talk about your instant mood lifter. His name is Jason D. Williams, and we became friends. So I’m a bit of a big deal.”

    Here’s Williams at the keyboard with a band. Watch it through til the end with the volume turned up. I guarantee it will knock your socks off — from inside your shoes. I’m just glad I didn’t lose any toes.

    That reminds me of a Sam story. I was visiting him in Annie Arbor when he was an undergrad at UMich, and we had some plans for the day so I was picking him up in the morning. He told me not to ring the doorbell because his roomies would still be asleep. I was to call him when I got there and he’d come out. So I found a spot a few houses down, gave him a call, and he said he’d be out in a few minutes.

    Glancing around, I noticed a single black sock sitting in the street by the side of the curb. It seemed odd because it was winter so what one usually found in the street was a single glove, or a knit cap. Socks are generally securely encased by shoes — how would a single sock get out? How drunk must this kid have been? — “Hold on a minute fellas, I have to tie my shoe. Oops it came off. And there goes my sock! Hold on guys. Where did it land? Oh, never mind,” and he goes staggering off down the street with one sockless foot. Was that what happened? Or was he just so drunk that he suddenly had to take one sock off and heave it into the street? In any event, I felt very lucky not to be the parent of that poor sot.

    After a few more minutes, I saw the door to Sam’s house open and out popped Sam. He saw where I was parked, waved hello, and locked the door behind him. As he was walking to the car, he noticed the sock in the street. He bent over and picked it up. “I’ve been looking for this,” he said as he got into the car.

    What?! That’s yours? You better have a good story on how it got there!

    He did. It had fallen out of the pillowcase he was using as a laundry bag on his way back from the laundromat. We had a wonderful day, as we always did in that wonderful little city. Go Blue!

    “Sanctuary for many couples,” was a nice clue for ARK. As was “Unconditional condition,” for TRUE LOVE. They prompted commenter Lewis to recall a terrific clue by this constructor (Kate Hawkins) in an earlier puzzle of hers: The answer was HOLE PUNCH, and the clue was “Inefficient confetti-making tool.” Ha!

    Here’s a word for you that only exists in Crossworld, and, in fact, only in Rex Parker’s small corner of it. So Owl Chatter readers will be among the very few people in the world who know it. It was coined a while back by a Rex commenter. She noticed that it sometimes weirdly happens that you enter a wrong answer in one part of the puzzle and then find it to be the correct answer elsewhere in the grid. It happened to Rex today. The clue at 1A was “Smart,” and Rex wrongly filled in ACHE. (It turned out to be CHIC.) But ACHE was the correct answer at 32A for “Long.” When that happens, it’s called a “malapop.”

    You’re going to need to know what a contrail is for the poem by Kooser I’ve reproduced below from Winter Morning Walks. A contrail is a trail of condensed water from an aircraft or rocket at high altitude, seen as a white streak against the sky.

    Here’s the poem.

    Walking in darkness, in awe,
    beneath a billion indifferent stars
    at quarter to six in the morning,
    the moon already down
    and gone, but keeping a pale lamp burning
    at the edge of the west,
    my shoes too loud in the gravel
    that, faintly lit, looks to be little more
    than a contrail of vapor,
    so thin, so insubstantial it could,
    on a whim, let me drop through it
    and out of the day,
    but I have taught myself
    to place one foot ahead of the other
    in noisy confidence
    as if each morning might be trusted,
    as if the sounds I make might buoy me up.

    Thanks for stopping in. See you tomorrow.

  • Bang The Drum Slowly

    A hearty Owl-Chatter chuckle for a term in today’s puzzle that is a real word: UNOBTANIUM. It was originally coined for an element or material that would be perfect for one’s needs but that doesn’t exist. Now it’s used in engineering or more widely to describe something that is impractically hard to get, due to scarceness or cost. It’s the compound mined in the Avatar movies. According to Wikipedia, similar terms include hardtofindium, eludium, and handwavium.

    Other elements that have only recently been discovered are kvellium, which imparts a feeling of joy; kvetchium, which has the opposite effect; verklemptium, which causes one to be overcome by emotions; and schlepium, the effects of which are not known, but it’s very hard to transport.

    And let’s have a very special Owl-Chatter welcome for an old Brandeisian from before our time, the late Abbie Hoffman, in today’s NYTXW at 6D. Here’s what I posted for the Rex folks:

    “The late ABBIE Hoffman at 6 down — love him or hate him, he was very very funny. He was the original “Sandwich Man” when he was a student at Brandeis, before my time there. (You could say he was a dorm-to-dorm salesman.)

    “He said he was against women’s rights — “Why, if you give women rights, the next thing you know men would want them too!”

    “When he was negotiating with the Miami police chief for protests of the GOP convention, he said, ‘Listen Chief, if one curly hair on this head is hurt, my father will never come down to Miami Beach again.’ And the chief replied — ‘Abbie, I know your father — he’ll come.’”

    Abbot Howard Hoffman was born on Nov. 30, 1936 in Worcester MA, and died at his own hands when he was 52. He graduated from Brandeis in 1959 with a degree in Psych. He studied under Abraham Maslow and Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, who Hoffman said was a great influence on him. Abbie was on the Brandeis tennis team. After Brandeis, he completed the coursework for a Masters degree in Psych at UC Berkeley.

    So much can be written about Abbie, but there’s a danger of Hoffman overload. He was married twice and had three children, Andrew (62), Amy, and america (age ?). Sadly, Amy also took her own life in 2007, at the age of 45. Abbie’s memorial service was held in Worcester, at Temple Emanuel, the synagogue that he attended as a child, with 1,000 friends and family members in attendance.

    Here’s Abbie with his youngest son, america. Below that, Abbie’s bar-mitzvah? Could be.

    If I had to come up with a definition for OAST, the answer at 23A today, I would say I thought it was some sort of oven, like a kiln. I would be right – it’s a kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco. But it’s also used to describe the building it’s in. So the clue today was “Outbuilding that’s sometimes converted into a dwelling.” They usually have a conical or pyramidal roof.

    Here’s a limerick on the topic, courtesy of LMS:

    Mrs. Bread moved into her OAST.
    Its warmth appealed to her most.
    Though cozy at first,
    The heat just got worse
    She has since changed her name to Ms. Toast.

    The very first clue/answer at 1A was clever today. The clue was “Finishing-line cry?,” and the answer was BINGO! I didn’t get it at first — the “line” is a line on your Bingo game card. When/if you fill in (“finish”) a line, you win and yell Bingo. It’s not a finish line in a race.

    Here’s some priceless chatter on the topic from the redoubtable LMS:

    “I think I’d happily stay home and stab my kneecap with a plastic fork than go with Mom to the Tuesday BINGO event. You should see how she frets about her outfit and who’s slated to do the calling for the night. She and her friend get there 30 minutes early so they can sit at their customary table. No, really. For her, it’s the highlight of the week. For me, I get to come home to an empty house and collapse onto the couch in a fugue state. No questions, no chit-chat. No dredging the bottom of my empty tank trying to conjure conversation from the fumes.”

    Here’s something: The clue for 11D was “Language that’s mutually intelligible with Hindi.” The answer (of course) is URDU, but it begs the question, if they are co-intelligible are they really different “languages?” Could they just be different “dialects?” The following observations by language-lover LMS got me wondering about that:

    “The convention of what we call ‘languages’ is a lot of times purely political or geographical. Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, so you could argue that they’re actually just dialects of each other – not separate languages. And we have a ‘language’ with dialects that are not mutually intelligible, so like you could argue that the cockney English spoken in London’s East End is a separate language from the English spoken in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks. And the English a very agitated Boogie [a student] was using last week to recount his upsetting run-in with the police because he was carrying in violation of his ankle monitor and tried to run and and and, well, I just couldn’t follow even though I was listening with all my might. . . you could argue that his English is a separate language from my English. The cool thing is, Boogie can understand mine, so in a sense he’s bilingual and I’m not.”

    jberg later added: When I was in college there were courses in the Serbo-Croatian language; it was generally considered one language until Yugoslavia broke up, after which everyone insisted they were distinct. My son worked with a bunch of Croatians, and would occasionally ask what the difference was; the answer was always that they had different words for “belt.” No one could come up with anything else.

    Do our bike-riding friends know this one? At 18A the clue is “Long ones can be measured in centuries,” and the answer is BIKE RIDES. So, e.g., a 200-mile bike ride is referred to as “two-centuries long.”

    Here’s a pretty bike rider from Copenhagen who caught owl-chatter’s eye.

    Gertrude Stein was born on this day in Allegheny City, PA in 1874. Happy Birthday Ms. Stein! I cite her in my tax class, stealing a line from my old professor Bernie Wolfman (alav hashalom). The definition of gross income in the tax code is very broad. E.g., if you find $50 on the street and you’re an honest taxpayer, you should include it in gross income. So Wolfman said Gertrude Stein wrote that Code Section and it says “Income is income is income.” The joke is based on Stein’s famous line: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Hysterical, right? Tax humor. You should hear my material on depreciation deductions. You’ll plotz.

    But enough about me. Stein moved to Paris in 1903 and met Alice B. Toklas, the love of her life. (The B is for Babette. I bet you’ve gone your whole life without knowing that.) They drove an ambulance in World War I. Of course, it wasn’t called World War I back then. Who knew? After the war, they maintained a salon attended by the cultural big shots of the age: Picasso, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, Matisse, and others.

    There is some “dark matter” in Stein’s history — collaborationist activity with the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France. Some have cited the difficult situation she was in by virtue of being Jewish. Owl Chatter is just going to tip-toe away from that for now.

    Stein’s writing style was abstract – the verbal equivalent of Cubism – so it was not easy to understand and her work did not sell well. The only book of hers that did sell was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was actually her own autobiography written from the perspective of Toklas. Her other well-known line is about Oakland CA where she grew up: “There is no there there.” Just two weeks ago, Biden used that line to dismiss all the hoo-ha about the classified documents, and he didn’t credit Stein! WTF Joe! Stein may have just meant that her old home or neighborhood simply no longer exists, but the quote has grown to be a way of describing something that has no substance to it, akin to a “nothing-burger.” That was Biden’s meaning.

    Stein died at the age of 72 from stomach cancer. Here she is, as painted by Picasso.

    33D was “Broke up a band, say,” and the answer was WENT SOLO. But a whole bunch of folks said they liked WENT YOKO better. (Owl Chatter is one of them.) Ha! “The band was doing well, until the lead guitarist went Yoko.”

    Yoko is 87 now and in poor health, wheelchair-bound. She is very close to her son Sean who is 44. Here she is, earlier in life.

    To end on a sweet but sad note, we bid farewell to, and bang the drum slowly for, Clevelander John Adams, who died on Monday at 71. He worked at AT&T as a systems analyst and quality manager for 40 years, but we hail him today because he banged a bass drum in the bleachers at Indians games for close to 50 years — at over 3,700 home games.

    He began playing the drums when he was nine. And on August 24, 1973, when he was 21, Adams asked for permission from the Indians to bring his drum to the game. It was granted but he was told not to disturb anyone. He only started beating it when a drunk fan challenged him to. Once he began, the crowd started clapping to his beat and he was credited with rattling the opposing pitcher. From that day on, until the pandemic and health issues quieted him, he was a fixture at Cleveland homes games. Owl Chatter is pleased to note it was in attendance at a handful of those games over the years.

    At a home game in 2006, the team gave away bobblehead dolls modeled on Adams with a drum and moveable arms. In 2012, Great Lakes Brewing introduced Rally Drum Red Ale in his honor. And just last year, on the 49th anniversary of his first “performance,” he was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame. A sculptor created a bronze replica of his drum and it was affixed to his bleacher bench and installed in the team’s Hall of Fame area behind center field.

    “There’s nothing like being down at the ballpark,” he said. “Because it’s more than just the game.”

    Amen to that, John Adams. Rest in peace.

    Good night, everybody! See you tomorrow.

  • Bed, Bath, and Behind

    IMO, today’s puzzle was pretty easy for a Thursday. There were ten answers with a letter missing. For example, at 1A, the clue was “Pit-of-the-stomach feeling,” and the answer was DREAD, but you only had 4 spaces to fill in, so you were to fill in READ and keep the D “dark,” i.e., unseen. Those ten “missing” letters spell DARK MATTER, and at 27D the clue was “Science that deals with the phenomenon” and the answer was PHYSICS.

    Barbara S. added this helpful note:

    DARK MATTER and DARK energy are subjects of great interest to my husband and, believe it or not, we’ve had some “DARK” discussions around the dinner table. My understanding is that the two things counteract each other in the cosmos: DARK energy is the force which speeds up the expansion of the universe by driving galaxies apart, while DARK MATTER slows down the process by pulling them together. You see various percentage estimates, but it’s been theorized that our universe is made up of:

    68% DARK energy
    27% DARK MATTER
    5% normal matter (i.e. everything we can see on Earth, and everything observable through telescopes)

    I liked this comment by Anonymous: “The puzzle was so easy but with no piece of paper or writing implement immediately at hand to record the missing letters, I never discovered Dark Matter. No matter, having read the review I think I made the right choice to eschew getting up and walking 3 feet to the table to acquire the tools to solve the mystery. Guess that attitude’s why I have yet to win a Nobel prize.”

    Here’s what pmdm added:

    “A word about dark energy and dark matter. As did Galileo when he dropped a few apples from a tree, we discover reality by observing what happens when something is done. We then infer the rules that govern why what we experience happens. Because we live in a medium size world, what we experienced was only a generalization of the laws of physics. That’s why when we started considering the atom or the larger universe, we had to update the laws of physics. E = m c squared may work in our fairly slow world, but when one accelerates to near the speed of light, the law becomes a bit more complicated.

    “We observe that the universe is expanding at ever greater speed. We observe that the galaxies rotate in a manner that our known laws of physics don’t predict. Therefore, there must be unknown forces causing what we observe. We decided, for want of better terminology, to call these forces dark matter and dark energy. Additional observation may someday solidify the laws and explain how the force laws are all related to each other.

    “Some may be bothered by the law which claims energy can be neither created or destroyed. That is true in a closed system, but the expansion of the universe demonstrates that our universe is not a closed system. Therefore, as it expands, “dark energy” can be created. Or at least, this is how I understand it.

    “Hopefully, those not interested in these types of things stopped reading my comment long ago. For those who are interested, imitate Einstein and construct a world explaining why what we observe happens the way it does. If you are good at math, reduce your thoughts to mathematical laws. Maybe you will win a Nobel Prize. And add to our knowledge of reality. Good luck.”

    I have no idea what this photo is, but when I googled “dark matter images,” this is one of the things that came up.

    The neckpieces, or collars, or jabots, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore over her judicial robe sometimes sent messages. She had a yellow one that she wore when presenting the Court’s opinion. It was a gift from her law clerks. And she famously had a dark one when she was reading a scathing dissent. She also wore the dark one the day after Trump won the 2016 election.

    For her first official portrait on the Court she wore a simple straight-edged jabot similar to those worn by French justices. They became more embellished over the years. She said the standard robe is made for a man in that it has a place for the shirt and tie to show. So she and Sandra Day O’Connor decided to adopt the neckwear as an appropriate feminine response.

    Today’s puzzle used RBG’s collars in the clue for DISSENT. The clue notes that RBG’s “iconic” dissent neckwear has been turned over to the Smithsonian. It’s dark and beautiful.

    One of my all-time favorite stories involves Sandra Day O’Connor. At some fancy dinner in Washington DC, she was seated at the same table as John Riggins, a very good running back for the then-Washington Redskins (formerly of the Jets). I guess the dinner was honoring, or at least inviting, DC personalities from all fields. Anyway, Riggins must have had a few drinks and must have found Justice O’Connor to be a bit stiff as a dinner companion, because at one point he turned to her and said, “Oh, loosen up, Sandy baby.”

    Congratulations, Riggins — you’ve just been inducted into the Owl Chatter Hall of Fame.

    My favorite feature of Frank Bruni’s newsletter is “For the Love of Sentences.” His readers send in samples of sentences they’ve come across in the media, and he selects the best ones to share. (I’ve gotten selections accepted twice.) Here’s a funny one from today’s letter:

    In The Herald-Mail, Tim Rowland analyzed Bed Bath & Beyond’s closing of scores of stores: “Even in the best of times, no one paid full price for anything at BBB due to its ubiquitous discount mailers. In fact, there are aboriginal tribes in Malaysia whose only contact with the outside world is a 20-percent-off coupon for Bed Bath & Beyond.”

    Did you know that a SARD is an “orangish-brown gem?” It was new to me. Some of you are no doubt wondering, how does it differ from carnelian? Well, both of them are varieties of the silica mineral chalcedony, of course, and the coloration is similar. But sard is somewhat harder and darker. They are often used interchangeably, so don’t feel too bad if you confused them.

    Owl Chatter just asks for a few minutes of your time. By contrast, James Joyce, who was born on this day in Dublin in 1882, demanded of his reader “that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”

    When he was 22, Joyce fell in love with a Galway hotel maid named Nora Barnacle. He set the action of Ulysses on June 16, 1904, the date of his first date with Nora. They eloped to Europe where they were impoverished and relied on the help of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus.

    Joyce and Nora had a son Giorgio after which they slept head to foot as a means of birth control. But, as Seinfeld pointed out, the important parts were still near each other, and they had a daughter, Lucia, just about a year later. Joyce was a doting father. He spoiled his kids and never punished them. Here’s a shot of him with his grandson Stephen.

    Nora had no interest in his writing. He wrote at night and laughed so loudly at his own words that she often had to get up to shush him so she could sleep. How wonderful! It took him seven years of steady writing to finish Ulysses: 20,000 hours.

    He was afraid of thunder and lightening and hid under the blankets during storms. He was also afraid of dogs and kept rocks in his pockets when he was out in case he ran into any roaming loose. He liked drinking and dancing. It was said of him that liquor went to his feet, not his head. He was kind and generous to strangers, often inviting waiters to join him at his table for food and drink in restaurants. What a beautiful man. It’s an honor to have him in Owl Chatter. And I can’t imagine a nicer note to end on. See you tomorrow!

  • Giant Death Ray Cannons

    Another brilliant puzzle in the NYT today. It’s by Dan Caprera, who must be a science fiction buff. The theme is TRACTOR BEAMS. These are energy rays that suck up objects — like cows, cars, and people. They were popularized in Star Trek. Like when someone was “beamed up” it was via a tractor beam. So in the puzzle there are three spacecraft answers (FLYING SAUCER, MOTHERSHIP, and SPACECRAFT), and each one is sucking something up into itself. E.g., the S in “flying saucer” is part of the down word SCOW, so it’s like the “cow” is being lifted up into the Saucer.

    LMS posted this today:

    “I recently was able to (finally) connect with a particularly tough kid – we had butted heads several times – when he knocked on my door during my planning to ask if he could do some work in my room. Oh. Hell. Yes. All the plans I had had for that hour went out the window so that I could finesse some kind of détente with this guy who had thrown an apple at my shins. I don’t know how it came up, but we ended up talking about UFOs. I said if one landed right outside, I’d be the first to go up to it and knock on the door. Helloooooo? Got some kind of Close Encounters ramp you can lower for me? Hello? Anyone home? You come in peace, right? Josh said no way – he’d be running out the back door. So this [puzzle] theme makes me happy. Josh and I are good now, and he sits and works for me during class.”

    But commenter Masked&Anonymous said he wouldn’t be so quick to knock on that UFO’s door. He’d need to know: “Are there dead bodies ringing around it, especially half-eaten ones? Are there any of those giant death ray cannons protruding from its hull? Does it have a big MAGA sticker splatzed on its hull? Has the surrounding vegetation died from radiation or somesuch? Is there real tense soundtrack music playing? Are there giant robots on patrol?”

    Makes sense. He’s just being cautious. I like the “tense soundtrack” factor.

    The clue for 7D was “most urbane,” and the answer was SUAVEST. Several folks thought that word was a little clunky, although “most suave” doesn’t flow either. Here’s LMS again, from whom I’m stealing material today UNABASHEDLY, which was the answer at 24D (“without shame”):

    “I can’t put my finger on it, but adding an EST to SUAVE feels weird, maybe because suaver feels weird? But so does most suave. I’m probably overthinking it because yesterday between classes (when I’m besieged by kids stopping to get an apple), I was explaining to a new guy that the Granny Smiths were sourer than the Pink Ladys. Then I kept saying sourer and making other kids try to say it. The good sports would try and fail; the budding little purist snobs would argue that it wasn’t a word. I tried to tell them that it’s a word if a native speaker says it and that I had said it and that the dictionary isn’t the be-all and end-all of what gets to be a word and that language is really playwithable so there. . . But they’re like everyone else who’s drunk the Prescriptive Kool-Aid. Ah me.”

    For the record, owl-chatter strongly concurs that language is “playwithable.” Amen to that, Teach.

    “Performer who may step on some toes,” was BALLET DANCER. But one person tried to fill in BAD LAP DANCER first. Ha!

    Here’s a shot I took at our department’s Christmas party last year. That’s a brilliant economist blowing Owl Chatter a kiss on the right. Hi Dr. Mayfield!

    It’s the birthday of the great humorist S.J. Perelman today, who was born in Brooklyn in 1904, and lived to be 75. He was the only child of Joseph and Sophie Perelman, who moved from one failed business to another until they found themselves raising chickens on a farm and running a dry goods store in Providence, RI. He went to Brown University and was the editor of their humor magazine, but dropped out and moved to NYC to write. His brilliance was manifested mostly in short pieces in The New Yorker in the 30s and 40s. His writing about himself was typically self-deprecating, e.g., he wrote: “before they made S.J. Perelman, they broke the mold.”

    Here’s a sample of some dialogue:

    MRS. BESSEMER: Yes, sir?

    PUDOVKIN: If this is chicken consommé, so is Lake Louise. And you can tell the manager I said so.

    MRS. BESSEMER: But you’re the manager, Mr. Pudovkin.

    PUDOVKIN (to the others): Well, I’ve heard all the excuses, but that’s a new one.

    If that sounds a little like Groucho to you, you’re on target. He co-wrote scripts for Horse Feathers and Monkey Business. He won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days. He worked with Ogden Nash on the book for a musical, One Touch of Venus, that ran on Broadway for over 500 performances.

    In 1929, when he was 25, Perelman married 18-year-old Laura West, the sister of the writer Nathanael West, and they remained married until her death in 1970. But it was not a good marriage. He had many affairs. Their son Adam tumbled into a life of crime, sadly: robberies and attempted rape. I was surprised to learn Perelman and Groucho were on very bad terms. Late in his life, Perelman did not want to be identified as a writer of Marx Brothers material, and Groucho once said “I hated the son of a bitch, and he had a head as big as my desk.”

    Here’s a shot of that head.

    When I sent birthday greetings via text to our friend Cindy, I was delighted to learn she had some stuff to tell Owl-Chatter about Mariah Carey. Mariah’s mom Pat was a member of Cindy’s church in Manhattan. At one point Cindy’s hubby Neal (alav hashalom), a song-writer, met with Pat at her houseboat at the 76th Street Pier to sing some of his songs. He said Pat told him that her daughter (i.e., Mariah) just signed a contract with a major record label, and she played some of the songs for him. Neal told Cindy he didn’t like them and she has a terrible voice. (Cindy added that Neal didn’t like Madonna’s voice either.) Ha! Go figure.

    See you tomorrow!