I’ve never eaten frogs’ legs. I did taste eel once in sushi form and grilled octopus, both pretty good. It came up because of this lovely bit of writing Frank Bruni shared with us in his “For the love of sentences” feature. It’s by Helen Rosner in The New Yorker, discussing what to order at a recently spruced up French restaurant: “You can hardly go wrong, though it would be the height of tragedy if not one person at the table ordered the frogs’ legs persillade, a cancan line of amphibian gams in an audibly sizzling bath of butter and garlic that a server oomphs up, upon presentation, with a squeeze of lemon.”
The puzzle’s theme today was about following directions. Four long answers hit circled squares. Each square represented a direction. You had to fit the direction into the square (e.g., “east”) and then continue with the answer turning in that direction. So, e.g., at 53A, the clue was “Keeps the faith.” The answer starts out HOLD, and then hits a circle which you need to fill in with SOUTH, then you turn downwards and finish with OPE. So the full answer becomes HOLD[S OUT H]OPE (holds out hope).
I haven’t heard of Suzy Bogguss under my rock, but Rex shared this puzzle-appropriate song of hers: “Drive South.” She has the chutzpah to rhyme “smile on” with “nylons,” in this racy stanza:
We can go south with a smile on Ain’t going to pack my nylons Just leave these legs showin’ It gets hot down where were goin’
The Gnats shook the baseball world this week taking two from the power-laden Yanks, who drove all the way down Route 95 to get whupped in DC. On Tues, the Nats were clinging to a shaky lead like Leonardo D to his bit of flotsam in Titanic. And then, suddenly, some rinky-dink hits and an error loaded the bases for Aaron Judge. Yikes! But the big man’s hot liner reached CJ on a bounce and was good for two outs and an end to the threat. Whew.
Weds, again, the Gnats took a tenuous lead into the 8th but when they got men on first and second with nobody out, it looked like the Gnats might be able to grab an insurance run or two. New third-bagger Tena drove the ball to the deepest part of center, over Judge’s head, and it banged off the wall. But the lead runner hesitated and was tagged out after a rundown between home and third. And then, oh, no!, the batter was caught between first and second, for an improbable and devastating double play. Instead of getting two runs they ran themselves into two outs. They limped into the ninth, embarrassed by it, and when the first two Yankees reached base, a Gnats’ collapse looked all but inevitable. But Finnegan, grimacing, was having none of it. A soft fly to right, and a feeble grounder back to the mound restored order. When Torres struck out it was over. He’s a Detroit boy, Finnegan, born and raised.
Sarah Palin is back in the news, and not a moment too soon, as far as Owl Chatter is concerned. She’s been granted a retrial for her libel lawsuit against the NYT. You may recall that Ms. P’s political action committee published a map with crosshairs over several congressional districts, including that of Gabby Giffords. Shortly thereafter a shooter went on a rampage that left six dead and injured Giffords. SP said the Times defamed her by wrongly suggesting she incited the shooting. The Times did swiftly correct and apologize for the piece. The jury ruled in favor of the Times, but an appeals court just granted her a new trial. It held the trial judge erred in preventing jurors from hearing evidence that might have shown the Times knew or should have known Palin did not incite the shooting.
If you’re following the case closely, you may want to pick up one of these refrigerator magnets for $7.50 on eBay. Lookin’ good, babe!
Tomorrow is opening day for my final semester. Hope it goes well. Thanks for stopping by.
Here’s an ironic headline for you: Tom Brown Jr., World-Renowned Survivalist, Is Dead at 74.
Brown was the country’s leading authority on wilderness survival. For most of his life, he took on the greatest survival challenge in the world: New Jersey.
This is from his obit in the Times:
His preferred wilderness was the Pine Barrens, a vast, unpeopled expanse of sandy forest that stretches across the middle of New Jersey. He would disappear into the woods for weeks at a time, often with nothing but the clothes on his back, and emerge ruddy in health and even a few pounds heavier.
When he was 7, he befriended a boy named Ricky, whose grandfather Stalking Wolf was a Lipan Apache from New Mexico who had moved to New Jersey to be near his son. Over the next decade, Stalking Wolf taught the boys the ways of the forest. Both Ricky and Stalking Wolf died when Tom was 17, and he left home to wander the country for the better part of a decade, living mostly off the grid.
He came back to NJ in the mid-1970’s, provided training, wrote books, and helped legal authorities with wilderness tracking. E.g., he was brought in to help locate a mentally disabled man who had gone missing for days in the Pine Barrens. When he found the man, they both sat down and cried.
He wrote 16 books that sold 2 million copies. Two of his sons followed their dad and are survivalist trainers. Taking their cue from Brown, he is survived by his third wife, Celeste; three sons, Cody, River, and Tom III; his brother, Jim; four stepchildren; and three grandchildren.
Here’s a shot of the Pine Barrens.
And here’s Tom, several hours after rigor mortis set in.
Rest in Peace Tom.
Mark Heath, of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) shared that he organized his shed and can declare that he owns ten hammers.
Lori Smith said: “Let’s see ’em then!!” So Heath came back with:
Eamonn Flynn noted: I see a mallet hiding among them. And Heath said: Ah, you got me there.
Sterling Chamberlain said: I know a bloke that has 11 — sorry. And Heath replied: No, no, it’s not a race.
Steve Bunting asked: Are any of them left-handed?
Jonathan Shepard said: I’ve got 105 friends.
That prompted Matt Matterson to say: Excessive!, and Roland Bushell to ask — Where do you keep them?
Back to hammers, Jackie Hunt said: Damn, I thought 3 was enough!
Gareth Edwards: I have around 30. Most of them do not identify as hammers, but are used as such.
And, last, if you prefer the macabre, Liam James asked: “A new one for each murdered prostitute?” [Yikes! Where’d that come from?]
Goethe was born on this date back in 1749. He said: “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
Or read an Owl Chatter post!
It’s also Rita Dove’s birthday today: she’s 72. Her dad had a masters degree in chemistry but had to work as an elevator operator because he was Black. He eventually became the first Black chemist to work for Goodyear. Rita was brilliant in high school and was expected to become a lawyer or doctor. When she said she was going to be a poet, her dad said he didn’t understand poetry and asked her not to be upset if he didn’t read her poems. Her college profs urged her to take a more practical direction. You probably know where this is headed. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her work, was the first Black Poet Laureate of the U.S., and has been awarded 29 honorary doctorates, including from Harvard and U. Michigan. She frequently appears in NYTXW puzzles and has had soap named after her. She has been married to a German writer/professor, Fred Viebahn, since 1979 and they have a daughter, Aviva.
This is a poem of Dove’s that we’d bet even her dad would understand. It’s called “Scarf.”
Whoever claims beauty lies in the eye of the beholder
has forgotten the music silk makes settling across a bared
neck: skin never touched so gently except by a child
or a lover.
Happy birthday, Madam Laureate.
BTW, I posted the headline on Tom Brown, above, for the Dull Men’s Club — “survivalist dies,” noting it was the most ironic headline I’ve ever seen. And Adrian Bull quipped: “He had one job . . . . “
Puzzles sometimes use the clue “Losing tic-tac-toe line” for the answer XOX, OOX, etc. Apparently, this has driven some people batty and one of them posted (as Anony Mouse): Only “xxx”and “ooo” are losing in tic-tac-toe. The former is losing if you are playing o’s and the latter is losing if you are playing x’s. They are also winning lines for the player playing X’s and O’s, respectively. All other lines are neither winning nor losing.
OK. Thanks.
One of my favorite people in Crossworld is Wyna Liu. I met her once just to say hi and she seemed very sweet. She puts together the daily Connections puzzle that many of us enjoy (or the opposite of enjoy, depending on the day). Anyway, she was the constructor of yesterday’s XW in The New Yorker and it had one of the greatest ever clues/answers, IMHO.
The clue was: Ruminations such as “Whenever you clean something, you make something else dirty” and “If Cinderella’s slipper actually fit perfectly, it wouldn’t have fallen off.”
The scourge of anti-Semitism is insidious and can infect even the unlikeliest of places. Like Owl Chatter!
In yesterday’s puzzle, the clue at 28A was “Honnold who was the first to free-solo climb El Capitan,” and the answer was ALEX. If you saw the film Free Solo you know the incredible story.
Anyway, so on Rex’s blog, I posted the following comment: In the Jewish version of Free Solo, it’s not free, but we can get you a pretty good deal.
And commenter Germanicus came back with: Enough of the anti-Semitic tropes, already. They are not funny but mean spirited.
Ouch!Moi?
And, speaking of not funny, my post for the Dull Men’s Club (UK) yesterday on the five-sided state flag of Ohio, elicited a comment that has me puzzled. Here’s the flag again:
So Rayne Passmore said: That object has seven sides.
And Alistair Easthope said: Surely just two sides and five edges.
Passmore replied: those edges have a depth, so they are sides… it’s a heptahedron.
What the f*ck are they talking about? The only way I get up to seven is by counting the inner blue sides/edges. So I asked Passmore: Are you counting the inner (blue) sides to get up to seven?
His terse response was “No.”
So I asked: Then how do we reach seven? Front and back?
[The more I think about it, he has to be counting front and back.]
I hope this gets resolved. I’ve got enough keeping me up nights. I’ll keep checking every ten minutes for the rest of my life and let you know what happens.
Is Rhode Island big enough to hold them? With Taylor’s tour in Europe complete, she hung out with Travis, Owl Chatter photographer Phil, and friends (including Bradley Cooper) in the tiny state over the weekend. Phil managed to take a few shots of TS before falling down a flight of stairs, drunk (him, not her). Nice work Philly! Maybe get some ice on those bumps?
Today’s puzzle was a crafty nod to Scrabble fans. The revealer was TRIPLE WORD SCORE, clued as “Coveted Scrabble space,” but it also worked as musical score, because the theme answers were all hit songs where the title was a “tripled” word: FUN FUN FUN (Beach Boys); GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS (Motley Crue); MONEY MONEY MONEY (Abba); and BYE BYE BYE (N Sync). Also, re Scrabble, all 26 letters appeared in the grid. That’s called a pangram.
Olympic gold medalist ALY Raisman popped into the puzzle today. Easy for her, since she’s retired. She’s from Needham MA, and is Jewish. You got a problem with any of that? Hey, don’t look at me in that tone of voice.
Aly is short for Alexandra. She’s 30 years old and 5′ 2″ tall. In 2018 she shared the Arthur Ashe Courage Award for speaking out against sexual abuse along with other victims. Before retiring she did things like this.
A recent post in the Dull Men’s Club (UK) was by a woman wondering what the proper number of swipes is when applying a stick deodorant. Most folks answered 3 or 4, and there were a bunch of “it depends” (on a variety of factors). But my favorite response was: Whatever you do, don’t follow the instructions that say “Remove cap. Push up bottom.”
Some crazy baseball history was made today by the Blue Jays and the Red Sox. It started way back on June 26 when the teams were facing each other. Danny Jansen was at bat for the Jays with a one-strike count when the rains came and the game was suspended. It was scheduled to resume today, which it did. But Jansen was traded last month, so he couldn’t finish the game for Toronto. (A pinch hitter finished Jansen’s at-bat for him and got credit for it.) But get this — the teamhe was traded to was Boston — so he finished the game with Boston, going 1 for 4, and thus became the first player ever to play for both teams in the same game. Toronto won 4-1.
Here are both of them. Or both of him. D’oh — you know what I mean.
We end on a sad note today. The wooden grandstand, locker rooms, press box and dugout of the Jay Littleton Ball Park, a baseball field in Ontario, CA, were destroyed in a fire. It was featured in the movie about women’s baseball, A League of Their Own, and in The Babe. It was “an old-school, 1937, all-wood grandstand.” They don’t make ’em like that anymore, and they’re gorgeous.
You can see the stands and dugout in this eggs-zerpt from the film.
Fans of UMich will be keeping an eye on the LA Chargers of the NFL this year to see how coach Jim Harbaugh fares on his return to pro ball after leading the ‘Rines to the NCAA title last season. He was bursting with pride yesterday in this statement:
“You get in those situations, and it’s a test of wills. I was proud of each of the guys who were there. That’s a win. You feel good about yourself. You were challenged. It was a test of will, and you pull it down, or pull it in.”
Competitive sports has its ups and downs, except for two hours yesterday. What Coach Harbaugh was talking about were the eleven men and two women who were trapped in an elevator for two hours. In Dallas. Without air conditioning. Harbaugh praised QB Justin Herbert for staying cool and taking a leadership role during the crisis.
They were finally rescued by Dallas Fire-Rescue, one by one, pulled out through a ceiling panel, drenched in sweat. One of the women trapped with the eleven young athletic men, pictured below, was quick to assure her family that she was fine.
If you’re in Iceland, don’t waste your time shopping for cucumbers. According to a story in the NYT today, the whole country is out of cucumbers. It’s the fault of Logan Moffitt, a TikTok “influencer” known as “Cucumber Guy.” He posts videos on preparing cucumber salads and they’ve gone viral with devastating effect in Iceland, where the entire nation’s population is around 380,000. Since the country is relatively isolated (the name Iceland has nothing to do with “ice.” It’s from “island.”), it’s expensive to import foods when there are shortages. Nevertheless, an emergency cucumber shipment was rushed in from the Netherlands which helped a little. They’re a hardy breed, the Icelanders: they’ll live. Here in Jersey, I just picked up six adorable little ones (a pound) for just $2. God bless America.
Today’s puzzle featured an “echo” theme. Clues repeated themselves and the answers were wacky puns. The best was “Pooh-pooh?” as the clue for THIS BEARS REPEATING. Get it? And “11?” was the clue for ONE AFTER ANOTHER.
For a non-theme clue at 14A: “City with a cowboy hat-wearing replica of the Eiffel Tower,” the answer was PARIS, TEXAS. In 1993, a 65-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower was erected southeast of the city square. In 1998, when Paris, Tennessee put up their 60-foot version, the Texas folks responded by putting a giant red cowboy hat on top of theirs. Hrrrrrrumph!
Paris, TX, however, is marked by some horrific history. This is from Wikipedia:
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, several lynchings were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds as public spectacles, with crowds of white spectators cheering as the African-American victims were tortured and murdered. A Black teenager named Henry Smithwas lynched in 1893. His murder was the first lynching in US history that was captured in photographs sold as postcards and other trinkets commemorating the killing. Journalist Ida B. Wells said of the incident “Never in the history of civilization has any Christian people stooped to such shocking brutality and indescribable barbarism as that which characterized the people of Paris, Texas.”
Well, I can certainly see why the GOP would want to keep that stuff out of the history books. Way too gruesome.
I’ve had a chance to review Puzzle #4 from yesterday’s tournament. All of the puzzles, with solutions, were sent to us. #4 was the one that flummoxed me. It’s by Hoang-Kim Vu, and it’s pure genius, IMO.
I’m going to try to explain its brilliance as best I can. (Bare with me, as one nudist said to the other.) First the central across answers made it so the middle column reading down turned out to be FUN HOUSE MIRROR. Next all of the down clues on the left side of the mirror had to be read by reducing a double letter to a single letter, e.g., common saloon job had to be read as common salon job (because the answer was HIGHLIGHTS). Then, on the right side of the mirror, you had to do the opposite — a single letter in the clue had to be doubled. So Go on the road had to be read as Goo on the road (because the answer was TAR). As a final touch of elegance/genius, it was the same letter that was altered up or down, in terms of the grid’s symmetry. So if an “ee” was reduced to “e” on the left side of the mirror, it was an “e” that was added at the symmetrical position on the right side. (Wow)
It took me forever (in crossword puzzle time) to see what we had to do to the clues, and I ran out of clock before I could get through it with that knowledge.
I know several OC readers are noobies as far as crosswords go. Puzzle #1 from the tourney was for you. Here it is, give it a try.
Did you know the Ohio State flag is five-sided? Learned that from the puzzle today at 56D. I think that may be dull enough for me to share with the Dull Men’s Club (UK). It’ll be my first post. (I’ve commented there before but have never posted.)
Here’s a song about the Ohio River.
So I posted my first post with for the Dull Men and was quickly asked by Des O’Brien if there was any significance to the 17 stars on the flag (see above). It turns out (as I replied) that 13 are for the original 13 colonies, and four were added because Ohio was the 17th state to join the Union. I’m an expert on the Ohio flag now and don’t even know what NJ’s looks like.
Oy. Enough nonsense for today. Thanks for popping by.
The 17th annual Lollapuzzoola Crossword Puzzle tournament was held today in NYC and Owl Chatter competed!
I have to tell you, when I first entered the big room, I was pretty nervous.
But after I found a seat and settled in and picked up some (dreadful) coffee, I looked around at the competition — and then I got really nervous. But it wasn’t my first rodeo. Actually, it would have been my first rodeo, but it wasn’t my first XW tourney — it was my third. And that really helped. I was pretty calm.
Each puzzle had a time limit, 20, 30, or 40 minutes. You earned ten points for each square filled in correctly, 100 bonus points for a perfect grid, and one point for every second you finished before the time expired. There were two divisions: local (for mortals) and express (for serious puzzle folk — those who can complete a NYT Saturday puzzle in ten minutes on average). There was also a pairs division — two people work on each puzzle together. The tournament organizers proudly announced that they have been responsible for close to 40 divorces. [No they didn’t.]
In my division, I came in at #116 out of 169. Fine by me. That’s in the top half, right? Wait. Never mind.
I finished the first two with no errors and had just one error on the last one. D’oh! The fourth one — billed as the toughest — killed me. It was 40 minutes and I was staring at a blank grid for about the first 15 minutes or so. The theme was a “fun house mirror” and each clue was “distorted” with an extra letter in a word on half the grid, and in some other way on the other half. When I finally saw that, I was able to fill in a lot of it, but it took me all 40 minutes and I had 49 errors/blanks. Ouch. There was a lot of blood shed all over the place on that one.
My favorite was the third, although they were all top quality — and the constructors were there, so we could applaud them. The third one was based on the Drop Tower amusement park ride. At a bunch of places in the grid, an answer that had an A in it would suddenly “drop” via a long down string of A’s. Like you were falling and screaming. Then it would hit a level and finish off horizontally. It helped that you could fill in a whole bunch of A’s once you saw that. Several of the clues encouraged us to scream when we reached them, so there was frequent screaming from all over the place. It was funny and less distracting than I feared.
Two women wore dresses like this.
There was an hour-long break for lunch. I brought a tuna salad sandwich on a bagel with a pickle and enjoyed it outdoors on a park bench. Pizza and soda was provided to solvers who wanted it, for $15 (in advance). It looked good, but I was happy with my sandwich.
So that’s my report of a tiring day. Owl Chatter will resume normal broadcasting tomorrow, probably.
Owl Chatter readers — have you seen these men? According to NYPD, these two broke into Rick Pitino’s St. Johns office and made off with a ceremonial sword, a bullhorn, and an autographed basketball. Pitino’s entering his second year as the Johnnies’ head coach. Our staff photographer Phil snapped this shot of the duo as they left the crime scene. The University is offering a reward for any information leading to their capture although, at the moment, the reward is only a few sandwiches.
Please keep an eye out for the sword as well. Pitino released this photo of it:
I’m not going to sugar-coat it — the Owl Chatter offices are falling apart with George on an extended leave to attend to his legal troubles. The new guy is a disaster. I asked for material on Edgar Lee Masters and he brought me the file on Lee Harvey Oswald. Jeez Louise. And we’re completely out of Diet Pepsi except for the decaf kind which everyone hates. Arggggggh.
Edgar Lee Masters was born on this date in Garnett, Kansas, back in 1868, but he grew up in small farming towns in Illinois. He got the idea for his Spoon River Anthology from a collection of Greek poems which focused on daily life and ordinary people. He had over 200 local characters look back on their lives from beyond the grave in the small fictional farming town of Spoon River. It was a great success, selling 80,000 copies in four years, and for the first time in American literature put the focus on small towns.
The only glitch was that the people from the real town (Lewistown, IL), found it insulting and were outraged. It was banned from Lewistown schools and the library for 60 years (until 1974)! Masters’ own mother was on the library board and voted in favor of the ban!Ouch! Masters conceded that his mom was not a fan, but noted that his father loved it. (Not kidding.)
The town has since come around and is proud of Masters and the work. In 2015, the 100th anniversary of its publication was celebrated with tours, exhibits, and performances. The local Oak Hill Cemetery features a memorial statue of Masters, and offers a self-guided walking tour of the graves that inspired the poems.
In yesterday’s puzzle at 2D, the clue was “Sleeveless top” for CAMISOLE. Here’s my tax student, Evelyn, modeling one. Thanks, babe! We’ll see you in class next Friday — it’s my last semester!
At 50D, the clue was “University of North Carolina team, to fans,” which is, of course, HEELS, short for Tar Heels. Here’s Taylor with her broken pricey Louboutin heel that she tossed into the crowd in Brazil. The fellow who caught it is selling it to raise money for his cousin’s cancer treatment. A mensch.
Tay’s butterfly heels have held up, kinehora. But look at them — they could go at any minute, the way she runs around. Travis — skip a practice and take the girl shopping! Remember that t-shirt I saw near Times Square? — “I have as many shoes as I want — said nobody, anywhere, ever.”
Taylor was in the puzzle today. Did you know the term SWIFTIES was added to the Oxford English Dictionary last year? [The clue for it in the puzzle was “Fan base added to the O.E.D. in 2023.”]
The puzzle yesterday was an exercise in wordplay. The theme clues all had words the first two letters of which, phonetically, formed another word that started off the answer. [Huh??] So, e.g., for the clue “SAY WHAT?” the first two letters are S and A, which are also the word “Essay.” And “What?” is a question, so the answer was ESSAY QUESTION. (Get it?) Similarly, “MEDALS” were EMMY [“M-E”] AWARDS.
Commenter Lewis reminded us that this constructor (Brad Wiegmann) likes to play with letters. In an earlier puzzle of his, a brilliant clue was “Nicholson and Nicklaus, e.g.?,” for ONE-EYED JACKS. (Each last name has one letter “i” in it, and their first names are Jack. Wow.) And “Søren Kierkegaard and Chris Isaak, i.e.” was the clue for DOUBLE AGENTS. They each have two letters “a” in their names so they are “double-a” gents.
From egs today: If you get paid for uttering cries of fear, do you “eek out a living?”
Lewis is brilliant at finding little serendipities in puzzles that would be easy to overlook but add to the appreciation of the puzzle. E.g., today he noted that the answers ARM WRESTLE and SHAKE ON IT are near each other, and that the answer SNARE, which is right next to SWIFTIES, contains “ERAS.”
At 55A, “Spice derived from the inner bark of a tropical tree,” was CINNAMON. Remember the first Mission Impossible series? Cinnamon Carter was played by Barbara Bain. She was married to Martin Landau for 37 years (divorced in ’93), and they had two daughters. Bain, who is Jewish, will be turning 93 in a few weeks. Landau died in 2017.
Here’s a good example of a song I would never hear (or hear of) because I am too f*cking old and live under a rock, but is popular enough to be cited in a clue in the NYTXW. The clue was “TiK ToK creator,” and the answer was KESHA.
“Ain’t got a care in the world, but got plenty of beer.”
Let’s end today with two more musical selections. First is a song shared by commenter Son Volt connected to the puzzle’s HORNY TOAD (“Spiny reptile that, despite its name, is actually a lizard”).
And, finally, another LR classic which Rex tapped for the puzzle answer BIG PICTURE, clued with “Forest, in a metaphor.” (You know — not being able to “see the forest for the trees.”)
Honey child, I’ve got my doubts. . .
Who doesn’t? See you tomorrow.
[Late-breaking news: I got the call from the waiting list and will be competing (to use the term very loosely) in this year’s Lollapuzzoola, the XW tournament in NYC tomorrow. Should be fun. I’ll bore you with details in our next post.]
The best thing in the puzzle today was the clue for LAVA: “The floor is [blank].” It’s the kids’ make-believe game that Zoey and Leon like to play. You’re climbing on something, in this case — me, and you absolutely positively cannot touch the floor. Because it is LAVA. Of course, I thought my brilliant grandchildren made it up. Not so, apparently.
For 1D, where the answer was SARA, the constructor chose to go with “Fleetwood Mac song with Stevie Nicks on piano,” instead of Dylan’s.
ALMA was in the puzzle today too, but as ALMA mater, not as ALMA Thomas, whose painting Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers we saw yesterday in the Phillips Collection in DC.
Alma Thomas taught for 35 years in the Shaw Junior High School in segregated Washington DC. She taught the entire time in the same classroom. She only became a full-time artist after she retired from teaching. Her painting on the 1963 March on Washington, in which she marched, became the U.S. postage stamp issued in 2005 commemorating the event.
Thomas did not marry. She wrote, “Once upon a time it was said, don’t die having a ‘Miss’ on your tombstone. I feel very proud of having maintained my Miss. I say that Miss stands for all the jackasses I missed in life.” Her family took a demotion in social status when they moved from Georgia to DC, but they wanted their children to be able to get an education beyond elementary school. Alma and her sister John Maurice Thomas (named after their father), lived in the family home they moved into in DC their entire lives. This painting of Thomas is by Laura Wheeler Waring.
You’ll probably be as shocked as I was to learn that the “Most common Czech surname” is not Bernstein — it’s Novak. Remember Kim? She’s still with us at 91. Her husband since 1976, Robert Molloy, passed away in 2020. Earlier in life, she dated Sammy Davis, Jr., and Wilt Chamberlain. A bad experience with plastic surgery left her open to much abusive criticism after a rare public appearance at the Oscars in 2014. This included Trump graciously stating “she should sue her plastic surgeon.”
Enjoyed the hot dogs at the Gnats game very much — only $4 for a jumbo Hebrew National. Good mustard options and relish. That’s a Tuesday night special. The game itself, not so much. Gnat bats were asleep. Lost 3-1 to Colorado. CJ popped one.
There’s no shortage of idiots in this world. I’m not complaining — where would Owl Chatter be without them? But sometimes the idiocy is so perfect, so brilliant, we just have to stop and marvel. It’s a form of genius. Let’s have a look.
Danny Doherty of Norwood MA is 12. His brother Patrick is 15 and plays hockey with the Boston Bears Club. It’s a very special team, literally, – a special education team formed 25 years ago by John Quilli, for his son who is autistic. Patrick is autistic too and has been on the team for ten years, since he was five.
When Danny complained that he was bored over the summer, his mom Nancy suggested he open an ice cream stand on their lawn and donate half of the money they make to the team. His family made their own ice cream at home and Danny came up with a few flavors, designed a logo, and set up his table. That’s Danny on the right, below. They call the stand “Tree Street Treats.”
They raised $124 the first week and gave $62 to the team. Good stuff! It sounds like your basic feel-good story — American as apple pie, amirite? Until several days later they received a letter from Norwood’s Board of Health. “The Norwood Health Department has received a complaint that you are making and selling scooped ice cream and cookies at your residential property. The Massachusetts Food Code (105CMR. 590) does not allow for the sale of ice cream made in the home. Please desist in these activities.” It was signed by Abbie Atkins, Assistant Public Health Director, and clearly a moron of the highest order.
Rather than close up shop, the Dohertys started giving the ice cream away, for donations from the recipients. Local ice cream shops jumped aboard and held fundraisers. At last report, the stand has raised $7,500 for the team. Save two scoops for us here at Owl Chatter please!!
Baltimore is such a nicely creepy city, thanks to Edgar Allen and his ravens. What other city would name its football team the Ravens — the creepy offshoot of the Orioles. This sign was in the window of a store that sells “Shoes & Chocolate.”
The winter was rough at Valley Forge for Washington and his men, but lunch with Nancy and Eric on our way down today was a blast.
Nancy was as horrified as I was to learn about the endangered status of chocolate sprinkles. She managed to score this precious sample on the black market for $275.
I’ve never had a pickled egg, so when I saw this posted by Bob Lyons of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) I perked right up: “I tried my first ever pickled egg today. Not sure if I liked it or not.”
It seems like the sort of thing you’d know if you liked or not, but maybe it isn’t? Here are some comments:
Sarah Wallis noted: I worked in a Fish and Chip shop when I was 15, some 29 years ago. We used to have massive jars of pickled eggs on the counter. I always thought I’d try one, one day. 29 years later, I still can’t bring myself to try one. I expect it will be a food I request on my deathbed.
Simon Macfeeters asked: Did you swallow it whole?
Eric Hage: I bought the giant jar. Impulse purchase. Took me a year to get through it.
So it got me thinking I should try them. A whole bunch of varieties are sold on Amazon, including pickled quail’s eggs. Not cheap. I guess getting the quail to stand still while it’s pickled increases the labor cost.
These look good.
Here’s a quail with her baby. Neither has been pickled (yet).
Jim Daniels wrote this poem called “American Cheese.” It was in today’s Writer’s Almanac.
At department parties, I eat cheeses my parents never heard of—gooey pale cheeses speaking garbled tongues. I have acquired a taste, yes, and that’s okay, I tell myself. I grew up in a house shaded by the factory’s clank and clamor. A house built like a square of sixty-four American Singles, the ones my mother made lunches With—for the hungry man who disappeared into that factory, and five hungry kids. American Singles. Yellow mustard. Day-old Wonder Bread. Not even Swiss, with its mysterious holes. We were sparrows and starlings still learning how the blue jay stole our eggs, our nest eggs. Sixty-four Singles wrapped in wax— dig your nails in to separate them.
When I come home, I crave—more than any home cooking—those thin slices in the fridge. I fold one in half, drop it in my mouth. My mother can’t understand. Doesn’t remember me being a cheese eater, plain like that.
We’ve been enjoying Irish Cheddar since our trip last October. A cheesemonger in Dublin started us off with a sample.
Owl Chatter is hitting the road for a few days: a short vacation to Elkridge MD, near Baltimore. We hope to be broadcasting from there shortly.
Please join us in wishing the best for our loyal staff member George Santos who is facing his legal difficulties with grace and dignity. Just kidding, of course. Knock ’em for a loop, Georgie!
George joined our staff upon his expulsion from Congress. (It’s the country’s loss, Buddy!) His responsibilities have mainly involved keeping our refrigerator stocked with diet soda. We will miss him terribly while he’s in jail.
Here he is outside of Owl Chatter headquarters recently, on his way to pick up some Fresca,
Adrian Dorson, of the Dull Men’s Club (UK) has been pondering this for a long time:
A bumblebee flying due east hits a train travelling due west, the bumblebee then obviously starts travelling due west with the train.
To change direction from flying east, to being flat and travelling west, the bumblebee at one point must have been stationary in relation to the ground, if so the train must have been too.
Did the bumblebee stop the train?
Jeff Creeach notes: Wait until you think about how wheels work. The part of the wheel that touches the ground is stationary for a split second and the top of the wheel travels two times faster than the car itself.
[What? My head hurts now.]
Craig Williams: At EVERY individual point the train is stationary. To prove this take a photo of a single point in time. Is the train moving in the photo? No. It’s just that in the very next infinitesimally small point in time, it has travelled to a different point in space.
Peter Marshall died on Thursday at his home in Encino CA at the age of 98. He was the host of the funniest game show ever from 1966 to 1981: Hollywood Squares. The game was a tic-tac-toe board with nine celebrities in the squares. Contestants would pick a square and the celeb in the square would answer a question. The contestant “earned” the square if he or she correctly stated whether the answer was correct or not. Typically, the celeb would give a joke answer first and then a real answer.
Celebs often included great comics like Mel Brooks and Joan Rivers. Paul Lynde was a regular and was hysterical. Here are sample Paul Lynde lines: Question: Do guinea pigs whistle? Answer: Only when brought to a boil. Question: When your grandpa put oatmeal on his forehead, what was he trying to do? Answer: Get it in his mouth.
Remember the comic George Gobel? He was also a favorite. Question: Who is pregnant longer: your girlfriend or your elephant? Gobel’s answer, horrified: Who told you about my elephant??
“Is it a good sign if your man loves animals?” was the question for Joan Rivers. “Not to excess,” she replied.
Other regulars included Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie from the old Dick Van Dyke show, and Wally Cox, who was Mr. Peepers.
Gene Hackman, Redd Foxx, Dolly Parton, and Alice Cooper popped in as guest stars, as did — get this — Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron. OJ Simpson was on as a contestant after winning the Heisman Trophy at USC and later returned as a guest star. He was the only person to have been both. [Whatever became of him?]
With so much talent on stage, Marshall’s job was essentially to be the straight man. As he put it: the show’s producers said they prized one quality in particular when they sought a host: “‘We’re looking for a complete nonentity,’ they told me. ‘Well, look no further,’ I said, and they offered me an audition.”
BTW, I had always thought they fed the celebs the questions in advance, because the quips were so quick and funny. But Marshall insisted they didn’t. He did concede they sometimes crafted certain questions for certain celebs expecting to hit paydirt.
Marshall’s name at birth was Ralph Pierre LaCock. If you can’t figure out why he changed it for show biz, see me after class.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. But then he married Laurie Stewart in 1989 and it held. In addition to Laurie, his survivors include three children from his first marriage; 12 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Pete LaCock, the former baseball player, is one of Marshall’s children.
Alright, just a couple more from Paul Lynde.
Q: When is it a good idea to put your panty hose in the microwave for two minutes?
A: When your house is surrounded by the police.
Q: According to Julia Child, how much is a “pinch?”
A: Just enough to turn you on a little.
Q: What is the main thing we get from Honduras?
A: You got it too?!
Q: Marriage kills love. And love kills — what?
A: Twenty minutes.
Q: Within two, how many husbands have the three Gabor sisters had among them?
A: Including their own?
And, last one: When Paul Lynde was asked: According to the Food Editor of the Dallas Morning News, what’s the best reason for pounding meat?, his answer was: “Loneliness.”
Rest in peace, Peter Marshall — I hope you enjoyed it all as much as we did.
The puzzle today by Brandon Koppy had a ton of good stuff in it. If you’re not a puzzle person, you may be wondering, what the hell does that mean? It’s just word clues and answers? Well, they can be fun. At 20A today, the clue was “Reason one might read a ‘Speed Hump’ sign and laugh.” Answer: DIRTY MIND.
Or at 35A: “Jamie Lee Curtis or Neve Campbell, notably.” Answer: SCREAM QUEEN.
56A was cute: “A deal’s a deal.” NO BACKSIES!
At 50A, “The “1” in 8-8-1, e.g.,” was a very clever clue for TIE (get it?).
There were two Egyptian gods in the puzzle — that’s two more than I’d prefer: OSIRIS and AMON-RA. Rex asked: Who’s paying the NYT for this kind of exposure? Big Egyptology, no doubt.
I learned something about beer at 36D: The clue was “Low-cost lager from Anheuser-Busch, familiarly.” The beer they were looking for was Natural Ice, but the answer was its cool street name: NATTY ICE.
Also learned that in Buffalo it’s a faux pas to order RANCH with your wings. Here’s Rex on that: “I love the idea that some burly Bills fan snarfing wings is gonna use a word like “faux pas” with orange Buffalo sauce dripping off his lips and fingers. ‘RANCH? Oh dear, no. It’s simply not done,’ he splurted.”
Last, at 51A, “Hold please?” was a great clue for I NEED A HUG.
Who doesn’t?
The brilliant actress Gena Rowlands passed away this month at the age of 94. She was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which, if you saw, you will never forget. In addition to an obit, the Times ran an article by Manohla Dargis on just one scene from that movie. Here’s how Dargis sets it up:
“Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.”
Dargis goes on:
“As the two begin working it out, Cassavetes [the director] cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.
“As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. ‘Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,’ she says. ‘I can be that. I can be anything.’”
I remember that scene. I remember it seemed to me that she was taking us to a place we’ve been, but only alone, and we didn’t know anyone else knew we had been there. Here’s how Dargis continues:
“Rowlands breaks my heart each time I watch this scene, to the point that sometimes I’ve been reluctant to revisit it. It’s overwhelming and, even after repeat viewings, it’s still shocking, and it seems as intimate and genuine as my own agonizing fights and struggles. I feel the performance — and Mabel’s confusion and desperation — in my bones.”
Rowlands herself recounted a different scene from Under the Influence. She and Falk were working up an emotional intensity that suddenly seemed to be going too far. Cassavetes was shooting it with a hand-held camera and thought something cracked in Rowlands. “She’s gone,” he said, and he dropped the camera and “crashed the scene,” thinking he had to pull her out of the character.
“’I think he thought he pushed me just a step too far,’ Rowlands said with faint amusement. He hadn’t. Instead, working in concert, Rowlands and Cassavetes had in this film pushed themselves to the point of perfection.”
Forgive me for taking so much verbatim from the article, but you need to see the last paragraph before we say goodbye to her.
“Rowlands and Cassavetes changed American cinema, and they also, as importantly, changed the women in it, making films that spoke to their liberated moment. Cassavetes may not have been a feminist, strictly speaking. Yet he and Rowlands made some of the greatest, truest films about women. In Rowlands, Cassavetes had an obvious muse; he also had an equal, a partner who could go to the edge, who could open veins, break hearts and blow minds with characters who were messy and real inside and out, and gloriously, at times terrifyingly imperfect. There have always been brilliant actresses who could bring great art and honest feeling to the screen. Few have been as transcendent as Rowlands — an immortal.”
The Wellington Files 