The Wellington Files

  • Humanoid Marshmallows

    Everybody’s favorite cookie in Crossworld is Oreos, of course. But Erik Agard’s puzzle today included the Oreo breakfast cereal Oreo O’s! (I added the exclamation mark, because it’s exciting.) First, the name is very appropriate because Oreo O’s look just like Cheerios but are chocolate (see below). An employee in an advertising firm came up with the idea and Post Cereals ran with it in 1997. A variation was introduced in 2001 called “Extreme Créme Taste Oreo O’s” which added Oreo-filling-flavored marshmallows. Yum!

    Ads were run on TV for Oreo O’s. But Extreme Crème Oreo O’s had its own television commercial starring the “Créme Team,” a troupe of humanoid marshmallows sporting sunglasses. Check it out.

    Get this — the cereal was a joint production of Post Cereal and Kraft Foods. But in 2007, both companies ceased “co-branding,” which made the cereal impossible to produce (legally). Kraft owned the rights to the name Oreo, but Post owned the rights to the cereal recipe itself, and neither company wished to give up their rights. Yikes. Due to some weird loophole, it could only continue in South Korea. U.S. buyers could still get it on eBay from third-party sellers for $10 a box. Fast-forward to 2018 — Post resumed co-branding and the original product became available again, thank God! The marshmallow version is only available in Walmart, however, and instead of being labeled “Extreme Créme Oreo O’s,” it is labeled “Mega Stuf Oreo O’s.” Small price to pay.

    Today’s puzzle theme was MARIAH CAREY. Her full name was the theme answer and four of her “chart-topping” hits “topped off” four other down answers, e.g., her hit “Someday” was in the answer SOMEDAY SOON, clued as “Not long from now.” I listened to a couple of them, but I guess I’m not a fan because none of them grabbed me. (TBH, it wasn’t a fair test.) So I’m just including a photo.

    Carey was born in Huntington NY and is 53. Her name was inspired by the song “They Call the Wind Mariah.” She’s been married/divorced twice and has very cute 11-year-old twins, one of each flavor. The girl is named Monroe, and the boy is named Moroccan. I guess his friends call him Morrie or Mo.

    Carey’s mom Patricia was Irish, and an opera singer and vocal coach. Patricia’s family was aghast when she married an aeronautical engineer of African-American and Black-Venezuelan descent, and disowned her! (Boo!) What’s more, Huntington was not thrilled at the interracial nature of the family, and neighbors poisoned their dog and set fire to their car. WTF! Mariah’s parents eventually divorced and she was raised by her musical mom.

    I knew Mariah’s success was extraordinary, but I had no idea how extraordinary. Just this year Rolling Stone named her the fifth greatest singer of all time. She has the most #1 singles (Billboard) of any solo artist (19). Only the Beatles have more (20). She doesn’t need Owl Chatter to sing her praises, so we’ll leave it at that.

    The song “Someday Soon” was written by Ian Tyson of Ian and Sylvia in 1964. It became a big hit when Judy Collins recorded it (which helped pay for needed improvements on Tyson’s ranch, he said). It’s a gorgeous song. I had never heard Ian and Sylvia sing it.

    So blow, you old blue northern, blow my love to me
    He’s driving in tonight from California
    He loves his damned old rodeo as much as he loves me
    Someday soon, going with him, someday soon

    The clue for HAT was the great Texas expression “All [blank] and no cattle,” for a phony or blow-hard. It led me to post the following on Rex’s blog:

    “All hat and no cattle reminded me of Abbie Hoffman’s description of Sen. Gary Hart: ‘A $25 haircut on a $10 head.’ (Needs to be inflation-adjusted.)”

    It garnered a nice response from commenter Whatsername:

    “Love the haircut quote, gotta remember that one. Seems Congress has no shortage of $10 heads these days.”

    I’ll be high for three hours from that — that’s how shallow I am.

    Norman Mailer was born on this day in 1923 – a Jersey boy, born in Long Branch. But he lived and wrote in Brooklyn, in a little studio a few blocks from his house. He said: “There’s an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that’s not good enough, you build a fence around the fence. So, no amenities. (But for a refrigerator!) I wrote longhand with a pencil and I gave it to my assistant. She would type it for me and the next day I would go over it. Since at my age you begin to forget all too much, I would hardly remember what I had written the day before. It read, therefore, as if someone else had done it. The critic in me was delighted. I could now proceed to fix the prose. The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.”

    I’m going to repeat my favorite line about memory loss: “I’m at the stage now where I can plan my own surprise parties.” (Needless to say, I can’t remember who said that.) Here’s Mailer:

    This poem is from Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks:

    From high above,
    the squeak and whimper
    of duck’s wings.

    How hurried they seem,
    though the pale blue shell of the sky
    stays all day long
    and has a pearl to finish.

    Thanks for popping in. See you tomorrow.

  • Goggles

    Today’s puzzle was a real hoot, with lots going on. It’s by David Steinberg, a veteran constructor. Well, he’s only 26 years old, but this is his 108th puzzle in The Times. The theme is “RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES” which is two answers: RIGHT BETWEEN THE at 56A, and EYES two lines down at 67A. Then each of four long answers includes a pair of “I’s” with a different letter sandwiched between them, e.g., SKATED ON THIN ICE has an “N” between the I’s. The four sandwiched letters spell N-O-S-E, which, of course, is “between the eyes.” As a little joke, the word between “between the” and “eyes” is GOOP, — you know, that stuff that is sometimes in your eye when you wake up. Last, if you connect the four letters N-O-S-E, you form a giant nose. Wow!

    Always-upbeat commenter Lewis said: David, this being your 108th NYT appearance, did you know that official MLB baseballs have 108 stitches, that there are 108 cards in an UNO deck, and that 108 is a sacred number in Buddhism and Hinduism? So, let today’s puzzle be a special occasion for you — as it was for me. Thank you!

    At 48D, “place to wear goggles” was LAB. And the requirement doesn’t apply solely to people! Woof woof!

    ALICIA GARZA is in the puzzle at 11D, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. She is crossed at 36A by THIS IS AN OUTRAGE. She was born in Oakland CA and is 42. Starting at age 4, she was raised by her mom and her (Jewish) step-father. She grew up as Alicia Schwartz in a mixed-raced and mixed-religion household. Garza identifies as Jewish.

    (Jeez! One thing I am learning from owl chatter is that absolutely everyone is Jewish. The co-founder of BLM, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, Tom Verlaine. Or at least Jew-ish, like George Santos and Rod Carew. I’m beginning to think those anti-Semites who say the Jews control everything are right. When I was working at my law firm in Rochester, if someone came to see me when I was out, my partner Pat would tell them I was at a meeting of the International Jewish Bankers Conspiracy.)

    Anyway, back to Alicia Garza. She graduated in 2002 from UC San Diego with a degree in anthropology and sociology. In 2004, she came out as queer, but married Malachi Garza in 2008. They ended their relationship in 2021.

    A tattoo emblazoned on her chest is comprised of the final lines of June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights.”

    I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
    My name is my own my own my own
    and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
    but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
    my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
    may very well cost you your life

    Okay, Alicia — easy does it now. I hear ya.

    There was an ASPEN TREE in yesterday’s puzzle.  Each individual aspen tree can live for 40–150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony is long-lived, in some cases for thousands of years! New trunks are sent up as the older trunks die off above ground. For this reason, an aspen tree colony may be an indicator of ancient woodlands. One such colony in Utah has been estimated to be as old as 80,000 years. Yes, — even older than Joe Biden.

    Aspen wood is white and soft, but fairly strong, and has low flammability. So it’s used for making matches and paper. Shredded aspen wood is used for packing and stuffing, sometimes called excelsior.

    (The clue for ASPEN TREE was “Main course featuring Egyptian snake meat?” Wait, what? That was the “trick” of the Sunday puzzle. An answer was clued wackily and then you changed the spacing. So this clue led you to ASP ENTREE, which becomes ASPEN TREE when you move the space.)

    Hi Toby! The writer TOBIAS Wolff was in the puzzle today. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army. He has written four short story collections and two novels including The Barracks Thief, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from Obama in 2015. He was born in Birmingham AL, is 77, and lives in California with his wife of 47 years. They have three kids. Wolff was raised and identifies as a Catholic, but his paternal grandfather was a Jewish doctor (of course).

    I remember reading one of his stories in The New Yorker: “Bullet in the Brain.” It’s terrific and has stayed with me since ’95. Here’s a clip from it, followed by a link to the story in its entirety:

    With the line [at the bank] still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a Position Closed sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred. “Oh, that’s nice,” one of them said. She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, “One of those little human touches that keep us coming back.”

    Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. “Damned unfair,” he said. “Tragic, really. If they’re not chopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions.”

    She stood her ground. “I didn’t say it was tragic,” she said. “I just think it’s a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.”

    “Unforgivable,” Anders said. “Heaven will take note.”

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/25/bullet-in-the-brain

    The best moments in class are when a laugh pops out of mid-air. When I cover the topic of Fraud in Contract Law, I start with an example in which an apple seller in Upstate NY sells “Ellen” a bushel of apples. The ones on top look great, but she learns later that there are some that are pretty bad below those. She feels she was deceived. One issue we address is the fact that she wasn’t more careful in checking them herself — she could have looked at the apples below the top level but didn’t.

    So one student, a very nice fellow in the back row, raises his hand and says: “Isn’t there a Latin expression, ‘Let the buyer beware?’”

    I was quick on my feet that day. “That’s English,” I said.

    Thanks for stopping by — see you tomorrow.

  • Toe Tag

    I like it when I realize that something or some action really means something else, something nicer, like an expression of love. My brother Jay spent every waking moment trying to get a laugh (and mostly failing). I only realized after he was gone that it was a way he had of telling you that he loved you. Today’s “Tiny Love Story” in The Times is a little bit like that. Since it’s tiny, I can reproduce it for you:

    “When she was pregnant with me, my mother bought yellow and blue yarn, thinking she would make me a blanket despite not being crafty. She never made it, but kept the skeins thinking, “One day, maybe.” Every few years she would show them to me, proof that she loved me and had the best of intentions long before we met. I’ve kept them in a box since she died. I only recently noticed that the blue skein is called “heather yarn.” My mother could never remember what inspired my first name. Like her love, there it was, all along.” (Heather McClean)

    Eerily, a week ago Friday (Jan. 20), in the New Yorker puzzle by veteran constructors Brooke Husic and Will Nediger, the clue at 17A was “Influential debut album by the art-punk band Television.” That was Tom Verlaine’s band, and the album was Marquee Moon, which I remember very much enjoying a hundred years ago. Then, just this morning, I learned that Tom passed away yesterday. He was 73.

    He was Tom Miller at birth, but to distance himself from his past, he took the poet Verlaine’s name as a new surname, as Bob Dylan had done with Dylan Thomas, Verlaine said. Get this — he’s Jewish and was born in Denville, NJ, not far from Owl Chatter headquarters. His family moved to Wilmington DE when he was six.

    He was musical from an early age but was only inspired to take up the guitar when he heard the Rolling Stones’ song “19th Nervous Breakdown” as an adolescent. He eventually became a groundbreaking and influential guitarist in ways it is beyond my capacity to understand or describe. Along with Patti Smith, the Ramones, and others, Verlaine’s band Television pushed CBGB’s into becoming a seminal punk rock venue and leave country, blue grass, and blues behind (which is what the letters CBGB stand for).

    The Times obit was written by Peter Keepnews, and it contains this paragraph:

    “The layered, often ethereal sound that Mr. Verlaine and the other members of Television developed was a far cry from the stripped-down approach of the Ramones and other leading lights of the punk scene. But that scene — which also included bands as disparate as Blondie and Talking Heads — was never as one-dimensional as it was often portrayed.”

    Take a listen yourself, if you can spare a few minutes.

    A clue today at 95D was “Sign unlikely to have been written by the person it’s attached to.” The answer was KICK ME, but someone said he first wrote in TOE TAG. Ha!

    How about “Mountain lake” with the answer TARN? If I knew tarn once, I forgot it long ago. Welcome back, tarn.

    And the sultry DUA LIPA popped by. I looked up sultry to make sure it was the right word: “Attractive in a way that suggests a passionate nature.” You decide:

    Dua means love in Albanian, which is her native language. She is of Albanian descent, although born in London. Her dad was the lead singer and guitarist of the Kosovan rock band Oda. She was rejected from her elementary school choir. The teacher said she couldn’t sing. He was wrong. Her hit “Levitating” was so big that even I heard it from under my rock. She is also a top model. No surprise there.

    Lipa’s support of the Palestinian cause has not endeared her to Israelis. A petition was presented to Israeli Army Radio demanding that her songs be banned, but it was rejected with the statement that it does not boycott any artists.

    My football obligations and tickets to see Hilary Hahn perform the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the NJ Symphony are keeping Owl Chatter short today. I also saw Hilary about 15 years ago in NY performing I forget what. I’ll see if Sam remembers, he was there too.

    Hahn was born in Virginia and is only 43. She started playing violin a month before her 4th birthday. Good move. She was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philly at age 10, and completed the requirements for a college degree by age 16. She started performing with major orchestras at age 11.  Hilary Hahn‘s husband Volker Bertelmann is a German composer, pianist, producer, and artist. He is mainly known by his alias Hauschka. How come more of us don’t have aliases? I don’t know anyone with an alias. I don’t think I even know anyone with a nickname.

    Anyway, they live in Cambridge MA, have two daughters, Zelda and Nadia, and make quite a striking couple.

    A while back I shared a photo of Rex Parker with his cat Olive who passed away last year, and some words he wrote about her. Here’s a shot of him with his new cat, Ida. Sweet way to end today. See you tomorrow.

  • Irma Vep

    Several Owl Chatter readers sent very nice notes about Susan. Thank you! Here’s a photo Liz shared with me.

    Hi S. We’re holding on.

    Recently, Rex commenter LMS was sort of lamenting not having become a suburban lady, lunching with the girls, etc. But she walked that back today. Here’s what she posted:

    I guess I misrepresented myself yesterday. Just because I didn’t end up being a carefree Lady Who Lunches, that I ended up teaching at an alternative school, doesn’t mean I don’t like my job. I love my job – because of the students. They’re bright, courageous, honest (in a bass-ackwards way) kids who deserve to be “seen.” If the superintendent of Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools called and offered to double my salary to move to a “better” school to teach AP and Honors English, I’d be like Nope. No thanks.. (Those kinds of students are snarky, sneaky, entitled know-it-alls. I know this precisely because I was one, and I have occasionally taught such kids.) Yesterday morning I was poring over the questionnaires they had filled out (new semester, new kids) about themselves. I had added the question, How would your parents/guardians describe you? thinking this would let them share some good aspects of who they are. I was blindsided by some of the devastating responses – “I’m a bad kid, I’ll never amount to anything, I’m lazy. . .” One guy wrote that he was “dead to them.” I just sat there and cried.

    You never know who will pop up in the grid on a Saturday. Hello ARI SHAPIRO! The clue at 15A was “First NPR reporter promoted to correspondent before age 30.” He was born in Fargo, ND — whodathunkit? The family moved to Oregon when he was eight. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 2000. In Feb. 2004 in SF, Shapiro married Michael Gottlieb, a lawyer who worked in the White House Counsel’s office from 2013 to 2015. (Relax — it was for Obama.) Shapiro and NPR’s Susan Stamberg are cousins.

    In addition to his work as a journalist, for which he has won numerous prestigious awards, Ari has been a regular guest singer with the band Pink Martini. He appears on four of their albums, singing in several languages. He made his live debut with them at the Hollywood Bowl, and has performed with them frequently, including at Carnegie Hall, NY’s Beacon Theater, and the Kennedy Center in DC.

    Owl Chatter caught him unawares, at the station.

    And here he is gettin’ down with the band.

    One of Owl Chatter’s favorite people in the world died in Brooklyn last Monday: Everett Quinton of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. He was 71. He was also born in Brooklyn.

    Quinton dropped out of high school but earned a GED. He was taking drama courses at Hunter College when he hooked up with Charles Ludlum, whom he met “cruising on Christopher Street,” and they produced and starred in many wonderful insane shows at their Ridiculous Theater in Sheridan Square in Lower Manhattan. Ludlum died in 1987, but Quinton carried on.

    He was especially good (and hysterically funny) portraying women. Of his first on-stage role he said: “I was the ballerina who got kidnapped. I knew I’d found my niche.” Their biggest hit was The Mystery of Irma Vep, which they performed over 330 times: a parody of Victorian penny dreadfuls in which they played all the roles, male and female, switching deftly and rapidly. Quinton held down four roles — a maid, an aristocrat named Lord Edgar, a monster/vampire, and a woman hidden in the manor house. (“Irma Vep” is an anagram of vampire.)

    Frank Rich, in his review in The Times said: “Each character is such a complete, precise comic creation that it often takes one’s breath away to watch the actors move from one role to the next (and back again) with nary a pause.  Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton have raised the Ridiculous to the sublime.”

    In the NYT review of Drop Dead Perfect last performed in 2015, Anita Gates began with: “In a sweet 1950s peach crocheted dress and matching bolero, Everett Quinton has never looked lovelier.”

    Oh, they are having a f**king blast up there in heaven.

    The clue for POST MALONE at 13D was “His 2016 debut album unseated ‘Thriller’ for the most weeks spent in the top 10 on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop chart (77).” Pretty impressive. Of course, I hadn’t heard of him. What the hell kind of first name is Post? It turns out Post is actually his last name (Austin Richard Post), and he got Malone by plugging his birth name into a “rap name generator.” It worked; he’s very successful. The album in the clue is Stoney. He gained acclaim for blending hip hop, pop, R&B, and trap. I hadn’t heard of “trap” either (duh). It’s a subgenre of hip-hop, derived from an Atlanta slang word for a house that is used exclusively for drug sales. How it slipped by me is a mystery.

    I suggested an alternate clue for POST MALONE on Rex’s blog: “Cheers, after Sam retires.”

    He likes tattoos. Under his eyes it says “Always Tired.” Wait till you hit 70, Post.

    Tyre Nichols, who died in Memphis at the hands of the Memphis Police on January 10 at age 29, worked for Fedex and was a photographer. Here’s one of his shots. He gave it a title: “That Playful Kind Of Love.”

    Thanks for stopping by. See you tomorrow.

  • Bay and Goodman, RIP

    The St. Joseph Hawks (Phila., PA) were in the NYTXW today, right up there at 1 down. At games, by tradition, the Hawk mascot has to flap its wings at all times (although it can be one wing at a time) in keeping with the motto that “the Hawk will never die.” During one game, the Hawk got into a fight with the other team’s mascot but kept waving its wing(s) during the entire tussle. Serious business.

    Alanis Morrissette was in the puzzle too, along with her hit album Jagged Little Pill. Impressively, they were both spelled out in full, one on top of the other — they are each 16 letters long so the grid was one space wider than usual to accommodate them. The constructor did that again with Justin Timberlake and the film he was in, The Social Network. One on top of the other; both 16 letters. Pretty neat.

    LMS did some digging and says the “jagged little pill” is the pill of life — reality — the pill in the expression “a hard pill to swallow.” Alanis was born in Ottawa with a twin brother who is 12 minutes older, Wade, a musician. Her mother has Jewish (and Hungarian) ancestry but Alanis was raised Roman Catholic. She married rapper Mario “Souleye” Treadway in 2010, and they have three kids: Ever, Onyx, and Winter (boy, girl, boy).

    The clue at 5D was “Does drudgery, old-style,” and the answer was MOILS. That word was new to me. It means to work hard. It led me to post the following on Rex’s blog:

    I got a chuckle out of MOILS when I thought of it as a verb form of MOHEL. A mohel is the person who performs a circumcision (or bris) and it’s often pronounced “moyle.” But it hasn’t made the journey to verbhood yet, so you would not say “Rabbi Cohen moiled my new grandson last week.” It would save you one syllable from “circumcised,” but I guess we’re not that lazy (yet).

    I had the pleasure and honor of attending my new grandson Morris’s (Mo’s) bris in Michigan back around Thanksgiving, 2021. Only the immediate family was invited due to Covid, but others could attend via zoom. The mohel was terrific and everyone thought the ceremony was beautiful (except for Morris, obviously).

    I started wearing suspenders a few years ago — not as a fashion statement — they keep my pants from falling down. A friend who was attending the bris via zoom mentioned to me that he noticed that I was wearing suspenders and was also wearing a belt. I said “that was one ceremony where I really didn’t want my pants falling down.” Here’s a photo.

    (What did you expect a photo of?)

    Another expression that was new to me from the puzzle was ON TILT. It means “in a reckless or rash state; acting without proper care, attention, or consideration.” It was originally a poker term, for someone whose play is ragged, and it derives from pinball machines, which will shut down if you tilt them too wildly.

    The clue at 60A was “Where orders come from,” and the answer was MENUS. Here’s an observation by LMS:

    The clue for MENUS is great. Funny that they’re called “orders” when so many people, my daughter included, invariably turn it into a request, Can I have the snapper? Like maybe the waiter’ll say no. But I guess even saying I’ll take the snapper still isn’t an order. Bring me the snapper and make it snappy. Now there’s an order.

    At 33D, “Genesee Brewery offering” is CREAM ALE. It used to be a regular of mine for the few years I lived in Rochester. That’s where it’s brewed. (Burp!)

    There was a great pizza/beer place up there: Bay and Goodman, on the corner of Bay and Goodman Streets (duh). It was a real dive in the middle of nowhere, although it changed locations after I left, and recently closed permanently (oh no!). Their pies were round but they cut the slices into squares. (Yes, deal with it.) IMHO it was the best pizza place in the city, which is saying something because a study named Rochester the No. 1 pizza city in the U.S. Yes, little Rochester, NY.

    The study appeared on a real estate website, Rent.com, and can be disputed because it was based solely on the following three factors, weighed equally: pizza restaurants per square mile, per capita, and as a proportion of all restaurants within the city. Here are the top ten, according to those standards.

    1. Rochester, NY
    2. Pittsburgh
    3. New Haven
    4. Philadelphia
    5. Bridgeport, CT
    6. Miami
    7. Buffalo
    8. Cambridge, MA
    9. Worcester, MA
    10. Manchester, NH

    Here are some follow-up notes on the Mr. Elko/Cold Milk story. Before reading it at the wedding, I tested it out on one of my classes, to get a sense of how it might go over, etc. And when I got to the last part, on what Sam’s answer meant, I had trouble reading it because I got emotional. The class was very touched by that, but it posed a problem for me in terms of getting through it at the wedding. The solution I came up with was to turn the last part over to my niece (nibling) Deborah to read. She did a great job.

    At the wedding, when I got to Sam’s line “What I love most about my family is that they keep the milk cold,” the room exploded with laughter. It was the biggest laugh I (or Sam, actually) ever got, in all my years of going for laughs. I remember standing there thinking — “when will it stop? I need to keep reading,” and then thinking “no, wait, that’s good that they’re still laughing.”

    I wrote it up a few months ahead of the wedding and when I finished, I checked the directory for the Chatham School system and found that Mr. Elko was still teaching. So I emailed it to him with a nice cover letter catching him up on how Sam was doing. After a few days or so he wrote back. He said he remembered Sam (fondly) but, amazingly, did not remember the milk business. He loved the story and said it made him laugh out loud. He said he was getting to the stage of his life when he was starting to think about retiring but that letters like mine make him want to continue teaching.

    See you tomorrow, everybody!

  • Sheena

    James Lowenstein died back on Jan. 3, at age 95. He was a Jersey Boy, born in Long Branch. Lowenstein was a key, if understated, figure in turning the country against the Vietnam War. After Nixon presented his strategy for ending the war, which included its Vietnamization, i.e., turning the fighting over to the Vietnamese, William Fulbright, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was dubious. He sent former Foreign Service Officers Lowenstein and Richard Moose over to investigate. They didn’t just scratch the surface meeting with the big shots, they met with mid-level officers and traveled the country to meet with village elders. Their report blew the lid off the public perception of how the war was going. (It was not going well.) It included numerous instances of “fragging,” in which American soldiers intentionally caused the deaths of their own superior officers with hand grenades. Return trips uncovered more dirt. The tide slowly turned.

    A small note tucked into the NYT obit was of particular interest to Owl Chatter: Lowenstein’s dad was a prominent NYC estate lawyer one of whose clients was Babe Ruth.

    Have you ever had a moment in which all the clouds of worry and stress dissipate — even the little wisps — and you feel a pure peacefulness? It’s very rare, but it happens, if fleetingly.

    I can go months without finding a poem in The Writer’s Almanac that grabs me. (TWA includes one each day.) But here’s the second one this week that I liked. It’s Subway Psalm by Alden Nowlan.

    It’s the first storm of the winter
    and the worst since 1888,
    the girl on television said.

    I keep slipping in my leather-soled shoes.
    Twice I’ve turned into a windmill
    in my efforts to keep from falling.

    At the top of the stairs leading down
    to the subway, Johnnie watches me,
    not just with his eyes but with his arms and legs.
    He’ll do his best to save the old man.

    That’s how I must have looked at him
    when he was five or six years old.
    Now he’s twenty-six, and it seems
    we’ve traded places.
                                               Why are you laughing?
    he asks me.
                              The honest answer is:
    Because you look so funny, standing there
    like that, my beautiful son,
    and because I’ve loved you
    for such a long time and because this
    is the finest storm I’ve ever seen
    and everything is exactly as it should be.

    In the puzzle today, 22A was “Comicdom’s ‘Queen of the Jungle,’” and the answer was SHEENA. Sheena was the first female comic book character with her own title, preceding Wonder Woman by less than a year (in 1942).

    Sheena is the young, blonde daughter of Cardwell Rivington, who was exploring in Africa with his daughter in tow. Cardwell died from accidentally drinking a magic potion made by Koba, a witch doctor. Don’t you hate when that happens? Koba raised Sheena, teaching her the ways of the jungle. The adult Sheena becomes “queen of the jungle” and encounters a hell of a series of adventures with her monkey sidekick Chim, including battles with a super-ape, the Green Terror, sabre-tooth tigers, voodoo cultists, gorilla-men, devil-apes, blood cults, devil queens, army ants, lion men, lost races, the Princeton Glee Club, leopard-birds, cavemen, serpent gods, vampire-apes, — you name it.

    Sheena was created by Jerry Iger who said he picked the name because his mind wandered to the derogatory name “sheenies” that Jewish people were sometimes called in his early days in New York. (Iger was Jewish.) Wow! So Sheena’s Jewish!!

    I’ll tell ya, fellas, we don’t have too many like her.

    “Beer containers” was the clue at 4D and the answer was GROWLERS. It generated this very informative comment:

    “A growler is a 64-ounce container, typically glass, that gets filled from the tap at a brewpub. There is also a 32-ounce container, which is called a howler (at least at the places I know around Chicago). And finally, there is the crowler, which is also 32 ounces, but is a can that is filled with tap beer and then sealed with a special machine. Not many places have them though; the machines that seal the cans are expensive.”

    Burp!

    How often have your family dinners exploded over whether Omaha or St. Louis is the “Gateway to the West?” Seriously, amirite? The puzzle today went all in for Omaha at 45A, but several angry comments disputed the matter, opting for St. Louis, which even took the trouble of erecting the goddamn Gateway Arch, for cryin’ out loud, they pointed out. But get this —

    According to Wikipedia, all of the following have been dubbed “Gateway to the West” at various times for one reason or another:

    • Lyons, Illinois
    • Fort Wayne, Indiana
    • St. Louis, Missouri
    • Eureka, Missouri
    • Omaha, Nebraska
    • Fargo, North Dakota
    • Bridgeport, Ohio
    • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    • Kemmerer, Wyoming
    • The mountain formation known as Cumberland Gap.

    (Hrummmmph.)

    A commenter remembered how big a deal the arch was when it was erected in the mid-60s, giving the title to St. Louis, in his or her view. “Until then, from its founding in the mid-1800s (I think), OMAHA was the ‘Gateway’ because of its location at the junction of the Platte and Missouri rivers, making it the perfect place for folks to gather to start their journeys westward. Wagon trains used OMAHA as the starting point which helped the city develop.”

    Here’s stuff I learned about some words. Have you heard the term “niblings?” It was new to me in Monday’s New Yorker puzzle. The clue was “Some niblings.” I (wrongly) associated it with food — you know, to nibble on something? And I had [x]IECES, so I guessed PIECES. Well, the answer was NIECES. It turns out “nibling” is a relative, so to speak, of “sibling.” Sibling is a brother or sister, and nibling is a nephew or niece.

    According to the folks at Merriam-Webster, the word was coined in the 1950s but only took off to the extent it did recently.

    Finally, — you know the phrase to run “amok?” I bet, like me, you thought it meant to run around sort of crazily, right? That’s how it’s consistently used in puzzles. But it’s much more violent than that. It’s Malaysian in origin and means “possessed with or motivated by a murderous or violently uncontrollable frenzy.” That’s straight out of Merriam-Webster, and it’s not just an alternate meaning. Yikes.

    Try nibbling on that for a while. See you tomorrow.

  • Mr. Elko

    Today Owl-Chatter celebrates its 100th post! It all started back on October 6th of last year. We are celebrating by sharing this story about Sam that I told at his wedding. Giving the guests access to free alcohol for an hour before I went on was a good idea.

    When my son, Sam, was in third or fourth grade, we went to parent/teacher night at his school.  His teacher was Mr. Elko, whom Sam (and we) liked very much.  The meetings took place in the school gym where rows and rows of tables were set up with seats for the teachers and parents.  There was also one area off to the side, cordoned off for privacy.  This is where they brought you, for example, if they found grenades or an AK-47 in your child’s locker, and you would meet people from Homeland Security who would explain that they have taken your child away and you would never see him again.

    So we lined up outside the gym with all the other parents waiting our turn.  After 20 minutes or so, Mr. Elko came out, introduced himself, and invited us in.  Engaged in the appropriate small talk, we started walking towards the central area with all the tables, but Mr. Elko stopped us and said, “I think we might be more comfortable meeting in this private area,” and ushered us towards the cordoned-off terrorist place!  Yikes!  Linda and I gave each other a look, sat down behind the barriers with Mr. Elko, and braced for the worst.

    “First of all,” Mr. Elko started off, “let me just say that Sam is a wonderful boy.  Everybody loves Sam.  He is smart, and funny, and a pleasure to work with.”  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I was thinking, “let’s get to the part with the grenades.” 

    “But there was one unusual thing I thought I should bring to your attention.”

    “Okay,” we said.

    “In anticipation of this meeting, we asked the students to put together a sort of autobiography.  You know, do they have brothers or sisters, do they have pets, what is their favorite TV show, things like that.”

    “Okay.”

    “And the last question was, ‘What do you love most about your family?’  And most of the kids put down things like, ‘I love visiting grandma and grandpa because they give me so many presents.’  Or ‘I love when we go to the shore over the summer.’  Or ‘I love our trips to Minnesota to visit my cousins.’  You know, stuff like that.”

    “Okay.  And what was Sam’s answer?”

    “Yes.  Sam wrote: ‘What I love most about my family is that they keep the milk cold.’”

    “Say what?”

    Before repeating it, Mr. Elko showed us what Sam had written in his adorable 9-year-old’s handwriting.

    “’What I love most about my family is that they keep the milk cold.’ Do you know why he might have written that?”

    I shifted into defense-lawyer mode:  “Well, it is true.  We do refrigerate the milk in our home.”  But I conceded it was an unusual response.  We thanked Mr. Elko and assured him we would ask Sam about it when we got home.

    Sam was up in his room when we got home and we told him the meeting went well, Mr. Elko thinks you’re terrific, blah, blah, blah.  “But then he showed us that little book you made:  What’s with the cold milk?  The thing you love most about us is we keep the milk cold?”

    “Oh, yeah,” Sam explained.  “Earlier in the week I was visiting Greg for a play date and his mom came in and asked if we wanted a snack – some milk and cookies.” 

    “Your favorite,” I noted.

    “Right, my favorite,” Sam went on.  “But when she brought it in, the milk was warm.  It tasted horrible.”

    “What did you do?,” I asked.

    “Well, I didn’t say anything.  That would not have been polite.”

    “Right!” I said.

    “So I realized how good it was that in our house the milk is cold.”

    “That’s it!?,” I said incredulously.  “That’s what you love most about our family?  That we keep the milk cold?!?  What about our visits to Lil and Irv and all the gifts they lavish on you?  What about the trip we took last summer to the Grand Canyon?  All the great stuff we do??  It’s the milk?

    “Well,” Sam said, “it wasn’t just the milk – I couldn’t enjoy the cookies either.”

    “Okay, okay,” I said resignedly.  “It’s okay, it’s fine.”

    From that day on, in our house, leaving the milk out of the fridge for 3 extra seconds was the biggest crime you could commit.  We would scream at Caity – “What the hell is wrong with you!! Put the milk back!  Sam’s going to leave us!  It’s the only reason he loves us!”

    Sam finished up through the Chatham school system and went on to Michigan for college.  On one of his visits home, I guess about 10 years after the Elko meeting, we were taking a walk on a beautiful fall day and the milk story came up again for a good laugh.  

    “Admit it,” I said to Sam.  “You just didn’t understand the question, right?  You didn’t know it was about things like visits to grandma and vacations, right?”

    But Sam stuck to his guns.  “No, no,” he insisted, “I understood the question completely,” he said.  “I thought about it carefully and that was my answer.”

    I have been teaching law and taxation in the accounting program at Hunter College since 1986.  I like to tell jokes, riddles, and stories, at appropriate points in class, usually when we finish a topic and are ready to start a new one.  “It cleans the palate, like the wine tasters say,” I tell the class.  The students love the stories I tell about my kids and I make sure to find time each semester for Sam’s cold milk story.

    So I was on the subway heading up to Hunter, and I was going over the milk story in my mind.  I thought I might tell it in class that day.  And it suddenly hit me what Sam’s answer really meant!  (It was about 17 years since the meeting with Mr. Elko:  I guess I’m a little slow.) 

    I think Sam’s answer was his way of saying that what he loved most about his family was that we loved him, and took care of him, and worked as hard as we did to give him a good life and all the things he loved, and that he knew how lucky he was.  I think the warm milk at Greg’s house made him feel a little sad for Greg, as silly as that might seem.  And it made him appreciate all the little things he had in his life that he took for granted.  I think without realizing it, Sam was making the milk a metaphor for his happy childhood. 

    What a wonderful answer!  So much richer, in its way, than listing a vacation or a pile of gifts.  What Sam loved most about his family was simply that we loved him, in a million ways, little and big, on a daily basis.  As we certainly did, and as we certainly do.   I am blessed to be reminded of that now, every morning, when I pour a little into my coffee (and hurry to put it back in the fridge).

    Good night everybody. I’m going to leave it at that for today — I’m too tired from my classes to put together any new nonsense. See you tomorrow!

  • Grief Bacon

    I’m welcoming a new poet into Owl Chatter today, by way of The Writer’s Almanac. It’s Joyce Sutphen, and she wrote this one, Silo Solo, in 2010.

    My father climbs into the silo.
    He has come, rung by rung,
    up the wooden trail that scales
    that tall belly of cement.

    It’s winter, twenty below zero,
    He can hear the wind overhead.
    The silage beneath his boots
    is so frozen it has no smell.

    My father takes up a pick-ax
    and chops away a layer of silage.
    He works neatly, counter-clockwise
    under a yellow light,

    then lifts the chunks with a pitchfork
    and throws them down the chute.
    They break as they fall
    and rattle far below.

    His breath comes out in clouds,
    his fingers begin to ache, but
    he skims off another layer
    where the frost is forming

    and begins to sing, “You are my
    sunshine, my only sunshine.”

    Sutphen is from Minnesota and is 73. She was the poet laureate of Minnesota from 2011 to 2021, following Robert Bly. She has a PhD in Renaissance Drama from UMinny.

    Happy Birthday to Edith Wharton nee Jones, born in 1862 in New York City. The Joneses were wealthy New York society folks, and the expression “to keep up with the Joneses” refers to them! (Not kidding.)

    In the puzzle today, 44A “Sky-blue” was AZURE. Commenter Wanderlust took issue with it, saying that’s the color of the sea, and cerulean is sky blue. But Merriam-Webster defines both azure and cerulean as sky blue. I think the color for the sea may be “sea blue,” or “deep sea blue,” which is darker than sky blue. The sea can contain colors other than blue, e.g., green. Homer refers to the “wine-dark sea.” (Not Homer Simpson — the other Homer.)

    At 36A, “Challenge for a translator, maybe” was IDIOM. It made LMS think of some words that other languages have that English doesn’t:

    Sobremesa (Spanish) – The time spent at a table after eating. The food is gone, but everyone is still sitting around chatting. (When I worked at Quinn’s Mill in Atlanta and some patrons were sobremesa-ing at closing time, we’d turn up the AC to make it really cold.)
    Kummerspeck (German) – Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, “grief bacon.”
    Shemomedjamo (Georgian) – When you’re really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can’t stop eating it? This word means, “I accidentally ate the whole thing.” This is pretty much me with any order of homemade potato chips and some ranch dressing. I’m powerless to stop.
    Tartle (Scottish) – That panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

    The weekday grid is usually 15×15, but today it is 15×16 to accommodate 7D: “Response from someone who merely glanced at an online post, maybe” which is TOO LONG; DIDN’T READ, often shortened to the initialism TL;DR.

    It inspired this typical self-deprecating wonderful note from LMS:

    I kind of winced at TOO LONG; DIDN’T READ. If I consider the continuum of my comments over the years here I would have hoped to grow less long-winded. My first tentative contributions were really short because I was so afraid that people would wonder if I’m stupid. Now I write treatises that remove all doubt.

    Another comment suggested an alternate clue for TL;DR — “Student’s excuse for flunking pop-quiz about ‘Crime and Punishment.’”

    A few days ago I discussed a puzzle answer: PROOFS, but I forgot to share a New Yorker cartoon on it that I like. It’s a lawyer talking to the press, outside the courthouse. And he’s saying: “The proof was in the pudding. Unfortunately, the judge ruled the pudding inadmissible.”

    The clue at 42A was “Me too!” and the answer was SO DO I. It’s one of those annoying clues because it can just as easily be “so am I,” or “ditto,” so you have to wait before committing. Today, however, it led Son Volt to share this extraordinary song with us. If you give it the few minutes it asks of you — it will lighten your day, I promise.

    Ginny Redington Dawes died back on New Year’s Eve. She was 77. She was a songwriter best known for her jingles, e.g., for the “Coke is it” campaign, and tunes for Kit Kat bars and Tide detergent. She married Thomas Dawes, who was also a jingles writer! — he did “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz” for Alka Seltzer, and “7Up, the Uncola.” He died back in ’07.

    She also wrote some pop songs that did well, and started out as a singer herself. When she performed in 1975 in an Upper East Side restaurant, a review in the NYT called her a “startling performer” who sang “in a deep, strong, beautifully controlled voice that is filled with vivid colors, as she moves from low, sexy passages to an open, lusty shout.” Ginny was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised.

    Last, let’s hear it for Joe Burrow, quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals. They just upset the Bills in the snow in Buffalo and are headed to KC now to play the Chiefs. If they win, they’ll be in the Super Bowl for the second year in a row. (They lost to the Rams in the SB last year.)

    I’m mentioning Joe here in Owl Chatter because he gave the perfect answer to a question that was asked of him after the game last Sunday. In the modern era of football, because of the salary cap, free agency, etc., it’s very hard for a team that achieves excellence to maintain it for more than just a few years — their “window of opportunity,” so to speak.

    That’s what the question for Joe was about. It was something like — “Is there a sense of urgency to win this year? How long is the window open?” He didn’t hesitate with his answer: “The window’s my whole career; the window is always open.” You tell ’em Joe!

    Thanks for stopping by, everybody.

  • Riki-Tiki-Tavi

    Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, was born on this date in 1783 in Grenoble, France. Among the dozens of other pseudonyms he used were William Crocodile and Old Hummums (I’m not kidding), but Stendhal was the one that stuck. He got it from Stendal, the name of a German city, and added the H to help with its pronunciation. He hated his father so he fled to Paris as soon as he could, but got sick there, as a result of which his hair fell out. (Don’t you hate when that happens?) He wore a toupee his entire life. Disappointed in Paris, he enlisted in Napoleon’s army for the invasions of Italy and Russia, the latter of which did not go too well.

    In 1818 he fell in love with the wife of a Polish officer. When she did not reciprocate, he trailed her across Italy (what today would be called stalking), disguising himself by wearing green eyeglasses. We’ve all been there — amirite, fellas? — I still have a drawer full of them. He couldn’t win her over, bespectacled or not, so he returned to Paris where he wrote his masterpieces.

    In 1817, while in Florence, he visited the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo are buried, and he was overcome by emotions. But I mean really overcome — heart palpitations, nearly fainting, that sort of stuff. Today, when someone is overcome by a work of art to the point of needing medical attention, it’s known as The Stendhal Syndrome. It was so named in 1979.

    The staff at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova hospital are accustomed to tourists suffering from dizzy spells or disorientation after viewing the statue of David, the artworks of the Uffizi Gallery, and other historic treasures of Florence. The syndrome is not listed as a recognized condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so it may not be covered by insurance. There are no known cases of the syndrome’s arising after exposure to Owl Chatter.

    There is also a Jerusalem Syndrome, triggered by religious sites, as opposed to artwork, and a Paris Syndrome, which is a severe form of culture shock.

    I tried to find a photo of Stendhal with the glasses, but failed. Here he is, though, followed by a film based on the syndrome.

    Remember I mentioned that something in a puzzle can open a little door for you? Some folks fall down a rabbit hole. Well, today, at 26A, an “aid for squeezing into a tight piece of footwear” was, of course, a SHOEHORN. It caused LMS to post the following.

    “SHOEHORN — Mom gave me an extra one she had – one for old people that is almost a yard long. You know, so you don’t have to bend over. I just thanked her and shoved it in the back of my closet, quietly relieved that I wasn’t There yet, didn’t need something so obviously for old people. Fast forward a year and a half – now I use it from time to time for this one pair of tight shoes and darn if it’s not a swell invention. I also join mom in some daily MiraLAX and find myself using her 10X magnifying mirror when I’m in the mood to be horrified by a real close-up of my face skin. I went to church with her yesterday – we have to get there 30 minutes early for the 8:15 service – and this woman came over and joked that she saw me and thought I was my 87-year-old mom. I tell you what. This will flat bring you down a peg or two. When I catch myself scowling through a slit in the closed blinds at a truck I don’t recognize parked on the street, I just sit down and wonder where my life has gone.”

    Someone else noted that a SHOEHORN is, in fact, a musical instrument, but it can only play footnotes. Or sole music.

    “Lack of seriousness about a serious situation” was LEVITY at 59A. Levity was once a scientific term, thought to be a physical force like gravity but pulling in the opposite direction, like the helium in a balloon. As recently as the 19th century, scientists were still arguing about its existence. Today levity refers only to lightness in manner.

    “Crystal filled rocks” was GEODES at 21A. They can be quite pretty.

    The Monday NYTXW is, of course, supposed to be the easiest of the week. Some folks add to the challenge by trying to fill in the grid by looking only at the down clues. I haven’t tried that. Today’s, though, was unusually easy, which elicited this funny (IMO) comment by kitchef (a spoof of the sort of comment that is common on Fridays and Saturdays):

    “Ridiculously hard. I mean, “Heaven’s opposite” gives you HELL? What on earth does that mean? “Not delayed” = ON TIME??? “Wet forecast” = RAIN??????? How on earth are we supposed to solve this thing?”

    If you were a baseball fan in the first half of the ’70s, you remember that the Oakland A’s won the World Series three years in a row, ’72 – ’74. Sal Bando, who died last Friday at the age of 78, was their captain and played third base. In ’71 he was runner up for the AL MVP, finishing behind teammate Vida Blue. He had a very solid career, averaging 23 HR and 90 RBI over his last eight years in Oakland. Before turning pro, he played college ball at Arizona State U and won the College World Series with them in 1965.

    Bando and teammate Gene Tenace were guest voices in a Simpsons episode in 2006. Here’s a shot from his induction into the College Baseball Hall of Fame.

    At 8D, the African mammal resistant to snake venom is a MONGOOSE. The most famous mongoose is Riki-Tiki-Tavi from a short story by Kipling. In the story, Riki saves a family from cobras. In general, mongooses are considered protectors from snakes. (The plural is mongooses, not mongeese.) There is no term for a group of mongooses in An Exaltation of Larks. Since we have a gaggle of geese, maybe it should be a mongaggle of mongooses? Nah.

    Remember the folksinger Donovan Leitch (Mellow Yellow)? He’s still alive and not too old (76). He has a song about the mongoose Riki-Tiki-Tavi. It’s kind of catchy.

    And here’s what they look like:

    That’s a cute image to end on. See you tomorrow!

  • White Chocolate

    Yesterday’s puzzle suggested CHEERIOS (11D) as an alternative to bread crumbs for gluten avoiders. But here’s a caveat from an anonymous post:

    “There is one substantive mistake in the clues that is a health hazard for people with Celiac disease. Cheerios aren’t safe for those with the disease because the oats they use aren’t certified gluten-free and are in fact often contaminated with wheat or other gluten containing grains. Canada made General Mills remove the GF label because of the frequency of contamination. GM would say that sufficient certified oats aren’t available for their needs. Fair enough, but then don’t claim that the product is GF. Further, the label complies with US FDA rules, but our rules are dangerously wrong.”

    Yikes! Rachel! Jenny! Put down those Cheerios and run!!

    Our favorite Congressman, George Santos, has been appointed to the House Science Committee. Rep. Bill Foster, a dem from Illinois, is also on that committee. Foster is an award-winning physicist who holds a PhD from Harvard. Here is his “welcome aboard” tweet:

    “As the only recipient of the Wilson Prize for High-Energy Particle Accelerator Physics serving in Congress, it can get lonely. Not anymore!… I’m thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal—the top prize in Mathematics—for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers.”

    Let’s get to some beautiful writing right away. At 55A, today’s puzzle includes Jhumpa LAHIRI — author of the Pulitzer-winning “Interpreter of Maladies.” And Rex commenter Barbara S. was kind enough to share this sample of Lahiri’s writing:

    “Eventually I took a square of white chocolate out of the box, and unwrapped it, and then I did something I had never done before. I put the chocolate in my mouth, letting it soften until the last possible moment, and then as I chewed it slowly, I prayed that Mr. Pirzada’s family was safe and sound. I had never prayed for anything before, had never been taught or told to, but I decided, given the circumstances, that it was something I should do. That night when I went to the bathroom I only pretended to brush my teeth, for I feared that I would somehow rinse the prayer out as well. I wet the brush and rearranged the tube of paste to prevent my parents from asking any questions, and fell asleep with sugar on my tongue.” (Interpreter of Maladies)

    Here’s Ms. Lahiri. She’s 57, of Indian descent, born in London.

    There was much grumbling today about 93 down: “State of uneasiness, informally.” The answer was FANTODS. The only reason it rang a bell for me is it was a Merriam-Webster “word of the day” within the last year or so. Saying “the fantods” is an arcane way of saying “the creeps.” It was used by Mark Twain in Huck Finn. DrBB, a former lit professor, commented on Rex’s professed ignorance of the word. (Rex is a lit prof too.) Here’s what he said:

    I find some of Rex’s literary blind spots baffling. Of course we all have them, and certainly this one isn’t going to be a gimme for everyone, but still The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is way up on the list of “Things You’re Supposed to Know,” stuff you’re gonna end up teaching even if it’s outside your specialty, and the word is SO richly redolent of time and place that for me it just plunked right into that place in my brain that retains this sort of thing forever the first time I encountered it, and revisiting it made me realize why.

    Turns out it’s not really trivial. It occurs at the climax of the description of a key moment in the narrative, when Huck first encounters Jim at the outset of their journey of escape, and in context that single word does a huge amount of work in creating the time and place and character of Huck himself. I’m certain Twain, who was supremely finicky about craft and usage, selected it precisely for that fact. It stands as such a fine example of Twain’s economy and artistry that I’m just going to have to share the whole dang scene here on behalf of anyone who didn’t appreciate this bit of fill as much as I did:

    “So I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a step or two, and then let the canoe drop along down amongst the shadows. The moon was shining, and outside of the shadows it made it most as light as day. I poked along well on to an hour, everything still as rocks and sound asleep. Well, by this time I was most down to the foot of the island. A little ripply, cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as saying the night was about done. I give her a turn with the paddle and brung her nose to shore; then I got my gun and slipped out and into the edge of the woods. I sat down there on a log, and looked out through the leaves. I see the moon go off watch, and the darkness begin to blanket the river. But in a little while I see a pale streak over the treetops, and knowed the day was coming. So I took my gun and slipped off towards where I had run across that camp fire, stopping every minute or two to listen. But I hadn’t no luck somehow; I couldn’t seem to find the place. But by and by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of fire away through the trees. I went for it, cautious and slow. By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most give me the fantods. He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I set there behind a clump of bushes in about six foot of him, and kept my eyes on him steady. It was getting gray daylight now. Pretty soon he gapped and stretched himself and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson’s Jim! I bet I was glad to see him. I says: ‘Hello, Jim!’ and skipped out.”

    DrBB continued: TBH I didn’t care for this particular puzzle all that much over all, but one of the chief pleasures of doing these things is when some seemingly opaque clue opens up a window like this. Hurray for FANTODS says I.

    Here’s Twain:

    The bread bakers among you may know the expression to “proof” yeast, but it was new to me. (The clue at 6A was “Activates, as yeast,” and the answer was PROOFS.) Proofing yeast tests its vitality—you’re proving it’s vigorous enough to make dough rise. To proof yeast, you dissolve the yeast in warm water with sugar and wait until it’s creamy-looking with many small bubbles, which indicate the yeast cells are doing their thing.   The only yeast that requires proofing is yeast you suspect is old.

    For 103D, the clue was “Interlocking bricks,” and the answer was LEGOS. The LEGO company wants us to say “Lego blocks” (or Lego bricks) as the plural — not legos. But here’s what TTrimble says: “You’re in your bare feet and you step on a LEGO [or LEGO brick, IF YOU WISH]. In the moment of pain, do you command the youngsters to pick up their LEGOS, or do you go all prescriptivist and call them LEGO bricks, because that is what corporate headquarters says is correct? Be honest now.”

    So nice to see ISLA Fisher at 42A in the puzzle today — in her own right. She was mentioned in Owl Chatter recently as the wife of Sacha Baron Cohen when he was in the grid. Fisher considers herself Australian, having been raised there since she was six. Her parents are Scottish and she was born in Muscat, Oman, where her dad was working as a banker for the United Nations. BTW, I was a little surprised to learn that, to avoid charges of favoritism, the U. N. conducts all of its finances using Monopoly money.

    Fisher’s breakthrough came with the movie Wedding Crashers, with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. One reviewer called her an “unexpected, scene-stealing joy.” She used a body double for a sex scene. She converted to Judaism before marrying Cohen, and, you may recall, they have three cute kids. Here’s a nice shot of her.

    Since we had the discussion of gnus recently, I was wondering what you call a collection of gnus. From “An Exaltation of Larks” it turns out there’s nothing official, but an “implausibility of gnus” has been suggested. Similarly, an “aarmory of aardvarks.”

    Here are a few others I like: a pew of church mice, a rumination of cows, a malocclusion of beavers, a stand of flamingo, a dropping of pigeons.

    Enough. Good night.