Today’s poem in The Writer’s Almanac is by Louis Simpson and is called “Tall Girl Running.” No doubt it’s a nod to the Boston Marathon that is being run today.

The poem starts with a quote by Richard Dawkins: “There is no gene which single-handedly builds a leg, long or short. Building a leg is a multi-gene cooperative enterprise.“

She went running by.
I never saw a girl

with such long legs.
She ran by again.

I shouted to her,
“You run like an angel.”

She smiled and said,
“Thank you.”

She did some knee bends.
I said, “Where did you

get those legs?”
“My father,” she said,

and went her way smiling.

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As I noted earlier, Rex solves the Monday puzzles using the down clues only because they are otherwise too easy. This has led to some very funny comments on other ways to increase the challenge. Michael Joseph wrote this today:

My Monday blindfold is at the dry cleaners, so I tried solving this in a pitch black closet and found it to be extremely challenging. Not only did I have trouble knowing what the clues were. I also ended up with a DNF [did not finish] because I didn’t realize that my pen had run out of ink.

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With SAP in the puzzle today at 10A, LMS confessed: I prefer the crappy chemical-laden fake maple syrup to the real stuff from real maple sap. I’m thinking I like all the added sodium, I dunno. Waffles with the “good” syrup eat too sweet and one-notedly.

[Owl Chatter could not disagree more.]

It elicited this response from Wanderlust:

LMS, I don’t agree with you on syrup, but I’m not a snob, I swear. I’d actually like to do a blind taste test to see if my purism will hold. I remember when Cook’s Illustrated magazine did a blind taste test with serious foodies on real vanilla extract vs. artificial, and artificial won. It rocked the cooking world. I think they did it again, and this time the real stuff won, and everyone settled down. My sibs and I grew up eating Little Debbies Swiss Rolls in our lunch boxes, while our cousins had Ho-Hos. Each of us insisted our product was superior, so we did a blind taste test with the chocolate logs cut into slices so we wouldn’t know the size (Ho-Hos are bigger). We sheepishly had to admit Ho-Hos were better. Oh, and I should say that we did this taste test as adults in our 50’s. OK, have I proven I am not a snob yet?

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Meir Shalev, an Israeli writer known for his sense of humor, died last Tuesday at his home in the village of Alonei Abba in northern Israel’s Jezreel Valley. He was only 74. He wrote mostly about the years before Israel became a state.

On the Bible, he observed:

The Tenth Commandment, unlike the other nine, is a prohibition against coveting — that is, against feeling, not action.

“Everyone covets,” he wrote. “Everyone fails the last commandment. Thus, the biblical lawgiver made sure that no Jew would ever get a perfect 10 in the test of the commandments. Nine is the highest score on the Jewish report card.”

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Rachel Pollack also died recently at her home in Rhinebeck at the age of only 77. She was a transgender activist and writer who created the first trans super-heroine for DC Comics.

Pollack said she came out as transgender and lesbian in 1971 and underwent transition surgery in 1976. She noted a difference between when she underwent her transition 47 years ago and today. “The big thing that’s changed, an astonishing change, is that transgender people are now visible,” she said. “Society recognizes that this is something people can be. Obviously, there is a strong reactionary element fighting change, as always, but the difference is remarkable.”

She developed a fascination for tarot cards in her youth, and used them in her writing. Her guide “Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom,” established her as an authority.

The trans superhero she developed for DC Comics was Kate Godwin, aka Coagula. She had an unusual superpower — she could dissolve objects with one hand, and solidify them with the other.

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Tired. See you tomorrow.

At 101D today, the clue was “Manatee,” and the answer was SEA COW. The always sunny Lewis noted: For Manatee I threw in “dugong” immediately, which, of course didn’t work. But it got me wondering about dugongs, and during a quick investigation, I learned that they are related to manatees, with the main difference being the tail. The dugong’s is forked (bifurcated), while the manatee’s is paddle-like. Amazingly, dugongs and manatees are more related to elephants than they are to other marine mammals!

Here’s a manatee with its paddle-like tail:

And here’s a dugong:

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Does the name Buddy Sorrell ring a bell? Dig down — it was Morey Amsterdam’s character’s name on The Dick Van Dyke Show. He visited the puzzle today! Remember the classic theme song at the opening of the show with DVD falling over the ottoman (or, later, skirting it)? Check it out:

In an interview on NPR in 2010, Van Dyke revealed that Amsterdam wrote lyrics for the tune which were never used. He sang them. Here they are:

So you think that you’ve got trouble?
Well, trouble’s a bubble
So tell old Mr. Trouble to get lost!

Why not hold your head up high and
Stop cryin’, start tryin’
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.

When you find the joy of livin’
Is lovin’ and givin’
You’ll be there when the winning dice are tossed.

A smile is just a frown that’s turned upside down
So smile, and that frown will defrost.

And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed

Amsterdam was his real last name. His first name was Moritz. He was so quick at churning out jokes that he became known as the “human joke machine.” He sometimes performed with a mock machine on his chest, hanging by a strap. He turned a crank and paper rolled out; he would then pretend to read the machine’s joke, although actually the paper was blank. He was also an accomplished cellist, and very knowledgeable on the Bible.

He was born in Chicago on 12/14/1908, and died in LA at age 87 on 10/28/1996. He said his neighborhood in Beverly Hills was so exclusive that even the police had an unlisted number. He was married for twelve years (’33 – ’45) to actress Mabel Todd, and was married to Kay Patrick from 1949 until his death did them part. He had two kids with Kay, a son Gregory and a daughter Cathy.

His character on the DVD show was one of the few openly Jewish TV characters of the era. One episode centered on his adult Bar-Mitzvah. I remember it and it was wonderful. Carl Reiner, who created the show, said Amsterdam’s character was based on Mel Brooks.

Here’s one of his lines: According to statistics, a man eats a prune every twenty seconds. I don’t know who this fellow is, but I know where to find him.

This is the first time I recall him appearing in a puzzle. Please pop by again soon, Buddy — We love you!

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If you’re at all like me, you leaped out of your seat while watching the horrific events of Jan. 6 and shouted, “OMG, I think that’s Logan James Barnhart, 41, of Holt, Michigan, participating in the mayhem (or, more accurately, the januaryhem)!”

Barnhart, of course, is the male model who has been on the cover of numerous romance novels, including Owl Chatter fave: Stepbrother UnSEALed: A Bad Boy Military Romance. Barnhart was sentenced to 36 months in prison after pleading guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers with a dangerous weapon.

Et tu, Barnhart?  

“The way I was acting seems so foreign to me,” Barnhart told the U.S. district judge, Rudolph Contreras, in what seems like a pretty dopey exculpatory statement. But the feeling here is that Barnhart was not put on this planet for his brains.

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And, speaking of a lack of brains, the NYT reported today that thieves broke into a truck parked at a Walmart in Philadelphia and made off with $200,000 in cash. The only problem is it was made up entirely of dimes. The truck was transporting the dimes from the U.S. Mint in Philly to Florida. There were ten thieves, and they made off with roughly two million dimes, weighing five tons.

Officer Miguel Torres, a spokescop for the Philly police wondered how the robbers would be able to spend the money. That’s a damn good question Torres. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you.

Aaron J. Chalfin, a professor of criminology at U. Penn, intent on revealing himself to be an idiot, said: “Millions of dimes is a lot of money, so it doesn’t seem so silly.” It doesn’t? What the f**k planet are you living on?

Cops arriving on the scene found thousands of dimes scattered on the parking lot ground. Owl Chatter photographers, of course, were on the spot as well. Here’s a close-up shot they managed to capture before the cops sealed off the area.

The article in today’s NYT ended with (and I’m not kidding):

As the department continues its investigation, Officer Torres offered some advice to those possibly harboring stuffed piggy banks. “If for some reason you have a lot of dimes at home,” he said, “this is probably not the time to cash them in.”

Yup. Right on target again, Torres.

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Looking back: Did you ever catch the wind? Not everyone does. You have to be very lucky. Very very lucky. And if you manage it — don’t let go.

When sundown pales the sky
I want to hide a while behind your smile
And everywhere I’d look, your eyes I’d find.

Here’s Donovan’s song. It’s held up over the years, for sure. The owls are sending it out tonight to friends Hank and Judy, who are in our thoughts, and who got very very lucky, many years ago, and held on.

See you tomorrow.

If you have moments of doubt about the value you’ve contributed to the world, take comfort in the fact that Leonardo da Vinci once wrote “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.”

It’s his birthday today. He was born out of wedlock in Tuscany to a peasant woman in 1452. His dad was a notary. Here’s something I didn’t know about him — he wrote in mirror-image script, i.e., backwards. This may have been easier because he was a lefty, but still. . . He never married and had few close relationships with women. He was very close with several of his male students and was likely gay. Whatever. Happy Birthday Leo!

It’s also the birthday of Henry James, born in NYC in 1843. I’ve read some of his stuff, but I must say I found it a little stiff. I’m not alone. Oscar Wilde was so bored by James’s writing, he said that James “wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty.” T.S. Eliot quipped, “James has a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” And Ginny Wolff once wrote to a friend,  “Please tell me what you find in Henry James. We have his works here, and I read, and I can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale. Is there really any sense in it?”

A professor of mine once told a story in which a reader complained to James that he could spend a whole paragraph on a woman touching a handkerchief to her forehead. And James replied, “My good woman — a woman touching a handkerchief to her forehead is an entire novel.”

Nevertheless, Happy Birthday HJ!

Rather than dig up a photo of the stodgy old fellow, here’s Cybill Shepherd, who played James’s Daisy Miller in the film version.

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And speaking of the droolingly beautiful, LMS treated us to a discussion of the difference between drool and slobber. It came about because the clue at 3D today was “[I am so-o-o hungry]” and the answer was DROOL. Here’s LMS:

“Then I sat, yet again, pondering the difference between DROOL and slobber. Slobber feels much more active and exuberant, like the slobberer is fully engaged and aware. But DROOL feels quieter and sneakier. Like maybe the DROOLer isn’t even aware of their offense. Also, DROOL is a naptime event. If I happen upon a napper who is slobbering, I’ma back myself out of the room on tippy toe and rethink my relationship with this person.”

On the answer GOING RATES, she noted:  “reminded me of all the pay toilets in Europe.”

In my eyes, though, for laughs, nothing can top her comments on “Mom.” Here’s today’s, triggered by the answer THEME, which was clued by “Word with party or park.”

Mom and I have a THEME party coming up – a Derby Day at the clubhouse of our little community. She was so excited about it, about having me participate with her, that I didn’t have the heart to say no. There will be food! And games! And we have to dress up and wear hats! And this year no one will be admitted without a ticket, so we have to get ours fast! (Apparently last year, there were sneakers-in who crashed the event, so the food ran out pretty quickly. People are still talking about it.) Look. I’m no spring chicken, but I can tell you that an afternoon spent being charming to Mom’s friends, pretending to enjoy the cloying punch (ladled out from the actual punch bowl into the matching little punch glasses), nibbling on the nuts and after-dinner mints. . . jeez Louise as I type this, I hate myself for being such a jerk. But now I’m caught up in finding the perfect white hat to go with my outfit. And I’m borrowing some white gloves from my sister. Mom got her hat from a nearby Goodwill-type store for only $3. I’m looking on Amazon for mine. Go big, or go home.

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Ed Koren died yesterday in Brookfield, VT, at age 87. Starting in May of 1962, thousands of his cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, many with his large, cheerful, furry animal characters, or, below, not so cheerful. (Note the crossed arms and legs.)

In case you can’t read the caption, it says: Rufus here is the center of our life.

Koren was on the art faculty at Brown until 1977, which, happily, overlapped with our friend Bob’s time up there. I sent Bob the sad news and he replied saying Koren was an amazing guy.

One of my favorites of his graced the cover of one of his collections. A little girl is standing with a look of utter despair on her face. She is holding a cone out of which fell the scoop of ice cream it previously contained. The splat of ice cream is on the ground at her feet. Her mom is bending over her sympathetically and says: “Do you want to talk about it?”

Many years ago, I had an idea for a Koren cartoon. There’s a car with a bumper sticker on it that says, “We Brake for Animals.” It’s stopped on the road, and in front of it is a giant furry Koren creature, smiling down on it benevolently. I sent the suggestion to Koren, care of The New Yorker. He wrote back that they are not permitted to take suggestions, but then he drew it, wonderfully, on the paper I wrote my letter on. I still have it somewhere in the house — if I can find it, I’ll show it to you.

“I’m the kind of American middle-class folk I like to draw,” Koren said in 1982. He found subjects everywhere. Walking in the woods, he was passed by a jogger, who called out: “Working on my quads!”

“There’s a cartoon,” he said.

The NYT obit included these:

A bearded snob on his grand portico greets a grimy plumber: “Ah, Hopkins! Finalmente!”

A bathroom mirror speaks a dreaded morning message: “Time has not been kind to you.”

As two bearlike creatures look hungrily up a tree trunk at a hiking couple cowering in the branches, the man says to his wife, “Tell them how hard we’ve worked to protect their habitat.

He moved to Vermont in 1982. He joined the volunteer fire department and was its captain for 30 years. He never retired from drawing. For The New Yorker’s April 17 issue, he drew Moses on a mount overlooking his people and holding up a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments while proclaiming, “Time for an update!”

He is survived by his wife, three children, two grandchildren, and this guy:

Rest in peace, Koren.

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In today’s puzzle, some were flummoxed by the clue “Many a unicorn,” the answer for which was TECH STARTUP. So Rocketman explained:

“A unicorn is a start-up/private company that has a valuation of more than one billion dollars. A NYT article today about the rising trend of criminal prosecutions of start-up executives (The End of Faking It in Silicon Valley) noted that there are currently around 1200 such companies. I worked for one of the ones mentioned in the article and my former boss reports for prison on April 27th. I have a nice bottle of champagne reserved for the occasion.”

And then there was “Papal topper,” the answer for which was TIARA. Really? He wears a tiara? Get outta here! Sailor explained:

“The Papal TIARA (a three-tiered crown, actually) was retired by Paul VI in a gesture of support for the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. No pope has worn it since 1963. So a bishop’s mitre has been the actual “Papal topper” for the last 60 years.”

And here’s Southside Johnny on the matter: I’ll admit to being confused by the clue for TIARA. I know that the Catholic Church has been struggling with the whole gender-bending and age of consent quagmire for like centuries now, but still the thought of the Pope in a Miss Universe contest still seemed like a stretch to me. Then I saw that a TIARA is also a diadem “worn by a Pope” – so today I learned that diadem is a synonym for a funny hat.

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27A was “Smoking,” and the answer was RED HOT. Here’s Billy Lee Riley letting you know that his gal is RED HOT and your gal ain’t doodley-squat. Hrrrrumph!

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Dinner at Bell’s Tavern tonight in Lambertville with Dan and Mary. Happy Birthday (yesterday) Mary! I ordered their “Signature Burger,” but had to send it back — there was ink all over it!

Ba da boom!

See you tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by.

Do you ever do something “bad” while driving, like run a red light, and then start making up a story in your head to try to weasel out of a ticket in case the cops stop you? Me neither. The story makes perfect sense to you, but a little guy in the back of your brain knows you wouldn’t have a chance. Anyway, there was a GEO METRO in yesterday’s puzzle, and I love this story posted by whatsername:

A former coworker got stopped for “attempted speeding” in a GEO METRO. This guy commuted 125 miles each way, much of which was through the mountainous areas of northern Arkansas where he was pulled over. He explained to the patrolman that he had to go as fast as he possibly could on the way down the mountain; otherwise he wouldn’t have enough speed to make it back up the next one. The cop stepped back, looked at the vehicle, shook his head, and sent him on his way without so much as a warning.

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The clue for OTTER yesterday was: “Animal that might make a waterslide to play on.” Otters are notoriously playful. They may construct a slide to get from point A to point B, but if it’s fun, they will keep going down it over and over again before continuing on. The writeup on otters in Britannica notes in the very first sentence that otters are known for their playful manner. Adorable. I don’t know what our photographer Phil did to get this one to wave to us. You’re incredible, Philly! We don’t pay you enough.

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Mary Quant died in her home in Surrey, England yesterday. She was 93. The headline in the Times obit called her a British fashion revolutionary. We live in the world of our vision; who knows how profound the changes she brought to our world really are?

Quant opened a boutique called Bazaar on King’s Road in London in 1955, and started selling the outfits that she and her bohemian friends were wearing, “a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories,” — short flared skirts and pinafores, knee socks and tights, funky jewelry and berets in all colors. She made some of the clothing herself, and the store became a hangout like a coffee bar.

A decade later, Mary Quant was a global brand, with licenses all over the world — she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1966 for her contribution to British exports — and sales that would soon reach $20 million. When she toured the U.S. with a new collection, she was greeted like a fifth Beatle; at one point she required police protection.  In 2009, she was honored by the Royal Mail with her own postage stamp, featuring a model wearing a black Mary Quant flared mini. In 2015, Ms. Quant was made a dame.

It’s not clear who actually “invented” the miniskirt, but Quant as much as anyone brought about its explosion, and she has been called the “mother” of the miniskirt. Here’s a young Mary herself, and then one of my tax students modeling a mini.

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OBOE is a common answer in Crossworld; it shares three letters with our favorite snack treat OREO. But the clue for it today was new to me: “Heckelphone relative.” Any of you hear of a heckelphone before? It was developed by Wilhelm Heckel at the suggestion of Richard Wagner. It’s larger than an oboe and is an octave lower.

The first annual meeting of the North American Heckelphone Society took place on August 6, 2001, at the Riverside Church in New York City, with six heckelphonists in attendance. Later meetings have included as many as 14 instruments.

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Good night readers! Sweet dreams!

I’ll spare you a photo on this, but not the discussion. If you’ve been to Greenland, have you tasted (or heard of) kiviaq? It’s a staple at celebrations among the Inughuit, a distinct Inuit culture indigenous to Greenland. The ingredient list includes one seal carcass (hollowed out, of course), and 300 to 500 dovekies. These are small birds, also called little auks.

You take your 300 to 500 whole dovekies (beaks, feathers, and all) and cram them into the seal carcass. You then sew up the opening and seal it with seal fat. One nice thing (perhaps the only one) is that seal fat repels flies. On the other hand, you may wonder about a “delicacy” that even flies don’t want any part of.

Hopefully, you’re not too hungry at this point in time because the next step is to bury the whole mess under rocks for a few months to ferment. When it’s dug up, and opened up, you skin the little birds and eat them one at a time. Yum.

Our friend Pam has made recipes that have appeared in Owl Chatter before. Let us know how the kiviaq turns out!! Maybe you can bring a few dovekies on the Fourth. You should have enough time for the fermenting, no?

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Alicia “Lisa” Shepard died on April 1; she was only 69. (Anyone dying within five years of my age in either direction gets an “only.”)

She was at the center of some controversy when she was the ombudsman at NPR, a post she held for nearly 4 years. It was back when the Bush administration (W’s) was using waterboarding to elicit information from detainees (or to force them to finish their kiviaq). NPR was using language such as “enhanced interrogation tactics” instead of labeling them torture, and it was accused of serving as a right-wing apologist. Bush would not refer to waterboarding as torture, but Obama did.

Shepard personally believed it was torture, but felt an obligation for NPR to be neutral. So her position was to have the practice described and let the listener decide. E.g., to report that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds.” But she and NPR were accused by some of misleading its listeners and adopting “Orwellian government euphemisms.”

She also wrote a book on Woodward and Bernstein, “Life in the Shadow of Watergate.” She revealed in it that Woodward and Bernstein greatly angered Barry Sussman, an editor at WAPO with whom they worked very closely on the Watergate story. Sussman felt he should have been listed as a third author on “All the President’s Men.” He told Shepard: “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.” Ouch.

The cause of death was lung cancer. She is survived by her husband, their son, and a grandson. When asked how it was raising her son through his teen years, she just shook her head. “It was torture,” she said.

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The puzzle today was by Robin Yu. Yeah, Yu. It had several phrases that did something weird until you found the “revealer.” E.g., for the clue “Dangerously near,” the answer should have been TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. But the answer seemed to start with CLOSE and the entire phrase wouldn’t fit in the spaces allotted to it. The same thing happened later with TOO HOT TO HANDLE — the answer started with HOT and couldn’t fit.

Cleverly, the revealer turned out to be TOO LITTLE TOO LATE, and what you had to do was shift the TOO to the end of the answer (“too late”) and squoosh it into one square (“too little”). Neat.

It earned a rare nod of approval from Rex on his blog — he is famously critical. And among the comments was this from Constructor Yu:

“Wow, I got a rave review from Rex! I’ve been reading your blog for years and this absolutely made my day. Thank you!”

There were some bruisers in it. 27D: “Romantic music genre originating in the Dominican Republic.” WTF? Turns out to be BACHATA. Gimme a break! And there was a cross that defeated me: 71A was “Some compound gases,” which was MONOXIDES, and I couldn’t get the I from the crosses because 58D was “Singer Zayn,” with the answer MALIK. Never heard of him. He’s a good-looking kid. Thirty-years old and British. His mom’s British/Irish and his dad’s Pakistani.

He has a daughter with model Gigi Hadid, but they broke up in 2021. There was some abuse/violence involved, sorry to say. He especially had problems with Hadid’s mom.

Here’s the lovely Ms. Hadid. Is that a wrist watch down there?

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Last, do you know the difference between comfits and confits? The clue today was “Candied fruits or nuts,” and that’s COMFITS. As for confits, Barbara S. kindly explained:

Confit is any type of food that is cooked slowly over a long period as a method of preservation. Confit, as a cooking term, describes when food is cooked in grease, oil, or sugar water, at a lower temperature, as opposed to deep frying.

Both differ quite a bit from the fermentation of dovekies sealed up in a hollowed-out seal carcass buried under rocks for a couple of months. But you already know about that.

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See you tomorrow.

Hobie Landrith was missing. Well, he died last week, but I mean he was missing from my autograph collection. He was a good example of the type of player I would not care about having in the collection — a back-up catcher for a variety of teams over a respectable but unspectacular 14-year career. But his obit today made him a “must get” in my eyes: He was the first ever Met!

When the Mets (along with the Houston Colt 45’s) were formed in 1962, an expansion draft was held. Each Major League team could protect most of its roster, but the new teams could draft unprotected players. Houston went first and grabbed shortstop Eddie Bressoud from the Giants. Then the Mets made Landrith their first choice. When Manager Casey Stengel was asked why they chose Landrith, he said you gotta have a catcher, or else you’re gonna have a lot of passed balls. Landrith was the catcher and batted eighth in the Mets first regular season game. He went 0 for 4, made an error, and allowed three runners to steal. Oh, well. It’s baseball — not a fairy tale.

On May 12, 1962, Landrith came up to pinch hit in the bottom of the ninth with the Mets down 2-1. Rod Kanehl was on base, having pinch run for Gil Hodges. Before Landrith stepped into the box, Stengel called time and whispered something in his ear. The great Warren Spahn was pitching for the Braves. Landrith sent the first pitch over the fence for a game-winning home run. When Stengel was asked later what it was he whispered, he said “I told him to hit a home run.”

It was almost negated. Kanehl failed to touch third base. Luckily, third base coach Solly Hemus noticed and stopped Kanehl in his tracks and had him go back and touch third before Landrith did. Had Landrith touched the base first, Kanehl would have been called out and the Braves would have won the game on a walk-off home run by the opposing team.

[Side note: I rode the subway home from a Mets game once along with Solly Hemus. That’s how I got his autograph. He was very friendly.]

One of the other teams Landrith played for was Cincinnati. According to Wikipedia, it was during the height of anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S., and the Reds officially changed their name to the Cincinnati Redlegs to remove any potential “confusion” between the baseball team and Communists.

Let’s just tip-toe away from that. Comments could only diminish its luster.

When I noticed that Landrith was missing from my collection, I went on eBay and picked up a nice signed card by him for under $10. It’s pictured below. The lack of monetary value is more than made up for by the story, the historic value.

Landrith is survived by his wife, six children, his brother, 11 grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren. He was 93. He’ll be settling in behind the plate once he gets through those pearly gates. Even Heaven can always use a solid back-up catcher.

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“Weezie” had a perceptive and heartfelt comment on today’s puzzle, IMHO. The puzzle included Toni Morrison, Nat King Cole, Langston Hughes, stuff from India (tandoori oven and atta flour), and Ravi Shankar. Also Michaela COEL, British actress and screenwriter.

Weezie noted: I really appreciated how non Eurocentric/white-centric this puzzle was. It is a great example of how much more inclusive crosswords can be while still being accessible. Another fabulous example in another dimension of inclusion was cluing STEER as “Use a wheelchair’s push rims, for instance.” Seeing that casual inclusion of disabled people’s experiences – not in any kind of exceptionalizing, pitying, or “inspiration porn” way – feels like it normalized disability, much like it normalized decentering whiteness.

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Wow — a lot of attention on Tennessee lately. Last month, during deliberation on a bill to allow the use of firing squads as an execution method, GOP State Representative Paul Sherrell suggested adding an amendment that would allow lynching as well: “hanging by a tree.”

In response, Democrat Justin J. Pearson attempted to read out the names of lynching victims in Shelby County, where the majority of the lynchings in Tennessee took place, but was cut off by House Speaker Cameron Sexton, who stated he was “out of line,” the “he” being Pearson, of course, not Sherrell. Sherrell apologized for the remarks two days later. Members of the Tennessee Black Caucus criticized his apology for being “insincere.” Sherrell was removed from the Criminal Justice Committee. Yup — that probably wasn’t the best committee for the guy.

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The theme for Sunday’s puzzle was aphorisms where only the first half is given and the remainder can be omitted because it’s understood. A BIRD IN THE HAND is all you need to say, right? Similarly, WHEN IN ROME, or IF YOU CANT STAND THE HEAT. Some took issue with the inclusion of SPEAK OF THE DEVIL, claiming that it has no second part. But the consensus was that it does – something like Speak of the devil “and he appears,” or the more lurid “and you see his horns.”

Each of these is an example of an “anapodoton.” That’s what they are called. Another example from the puzzle was ALL THAT GLITTERS, and one person corrected that, claiming it should be “all that glisters.” WTF?? Can’t be! But it sort of is. The saying predates Shakespeare by several hundred years, but his version of it (in The Merchant of Venice), was “all that glisters is not gold.” It changed to glitters by the time Dryden used it in 1687, and that’s the current common usage. Both words mean the same thing.

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Three cheers for Ronnie Gajownik, first female manager of a High-A level minor league ballclub, The Hillsboro Hops, in the Diamondback farm system. Hillsboro is in Oregon, in the Portland area.

She’s gay too! Here’s a sweet shot from her wedding. Owl Chatter will be pulling for the Hops bigtime this season! So far, so good — they are 3-1.

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Let’s close on that nice note — see you tomorrow!

Hi everybody! We haven’t been chattering as much as usual of late because we’ve been out visiting our boy, Worthington, in Michigan. That’s him in the middle, with Wilma on the left, and (me) Welly, on the right. We just got home so we’ll be starting up again soon!

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In today’s puzzle, 3D was Misunderstood song lyric like “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.” The answer was MONDEGREEN. I hope you’re familiar with the term — it’s when you mis-hear a song lyric with amusing results. In the puzzle clue, of course, the actual lyric was “kiss the sky.”

The commentariat was rife with examples. From Silent Night: Round John Virgin.

From Bad Moon Risin’: There’s a bathroom on the right.

From Pabloinnh: Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with the light from a bulb.

Lewis chimed in with: The mondegreen of my early early youth was in the song “Runaway” by Del Shannon, where what I heard was, “I’m a walkin’ in the rain / Through the groin I feel a pain”.

From Barbara S.: Petula Clark: “Listen to the rhythm of the crackers in the city” or sometimes when I really heard the F-sound “Listen to the rhythm of the catfish in the city.”

From JonB3: “Now that you’ve gone, all that’s left is a xylophone”

From Carola: Heard in church as a child: In “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “Christ the royal master leans against the phone” (= leads against the foe). Obviously from the olden days of wall phones. [very olden]

“Hold me closer, Tony Danza.”

From egsforbreakfast: My favorite Mondegreen came from a neighbor kid who thought that “She’s got a ticket to ride” was “She’s got a chicken giraffe” (and she don’t care!).

Burtonkd had a good one: “The girl with colitis goes by.” (kaleidoscope eyes)

Personally, I like the line from Dylan’s Jack of Hearts: “Rosemary combed her hair and took a cabbage into town.”

Taylor Slow explained where the term comes from: The word originates with journalist Sylvia Wright, who wrote a column in the 1950s in which she recounted hearing the Scottish folksong The Bonny Earl of Morray. Wright misheard the lyric “Oh, they have slain the Earl o’ Morray and laid him on the green” and thought it was “Oh, they have slain the Earl o’ Morray and Lady Mondegreen.”

Did you know the difference between a mondegreen and an eggcorn? A mondegreen is a misconception based on a song lyric. An eggcorn is when it derives from anything else.

Did someone say Del Shannon? Remember this look?

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See you tomorrow!

It’s the birthday today of Eadweard Muybridge. He was born in 1830 in Surrey, England, moved to California in the 1850’s, and became one of the first internationally known photographers. From 1883 to 1886 he was based at the U. of Pennsylvania and produced over 100,000 photos of animals and humans in motion.

He designed a camera that could take a picture in one-thousandth of a second. He set up 24 of them along a racetrack with trip wires to pull the shutters. The resultant series of pictures of a horse galloping proved for the first time that all four of a horse’s hooves will sometimes be off the ground at the same time.

He died at the age of 74, never having completed his centipede project.

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Do you ever “misread” an event and show up “underdressed?” On this day in 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his 28,000 troops to General Ulysses S. Grant, thus ending the Civil War. The night before, Grant was having a rough time of it. He knew the Union army had Lee’s troops fucked, but Lee wasn’t giving up the fight.

Grant went to bed dirty, tired, and miserable with a bad migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” It didn’t work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before, and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.

An escort from Lee met up with Grant and handed him a note. It essentially said, We’ve had it — it’s over. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

Grant allowed Lee to choose the location for the surrender, and Lee’s troops found the homestead of Wilmer McLean. When McLean showed them to a run-down unfurnished house on his property, they said What the fuck McLean — don’t you know what’s going down here today, you idiot? So he let them use the main house.

Lee showed up in a new uniform, silk-stitched boots, a felt hat, and a jewel-studded sword. Grant arrived in a mud-splattered uniform and boots, with tarnished shoulder straps. “Shit, Lee,” Grant said, “Would it have killed you to let me know I was supposed to dress up for this? Look at me. And the goddamn Owl Chatter photographers are here.” [See photo below.]

Instead of taking Lee’s troops into custody, Grant allowed them to return to their homes with their weapons and horses, and with their pride. Lee had told Grant that his men were starving. Without hesitation, Grant told Lee he could have all the provisions he wanted. For the rest of his life, Lee never allowed an unkindly word to be said about Grant in his presence.

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Our lunch at the Gandy Dancer in Annie Arbor did not disappoint. Sam and Sarah ordered different treatments of salmon, Linda went with the scallops, and I had the snapper — all excellent. The calamari appetizer was even better. Here are some shots. Can you find Sam and Linda dining?

After our meal we took a long walk around Ann Arbor. We found this poem posted in a cafe window. It’s by Ellen Stone, and it’s called If You Don’t Think You Do Anything Right — for John Prine.

Make beer w/one can of cheap lager.
Consider becoming more flavored yourself.
Eat more bone marrow. Reduce cruciferous
vegetables especially cabbage. Soak your feet
in well water centered with rind of blood orange.

Remember clubs of cheery types of people who
gather in groups like knitters, coin collectors
and those who like old dolls. Do more meditation
when recycling & garbage has finally been collected.
Sing at sunrise or when the dew comes off the grass.

Embrace your household of living beings —
mice, squirrels or your offspring. Find
a handful of fountain pens, freaks & curlers
or the right side of the bed. Ask everyone
one song that makes them cry every day.

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Thanks for dropping in. See you tomorrow, if we can get onto the internet in Greensburg, PA.

An important rule of Owl Chatter is, if you are confused about something, rather than calmly thinking it through, say something as quickly as possible to make it clear what an idiot you are.

Here’s an example. Linda and I drove 300 miles to Dubois PA yesterday and settled into a nice restaurant called Station 101. (It’s off of Exit 101 on Route 80 — what are the odds?) We sat down, decided what we wanted to have, and I dashed off to the men’s room. When I returned, Linda got up to go to the ladies’ room while a woman was dropping off some napkins or something. So I said to her: “I can order.”

Now here’s where things got sticky. She asked me, “You’re not waiting for her to get back?”

The thing is, I didn’t know whom she meant by “her.” It didn’t occur to me that she meant Linda. Because it had to be clear that by saying “I can order” I wasn’t waiting for Linda to get back, right? It seemed (to me) to be “baked into” my statement, that I was able to order without Linda. So it had to be, I reasoned, that this woman was not our waitress — she was a hostess or something. And our waitress must have come by to introduce herself while I was in the men’s room. So when the hostess asked me “You’re not waiting for her to come back?” the “her” must have referred to our waitress, and the hostess was asking me if I wanted to wait till our waitress came back to place my order. So I said “You mean our waitress?” And she said “I am your waitress.”

D’oh!

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When three Democrats were up for expulsion from the Tennessee legislature this week and the two young Black men were expelled while the white woman wasn’t, Owl Chatter grew concerned that race might have been a factor. After all, all three engaged in the exact same action — protesting the legislature’s refusal to act on gun control after the shooting deaths in Nashville earlier in the week. But Jody Barrett who only voted to expel the Blacks cleared this up when asked by NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. He said “It had absolutely nothing to do with race.” Absolutely! He went on to clarify his position:

“I’m an attorney, and Ms. Johnson was the only representative that showed up with legal counsel, and their legal counsel made an opening statement pointing out deficiencies in the resolution that had been filed that we were voting on. And once those deficiencies were pointed out, in my view as an attorney, then it was incumbent upon the debate to present evidence to correct that and to establish clearly what it was that Ms. Johnson did to rise to the level of expulsion. I just don’t think that we established that during the debate.”

Convinced?

At least Barrett stuck around to spout that bullshit. When CNN’s Van Jones asked Jeremy Faison, Chair of the Republican Caucus, repeatedly why they didn’t bring the matter up before the Ethics Committee, he fumphered around a little and then said he had a long commute home and bolted.

God Bless America.

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I had to have my bladder checked out for reasons too disgusting to go into. Everything is fine, kinehora. But let me tell ya, folks, if you need to have one thing checked out — try for it to not be your bladder. Because, fellas, the way they get in to check it out is through the exact last thing you want them messing with. When I awoke from the procedure, the doc explained that she placed a stent somewhere in there for some reason I have no idea about. I trusted her, so I wasn’t paying attention. She said to come back in a week and she’ll just pull it right out, like it’s nothing.

When I came back a week later, Allison the assistant told me to remove all my clothing from the waist down and to lie back on the examining table. She gave me a flimsy little paper blanket to cover up with. Then she walked out of the room after telling me: “Don’t go anywhere.” Funny.

A few minutes later she came back with the doc. How to describe it? Well, first of all, it’s not nothing. It’s the extreme opposite of nothing. Here she is talking to Allison while poking around in me. “There it is. Okay, so now I just need to angle it to guide it out. There it . . . ” and I missed what she said next because I was going Yow Yow Yow pretty loudly, and I vaguely recall kicking out with my left foot. Like that could help. But the pain and my yowing just lasted a second or two. It was out. She wanted to show it to me but I closed my eyes and said, “No, I don’t want to see it!” Like I’m supposed to be friends with it now?

TMI? Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the rectal MRI I had about ten years ago. You don’t want one of those either. No sir. No ma’am. Get that thing away from me.

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In Brookville PA, where we stayed last night, in our favorite dump off Route 80 on the way to Michigan, there are only two FM radio stations in reach overnight. So I could not resort to my usual sports-talk nonsense to get back to sleep after a bathroom run. One station plays country music, and the other an endless string of soft rock songs. I went with the latter. I recognized about half of them. One was a Taylor Swift song, I Knew You Were Trouble. Here’s her acoustic version. If you can take your eyes off of her for a second, what’s with the hair on the guy on the right?

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We had a great meal today with little grandson Morris at Gandy Dancer, the classy Annie Arbor eatery discussed in Owl Chatter a while ago. Loved it! When the photos get back from that little orange shack in the K-Mart parking lot, I’ll post a couple.

Thanks for popping by!

Columnist Frank Bruni is back after a month away. His “For the love of sentences” includes Peggy Noonan’s note on the chilliness of Ron DeSantis who gives her the feeling “that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone.” Well put, Noonan.

And Nathan Heller in The New Yorker said this about the declining attention spans of college students: “Assigning Middlemarch is like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.”

Here’s some wisdom from the internet: It’s just as hard to try to lose at Rock, Paper, Scissors, as to try to win.

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Yesterday was the wedding anniversary of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Mazel Tov kids! They married in 1614. He was 29 and she was only 18. Her real name was Moataka. Pocahontas was a nickname that means “playful one.” She was kidnapped by the English who intended to swap her for prisoners held by her dad, the Chief. While captive, she learned English, converted to Christianity, and changed her name to Rebecca. What is it with this girl and names? And she and Rolfe fell in love, which seemed to nix the swap plan.

He asked her dad the Chief for permission to marry and then asked English Governor Tom Dale also. “It is Pocahontas,” he wrote, “to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have been a long time so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I (could not) unwind myself thereout.” Not exactly a Shakespearean sonnet, but love is love.

They later toured England with their infant son Thomas. Pocahontas grew ill and died there, in an inn in Gravesend. John left Thomas behind to get an English education, and returned to Virginia. They never saw each other again.

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It got as high as 74 today at Owl Chatter Central. Winter is on the run, no question. One of our favorite songs about the changing seasons is Urge For Going, by Joni Mitchell. Tom Rush does a great version of it.

I had a girl in summertime, with summer colored skin
And not another man in town my darlin’s heart could win.
But when the leaves fell trembling down
And bully winds did rub their faces in the snow,
She got the urge for going, and I had to let her go.

And she got the urge for going, when the meadow grass was turning brown
Summertime was falling down, and winter closing in.

So I’ll ply the fire with kindling, pull the blankets to my chin
I’ll lock the vagrant winter out, and bolt my wandering in.
I’d like to call back summertime
And have her stay for just another month or so
But she’s got the urge for going, and I guess she’ll have to go.

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Here’s a poem by Ted Kooser, from Winter Morning Walks to send us on our way.

There are days when the world
has a hard time keeping its clouds on,
and its grass in place, and this
is one of them, tumbleweeds
huddled up under the skirts
of the cedars, oak trees
joining hands in the windy grove.
Even the dawn light, blocky
with pink and yellow and blue
like a comics section, quickly
fluttered away, leaving a Sunday
the color of news.

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Good night everybody! OC is heading out to Detroit tomorrow, God willing. First stopover — Brookville, PA.