At 37D today the clue was “Feature of the Brontë sisters but not the Brothers Grimm?” That’s a challenging clue for a Tuesday. You need experience in knowing what to look for. The answer, of course, is breasts. D’oh! Just kidding! It’s those two little dots over the e in Brontë. They are called DIERESIS. They look like an umlaut, but they operate differently.
An umlaut tells you the pronunciation of the vowel under it is different from the usual. An umlaut is only used over a, o, and u. Dieresis tells you to pronounce the vowel under it as opposed to letting it go by silently. So if you put dots over the i in naive, that’s dieresis, letting you know not to just say nave. Similarly, the dots in Brontë tell you to pronounce the e, and not just say bront.
Another difficult clue in the puzzle was at 44D: “Korean dish similar to sushi rolls.” Answer: KIMBAP.
You could use both in a sentence as follows: “I was up all night in the bathroom with dieresis; should not have ordered the kimbap.”
The theme today was names of rock bands that were applied literally. For example, for the clue “Red Hot Chili Peppers,” the answer was CAROLINA REAPERS. (That’s the name of a hot pepper.) For the clue “They Might Be Giants,” the answer was BASEBALL PLAYERS.
Commenter Lewis shared with us how the band got the name “They Might Be Giants.” They took it from a film of that name and it derives from a passage in Don Quixote where DQ mistakes windmills for evil giants. (If you like stuff like that, there’s a book on how bands got their names called “Rock Formations.”)
Headline from The Onion:
Cardinal Who Spent Easter Dinner Telling Pope To Ease Off The Butter Feeling Pretty Vindicated
Also, this local item:
Grandmother Palms Grandson $10 Like She’s Fixing Boxing Match
Is Jim Morrison of The Doors still dead? A documentary came out in January that says he’s alive and living in Syracuse, NY. Here’s the trailer.
And here’s a photo of Jim taken recently:
Actually, that’s a photo of a man named Frank X, a maintenance man for Wegman’s, who some believe is Morrison. The thinking is Morrison faked his death way back then in Paris. In fact, there was never an autopsy, and his Social Security Number remains active (and traces to NY). His girlfriend gave conflicting answers as to his demise. Here she is: Pamela Courson.
The minor league baseball team in Syracuse (the Mets) held a promotion earlier this month in which they invited Frank to throw out the first ball (see below). They also invited anyone who looks like Jim Morrison to attend and they held a Jim Morrison look-alike contest. Nine people entered the contest. Only one looked at all like Morrison, though. (He won.) When asked directly whether he was Jim Morrison, Frank said no. But, then, what would you expect him to say?
The USA defeated Canada in the finals of the Women’s World Hockey Championship in the Czech Republic last night. It was a hell of a game. Canada was down 3-2 with under six minutes to go when OC fave Sarah Fillier scored the tying goal! Brava Sarah!! Then, 17 minutes into overtime, Tessa Janecke scored the game winner for the U.S. Good game ladies. We’ll see you again at the Olympics in February.
It isn’t supposed to happen anymore. When umpires blow a call in a blatant manner, justice is restored upon review. But a dreadful call robbing Yankee slugger Aaron Judge of a home run yesterday was upheld upon review. You be the Judge. No, I mean you be the judge.
Commentators were impressed with manager Aaron Boone’s eloquent response to the travesty. “The audacity of the call standing is remarkable.” It’s haiku-like, although the syllable pattern is 5-5-5 and not 5-7-5.
The audacity
Of the call standing
Is remarkable.
Something else happened during the game. Max “The Yid” Fried was on the mound and pitching a beaut. In fact, Max was pitching a no-hitter when the following play occurred in the sixth inning:
The batter for the Rays was Chandler Simpson, who was just called up from the minors over the weekend. He is extremely fast – perhaps the fastest runner in the majors. You can see in the play that Yankee first-bagger Goldschmidt clearly booted the ball. The official scorer ruled it an error, thus preserving the no-hitter. Max got through the sixth and seventh innings with the no-hitter intact. Cue the nail-biting music, right? Not right!
Although Max continued to pitch believing he was working on a no-hitter, the official scorer changed his ruling on the Simpson play from an error to a hit in between the seventh and eighth innings. He determined the runner would have beaten the throw to first even if it had been fielded cleanly. No one is arguing against it being ruled a hit. Max yielded a clean single in the eighth inning, so the no-hitter was gone either way. But the timing of the scoring reversal was criticized by some. Was it right for Max to go on believing he had a no-hitter for so long? Should the scorer have delayed the announcement of the reversal until after Max yielded the other hit? Max’s quote on the matter fell short of Boone’s “audacity.” “It is what it is,” he said.
When we reported on Max in Owl Chatter a while ago, he was dating U.S. soccer star Rose Lavelle. But they broke up (Max complained she never used her hands). Here’s his new babe, Reni Whalley-Meyer, a former volley ball star at USC. She’s met his folks.
In our You-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up Department, it was just reported that Kristi Noem, head of our nation’s Homeland Security, had her bag stolen in a restaurant. (Not kidding.) Noem had her Homeland Security badge, passport, driver’s license, $3,000 in cash, checkbook, apartment keys, makeup and medication in the bag. [Medication? — maybe up the dosage? Just sayin’.)
Police are looking for a man around 30 years old, 6 feet tall, who is throwing around a lot of cash, flashing a Homeland Security badge, and wearing makeup.
Coulda happened to anyone, Babe — don’t let it get you down.
The puzzle today was nothing to sneeze at. Or maybe it was. The four theme answers ended in order in AH, AH, AH, CHOO, and 56A wrapped things up with GESUNDHEIT.
At 20A the clue was “Let’s go!” in Mexico, and the answer was ANDALE. It led to this note from commenter Barbara S.
ANDALE gave me an immediate flashback to Speedy Gonzalez: “¡ANDALE, ANDALE, Arriba, Arriba!” For those young enough not to know, Speedy was a cartoon mouse on television in the 1950s and 1960s. Wikipedia says:
Feeling that the character presented an offensive Mexican stereotype, Cartoon Network shelved Speedy’s films when it gained exclusive rights to broadcast them in 1999…However, the Hispanic-American rights organization League of United Latin American Citizens called Speedy a cultural icon, and thousands of users registered their support of the character on the hispaniconline.com message boards…Speedy Gonzales remained a popular character in Latin America. Many Hispanic people remembered him fondly as a quick-witted, heroic Mexican character who always got the best of his opponents, at a time when such positive depictions of Latin Americans were rare in popular entertainment.
Owl Chatter headquarters will be closed tonight for a special prayer meeting. Please, God — don’t let Pete Hegseth be fired. The man’s a national treasure. A gift that keeps giving, 24/7. We know he’s been careless with classified information and then lied about it not being classified. So what? Who hasn’t? And we know all the top officials at Defense have either quit or been fired by him (including a bunch he recently hired himself). Big fucking deal. Hands up if you agree he deserves another chance (or a couple more, actually).
Thanks, Joni!
Mark Roberts of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) posted: Just curious how long can a human stay awake for? I’m on 32hrs now, and had 3hrs sleep before. Looking at another 16hrs before I can finally settle down with a beer and sofa.
Here are some of the dullest of the 152 comments:
John Millward: Roughly 9 days of no sleep results in death apparently.
Avi Liveson: Apparently?
Pippa Squeak Morley: I hope you’re not driving in that state.
Avi Liveson: Or in New Jersey.
Pete Holder: Just tell her to hurry up or you’re going without her.
Tom Fisher: According to Guinness: 11 days and 25 minutes. Randy Gardner in 1963. No stimulants were used. He was 17 at the time.
Jem Giles: Guinness no longer keeps track since it’s dangerous to try. Wikipedia says the 11-day record was broken. The longest I could find is 18 days.
Andy S. Carvey: While filming Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman stayed awake for days so that he’d look right for the part. Sir Laurence Olivier, his co-star, when told, said “You should try acting dear boy… It’s so much easier..”
Avi Liveson: I heard that when Hoffman asked Olivier what he would have done, Olivier said “I would have pretended.”
Bridget Butler: Please tell us why you are enduring this.
Mark: done a night shift, and the wife decided to lob herself down the stairs. So broken leg in 2 places, dislocated ankle, broken foot in 4 places.
Owl Chatter: Jeez Louise! Must have been one hell of a staircase.
It’s Easter Sunday today. So Friday was Good Friday. And that’s fine. I just wish, for once, we could have a Great Friday.
It really feels like Easter today. I was up around 4:30 this morning and took some Benadryl to help me get back to sleep. You ever do that? It worked, but then when I woke up for real around 7 it felt like I was coming back from the dead.
It’s also the last day of Passover. In our house Passover is mostly marked by having “matzoh brei” or fried matzoh for breakfast. It’s sort of French toast but with matzoh. Stir up some eggs with a little milk. I use one egg per sheet of matzoh. Three sheets for two people. Then, soften the matzoh using hot water. (I just run hot water from the sink over it until it softens enough to be broken into little pieces.) Then break up the matzoh and stir it into the egg/milk mixture. Let it sit for a bit and then fry it up in some oil, until the egg part is fully cooked. You can use maple syrup on it. It was hard to get real maple syrup in the desert, so some people just use salt and pepper. If that’s your plan you can add sauteed onions and peppers like I did today.
Anyway, so even though today is officially the last day of Passover, in our family it lasts until we finish up the matzoh.
This poem is “Sunday Brunch at the Old Country Buffet,” by Ann Caston. It’s from today’s Writer’s Almanac.
Here is a genial congregation, well fed and rosy with health and appetite, robust children in tow. They have come and all the generations of them, to be fed, their old ones too who are eligible now for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age. Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one, heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said.
Here there is good will; here peace on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits of the gardens of America’s heartland. Here is abundance, here is the promised land of milk and honey, out of which a flank of the fatted calf, thick still on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.
This Tiny Love Story from today’s NYT is by Christine Oh. It’s called “Waiting For My Mother’s Hymn.”
The walls in our house couldn’t muffle my parents’ fights. My father had a temper, and I doubt my mother ever won. At the end of each argument, she would resume her chores while quietly singing the same hymn. I’d wait for her to start singing: my own reassuring ritual that all was well. Years later, I overheard my mother tell a friend that she sang that hymn whenever she was at her lowest. She passed away last year. I never got to tell her that during her saddest times, as she sang to console herself, she gave me comfort too.
In the NYT book review section today there’s a review of two books with cats. On “Kafka on the Shore,” by Haruki Murakami, Joumana Khatib tells us that one of the characters is an older man who gained the ability to speak with cats. Crazy things happen and there’s a terrible cat murderer the man learns about from a cat. Khatib writes: “These dialogues can stray into Jellicle territory . . . but occasional inane cat talk is a minor complaint. When nearly everything in a story is a puzzle or semaphoric contradiction, plain-spoken discussions about the deliciousness of tuna come as a relief.”
[FYI: “Jellicle cats” are briefly mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s 1933 poem “Five-Finger Exercises,” although they are not described until Eliot’s poem “The Song of the Jellicles,” depicting the cats as commonly nocturnal, black and white, scruffy cats. Eliot specifically mentions how they gather at an event called the “Jellicle Ball.” The name “Jellicle” comes from Eliot’s unpublished poem “Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats”, where “Pollicle dogs” is a corruption of “poor little dogs” and “Jellicle cats” of “dear little cats.” (Wikipedia)]
Here’s a good-looking couple.
That’s Ian Somerhalder and Nikki Reed. Hubby Ian popped in to the puzzle today way down at 126A: “Actor Somerhalder.” Some of you may recognize him from his role in the TV series Lost (2004-2010). He was the first major character to die, although, in the spirit of Easter Sunday, he returned for seven episodes post-mortem including the series finale. Wife Nikki also acts. They have two kids. Her mom was Cherokee/Italian and her dad Jewish, and she identifies as Jewish. Baruch Hashem! (Praise the Lord.)
The puzzle nailed me today at the cross of 118A: “Mother of Perseus” with 109D: “RNA base.” In crosswordspeak, those are two WOES (what on earth?) forming a Natick. For Mother of Perseus my best guess would be Mrs. Perseus, but it’s DANAE. And RNA base is URACIL.
I liked 49A where the clue was “Honcho,” and the answer was NABOB. No indication of any nattering.
Now I’m going to repeat a song by The Cure that we shared a while ago because I love it and it’s joyous. At 102A, the clue was “Smitten person’s declaration,” and the answer was (sigh) I’M IN LOVE. Turn it up!!
We learned a new word today: DRUPE. The clue was “Peach or plum, botanically.” Drupe means: a fleshy fruit with thin skin and a central stone (pit) containing the seed, e.g., a plum, cherry, almond, or olive.
A Rex commenter today went by the nom de plume of Donatello Nobody. Coulda been head of security on Car Talk. Remember their great staff names? Staff swimsuit designer: C. Bigbe Hinds was my favorite. Also loved Staff Butler: Mahatma Coat, and Staff Chauffeur: Pikup Andropov.
What do you get when you combine Rogaine and Viagra?
Answer: Don King.
Commenter Nancy shared with us that she’s going in for cataract surgery tomorrow. I wished her well and told her my wife had that same procedure. It improved her vision so much that she’s leaving me.
Sometimes, when I’m flipping around TV channels I fall upon a show on one of the food channels called Man vs. Food. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine. A nice guy named Casey (or Adam in earlier seasons) takes on food challenges offered by various eateries around the land — giant 5-lb burgers, or ice cream mountains, or huge burritos. If he can devour it all, Man wins. If time runs out, Food wins. A small local crowd cheers him on.
I was watching it the other day when the challenge was for Casey to drink three giant-sized ice cream shakes. As he was downing the first, I realized I had seen that episode before. (Man won.) Here’s a good rule of thumb: You know you may not be making the most of your retirement years when you’re sitting on your fat tuchas watching repeats of some poor slob shoving massive amounts of food down his gullet. Oy.
As commenter Andrew said: Happy Easter every bunny!
A baseball curmudgeon might say “Business as usual” at Wrigley Field yesterday when the Cubs took a 7-1 lead into the top of eighth only to emerge down 11-7. Ouch. A ten spot. But they came back to score six runs of their own in the bottom of the eighth and won 13-11. (Check my math.) And that’s not even the story.
The story is the sixteen total runs scored by Chicago and ‘Zona in that inning set the all-time record for most runs scored in Wrigley in an inning. Since W opened way back in 1914 (and became the Cubbies’ home in 1916), that’s saying something. The previous high was fifteen (duh) set in the fourth inning on 8/25/1922 when the Phillies scored a run in the top half and Chicago answered with fourteen.
Remember Bo Derek? She was sort of, not really, in the puzzle today via adjacent answers: DEREK (clued via Derek and the Dominoes) and BOO (surprising outburst).
She was the hottest hottie when she first emerged in the mid-1970s. According to Wikipedia: Her breakthrough performance came in the romantic comedy film “10” (1979), which cemented her status as a sex icon and mainstream celebrity. The role earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination for New Star of the Year – Actress.
Her acting career did not exactly take off after that. She “won” the Worst Actress of the Year award in 1982, 1985, and 1991, and the Worst Actress of the Decade award in 1990. She was nominated for Worst Actress of the Century in 2000, but lost out to Madonna. It’s not as awful as it seems — some pretty good actresses got nominations here and there for individual dogs, including Helen Mirren for her role as Hespera in Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023), and Anne Hathaway for roles in two films in 2020: The Witches, and The Last Thing He Wanted.
Look — if it were so easy to be an actress, everyone would want to be one.
Wait, what?
Bo is 68 now and married to actor John Corbett. They’ve been seeing each other since 2002 and finally got married in 2020. Many would say JC is also a “10.” Bo never had kids.
At 57A, “Unwritten reminder” was MENTAL NOTE. Commenter Nancy took credit for this quip: “A mental note isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” It reminded me of a New Yorker cartoon by Ziegler I loved from years ago (when they were funny).
At 17A, a “Post meeting to-do” is an ACTION ITEM. Turn it up!!
By 1935, Mae West was said to be the second-highest-paid person in the U.S., after William Randolph Hearst. After writing and starring in “Diamond Lil” on Broadway in 1928, she went to Hollywood, got a part in “Night After Night,” and was allowed to rewrite her scenes. In one, a hat-check girl says to her: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” and West replies, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”
But we mention MW because on this date in 1927 she was sentenced to ten days in jail for starring in the play “Sex,” which she also wrote and directed. It had been playing for 41 weeks before the cops arrested the cast and crew for “producing an immoral show and maintaining a public nuisance.” West described it as being “about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.” West was the only arrestee sent to prison.
In jail, West was forced to turn over her silk stockings (gasp!), but allowed to keep her silk underwear (whew). She had a private cell, and charmed the warden and his wife so much that they invited her to eat dinner with them in their home each night. She was released two days early for good behavior.
The woman could wear a hat. We’ll give her that.
At 26D, “Meanders” was ROVES. It crossed 38A where “Mourns” was GRIEVES.
The Gnats, in need of a laugher, seemed to have one in hand, going into the bottom of the 7th in Colorado up 12-2. But the Rockies rocked and rolled and before you knew it, the lead was down to 12-10. Gulp. Cut to the bottom of the ninth. It’s still 12-10. Gnats manager Davey Martinez calls for closer Kyle Finnegan. At the same time, I call for Linda to get me my heart pills. We like Kyle. He’s a Detroit boy, an All-Star last year, and he gets the save more often than not, but not before sending us all to the cardiologist.
He walks the first batter. D’oh! But then he strikes out the next two. Yay! Just as we’re apologizing for doubting him, the next batter slashes a triple to right. It’s 12-11 now, and the tying run is on third. I start slamming my head into the wall in a show of support. It worked! — strike three called — game over. Never in doubt!
In the puzzle today, at 56A the clue was “Toward that place, quaintly,” and the answer was THITHER. I posted the following on Rex’s blog:
Have you seen my zither?
Thither.
Right, my zither. Have you seen it?
Thither.
Yes. Do you know where it is? My zither.
Thither.
(Continue in this vain until tired.)
[Low-hanging fruit, I know, but someone had to do it.]
The puzzle was brilliant, IMO. The idea was “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” First, the grid used the black squares to form the picture of a tree, see below. Then in six places an answer was short one letter that was represented by a tree. And the shortened word was separately the name of a tree! So, e.g., where the answer was ELMO, you filled in only ELM and it was followed by a square with a little tree in it. For the answer RASH, you left the R out and got an ASH tree, and so on, six times. And the six “missing letters,” in order, spelled FOREST. Wow.
Amazingly, this was the debut puzzle of the brother duo, Ilan and Shimon Kolkowitz, one a doctor and the other some type of scientist.
Many years ago I won a bet with a then-brother-in-law who was certain the expression was “can’t see the forest ‘from’ the trees.” Idiot.
Impossible not to include this song at this point.
At 34D the “start of a children’s book series” was ARNIE the Doughnut. An anthropomorphic chocolate-frosted sprinkle doughnut named Arnie? OK, I’ll bite.
I harbor no ill will towards Gnats pitcher Jorge Lopez. In fact, I wish him and his family nothing but the best. His wife Karla and he have a son Mikael who suffers from a rare condition known as Familial Mediterranean fever and is waiting for a small intestines transplant. But meanwhile Jorge’s not doing himself any favors.
Back on 5/29/24, playing for the Mets, on his way to the dugout after being ejected from the game, he threw his glove into the stands and untucked his shirt (gasp!). He then called the Mets “the worst team in all of fucking MLB” and they released him.
The Gnats, who of late actually come closer to that description than those Mets did, picked him up in January for $3 million. He’s made 8 appearances so far and has not hit stride. ERA of 10.57. And last night after hitting Pirate Brian Reynolds with a pitch, he threw one that appeared headed towards Andrew McCutchen’s noggin. He was ejected and faces a 3-game suspension.
C’mon buddy, pull it together. Jorge was an all star back in 2022. He’s 32 now — can still crank out a few good years.
Here’s Gnats’ catcher Keibert Ruiz telling Lopez to calm down and keep his shirt tucked in before the benches cleared last night.
Gnats lost 6-1. D’oh! Lost again today, 1-0. Ever get that queasy feeling?
Things almost got out of hand on Rex’s blog today. First there was this snippy comment:
Two answers that annoyed me, as a person who actually knows things instead of having accumulated lists of crossword answers in the back of my brain. The muse of Memory is Mnemosyne: Not MNEME. And the LOTUS, in general, is a water lily, not a tree. Harumph.
Kitshef replied: Mnemosyne was a goddess, rather than a muse. She was the mother of the nine Olympian muses. Mneme was one of the three muses according to Varro. (There are different numbers of muses, and with different names, according to different authors.)
And yes, there is a LOTUS that is a flowering aquatic plant, but also a lotus tree, again from Greek mythology. The lotus-eaters from the Odyssey were eating lotus trees.
Whatsername added the following, for good measure:
My knowledge of trees is very basic, but where I grew up in mid-Missouri, there were LOTUS TREES in our front yard. They were tall and slender with rough bark and exquisite smelling white blossoms which were always covered with bees. I’ve no idea what the scientific name for them is but that’s what they were commonly called.
Finally, ChrisS blew me away with this:
The Lotus tree, native to the Mediterranean area, is not one I was familiar with. I do know of lotus-eaters from Greek myth but did not know they were eating this tree. The Lotus tree is related to the Jujube tree, the fruit of which were an ingredient in the olden days candy Jujubes.
Jujubes! Wow. That takes me back.
Armas — you have these growing up in Cuba? Not too good for your teeth.
Can’t top candy and Ana de for a send-off. See you tomorrow. Thanks for popping by.
“He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” Trump said of Zelenskyy. “When you start a war, you’ve got to know that you can win the war, right? You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
Wait, what?
So Trump is saying Z started the war and then brands him as an idiot for starting it.
But he didn’t.
One of my (few) memories from when I was a little boy is riding in the back seat of the family car with my dad driving. He was a terrible driver and he blew through a stop sign or a red light. A city bus was going through the intersection and I remember watching it screech to a halt so it wouldn’t hit us. The driver got out of the bus and reamed out my dad. “I’ve got thirty riders on that bus! — and you’ve got a car full of people!! — do you realize what would have happened if it hit you??!!” He went on like that for a bit, all about what a disaster it would have been if the bus hit us. When the tirade finally subsided, my dad, looking a little sheepish, just said: But it didn’t.
Is there no end to the ineptitude of this administration? When the Ohio State footballers were invited to the White House to celebrate their national championship, Ohioan JD Vance, attempting to pick up the trophy, dropped it and broke it. That’s him on the right. Put that in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up dept. To his credit, he recovered the fumble.
Of all the poems we have shared in 763 Owl Chatter posts (yikes!), I think this one has the best title. It’s called “Renewal.” It’s by Jeffrfey Harrison and is from yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac.
At the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my driver’s license, I had to wait two hours on one of those wooden benches like pews in the church of Latter Day Meaninglessness, where there is no stained glass (no windows at all, in fact), no incense other than stale cigarette smoke emanating from the clothes of those around me, and no sermon, just an automated female voice calling numbers over a loudspeaker. And one by one the members of our sorry congregation shuffled meekly up to the pitted altar to have our vision tested or to seek redemption for whatever wrong turn we’d taken, or pay indulgences, or else be turned away as unworthy of piloting our own journey. But when I paused to look around, using my numbered ticket as a bookmark, it was as if the dim fluorescent light had been transformed to incandescence. The face of the Latino guy in a ripped black sweatshirt glowed with health, and I could tell that the sulking white girl accompanied by her mother was brimming with secret excitement to be getting her first license, already speeding down the highway, alone, with all the windows open, singing.
Where ya gonna go for your kicks? How about Route 66?
The puzzle yesterday took us down CEREAL AISLES. At 4D, the clue was “Came out in favor of a certain breakfast product?,” and the answer was ENDORSED CHEX. (Get it?) At 8D, for “Sugary bulk breakfast purchase?” it was WHOLE BAG OF TRIX. And at 14D, “Doing some shopping for breakfast?” was GETTING ONE’S KIX.
Commenter Andrew shared this great oldie with us:
At 60A the clue was “Nelson’s blood.” Did you know it’s a term for rum?
Per Wikipedia, A Drop of Nelson’s Blood is a sea shanty, also known as Roll the Old Chariot Along. The origins are unclear, but the title comes from the line: “A drop of Nelson’s blood wouldn’t do us any harm.” Following his victory and death at the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Nelson’s body was preserved in a cask of brandy or rum for transport back to England. “Nelson’s blood” became a nickname for rum, but it can also mean Nelson’s spirit or bravery. The shanty was sung to accompany certain work tasks aboard sailing ships, especially those that required a bright walking pace.
Philip Gleeson of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) wonders: When I burp in private I still excuse myself. Is this normal/common?
Someone incredibly named Treasaigh Dubhthaigh said: I do it too and thought it was normal. Is it not?
Sophie Aldus: Yup. I do the same. Conversely, I know someone who does huge Simpsons-esque burps in company and never bothers. Have we solo self-excusers used up all the manners?
Sarah Stockwell: I excuse myself when I sneeze in my car.
Ian Taylor: It’s the law.
Andrew Green: I still shout “More tea, Vicar?”
[OC Note: Have you heard that expression (More tea, Vicar?)? It’s British. It’s what you say in a social setting to distract from something boorish someone did like burp (or worse).]
I took me 75 years to make a good brisket. Not that it aged for that long, although I did. I found the simple recipe in Kosher by design Entertains, by Susie Fishbein. It’s so easy, it’s ridiculous. Here’s all I did. Buy a 5.5 brisket at Costco. Lop off some of the fat and throw it at passersby. Flop the brisket into a big pot (our largest brown Le Creuset) on top of some oil. Season it with pepper and give it a few minutes on each side.
Throw in a sliced onion and big chunks of potatoes and carrots. Poor a 12 oz can of beer over it all. (I used a Straub’s amber, brewed in St. Mary’s, PA, picked up locally on a trip to MI.) Dump in a 24 oz jar of salsa, medium, not mild.
That’s it. I swear. Just simmer it covered for 4 hours. Let it rest a bit. Slice it up and let it sit, sliced, in all the liquid that formed. We ate it 4 days later. Tender and tasty.
Hope you were all able to stay safe yesterday, Chatterheads. It was the date on which Abe Lincoln was shot AND the Titanic hit the iceberg. Yikes. Forty-seven years apart.
So — was Cracklin’ Rosie a sex worker? The song says she’s a “store-bought woman.” . . . asking for a friend.
It came up in connection with yesterday’s puzzle. The theme was WHAT’S CRACKING?” And the three theme answers started with things that get cracked: EGGPLANT DIP; CODE OF CONDUCT; and KNUCKLEHEAD, i.e., eggs, codes, and knuckles all get “cracked.”
The commentariat was quick to come up with additional crack-related fare. From Lewis: nuts, safes, ice, riddles, jokes, books, and smiles. I added Liberty Bells, doors, butts, and corn (Jimmy cracked it). Maybe not doors? You crack open a door, was what I had in mind.
But getting back to Cracklin’ Rosie, Sam and I attended a Lansing Lugnuts game (minor league baseball) maybe ten years ago. It was Neil Diamond Impersonator Night. OMG, what could be better, amirite? I thought he’d perform on the field to thousands of adoring fans in the stands after the game, but no. They set him up on the sidewalk outside the stadium where maybe twenty idiots like us hung around to hear him. Needless to say, he was fantastic. Introduced each song with a little history and he had a decent enough voice.
Now this, below, is not the guy we saw. It’s another Neil Diamond impersonator. Seriously. Have no idea how many of them are out there. Is there an army of Neil Diamond impersonators training somewhere? Should we worry? (Confession: We love this song.)
Suppose doing what you were doing suddenly paid you gazillions of dollars. What would you change in your life and what would you keep? The NYT sports section yesterday looked at MLB ballplayers who they said are penny pinchers.
Tanner Scott pitches for the Dodgers and is making $16 million this year. “We are definitely still on my wife’s family’s Netflix,” he said. Steven Kwan of Cleveland (making $4.17 mil) explained: “You stay rich by being cheap.”
Matt Strahm of the Phillies: I’m not going to just buy new clothes because I want to. I need to need clothes to buy clothes.
Derek Law of the Gnats: My wife is like, “You need to get some new shirts,” and I’m like, “Eh, I’m good.”
Ryan Mountcastle (Balt): I never need new clothes.
Seth Lugo (KC): I hate paying for shipping.
Jesse Chavez (Braves): And a processing fee. Processing? Where did that come from?
Matt Vierling (Tigers): I still drive my car from college. It’s a 2012 Ford Escape. It broke down on the highway on me. I was driving an even older car before. It was used when I got it; it had 65,000 miles on it. Now it’s got like 172,000 and we are still rolling. I am going to try to ride it out for another year. I got everybody in my family saying “It’s not safe, you should get another car.” And I’m just like: “Not yet. I will ride it until it dies.”
Getting back to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the U.S. sent to prison in El Salvador by mistake. The Supremes ordered that his return be “facilitated,” but the admin is brazenly failing to implement the order. Turns out Garcia is a union man — the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers. So the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, said the following to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!… And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”
McGarvey received a standing ovation. Good to see it.
I love portmanteaus. That’s not a type of wine. It’s when you combine two words to form a new word that makes sense. So smoke and fog yields smog. The best-known one might be brunch (breakfast + lunch). Portmanteau means suitcase, i.e., one with words packed into it. Did you know that electrocute is one (electricity + execute)?
I like making them up. Lianna and I came up with this one: What do you call it when it’s raining french fries? Answer: Precipitatoes.
There was one in today’s puzzle. At 30D the clue was “Container for keys, wallet, razor, etc., in a modern portmanteau,” and the answer was MURSE. It’s from male and purse, of course. Rex hated it. He was also upset that the grid contained TEC as a term for detective, which he maintains is never used. Here’s his rant:
I think MURSE was the thing that nearly made me slam my computer shut. First of all, no. And second of all, stop. And finally, third of all, no. No One Says This. People say “TEC” way more than they say “MURSE,” that’s how much they say “MURSE” (they don’t). This is one of those portmanteaus that the puzzle keeps trying to convince you is a thing, only it’s not. If it is (it’s not), it’s only a thing “jocularly.” No one is going to utter that term without smirking. And LOL “razor”? Dudes just carrying their razor around in their MURSEs for some reason? “Modern portmanteau” on what planet? This is not the modern world.
Might work better for a male nurse, it seems to me. Stay away from this guy, though.
I liked the theme of today’s puzzle because I like the expression it centered on: CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR. The four theme answers all had the letters: C, I, G, A, and R anagrammed but never spelling CIGAR. They were TRAGICOMIC, CHERRYGARCIA, MAGICREALISM, and CRAIGSLIST.
The clue for magic realism was “Genre for Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’” Have you read it? Its opening sentence is admired for its brilliance:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Sh*t! Who lit that cigar? This song by Leslie Stevens and the Badgers is called “Roomful of Smoke.”
Dave Kelly of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) faced the following conundrum:
“Well that’s my day ruined. Put too much milk in my first brew. I can’t throw it away either – Irish catholic upbringing: something about guilt/waste. I should probably just go back to bed.”
Stephen Murray offered this suggestion: Drink that one quickly, make another one strong and black, drink that one quickly then jump around the kitchen to mix them both inside you into two decent brews.
As expected, UCONN star Paige “Buckets” Bueckers was selected first by Dallas in the WNBA draft last night. Here’s how she dressed for the occasion.
This is one of nine stanzas in a poem we are not sharing today in Owl Chatter. Lo!
E’en as the essence of the Lotus-flower That philters thro’ the gardens hour by hour In ancient Egypt—Lo! it’s quick’ning breath Makes wise the meek, and triumphs over Death.
I’m far too lazy to do a serious analysis of this, but my understanding is that when a batted baseball crosses into the stands and a fielder goes after it, he’s at the mercy of the fans because he has crossed into their turf. So if they hamper his efforts to catch the ball, that’s just tough luck. But if the fan reaches out over fair territory and has an impact on a play, that’s “fan interference,” and the umpire can call the batter out even if the ball was not caught.
We asked Owl Chatter Sports Consultant, the beautiful Sarah Fillier of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, for her input but she seems unclear on what a “foul ball” is. (It’s not exactly “offsides,” SF. Let’s talk later.)
The upshot is the line separating players and fans is a little blurry. This play, below, involved a fan who later claimed he was protecting his son from being hit by a foul ball. Outfielder Mike Trout (proud Jersey boy) reached into the seats and caught the ball. But the fan was sort of grappling with him for it and ended up actually taking the ball out of Trout’s glove. (A punster would say he fished it out of Trout’s glove.) I love the look on the fan’s face when he realized what happened and apologized and offered the ball back to Trout.
The umpires, correctly IMO, did not call the batter out due to fan interference because the incident essentially took place in the stands. The play caused many to recall a similar but significantly different play from last year’s World Series, where two Yankee fans ripped a foul ball out of Mookie Betts’ glove. The ball had not clearly crossed into the fans’ turf. That was a pretty ugly scene. The batter was called out and the fans have been banned from baseball stadia.
In the Trout play, even though Trout lost the argument, when he found out the fan’s child was part of the story and that the fan was apologetic, he arranged to meet with them, gave them some stuff, including a bat, signed the ball, and orchestrated a very happy ending. Our Phil was on hand to video the meeting. Look at the kid’s face.
In the puzzle today, at 94A the clue was “Retail magnate James Cash [blank],” and the answer was PENNEY. It reminded me of this story which I shared with Rex’s readers:
Over four decades ago, I bought a pair of pants at JCPenney. They were cheap and comfortable and since they weren’t jeans I wore them to work now and then. I was riding home on the subway one day and was exhausted. Of course, there were no seats, but then I noticed that there was one open space. It was because right next to it was a poor homeless man who was in pretty bad shape. He hadn’t showered or shaved or laundered his clothes in a long time and nobody wanted to sit next to him. I assessed the space and determined that I could squeeze myself in and still leave enough of a buffer between me and the homeless gentleman. I was so tired I went for it. It was great to sit.
After a few stops I glanced over at the poor fellow and noticed he was wearing the exact same pants as me. I guess I wasn’t the fashion plate I fancied myself to be. When my kids chide me for how I dress I remind them of that story.
Commenter Son Volt shared a wonderful song today but, for the life of me, I couldn’t see its link to the puzzle. I re-read all of the clues and perused the grid several times. Finally I caught the tie-in. At 61D the clue was “Title for Marie Tussaud,” and the answer was MADAME.
Did you know this? The clue at 30A was “Fig. that never starts with 666.” The answer was SSN (for Social Security Number). Rex noted: “This is how you will know the antichrist—by the first three digits of his social.”
On this date in 1899 in Poughkeepsie, NY, Alfred M. Butts was born. He invented Scrabble. Among its many admirers was Vladimir Nabokov who worked it into his novel Ada, and had a Russian version produced especially for his wife and himself.
It took awhile for the game to catch on. Butts lined the original playing board into small squares and cut the 100 lettered wooden tiles by hand. The first players were Alfred, his wife Nina, and their friends. Nina was better at it than Alfred. “She beat me at my own game, literally,” Butts admitted.
He earned a degree in architecture at UPenn and was an amateur artist. Six of his drawings were collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY.
Rich Little is the best impersonator I’ve ever seen. He’s 86 years old and still active. Active? I think he’s playing shortstop for the Dodgers. In yesterday’s game against the Cubbies, LA fell behind 11-0 and conceded defeat. In baseball that means you bring in a position player to pitch. Why waste a pitcher in a losing cause? So the Dodgers put shortstop Miguel Rojas on the mound for the last two innings. But Rojas is a bit of a card and he put on quite a show with his rare opportunity — impersonating the deliveries of four of the Dodger pitchers.
This is how Andrew Simon put it on MLB.com:
“Rojas imitated the way teammate Landon Knack, when pitching from the stretch, keeps his glove at the belt and leans back a bit before starting his delivery. He mirrored the way Yamamoto wiggles the ball around in his glove, then works with a slight hesitation in his windup — all while using Yamamoto’s No. 18 blue glove. He then recreated Kershaw’s iconic pre-pitch process: lifting both hands high above his head before dropping them back down. And finally, he repeated the way Sasaki, the Dodgers’ highly-touted rookie, starts with his back knee bent and his front leg straight out ahead of him before lifting it way up high as he goes into his windup.”
Here’s a small part of the show Rojas put on:
Hey, I got through an entire post without mentioning Trump. Oops, d’oh!
It’s hard to imagine that a woman who looks like this could have done anything stupid, but she did. She literally froze her ass off.
This is Ravena Hanniely, 24, an “influencer” from Brazil. What she did that was so stupid is what you’re looking at. According to People Magazine, Ravena’s butt froze up in the 14-degree air. And that’s Fahrenheit — it was even colder in Celsius.
Despite planning the shoot “carefully,” she said “the cold was much more intense than I expected. At first, it felt manageable. But then my body started to lock up. I was freezing my buttocks off.” Dumbness set in, sorry, I mean numbness, and “I couldn’t even sit.” She went straight from the shoot to the ER where she was diagnosed with frostbite, or, in this case, frostbutt.
But we learn from our life experiences. As Ravenna shared with her 267,000 followers: “We get so excited about our ideas that we forget the risks. It looked beautiful, yes, but it was also very dangerous. The shot came, but so did the struggle.” Amen, girl.
One thing we can say for sure about the young woman — she was born for Owl Chatter. Keep in touch, Sweetheart.
This piece from tomorrow’s Met Diary is called “Wild and Free” and is by Avi Friedman.
Dear Diary,
We had been married for a year and were living in Kew Gardens Hills when we decided to make a Target run at 9 pm with our 3-month-old. We could still live wild and free, right?
We picked out two bright-green lawn chairs that would fill our porch (really just a tiny slab of cement off our kitchen). We were not sure they would fit in our compact car, but we bought them anyway. Somehow, stuff always fits, we figured.
When we got to the parking lot, our baby ran out of his patience, and we realized the chairs would not fit after all.
A man approached us to help. The woman he was with called out to him.
“Stop chatting,” she said. “It’s after ten o’clock.”
“They have a baby!” he yelled back.
He reached down, took the laces out of both of his sneakers and tied down our trunk.
I tried to pay him for the laces.
“Nah,” he said. “Just drive slow and take Jewel. You’ll make it.”
We did and we did.
The NYT ran a piece on the front page today about the 381 books the Administration removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library. Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is out. So is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” by Janet Jacobs. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” made the cut (phew) and is still on the shelves, as is “The Bell Curve” which maintains Blacks are genetically inferior to whites, although a critique of it was removed. Is it me, or is that overt racism and anti-Semitism?
There’s a town in Georgia called Rome and their minor league baseball team is the Emperors. They were supposed to host The Winston-Salem Dash last weekend when a plumbing disaster badly damaged the clubhouse. The Emps asked the Dash if the games could be switched to Winston-Salem, with the Emps still batting as the home team. Of course, the Dash were happy to help out. So what if the Dash had already rented their stadium out for a Friday night prom? Students at Davie County Early College High School in nearby Mocksville were slated to dance the night away in the Stadium’s upper-level Flow Club.
F*ck it, said Dash General Manager Brian DeAngelis, we’ll just combine the two — the dance and the ballgame — what can go wrong? In fact, things just kept going right. For starters, the Dash told their fans it was “Prom Night” and encouraged them to come to the game in tuxes and gowns. Dash players were surprised with printouts of their own prom pics before the game; the prom king and queen were crowned on the field during the game; the T-shirt toss featured fans throwing T-shirts from the stands into the Flow Club where the prom was taking place; former prom kings and queens were invited to attend the game free of charge; and prom-themed clips from movies such as Back to the Future and Grease were played on the videoboard.
After the game, Dash players visited the students to sign autographs, pose for pictures and distribute game balls and a team-signed jersey. Here are a few of them with a very pretty prom queen.
Good job all around, gentlemen!
If you are a fan of The Simpsons and completed the NYTXW today, you appreciated the curve thrown your way at 6D. “Onetime first name at Springfield Elementary,” just had to be LISA, no? But it was EDNA — Edna Krabappel, the teacher. She was voiced by Marsha Wallace, but when Marsha died in 2013, the character disappeared. (Thus the “onetime” in the clue.)
15D was interesting (at least to me). The clue was “Improv tenet,” and the answer was YES AND. There are “rules” to how you would work with someone in conducting an improv skit. You should always agree with your partner, and then build. Not “deny.” So if your partner lays something down, you say YES, AND . . .
Here’s Tina Fay:
The ever-gushing Lewis coined a new word today (a neologism) in describing the joy he derived from today’s puzzle:
“Oh, that magical moment when, with the addition of one more cross, suddenly I see what was opaque every time I looked at it before. It’s not just an oh-yeah moment but more of a joyous eruption – a bliss-krieg.”
Happy Passover, to those of you who are so inclined. See you tomorrow!
A crossword puzzle sometimes gives you a little insight into how your brain works, as you watch it pinball from wrong answer to wrong answer to, if you’re lucky, the right answer. It can make some funny stops. Here’s Rex describing a brain journey he took today:
The clue was “Creature with over 200 tiny eyes along its shell,” and the answer was SEA SCALLOP. (Who knew?) [OC note: A potato has eyes, but the answer is not “sea potato.”]
Rex: I may have come up with the dumbest wrong answer of all time. I dare you to beat it for dumbness. I had the SEAS- at the beginning and wrote in SEA SERPENT (a dumb answer, to be sure, but not the dumb answer I’m talking about); thankfully, it didn’t take me long to realize that SEA SERPENTs, in addition to being maybe fictional (?!), is almost certainly shell-less. So I left that answer and came back to it. When I came back to it, I had the -ALLO- part, and after a split second of wanting SEA SWALLOW, whatever that is, I thought “oh, no, it’s the seafood thing, the thing you never order at restaurants … what’s it called? … oh yeah, shallot! It’s SEA SHALLOT! (it was not, in fact, SEA SHALLOT, as a shallot is a kind of onion, as you likely know). In my defense, a shallot is roughly the size of a scallop (I’m just kidding, I have no defense, I plead insanity).
When ya gotta go, ya gotta go. I was with Linda in Central Park and the restroom we raced to for me was closed! Arggggh! No choice — with Linda standing guard, I snuck behind some thick bushes and . . .
My nephew Jared wasn’t as lucky. Years ago, I went to court with him after he was charged with public urination. I forget how it turned out – not too bad, I think. It was a long journey to court from when I was the holder (of his little legs) at his bris. It was quite an honor. I held on, but didn’t watch.
Anyway, this all comes up because of what happened, incredibly, at the Masters golf tourney this week. Jose Luis Ballester, a golfer from Spain, who was paired with the golfer ranked #1 in the world, Scottie Scheffler (whom I haven’t heard of, but that’s on me), just sauntered behind a bush on the 13th hole and peed into Rae’s Creek. He thought he was out of view, but some fans saw him and clapped! [Please make up your own puns. The Associated Press has already called him the Whiz Kid.]
If you’re wondering, well, how do the golfers relieve themselves during a long day of golfing? — there are restrooms spaced out along the course. Ballester just forgot about them.
We await blowback. The Masters is famous for its rigid sense of decorum. E.g., Ballester’s coach was kicked off earlier for wearing shorts. And he kept his fly zipped.
When I saw that yesterday’s puzzle was by Adam Wagner, I knew I was in for a treat. He’s a great trickster. Sure enough, I completed the entire grid but had no idea what the theme was. See how you do. Here are the five theme clues and answers. (I knew they were the theme because the clues were in italics.)
Clue: “Shoveling?” Answer: GENTLE NUDGE
“Martini?” — VENDING MACHINE
“Bandito?” — PINKY RING
“Sublet?” — FINGER SANDWICH
“Rockette?” — GRAIN OF SAND
See what’s going on? Took me a bit to figure it out. The ending of each clue makes it a diminutive. So, take Rockette – a very small rock is a grain of sand. A small shove is a gentle nudge; a small sub (sandwich) is a finger sandwich. What made the puzzle unusual is there was no “revealer,” i.e., you were on your own to figure out what was going on, and, as I did, you could complete the entire grid and still not know.
REM was a musical guest in the grid and Rex shared this song of theirs.
The lyrics are cryptic, at best. This is the second verse:
Who will tend the farm museums? Who will dust today’s belongings? Who will sweep the floor, hedging near the givens? Rally ’round your leaders, it’s the mediator season Cheyanne is on the beach, do you realize the life she’s led?
“It was at this point, gentlemen, that the President decided it was his plan all along to reverse course.”
You’ve made mistakes, amirite? What do you do? — You try to fix it, to undo the damage. Do you need the Supreme Court to tell you that?
So the government f*cked up and sent some poor slob in Maryland to a dreadful prison in El Salvador, by mistake, in their own admission. Instead of making a reasonable effort to get the poor guy back, they are fighting all the way up to the f*cking Supreme Court having to take any action to undo their damage. Even in light of all the craziness this administration has unleashed, this one still boggles the mind. It’s not the usual refusal to admit a mistake – we’ve come to expect that. They’ve conceded the error. With a human life at stake, how could anyone not take the next step to remedy the mistake? At least make a f*cking phone call. Remarkable. Even the Supreme Court said, “Duh, get the poor slob back, you idiots.” Nine to f*cking nothing. Even a monster like Alito couldn’t abide this one. Jeez Louise.
Can’t leave on that note. Phil — what do you have for us?
Nice shot, buddy. You still in Jersey? It’s Jessica Springsteen, The Boss’s daughter – world class equestrian. Not just a rich girl’s hobby: Jess won a silver medal in Team Jumping for the U.S. at the Tokyo Olympics.
The Wellington Files 