The puzzle today had a clue “Half of an evening outfit, informally,” with answer PJ TOPS. The pajama tops I will never forget were worn by the beautiful Barbara Feldon, who played Agent 99, opposite Don Adams (Agent 86) in the wonderful old comedy Get Smart. For some reason, she had to stay over at Max’s apartment one night and he told her she could have the bedroom and that there were pajamas in the dresser. A short while later, she came out wearing only pajama tops, with her lovely legs in full display. She said she could only find pajama tops in the dresser, and he said “Sorry about that. I hope it’s not a problem,” and she said, “It’s fine. I’ll manage.”

A few minutes later, she said, “Max, it’s time to call the chief with the secret code,” and he said, “Okay, I’ll go get it from my safe.” She said, “I didn’t know you had a safe. What do you keep in it?” And he answered: “Only two things: the secret code, and the pajama bottoms.”

The big debate today among the puzzle folk focused on the propriety of 33A. The clue was very clever: “Pile of texts?” But the answer (POOP EMOJI) was pretty controversial in the Rex gang. Quite a few folks thought it was disgusting to have poop splashed all across the grid. There is supposedly a “breakfast rule” that says the puzzle should not contain anything that might be disconcerting to a person doing the puzzle while relaxing over breakfast. Some gave it a pass on the grounds that the clue was so clever. Didn’t bother me. I also tried not to take personally the answer at 13D — YOU’RE A JERK. Ouch! Where did that come from?

I learned today that TUBAS (at 32A) means, literally, trumpets. Huh? So why didn’t they just call them trumpets? Trumpets was already taken? I’m confused.

Noah (the one from the Bible) made it into the grid today, cutely clued as “Organizer of a couples getaway?” There was a good New Yorker cartoon on the ark theme recently. The scene is the ark, and with an innocent look on his face, a lion is telling Noah “We need two more gazelles.”

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Life imitating art at the Chatham homestead. Linda and I were on the phone with our son Sam yesterday and Linda was telling him about a terrible experience she had in the woods behind our house while she was doing some yardwork. She was suddenly attacked by a swarm of bees! Within seconds, she was bitten around ten times. Yikes! Of course, once the attack began, she fled from the area. But, as she explained to Sam, the problem was, in her haste to get away, her glasses fell off back near the bees. She would have to return to get them.

“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s Bruce Willis’s wristwatch from Pulp Fiction!”

In the great scene, Christopher Walken explained to Willis as a little boy that the watch was passed down from his great grandfather to his grandfather and then to his father who was wearing it when his plane was shot down in Viet Nam. He knew the Viet Cong would take it from him, so for five years in the POW camp, he kept it hidden up his tuchas. When he died he passed it on to Christopher Walken who kept it up his tuchas for two years until he was released and sent home. And then he gave the watch to Willis as a little boy. Years later, Willis got in trouble, and fled from his apartment one step ahead of the mob. He told his girlfriend to be sure to take the watch but she forgot. So he was going to have to go back at great personal risk to retrieve the watch.

Exactly like Linda’s glasses, no?

Here’s Walken’s scene: https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&ei=UTF-8&p=christopher+walken+pulp+fiction&type=E211US1494G0#id=2&vid=47a0ce8b462ec4805e8a213b33ea14c3&action=click

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The puzzle word of the day, for me, is REBUTTED. It was part of the puzzle’s “trick.” The clue was “Sunset shade (MT),” with MT being Montana’s postal abbreviation. What we had to do was remove a city located in Montana from the word to get the answer. So if you take out BUTTE from RE[BUTTE]D, you’re left with RED — a sunset shade.

But I prefer a reading of rebutted offered by Rex poster LMS who said she couldn’t help but think about implants when seeing “rebutted.” A good clue for it might be “Had plastic surgery you didn’t take sitting down.”

Similarly, if you take PROVO (UT) out of [PROVO]LONE, you’re left with LONE (clued as “Sole”). And may I remind you — Man cannot live by provolone!

Carl told me he and his wife Andrea were planning to sign up for a pickleball tournament, but Andrea half-soured on the idea. (He said he would spear me the rest of his puns.)

There is a place near me called The Morris County School of Glass. It offers courses in glass-blowing –you can see the glowing ovens from the road. Years ago I told Carl I took a course there on PANE MANAGEMENT, but the professor wasn’t very good — you could see right through him. Within ten seconds, Carl wrote back asking if they serve glazed donuts.

LMS also pointed out a subtlety in the grid. There was a clue “Going both ways,” for which the answer was RECIPROCAL. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) And the central R was crossed by RADAR — a palindrome — a word you can read backwards and forwards (“both ways”). Wow.

Our beloved OWLS were in the puzzle today, creepily clued by “Birds whose eyes don’t move.” Crossed by (“lumpy citrus”) UGLI — Ouch! Right next to SNIT — and who could blame them?

In all birds, the eyes within their sockets are so large that movement is severely restricted. Wih owls, in particular, the eyes are virtually attached, preventing movement. This according to a Rex commenter who did a little digging. (That is certainly the case with my beloved stuffed owls, Welly and Wilma.)

I saw in the NYT recently, and the New Yorker of 10/17, that there is a brouhaha in the chess world over suspected cheating. Nineteen-year-old Hans Niemann was accused of somehow getting signals during a game giving him illegal assistance — the Houston Astros Gambit, we might call it. Niemann admitted cheating in the past, when he was 12 and again when he was 16, but insisted he wasn’t cheating anymore. Where could he have hidden a device?, the New Yorker speculated. His shoes, his tuchas? Niemann offered to play nude, giving a whole new meaning to the term exhibition match.

A friend of mine was the captain of his chess team in high school and, after an important win, he was invited to have lunch with a Russian grandmaster visiting the U.S. at the time — a great honor. A few days later, I asked him how lunch with the Russian chess genius went. He said “It was fine, but it took him ten minutes to pass the salt.”

The puzzle opens with KALE today, baby-clued by “Vegetable rich in vitamin K, appropriately.” C’mon man, it ain’t Monday. I could have gotten the K by myself. In one of life’s little dietary ironies, as I wrote in KALE, I was scarfing down (see below) a breakfast of leftover pizza from (granddaughter) Lianna’s birthday party last Saturday. At least it was veggie pizza.

But KALE is an appropriate opener today, because the puzzle was good for me! Full of wonderful delights. First of all, it was a “pangram,” containing all 26 letters of the alphabet. (Q appeared in QED crossed by QUAY. The X, in Prix FIXE, crossed by TAXED.) There were a whole bunch of female names, any one of which could be your AMIGA (“Close chica”) — MARIE (Kondo), SALLY (Mustang Sally), MERCEDES, MAYA, (Justice) ELENA (Kagan), gymnast ALY (Raisman), and (Lady) GAGA. Quite a treat for us womanizers. No wonder Sam Malone popped up too, clued as “Actor Danson,” with the answer TED appearing right below the answer AGED. Ouch! But right above AGED is BADASS (“Supercool individual”), so he must still have it! Way to go, Sammy!

I became a fan of Cheers many years ago (duh) when my mother was visiting Linda and me in Brooklyn from Florida, and I was looking for a TV show that might engage all of us. I had heard vague positive rumblings about Cheers, and when I turned it on, Diane entered the bar and said to Coach “I was at dinner with friends last night and someone mentioned that Sumner [somebody] often comes to this bar. Is that true?” And Coach responded testily: “How would I know what was said at your dinner last night?” Okay, I’m in.

Back to the puzzle, KALE also appeared in deKapitated form: ALE, oddly clued as “What XXX might represent in comics.” Huh?

There was a nice duo of (depressing) long answers: UGLY TRUTHS and EMAIL SCAMS. And my favorite mini-theme today: Water balloons! They appear twice in clues. Once in a great clue for AMMO (“Water balloons on a hot day, say”), and again in “Water balloon sound” — SPLAT.

If you were wondering how “scarf down” became a term for eating, it has nothing to do with scarves. It may come from an obsolete Scottish word scaff which meant to ask for something (food, e.g.), in a mean or contemptible manner. Ever lose patience with a waiter? Me neither.

It’s funny what can trigger a memory of someone from your past. I was making tuna salad for lunch, and my old boss from the 1980’s (before my teaching days) popped into my head. He was Jim Cheeks. His full name was James E. Cheeks, and the E was for Elmo. How great is that? He was a good boss. Anyway, when you handed in some writeup, if the writing was a little loose — too wordy — he might return it with a note: “Too much mayonnaise.” I’ll be careful Jim.

The answer for 1 across today is LIAR, nicely clued as “A word said twice before ‘pants on fire,’” although, if actually faced by the situation you would probably say something like “Take those pants off!,” a line that never worked for me on dates. Anyway, with LIAR setting the tone, I thought there might be at least one good liar in the puzzle — AGNEW would have done nicely from yesterday’s puzzle — but there wasn’t. Pinocchio was quoted in last Saturday’s puzzle, for the answer I’M A REAL BOY. I filled it in wrongly at first with I’M NOT A LIAR (same number of letters). I must have been conflating him with Nixon, whose line, of course, was “I am not a crook.” I’ll try to avoid such conflatulence in the future.

Sometimes, for fun, I come up with alternative clues for answers. I think my first ever post on Rex’s blog was such an effort. The answer was BABYGATES, clued by something like “Safety measure for toddlers.” My suggested alternative clue was “Tech billionaire in his infancy.”

I thought today’s puzzle was a little blah, but still a great accomplishment by the constructor, the youngest ever female NYT contributor, [Ailee Yoshida] who is 18. The youngest ever male constructor was only 13! (Daniel Larson) And my friend Carl noted there was once a puzzle made by a snake! — a boa constructor. (Hi Carl!)

Speaking of age, here’s a line I liked quoted by Frank Bruni in a recent column, tho, fittingly, I can’t remember who wrote it. It’s about the progressive memory loss we experience as we age: “I’ve gotten to the stage where I can plan my own surprise parties.”

I had three alternative clues to suggest today which might have zhuzhed the puzzle up a bit. For RIPTIDE I suggested: “Dis detergent.” (Get it?) For DAMON: “Words of encouragement to a beaver.” And for ASSENT: “Obnoxious med. specialist.”

Today’s theme centered on “SUPERGIRL,” which was fitting, since October 11 (today) is the International Day of the Girl (declared by the UN). Raise your hand if that one slipped by you.

The best word in the puzzle today by far was “YEETED,” the clue for which was “Chucked forcefully, in modern lingo.” Leave it to an eighteen-year-old to yeet modern lingo at us. You might lob a softball to the catcher from the mound, but you would yeet the basketball from midcourt towards the hoop in a last-ditch desperate attempt.

Wanna hear a joke?

I loved Bob Einstein.

He was a comic and actor who died at age 76 three years ago. You might recognize him from Curb Your Enthusiasm or Arrested Development. He was pretty successful (won two Emmys as a writer), but didn’t really hit it super big. His brother is Albert Brooks. One of my favorite jokes is Bob Einstein’s (and another very dirty one), but I’m not ready to tell it today. I’m bringing him up because of something I saw him do during a panel discussion of comics and writers he participated in. I forget what the topic was, but at one point the discussion lost focus and started meandering. Bob leaned into the mic and just said — “Do you wanna hear a joke?” And then he told a wonderful joke. I do that in my classes now. Every once in a while at exactly the perfect moment (of course), I’ll just stop the discussion and say — Wanna hear a joke?

My wonderful Aunt Anita is the sort of person who takes the responsibility of forwarding to everyone she knows any good bit of wisdom she gets via email or finds on the internet. So I am used to getting notes from her, most of which I look at and absorb and move on. But one time she sent me a joke (this joke, below), and I read it and said, Wow — Aunt Anita — this is one hell of a joke!

I’ve told it in class, but I really shouldn’t have — it’s clearly over the line (a topic for another day). The Sexual Harrassment training video CUNY produced (and requires all faculty (not just me) to watch) says we shouldn’t tell suggestive jokes in class.

But if you wanna hear a joke, you could do worse.

This couple gets married and the husband is 82 and the wife is 25 and gorgeous, like out of a magazine. And it’s not what you might think — he’s not a dirty old man, and she’s not after his money. It’s one of those mysteries of love. They met at some event, starting talking, and (magic!) before you knew it, they were truly in love and getting married.

The problem, however, is that in the bedroom things weren’t going so well. At 82, he just wasn’t the man he used to be. As the weeks went by, as much as they loved each other, the husband started to worry that he’d lose her if he couldn’t please her in this way.

So what do you when you’re having sex troubles? — You go talk to the Rabbi, of course! In this case, it was the Rabbi who married them.

The husband explained the problem, and the Rabbi said “It’s the younger generation. The old ways just aren’t exciting enough anymore. You need to zhuzh things up. Here’s what I want you to do. Do you have a big white towel?” And the husband said, “Sure, we have towels.” “Good. And can you find a handsome young man to assist you?,” the Rabbi asked. “Yes, there is a college nearby with students I could talk to.” “Good,” said the Rabbi. “So the next time you’re in bed with your wife, have the handsome young man stand by the bed waving the towel. You’ll see, with the waving and the towel and the handsome young man it will be exciting and your problems will be over.”

The husband was skeptical, but he knew better than to ignore a Rabbi’s advice, so he got a big white towel and found a handsome young man willing to help. They set it up for that very night. The husband and wife climbed into bed, the handsome young man started waving the towel, and — nothing. Worse than usual — dead!

The husband was in utter despair. When the Rabbi called to see how it went, the husband said, “It was terrible. Dead. Worse than usual. I’ve lost all hope.”

And the Rabbi said — “But you had the big towel?” “Yes,” the husband said. “And the handsome young man and the waving?” “Yes,” the husband said, “everything you told us to do, but it was awful. I’m going to lose her, Rabbi.”

“No, no, no!” the Rabbi said. “We are not going to let a loving couple fail — not in my congregation. But I’ll admit this is a tough case.” And the Rabbi stroked his beard, closed his eyes, and settled into deep thought.

Finally, the Rabbi said, “What we’re going to try next is the old switcheroo.” “What’s that?,” the husband asked. And the Rabbi explained, “This time, let’s have you wave the towel, and the handsome young man in bed with your wife. Let’s try it that way.”

The husband was so distraught he just said, “Rabbi, I’ll try anything at this point.”

The next night, the husband took the towel, the handsome young man climbed into bed with the wife, and the young couple started in as the husband waved the towel. Well, it was fantastic — shrieking and screaming with delight. Couldn’t be better. Fantastic! Finally, the couple finished, and the husband looked down at the handsome young man and said, “See? — Idiot! — That’s how you wave a towel!“

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Well, I must have told that joke a dozen times before I gave it some thought. First of all, I love the sheer insanity of it — the visual of the three of them with the big white towel waving over the couple in bed. The Rabbi stroking his beard and coming up with that.

But what the Rabbi was counseling, of course, was highly improper. How could a Rabbi propose such a thing? It has to be that it was more important to him to save the marriage which had a basis in true love. He knew the old husband couldn’t do the job. The solution he came up with satisfied the wife and tricked the husband into thinking it was his doing. That’s quite a Rabbi. And quite a towel. I’ve got to get one of those towels.

I told that story in my tax class one semester and about a half-hour later we covered a tax topic that had a series of steps and then a final “phase-out” rule. I went over it several times and finally said to the class — don’t forget the phase-out rule. If this comes up on the exam and you do all the steps but forget the phase-out rule, you might as well just be standing there waving a big white towel.

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[A procedural note: If you click on the title of a post, you will be able to comment/reply (I think). Please don’t hesitate to do so.]

There was a rare sighting of the elusive Shiny-Eared Musgrove in Queens last night, much to the consternation of the hapless Mets, who fell out of the playoffs with a thud much earlier than predicted. Joe Musgrove, starting pitcher for the San Diego Padres, was pitching a hell of a game. While his mates were battering Mets pitchers, Musgrove was mowing down Mets batters right and left, yielding only one hit, a single, over his seven innings. The Mets knew he was good, but not that good, and they suspected he was “doctoring the ball with a foreign substance,” as the expression goes. Was he hiding some sort of gel somewhere that he was applying to the ball to increase the spin and effectiveness of his pitches? The twittersphere was bombinating with speculation — particularly over Musgrove’s ears which did seem unusually shiny. What the hell was up with those shiny ears? So Mets Manager Buck Showalter asked the umps to search Musgrove for goop! Play was stopped and the umps gathered around the mound for the baseball equivalent of a pre-incarceration strip search. They checked his glove and hat, and then they felt all around both of his shiny ears. Nothing was found. I guess the man just has shiny ears.

Wait till next year, Mets fans.

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Today’s puzzle includes dogs or cats that are MALTESES, clued as: “White dogs, or bluish-gray cats.” It inspired a poster (LMS) on the Rex Parker blog to pen an Ogden Nash-ish verse, addressed to an allergy-sufferer:

The solution if you sneeze and wheeze is
Give away your two Malteses.

LMS has a wonderful way of letting us know she learned something new. She says: “I was today old when I learned. . .”

What she learned today related to the clue “Happy as __,” with the answer: A CLAM. (Monday puzzles are easy.) It turns out the full expression is “Happy as a clam in high water.” When the tide is out clams are at risk from clam-digging humans or birds, so they are “happy” in protective high water. If you google “depressed clams” you will find several fake “scientific” papers debunking the notion that clams are happy, and establishing that they are in fact depressed, especially the Jewish ones with teenaged children. (I made that last (Jewish) part up.)

One thing some puzzle people (cruciverbalists) like to do is find neat associations that appear in a puzzle’s grid, either unintentionally or by design of the constructor. Today for example FOODIE at 37A crosses CHEAP WINE at 12D. And, ironically, for me, whose parking skills have eroded precipitously since moving to Jersey from Brooklyn several hundred years ago, PARALLEL PARKING at 39A crosses EASY PEASY at 34D. Hardly.

Here’s what LMS has to say about it:

“Most of the time when you parallel park you have two audiences: the first are the people at the sidewalk café casually enjoying your humiliation over their wine. The second are the line of cars you’re holding up as you re-angle your car, three, four, five times. Nah. I’ll just park a half mile away and hoof it.”

Another thing I like to do, per Rex himself, is look at the very first clue/answer: 1 across, to see what tone it sets as an introduction to the puzzle. That’s where many solvers start. (Although many also start elsewhere, and many think it’s ridiculous to grant special significance to 1 across.) I’m with Rex here and was happy to see that 1 across today is: “Fusses in front of the mirror, say.” I wrote in PREENS, but soon saw it should be PRIMPS. A great first word — having primped sufficiently, I was ready to start the journey. Several days ago, 1 across was IN A COMA. I can relate to that.

BTW, how do you describe someone who uses way too many commas? COMMATOSE!

Several folks didn’t like the word INANER, for “More ludicrous.” It is clunky. One poster noted: There is nothing more INANE than INANER! And someone else replied: What about INANEST?

I was today old when I learned that the seeds of a PAPAYA are “highly nutritious,” according to the clue. (I wonder if a crossword puzzle has ever been cited as authority for something. Nah.) I bet you’ve just been throwing your papaya seeds away, right? They are an anti-oxidant, help with weight control, cholesterol, and a whole bunch of other stuff. You can get them in supplement form.

Some folks pore over a puzzle like Rabbis with the Talmud (which, incidentally, was an answer in yesterday’s puzzle, clued as “Temple text”). In case you had any doubt that it can get insane, check this out:

“Today’s puzzle set a new record for the most appearances of the letter P in a 15 x 15 NYT puzzle, with 20. Walden [the constructor] also holds the record (in a tie) for most appearances of the letter N, at 26. And he is in 5th place for most appearances of the letter O, although his total of 31 pales in comparison to the leader at 69.”

Noted. Thank you.

I’ll let myself out now. Don’t get up.

Hi Folks,

I see the Ukrainians blew up a bridge that was a major supply line for the Russians. Their Plan B was to work with Chris Christie to stop all traffic in both directions.

Yesterday’s puzzle contained a BEET. The clue was “Folate-rich root.”

I cooked beets once. I bought them with the beet leaves (greens?) on and everything. Once you start slicing the beets, everything around you slowly becomes very red. Very very red. By the time I was finished the kitchen looked like a scene from the Manson murders.

Today’s puzzle was by a couple of newly-wed constructors, Jessie and Ross Trudeau. Mazel Tov! It brilliantly (IMO) featured a “ladder” theme, with the answer for 8-down comprised of 21 straight H’s, forming a ladder up the center of the grid, with the crossbars serving as rungs. Then it had five long, two-word answers “climbing” the ladder by hitting it from the left, climbing up an indicated number of rungs, and then continuing on the right. Pretty nifty.

Ellen Degeneres discusses the different ladders she has in her house, how big or small they are, and what she uses them for. And then she says “I also have a little step-ladder,” indicating with her hand how tall it is, “which I treat just the same, and love just as much, as all the others.”

66 Down — “Play title that superstitious actors avoid saying aloud in theaters.”

Did you know that a superstition among actors is that it is bad luck to say “MACBETH” in a theater (except, of course, if that’s the play that’s being performed)? If it needs to be referred to, they will call it “The Scottish Play” or “MacBee,” and will refer to Macbeth himself as “The Scottish King.” How did it start?

It is rumored that the first performance of the play was a complete disaster. The young boy who was supposed to play Lady Macbeth reportedly died, so Shakespeare himself had to fill in and play the role. Additionally, the stage prop daggers were apparently replaced with real daggers, resulting in the death of the actor playing King Duncan. (Hello Alec Baldwin!)

[For some reason, that reminds me of one of my favorite Buddy Hackett lines. He saw a performance of the play based on The Diary of Anne Frank, and the actress playing Anne Frank was so bad, that when the Nazis came on stage the whole audience shouted: “She’s in the attic!”]

There is a whole series of mishaps, some deadly, associated with other productions of MACBETH. In 1937, an absolute disastrous situation overcame the cast preparing for the play at the Old Vic. The director and one of the actors were in a car accident on the way to the theater. The dog belonging to the founder of the Old Vic, Lilian Baylis, was hit by a car a few days after this car accident. Laurence Olivier, the actor cast to play Macbeth, lost his voice due to a cold just before opening night, resulting in the play being postponed. A 25-pound stage weight fell and narrowly missed Olivier, and Baylis died of a heart attack right before the final rehearsal for the show.

Getting back to Abe Lincoln (see yesterday’s post), it is said he read passages regarding Duncan’s assassination to his friends a week before he, himself, was assassinated. I don’t know — that connection seems a bit tenuous. Get this though:

As recently as 1998, Alec Baldwin (OMG, him again!?) sliced open the hand of another actor during a production of MACBETH. I assume he was performing in it and didn’t just charge the stage from the audience with a knife — we would have heard of that.

Fortunately, if an actor inadvertantly utters “Macbeth” in a theater, there are ways to remedy the curse, which strike me as entirely reasonable:

The most widely accepted one is to leave the theater, spin around 3 times, spit (typically over your shoulder), recite a line from another work of Shakespeare’s, and knock to be let back in. Variations include uttering a bad word instead of a line from Shakespeare (I imagine “f**k!” would do, and would likely come naturally under the circumstances), or not saying anything at all after the movements.

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Sunday is the day I do the Spelling Bee in the Sunday Times Magazine. I did okay this week, missing only algae and algal. Algal? Gimme a break. They did not accept LULAV, despite it being Sukkoth. I was not surprised since they also did not accept HALVAH a while ago. They would definitely accept BAGEL. I need to get a sense of where the line is. I wonder if BIALY would fly. A bialy, btw, is a relative of the bagel — it is not a cross between a beagle and a collie.

Woof woof

The challenge this blog poses for me is to make it appealable to folks who don’t do the daily puzzle that inspires it. I think the first post was a little too puzzle-centric and may have scared some of you away. So I’m going to try to minimize the puzzle matter and maximize the tangents it leads me on.

For example, I’ll just note that today’s puzzle had the clue: “Subject of a drawing, perhaps,” and the answer was DOOR PRIZE. This led to the following series of posts in Rex’s blog.

LMS: I never, ever win the DOOR PRIZE, but I’m beyond thrilled when the hygienist gives me my little gift bag. No, really. It’s ridiculous how happy I am with that damn thing.

ME: The goody bag my hygienist gives me contains a tiny “travel-size” thingie of floss, about the size of a medium-sized button. It’s adorable, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never had trouble fitting regular-sized floss into my bag for trips. I showed it to my wife, and, since then, every time I’m packing for a trip I yell out to her, “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to floss while we’re away — I can’t seem to cram the floss into my bag — do you have one of those travel-size flosses?”

The Joker (commenting on my note): Too funny!

Me: Thanks Joker! I’ll be high for six hours from your accolade. That’s how shallow I am.

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I learned several new words today. First, ZHUZH. To make something more stylish, or attractive. “To zhuzh something up.” Apparently, it’s used often on HGTV.

And, if you can imagine something even more interesting than that: Sockdolager. (That was the clue, and the answer was LULU.) This word plays an extraordinary role in our nation’s history. In the play Lincoln was watching when he was killed (Our American Cousin), the actor Harry Hawk had the line: “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap!”

It was known to Booth that that line always got a big laugh. He waited for the line to be read, waited for the laughter to arise, and shot Lincoln at that moment so the sound of the laughter covered the sound of the gunshot.

So the next time you’re at a Will Ferrell movie, be careful.

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My favorite clue/answer today was: “Second line of a child’s joke,” and the answer was WHO’S THERE? The reference, of course, is to knock-knock jokes. My g’daughter Zoey, who is six, tells this one: Knock Knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo who? Don’t cry, it’s only a knock-knock joke. (Sort of a pull-back-the-curtain approach.)

When my son Sam was little, he loved knock-knock jokes, but fell just short of getting the hang of constructing them. So in his famous one he’d say Knock knock. I’d say Who’s there? And he’d say: Apple. Does anyone want an apple? It still sends us into gales of laughter, thirty years later.

And my grandson Leon, who is five, has a different take on them. He says: Knock knock. Then I say “Who’s there?, and then he also says “Who’s there?” I usually crack up at that point, but sometimes I say, “Hey, that’s my line!

I’ll just let myself out now — don’t get up.

Today’s NYT puzzle (Friday 10/7) starts with a joke by Demetri Martin.  “How fast does a zebra have to run before it looks gray?”  (The answer was ZEBRA.)  I noted in a post on the Rex Parker blog that Demetri Martin is a comic with a very dry wit, like Steven Wright, who once said – “I have no fear of heights, but I am afraid of widths.”  It prompted another person to share this incredible Wright line: “I put instant coffee in a microwave oven.  I went back in time.”

Speaking of time travel, several answers in the puzzle, in combination, brought me back 50 years to when I was a pimply, gawking, teenage boy:  I SAW IT (17A).  CLEAVAGE (6A).  OMG! (25A)

The clue “They come with strings attached,” was for APRONS.  It reminded me of the sign in the music store window:  “Violin for sale:  Only $25.  No strings attached.”

But the highlight of the puzzle was its featuring a three-word “stack” for KETANJI BROWN JACKSON.  Right smack dab in the center on the week she made her appearance on the bench.  That J, with the Z from zebra, made me wonder if today’s puzzle might be a “pangram.”  A pangram is when the grid contains at least one of all 26 letters of the alphabet.  But it was missing Q and X.

For those of you who think the NYT is stodgy, last Sunday’s puzzle had ASSHAT as an answer, right up there at 1 across.  The clue was “total jerk.”  And today one clue was “Jerkwad,” with the answer TOOL.

When I first joined the faculty at Hunter, the Chair of our department was Marjorie and we always got along because she enjoyed a good laugh.  Sadly, she passed away a few years ago.  But I recall one email from her that got me to laugh out loud, reading it alone at home in my bedroom, which was rare.  She wrote me that a student was formally appealing a grade and asked me to set up a meeting with her (the student) to try to resolve it.  I am the Chair of our department’s grade appeal committee.  She forwarded the student’s complaint to me, and it was incredible.  It went on for page after page after page.  It was Tolstoyan.  I wrote back to Marjorie: “Is it me, or does the student seem a bit wordy?”  And Marjorie replied with just three words: “Wear a hat.”  I took it to mean, the shit’s going to fly, and I loved it.

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One thing I love about puzzles is that they play with words.  Words are malleable in a good constructor’s hands.  I like to think I tried to show my kids (and show my grandkids) that words can be toys.  You can twist them around like little action figures and it’s fun, it’s funny.  Lianna and I were trying to make up jokes once in the car on the way to school.  And we came up with one that I love – what do you call it when French fries start falling from the sky? – Precipitatoes!

Here’s an example from a puzzle I just completed by Erik Agard (New Yorker, online 10/5).  The clue was “How much longer?” and the answer was long – 14 letters.  I first thought of “Are we there yet?”  But that’s only 13 letters and the crossing letters I had were not consistent with that.  It turned out to be something I could make no sense out of – the answer for “How much longer?” was – THE WAYS IN WHICH. 

Huh?  WTF? 

It made no sense to me until I had what some call an aha moment.  Agard’s clue is playing with the word “how.”  A “much longer” way to say “how” something is done, is to explain “the ways in which” something is done.  Get it?  So how (much longer) is “the ways in which.” Brilliant, it seems to me.  Still confused?  Now you know how my students feel. 

The clue for eleven down today was “Animal that the Aztecs called ayotochtli, or ‘turtle-rabbit,’” and the answer (of course) was ARMADILLO.  Did you know there is a baseball team in Texas, the Amarillo Dillas, with an armadillo as its mascot?  God bless America.

Not to crow (much), but I almost always finish the NYT crossword puzzles that I try, i.e., Weds thru Sun. I sometimes have small errors, but I never look stuff up. Today, however, the very first day of this blog, I crashed and did not finish (DNF). It happened in the Northeast where ARCO finally popped into my head (amazingly), regarding the violinist’s bow, but I couldn’t let go of LOAF for “Lie about.” (It was LOLL, of course.) And “F in music class?” — fuhgeddaboutit. So I sputtered and crashed.

But it was a very impressive puzzle, it seemed to me, with two themes working together in five locations. Two downs “merged left” to answer the clue. So for “Noble title” the answer was COUNTESS, but it was formed by four across pairs: CO, UN, TE, SS, each also forming part of their own separate answers. And each down pair spelled another (unclued) word! — CUTS and ONES, from Countess. Wow.

So, bravo, Simeon Seigel. Other treats included a pair of identical clues: “Officer’s title,” with the answers being SIR in one case and MAAM in the other. And I somehow remembered that Melville dedicated Moby-Dick (good name for a porn star, btw) to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I did not know but was happy to learn that the Swiss flag is square! Really?

Rex (of the Rex Parker puzzle blog) absolutely hated it. He’s quite the curmudgeon. And one member of “the commentariat” paraphrased Samuel Johnson wonderfully and said: “The theme must have been extremely difficult to execute. I wish it had been impossible.” Another carper recounted what the losing football coach said when asked about his team’s execution. “I’m in favor of it.”

But another commenter countered: “Why do you always complain that themes don’t have a “reason” for existing? It’s a puzzle. You have to figure out which letters the clues want you to put in the boxes. That is the reason.”

The very first clue/answer was “Musky ‘cat’” for CIVET. And I bet you coffee drinkers didn’t know this: “Civet cats in Sumatra eat the fruit of coffee plants. Unable to digest the bean, they excrete them whole. The beans are then gathered, cleaned, and roasted to produce a rare and expensive ( $100 USD per pound) coffee prized by aficionados. I’ll….pass.” (per Rex commenter Joel Palmer) (I might put a little more emphasis on the “cleaned” part.)

That’s my puzzle chatter for the day, and I’m sticking to it.