Number 200. From Mozart to Tipper Gore.

Since this is my 200th blog entry, I may get a little carried away, but not far.

01. Eine kleine Scheissmusik! Sewer workers in Berlin are playing Mozart 's music to keep microbes happy so they continue to do their job by breaking down sludge. Those Germans seem to always be on the forefront of technology.

02. Bird drops: Indian police have arrested a pigeon for supposedly spying for Pakistan. Were they given a tip by a stool pigeon?

03. Oklahoma 1: An Oklahoma artist has presented his work, which contains a representation of the Virgin Mary holding a knife and a hand grenade, and also a nun wielding a machine gun. Even Dali didn't dare to do that.

04. Oklahoma 2: An Oklahoma prison has issued clown suits to their inmates. That way, if they escape, they will be immediately recognisable, especially by 7 year olds coming home from the circus. Maybe, if a few of the prisoners escape together they can commandeer a small volkswagen getaway car and avoid detection.

Speaking of the circus: e.e. cummings wrote "Damn everything but the circus!...damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, ... damn everything that won't get into the circle, that won't enjoy, that won't throw its heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence..."

One of these days, I'll write about my experiences as a circus worker.

I have read that some prisons are already giving the prisoners pink "uniforms" to wear. And, of course, some of them like pink, and there is nothing wrong with that.

05. Crossword puzzler is puzzled: Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me reports that an 89 year old crossword puzzler in Britain was surprized when he looked for crossword help on the Internet. He keyed in the definition which read: Wild Asian ass. The answer looked for was: onager. Guess what he got back.

06. Golden Girl Gone: I was saddened to read that Rue McClanahan has passed away. I really enjoyed her many tv rolls, especially her part in the Golden Girls. She was younger than I am!
(I think she was married 36 times. I could be wrong. But she was pretty enough to catch the eye of many men.) Now, only Betty White is left from that great show, which, of course, can be seen every night at 2 am on most local tv stations.

07. Low cost safety: One can now buy a fake flickering tv for around $30. This can be left on when you are sleeping or away on a trip. A burgler, looking to break in, will supposedly see the blinking from the faux tv and go pick on somebody else.

08. Oh, Oh! Subway has announce that they will now begin to "tessellate" the cheese on their sandwiches. Won't that make them heavy and hard on false teeth?

09. Green Side Up! Two million "Shrek" glasses are being recalled because of excess cadmium in the glass. Too much gray pigment? Perhaps they could be dumped into the BP hole.

10. Gimme a call! Tony Robbins, a famous motivational speaker, has offered his telephone number for one million dollars. That will allow the buyer to call him up for advice anytime of the day or night. (You can have my number for a lot less.)

Speaking of telephone numbers: A friend of our family used to call often to speak to my wife and when I answered, she would say: "Hello, big boy!" in a sexy voice. One day, a business person called and left a number at which to be called. I misdialed the number, and a sexy voice said: "Hello, big boy!" and started to say, "Welcome to the ....... sex line." I quickly hung up because I didn't want such a charge to show up on the telephone bill. But.... I swear both sexy voices were from the same person. I had always wondered what our friend did for a living.. now I think I knew. My wife would not let me mention the situation to her friend.

11. God is watching you! The teacher at a religious high school was fired for joining an atheist group on the Internet. She joined at home, using her own computer, so the question is: How did the school administrator know that she had joined?

12. Speaking of the Internet: It was sad to hear that Al and Tipper Gore were going to call it quits after 40 years of marriage. It'll be interesting to hear what Leno and Letterman make out of this. There are so many possibilities to weave keywords in: global warming and ky jelly, the Internet and Tipper (I mean Twitter), etc etc. Its tough to be in public life and have a private life. Good luck to them.

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Tough Friday Crossword

Friday's (July 31, 2009) crossword puzzle in the Baltimore Sun (actually a syndicated L.A. Times puzzle) was a tough one. I had a lot of fun solving it. And I learned a lot of things in looking up (yes, I had to google some answers) things I had no idea about before.

Along the way, I came across a recipe for frittata (one of the answers). Frittata is an Italian omelet. So, for breakfast I used the recipe and Elaine and I "feasted", if I do say so myself.
The only thing missing was garlic. Elaine doesn't like it, but I love it.

The puzzle had a strange type of theme. X's replaced SK's in some of the answers and made for nice wordplay. This reminded me of my Concordance of X, my weird "work" that I tried to palm off on a con man. But, he was smarter than I was, and my opus remains unpublished. (I talked about this in an earlier blog.)

I also was reminded of a speech by Mercutio about "Queen Mab." (Shakespearean scholars take note.).

I found out that "Laugh-in" was campy instead of corny.

A place to unwind is a tub? I guess so.

There is a river in the Carolinas named PeeDee.

A hockey team lineup makes a hexad.

A Borneo swinger is an orang.

A Beatle wig was popular in the '60's. I don't remember that.

King Xerxes was a tough son of a gun.

Fellow Mensan Jean Auel wrote The Clan of the Cave Bear. I didn't remember that the heroine's name was Ayla.

I forgot that "a sitcom set in a garage" had to be Taxi. (One of my favorite TV shows, probably because I drove a cab for a couple of years in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The least paying of any of the many jobs I have had in my lifetime, but one of the most interesting.)

I was reminded of a folk singer named Nanci Griffith.

After I solved the puzzle, I went out to one of the sites that write about each day's puzzles and their solutions. Very interesting. If you ask me to, I will supply the website addresses. There is a whole Crossword Puzzle sub-culture out there. I love it and my brain does to.
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Avoid Alzheimers, try Cryptic Crosswords

Have you ever done Cryptic Crosswords? Not the usual ones you see in almost every newspaper, but the ones that British people love.

When I was a child, I sat next to my grandfather, in his smoke-filled stinky den while he compiled the world's greatest crossword puzzle dictionary. He would give me puzzles to solve and I became quite expert in the American style crosswords.

I became a member of the National Puzzlers League in 1974 and branched out into all kinds of mental puzzles, and discovered Cryptic Crosswords. These are the crossword puzzles that people in the British Empire enjoy solving. These employ tricky word-play. If you want to keep exercising your brain and you want to do something quite different from the normal crosswords, such as appear in most daily papers, I would highly recommend Cryptic Crosswords.

You can find these puzzles in magazines like The Nation and BBC Music. The Atlantic Monthly as well as The New Yorker used to have good ones each month, but they were dropped, apparently because there wasn't enough interest by ordinary subscribers.

British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian publish cryptics. I hate to admit it, but I have NEVER completely finished even one of the Times cryptics. However, I have done some of the Guardians as well as ones from other British papers. BBC Music Magazine has a great music-themed cryptic each month. They are quite tough for me, but I learn something about classical music each month when I attempt to solve them. British puzzles naturally contain a lot of terms and words that Americans usually are not used to, and this makes them a bit tough, at least for me. But I love the challenge.

The cryptic in The Nation has been posed each month for years by a gentleman with a great sense of humor and a very wide knowledge of all kinds of things. I am able to solve almost all of them, but they do give my brain a workout.

Recently, the magazine THE WEEK has begun a regular crossword that is similar to a cryptic in humor and wordplay.

I have my regular puzzle "fixes". Every month, I do cryptics from The Nation, BBC Music Magazine, British newspapers, the National Puzzlers League, books from Borders, and wherever else I can find them. But I try not to ignore regular American crosswords, especially the tough ones in The Week magazine and the New York Times. (I'm sure you know that the American style puzzles in the Times start rather easily on Mondays and get progressively harder as the week progresses.)

Cryptic puzzles emply a number of different wordplay types.. such as anagrams, hidden words, charades, etc. If you haven't tried them, you are in for a mental treat.

Outside of the National Puzzlers League, I have only been acquainted with one other person who loved cryptic crosswords. His name was Chuck Adkins, and he worked for me at the Social Security Administration. Chuck was a puzzler and I got him interested in Cryptics.. and all of a sudden, he was submitting cryptic puzzles to Games Magazine. If you subscribe to that magazine, take a look at the names of the cryptics contributors, you may see a puzzle submitted by him. Even though Chuck passed away a couple of years ago, that magazine still publishes his cryptics periodically. Chuck was an amazing person and a good friend. I miss him.