The Wellington Files

  • 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!

  • 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!