In the puzzle today, 60A was “Frozen waffles since the 1950s” and the answer, of course, was EGGOS. It led egsforbreakfast to note:

I knew a guy who thought he was Mr. Cool because he took two months off to travel the whole country eating frozen waffles. He was on a real EGGO trip.

For a blog devoted to nonsense, it’s hard to imagine a better opening.

The puzzle theme was certain movies. There was DELIVERANCE, and then movies in which certain things are “delivered,” i.e., ROSEMARY’S BABY, BROADCAST NEWS, and MYSTIC PIZZA (baby, the news, and pizza, respectively).

LMS shared this wonderful banjo scene with us from Deliverance:

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Mystic Pizza, which has nothing to do with mysticism — it takes place in Mystic, CT, — was the first movie in which Julia Roberts was a critical success. Roger Ebert called her “a major beauty with a fierce energy.” That’s a good way to put it. She was very young in MP.

JR was born in Smyrna, GA, near Atlanta. Her parents, one-time actors and playwrights, met while performing in theatrical productions for the armed forces. They later co-founded the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop, and ran a children’s acting school while expecting Julia.

The children of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. attended the school; JR’s dad was the acting coach for their daughter, Yolanda. As a thank-you for running the only racially integrated theater troupe in the region (and due to the Roberts’ financial difficulties), Mrs. King paid Mrs. Roberts’s hospital bill when Julia was born. Technically, that means Julia Roberts is Black.

You don’t need Owl Chatter to tell you how successful she has been. She was the first actress to be paid $20 million for a film. It was for Erin Brockovich, and she won the Oscar for Best Actress for her work in it. Her husband since 2002 has been cameraman Dan Moder, whom she met on a movie set. They have three kids. Roberts converted to Hinduism in 2010, for spiritual reasons.

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Sticking with the arts, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, the much-beloved Seymour Stein, died in LA on Sunday at age 80. Stein wasn’t a performer: he was a producer. And he was a co-founder of the HOF.

Stein’s label was SIRE Records and he worked with many stars. To describe Stein as a music lover, would be laughably insufficient. Here’s a note from the NYT obit:

He could rattle off the lyrics, chart positions and B-sides of seemingly any notable record going back to the 1940s, and lovingly sing their hooks in a nasal whine. A champion of punk rock in the 1970s, he would also tear up over “La Marseillaise.” “He knows all the lyrics to every song you’ve ever heard,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once said.

He worked with so many great artists and bands: Lou Reed, the Ramones, The Talking Heads — just to name a few. He was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, and some of it stuck with him: He would fly to Europe loaded down with NY cheesecakes packed in dry ice to hand out to drooling execs and artists, and return with signed contracts.

His most successful signing was of Madonna at his bedside in Lenox Hill Hospital where he was recovering from a heart ailment. She was a struggling unknown at the time, and he snapped her right up.

“Words cannot describe how I felt at this moment after years of grinding and being broke and getting every door slammed in my face,” Madonna said of her signing after Mr. Stein’s death. (“I am weeping as I write this down,” she said.) “Not only did Seymour hear me,” she wrote, “but he saw me and my potential. For this I will be eternally grateful!”

Stein’s wife Linda was a co-manager of the Ramones and later a successful real estate agent. In 2007, she was killed by her assistant who was convicted of second-degree murder. Stein’s sexuality was fluid; he was attracted to men and the gay subculture. He once remarked of his marriage to Linda: “I somehow knew we’d make a rock-and-roll king-and-queen combo, — even if the roles were a little confused.”

He is survived by his daughter, his sister, and three grandchildren. The cause of death was the Blitzkrieg Bop.

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If you frequently confuse herons with egrets, you are not alone. They are not biologically distinct and they have the same build. It was an EGRET you might have seen in the puzzle today: “Wetlands wader.”

The distinction between a heron and an egret is rather vague, and depends more on appearance than biology. The word “egret” comes from the French aigrette that means both “silver heron” and “brush,” referring to the long, filamentous feathers that seem to cascade down an egret’s back during the breeding season. Just to confuse you further, those feathers are also called egrets.

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At 25A, the clue was “Option in a ‘no strings attached’ relationship,” and the answer was CASUAL SEX. Is there such a thing? I don’t think there is such a thing for Jews. It never gets below frantic. In any event, if your footsies tend to get cold, you can throw on some of those TUBE SOX at 50A. And you can hang out IN PJS afterwards (46A) — maybe scrounge up some EDIBLES (10D)?

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There was some consternation about 43D. The clue was “Crept,” and the answer was SNEAKED. Some thought SNUCK would be better. Technically, both are correct. Pabloinnh said:

I believe it was Dizzy Dean who used “slud,” as in “He slud into third.” Goes nicely with “snuck.”

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At 62A the answer was THAT SUCKS, for “Oof, sorry to hear it.” Kitchef shared this example of its usage from the movie Top Secret:

Dr. Paul Flammond: “The secret police broke into my house. They tore me from my family, ransacked my laboratory, and brought me to this dungeon.”

Nick Rivers: “That sucks.”

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Let’s close on that eloquent note. See you tomorrow!

The great upset victory of the Iowa women over South Carolina on Friday apparently emptied their tank, and they fell in the final to a strong LSU team this afternoon. Owl Chatter is already looking forward to next year.

Here is the winning coach, LSU’s Kim Mulkey, who dressed in outrageous outfits for the games.

Mulkey was Britney Griner’s coach at Baylor and has some issues with the gay community. Her approach seems to be, keep it to yourself — it’s nobody’s business. But that resulted, in Griner’s case, in her living a lie during her college years and she looks back sadly on them.

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Gladys Kessler died on March 16th at the age of 85. She was a federal judge who stuck it to the tobacco industry back in 2006. It was the big case brought by the Justice Department in 1999 that lasted over a decade. She found the tobacco industry violated civil racketeering laws for decades by “repeatedly, and with enormous skill and sophistication” deceiving the public about the health hazards of smoking,

Her 1653-page opinion stated the defendants marketed their “lethal” product with zeal and “with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.” The decision ended the debate on the vileness of the industry.

Kessler strongly took to task the lawyers for the industry for enabling their sordid and deadly activities. She wrote, “What a sad and disquieting chapter in the history of an honorable and often courageous profession.”

Amen to that, Your Honor. Rest in peace.

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The puzzle’s theme today was art-related. Very well constructed, but not very stimulating, IMHO. Here’s one of the works it referred to. Hopper’s Nighthawks.

It was inspired by a diner in Greenwich Village, Hopper’s neighborhood. The specific diner was later demolished, or was only ever a composite in Hopper’s mind. The theater lighting manufacturer Electronic Theatre Controls has a human-sized scale model of the diner in the lobby of their headquarters in Middleton, Wisconsin. Here’s what it looks like on site.

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Thanks for stopping by!

All Hail Caitlin Clark! — never better in defeating the big bad South Carolinians last night. One more to go!

Here she is with Coach Bluder.

Owl Chatter is on the move today. Heading down to Philly for a nice event with some friends. Not sure we can write later.

But here’s the poem of the day from the Poetry Foundation.

It’s by Denise Levertov, and it’s called The Secret.

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

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Yesterday’s puzzle was excellent, if hard, — a gem by Brooke Husic, a terrific constructor, partnering with Adam Wagner, also terrific. It took me forever to figure out the theme. In five places there were clues that were a repeated word separated by a slash. E.g., “Tease/Tease.” It turns out our job was to find a two-part word or phrase each part of which answers the clue. The answer to Tease/Tease was RIB ROAST. To RIB someone and to ROAST someone can both mean “tease.”

“Toilet/Toilet” was POTHEAD. Get it? Both POT and HEAD can mean “toilet.” Hard, right? Even Rex called it “Medium-Challenging,” and was impressed.

To round it out, if you’d like a little mental exercise, the other three were: “Quit/Quit,” “Drat!/Drat,” and “Heard/Heard.” Answers below the next separator.

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Dropkick, Crapshoot, Got Caught.

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The puzzle wanted us to know that the actress Awkwafina’s real name is Nora LUM.

So, one fellow noted that LUM is also the name of Mike LUM, a former ballplayer who, he said, was the only player ever to pinch hit for Hank Aaron! Well, Aaron had a long career, so I thought that was pretty amazing. But I did a little digging, and get this — at the time, it was wrongly reported in the press that Aaron was never lifted for a pinch hitter before Lum (on May 22, 1969). But Lee Maye had pinch hit for Aaron in ’62, as had Johnny Blanchard in ’65. And Johnny Briggs, Marty Perez, and Mike Hegan did it after Lum. Crucial information available to you only on Owl Chatter! BTW, Lum hit a two-run double with his historic opportunity.

Lum was the first major leaguer of Japanese ancestry. He was born in Hawaii and his mom was Japanese. (As of 2017) he holds the record for most games played by someone from Hawaii (1517). On July 3, 1970, he hit three home runs in one game for the Braves against the Padres.

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Clue/answers that set LMS off were “Lax LAX option” for TSA PRE. (LAX is the LA airport.) And “Potential response to ‘Look! I colored on the walls!,’” was YOU WHAT! Also “One might be turned down,” was BED.

Here’s her comment:

TSA PRE was new to me. I guess you apply for it so that you can breeze past the line of hapless people like me fretting over making the flight even though they’re there like three hours early? I leave tomorrow morning at 7am for the ACPT (American Crossword Puzzle Tournament), and I’m already at the gate just in case. Just kidding. But my sister will drop me off at the airport at 4:45am. No, really. I don’t travel much, so the hideous scenarios I imagine are exhausting. There will be a wreck on the interstate, and I won’t be able to get to the airport. They’ll have no record of my ticket. All flights to NY will be cancelled because of a rogue blizzard. They’ll lose my luggage. The car service I arranged to take me to Stamford was a scam, and I’ll have to walk, dragging my suitcase, because the idea of figuring out a train or bus is beyond my ken. The Marriott will have no record of my reservation even though I’ve called three times now confirming. Like all other times I fly somewhere, I’ve made myself sick with worry.

Loved the clue for YOU WHAT?!

(All by “Mom”)

“I decided to cut Sage some bangs.”
“I ate that last piece of ham I found in the back of the fridge drawer stuffed behind the Brussels sprouts.” (I had hidden it for a future sandwich.)
“I decided to start selling Amway.”

I also liked the clue for BED, “one might be turned down.” I did an Outward Bound winter camping and dogsledding week in the Boundary Waters (Minnesota, February) for my 40th birthday, and it was beyond cold. Like, colder than 30 below at night. When we got back to civilization, we invited one of our instructors to sleep in our heated cabin on a real bed. She actually declined and slept outside in her sleeping bag. Wait. She WHAT?

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Many (including me) found 28D to be a WOE (what on Earth?). The answer was ERHU and the clue was “Two-stringed Chinese instrument.” Here’s what one fellow said: Well, it’s all a question of what’s in your wheelhouse. Big erhu fan here, so no worries. The koto is Japanese, by the way. A close Chinese relative (I.e., both are zithers) is the qin, a very useful instrument in Scrabble.

Of course! And commenter Amy tells us to check out the KORA, a West African instrument. Here’s a pretty Erhuist:

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My favorite was “Tricep curls?” (a play on bicep curls). The answer was ARM HAIR. (Get it?)

Many were upset, claiming “tricep” is incorrect. The singular of triceps is also triceps.

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The puzzle today was murder: much harder than yesterday’s. I had to return to it about five times until I could hack my way through it. So it was satisfying to finish. (I refuse to resort to Google if I’m stumped. I keep returning and if I can’t crack it, I give up, consider it a DNF (did not finish), and look at the answer key just to learn stuff.)

Today’s was themeless but had a nice pair of answers that were linked. There was TOY PIANO, and the Peanuts character SCHROEDER, who played it. They weren’t perfectly placed to have Schroeder sitting at it, but almost.

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I was today years old when I learned that “demonym” is the term for what you call someone from somewhere. So Brooklynite is the demonym for Brooklyn. In the puzzle, the clue was “Harvard or Cambridge grad,” and the answer was CANTAB. It’s short for Cantabrigian, which is the demonym for Cambridge. (Apparently, Yalies call (or used to call) Harvard students Cantabs.) We’re all smarter now, right?

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The INDY 500 was in the puzzle, prompting this comment from someone who is clearly not a NASCAR dad:

“Maybe, you can explain why people watch the ‘Indy.’ I sat through one in person and the only thing that kept me from thinking about how bored I was, was thinking about how hot I was. The cars go round and round. That’s about it. Are you waiting for a crash or mishap? Someone burning alive? Blood and gore? I was kinda into it the first five laps or so, but by number 500, I just wanted out desperately. Actually I wanted out at lap 6. What is the point? What is of interest?”

Owl Chatter visited the famous raceway when we were in town for a minor league baseball game many years ago. No race was going on. It was neat to see the place. As for that game, at the time, the Indianapolis team played in a gorgeous old stadium (Bush Stadium) that was later used for the film Eight Men Out about the Black Sox scandal.

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In a different sport, Caitlin Clark puts it all on the line tonight against South Carolina. Let’s Go Iowa Women!

Thanks for stopping by!

Hi Everybody!

Owl Chatter had some stuff to attend to, but should be up and running again later today or tomorrow. Until then, to make matters verse, here are two poems. One is in honor of opening day from Baseball Haiku. It’s by Suzuki Murio.

Over
the outfielder’s loneliness —
the summer moon

And that old codger Ted Kooser has this for us, from Winter Morning Walks:

For the past two years there’s been
a white chenille bedspread
caught up in a barbed wire fence
along the road to the quarry.
For a while it looked like a man
who had fallen asleep on a sofa,
sad bachelor uncle of a man,
the soft ball of his bald head fallen,
long thin arms stretched out
along the back and trembling.
But today that was gone, torn away
by the wind, and there was no one
but me on the road. My heart
flapped like a rag in my ears.

The writer Nelson Algren was born on this day back in 1909 in Detroit, and died at age 72 in Sag Harbor, NY. He spent five months in jail for committing the perfect writer’s crime: he stole a typewriter. Because of that experience, his writing focused on the down-and-out, rejects and losers. His novel, A Walk on the Wild Side, contains his three rules for life:  “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” He married and divorced his first wife twice and his second wife once. He was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover and is featured in her novel The Mandarins.

Algren’s novel The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award. Leonard Cohen used images from it in “The Stranger Song,” from his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967): “you’ve seen that man before: his golden arm dispatching cards, but now it’s rusted from the elbows to the finger.”

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Yesterday I learned something about the plural of the word HERO. When used in the sense of “the hero who saved the damsel,” the plural is HEROES. And that’s the general rule for the word. BUT, when it’s used in the sense of a HERO sandwich, the plural is HEROS. “Ralph and Sally took two tuna salad HEROS with them on the trip.”

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The puzzle today made use of the expression “dead as a doornail.” It was used famously by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, below. But it stems from a time when the metal in a nail was valuable, so it was common for nails to be stolen out of whatever they were hammered into. So builders would hammer a nail through a door and then, on the other side, hammer that pointy part flat against the inside of the door. That way, the nail could not be pulled out and was deemed “dead.” Here’s Dickens:

“Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”

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Before I had grandchildren, and when my kids had grown up, my memory of what a 5-year-old or a 7-year-old is like was hazy. Who can remember what your kids were like at specific ages? But now when I hear about a 7-year old, I can picture him or her, because my Zoey is seven. Similarly, I can picture a string of younger ages because Leon is 5 and a half, Rafi 4, Isaac 2 and a half, and little Mo out in Michigan is almost one and a half. At the upper extreme, Lianna is thirteen and a half. All gorgeous and wonderful, kinahora.

So when I read that yesterday’s school shooting in Nashville killed three nine-year-olds, I could picture them as a little older than ZoZo. A substitute teacher was also killed, as was a janitor, and the head of the school. It would have been a lot worse if not for what seems like quick and effective police work. The police received a call at 10:13, and they were on the scene, saw the shooter, and killed the shooter by 10:27. Since the shooter was using assault rifles, the threat of many more deaths per minute of delay was real.

Nashville Police Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender, and officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the attacker. But according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.

Representative Andrew Ogles (R-TN), who represents Nashville, said he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting, and offered “thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost.” 

In 2021, Ogles, his wife, and two of his three children held guns as they posed for a Christmas card with a caption that read: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference—they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”

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This is the poem of the day today from The Poetry Foundation. It’s called The Sound of Music and it’s by Kathryn Nuernberger.

When I tell you I love
the song “Edelweiss”
you have to understand
that even though I too
am a sophisticate
who scorns musicals,
I was once a little girl
who stood in my grand-
father’s living room
singing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo! while he sipped
his scotch and laughed
at my preciosity.
And when I sing the lyrics
in your ear—Small and
bright, clean and white,
you look happy to meet me
—you have to understand
my grandfather only ever
had one friend, a jeweler
who also drank scotch,
and left his $10,000 Rolex
to my grandfather, who
wore it even though
it turned his wrist green,
wore it to the funeral,
where the daughter sang
in her ethereal voice. Blossom
of snow may you bloom
and grow, bloom and grow
forever. She couldn’t take
her eyes off the casket.
You have to understand that
my grandfather kept spinning
that heavy gold around
his wrist, and when he raised
his voice to join in, he cried
to sing it. Edelweiss, edelweiss,
bless my homeland forever.

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Bobbi Ercoline passed away on March 18 in Pine Bush, NY. She was 73. She and her husband, then-boyfriend, Nick Ercoline, became the quintessential symbols of hippiedom when a photo of them embracing amid the scene at Woodstock in 1969 became the photo on the Woodstock 3-LP set. Here’s the shot:

In fact, they were not hippies. They were both observant Roman Catholics. Bobbi was working as a bank clerk, and Nick was working in construction and bartending, putting himself through college. Their friend Corky Corcoran, who was in the photo sleeping nearby, had just returned from serving in Viet Nam with the Marines. (Bobbi’s sister Cindy later married one of Corcoran’s brothers.)

They did not plan to attend the festival originally, put off by the steep ($18) ticket price. But when all the hoopla was reported about the first day, they decided to go the morning of Day 2. They drove as close as they could get, ditched the car, and proceeded on foot for the last few miles. Bobbi found that blanket on the walk. They also “picked up” Herbie along the way, who was on a bad acid trip. Herbie supplied the large plastic butterfly you can see in the upper left of the photo, attached to the wooden staff.

The photo was taken by a freelance photographer for the Magnum agency, Burk Uzzle. He made use of advice from the founder of the agency, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had told him to study the detailed compositions of the Quattrocento painters of Renaissance Italy.

“I walk up and I know the curvature of the hill has to work with the curvature of the heads,” he recalled. “And there’s the flag, it’s going to have to be there, and just enough of the people.”

When the album came out, with the photo right on the cover, Bobbi had to fess up to her mom that she missed church that day — it outed her!

The couple married in 1971, and had two kids. Bobbi became a school nurse, and Nick a union carpenter and a construction inspector.

Alex Traub, who wrote Bobbi’s obit for the NYT, ended it with this paragraph:

“The Ercolines became frequent interview subjects for historians of Woodstock, and they often spoke about their marriage as a symbol of its lasting influence and an example of peace and love in action. Every morning when they woke up and every night before they went to bed, they kissed and held each other for about a minute — just as they had on a grassy hill in the summer of 1969.”

In addition to Nick, Bobbi is survived by their sons Matthew and Luke; a brother, John; a sister, Cindy Corcoran; four grandchildren; and the rest of us, attendees and non-attendees alike, half a million strong.

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We’re too tired to chatter tonight. See you tomorrow!

The book on Jewish Comedy by Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber is not an easy read. He finds seven “strands.” The first one says it’s a response to persecution and anti-Semitism. But he includes a very interesting joke in his introduction, which is new to me. He says it may be the second-greatest ever Jewish joke, but he concedes it splits 50-50 between those who find it terrible and those who find it hilarious. You can decide where you fall. Here it is:

Two old men settle onto a park bench in Tel Aviv; after a moment, they recognize each other as long-lost friends. “Reuven!” says the first, “Reuven, how are you? It’s been decades! Since we were young men from the same small town! How are you? How are your parents?”
“Oh,” said the second man. “Oh, they died decades ago. We’re old men now, Shimon.”
“Yes, well, of course,” Reuven replies. To be expected, I suppose. My condolences. But your siblings–I loved spending time with them. How are they?”
“Oh,” said Shimon. “Oh, you haven’t heard. My brother died ten years ago. Cancer.”
“I’m very sorry,” Reuven said. “That’s terrible news. But what about your sister? She was so lovely.”
“Oh,” Shimon said. “We really haven’t been in touch, have we? She died fifteen years ago. A stroke.”
“Ahh. . .” Reuven replies, casting about. “Well how is that beautiful wife of yours! I haven’t seen her since she was a young mother. . . “
“Oh,” Shimon said. “You didn’t hear. She died five years ago. Bus bombing.”
Reuven is now completely discombobulated. “Your kids!” he finally gets out. “How are your kids?”
“You’ll laugh,” Shimon said. “But they’re dead too.”

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So where do you come out? Terrible, or hilarious? For the record, Owl Chatter comes down on the hilarious side, but we’re not proud of it.

It’s similar, but much darker, than a joke I heard years ago about a man who goes to the undertaker to order a casket. The undertaker says, “Who died?” The man says, “My wife. She died two days ago.” The undertaker says, “Your wife? When did you get married?” The man says “Just last August.” And the undertaker says, “Wow! Mazel Tov!!”

You may be wondering what Dauber thinks is the greatest Jewish joke, if the one above is the “second greatest.” I am too, but he’s making us wait.

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Today is the birthday of the poet Robert Frost, born in 1874. He was the inspiration for Frosty the Snowman. [No he wasn’t.] He is associated with New England, but was actually born in San Francisco. His mom and he moved to Lawrence MA after his dad died when Robert was eleven.

The first poem of his that was accepted for publication was “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” and it appeared in the NY Independent when he was 20 years old. He was paid $15 for it (about $400 today). Frost was so excited to be a published poet that he proposed to his high school sweetheart. She said yes! They had six children, but four died before Frost did, and his wife, Elinor, died young too, at age 43, from heart failure. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 31 times. Here are Elinor and Robert:

And here’s a postage stamp issued in his honor.

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Sticking with the literary, on this day 103 years ago F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise. It’s a love story inspired by his romance with Zelda. Unfortunately, the summer before the book came out she broke up with him. His plan to win her back was to publish a book that was a big hit. It worked! They got married a month after it came out. Here’s a nice shot of the lovebirds.

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I was happy to learn that the radiated tortoise gets its name from the design on its shell that radiates out from the center, not from getting radiated like with radiation. They can be up to 16 inches long, weigh around 35 pounds, and often live for over 150 years. Pickles is the oldest animal at the Houston Zoo. He’s 90, and he and Mrs. Pickles, who is 53, recently had three babies: Dill, Gherkin and Jalapeño. The couple have been together since her arrival at the zoo in 1996. They are an endangered species so this is wonderful news. Here are three little tykes:

At 40D in today’s puzzle, the city at the foot of the Adirondacks was UTICA, NY. A little digging revealed that Annette Funicello is from Utica as well as the fictional character, Alice Kramden’s Uncle Leo. Here’s a sweet shot of Alice and Ralph, which I don’t recognize from any of the episodes. They look like a real and affectionate couple.

Thanks for stopping by! See you tomorrow.

Regular followers of Owl Chatter know that we are fans of the Metropolitan Diary column in the Sunday NYT. It often has pieces where nothing happens. I sent in a parody piece once that was something like this:

In 1984, I had just moved to New York City and I had to travel uptown from my apartment to a doctor’s appointment. I hailed a cab on East 15th Street and Third Avenue, and when one pulled over, I settled comfortably into the back seat.

“Where to?,” the driver asked.

I gave him the address in the West 80’s, and off we sped northward!

To no surprise, it wasn’t accepted. By way of contrast, here’s a piece by Kathy Kumar from tomorrow’s MD that is just about perfect:

Dear Diary:
It was a warm sunny afternoon. I was walking on East 4th Street in Manhattan when something fell from above and almost hit me. Looking down, I was surprised to see a denture.
Just then, I heard a woman shout from an upper story window.
“Is it okay?” she said.
I shouted back that it looked fine, and waited until she came down to retrieve it. When she did, she said it had shot out of her mouth when she sneezed while standing at the window.

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Today’s puzzle was by a very well-liked constructor, Robyn Weintraub. She lives in Rye Brook, NY, and her first puzzle was a NYT Monday puzzle back in March of 2011. An interviewer once asked her “Why do you do this to yourself?” She said: “Can’t help it. When I’m constructing a puzzle I enter that state of ‘flow’ where time just stops. I can work on a puzzle from morning until night, and only barely register the fact that I haven’t eaten or gone to the bathroom the entire day.”

Her cluing is fresh and creative. For example, today, an answer was CUBA, and this was her clue: Home to the world’s smallest bird, the bee hummingbird, which measures just 2.25″.

The “world’s smallest bird” — how wonderful.

Her long answers are often conversational. Two today were: “Common request at a bar.” Ans: CAN I SEE SOME ID? And “Response to a wild story.” Ans: YOU DID WHAT?

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It’s Gloria Steinem’s birthday today, she is 89, kinahora, and was born in Toledo, Ohio. She was married to David Bale from 2000 until his death in 2003. He was the father of actor Christian Bale. The marriage ceremony took place in the home of Steinem’s friend Wilma Mankiller, the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.

She once said: “So whatever you want to do, just do it…Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.” Amen to that, Steinem! Not a day goes by . . . .

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It’s also the birthday of Flannery O’Connor, who changed her name from Mary O’Connor which she thought was too plain for a writer trying to sell books. She was born in Savannah, GA, in 1925 and died of lupus when she was just 39.

When she was six, she was filmed by a British news service while a chicken that she’d personally trained walked backward. The newsreel was shown around the world, calling her “Little Mary O’Connor.” She said, “Everything since has been an anticlimax.”

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Hurrah for the Iowa women, who dispatched the Colorado Buffaloes last night in a tight, intense battle. Clark scored 31. Couldn’t relax till the last minute or so. It’s on to play Louisville next, and then, God willing, the Final Four.

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See you tomorrow!