Fact Boy

A kiwi or ostrich may be a ratite, but a flightless woodpecker is a ratatatite.

My father spent 16 months in the Solomon Islands during the war and three years in Mexico when he was hiding from his second ex-wife, but otherwise he never traveled outside of the US until he was in his sixties. When he came home from his first trip to Europe, he told me that Mensa was such a big organization in Germany that every university campus had a building for its exclusive use. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the German noun "Mensa" means "cafeteria."

Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. The USSR did not exist until 1922.

My father liked to think of himself as worldly, but he was at times startlingly naïve. After he returned from his first trip to Europe, which included a tour of Heidelberg, he told me breathlessly that Mensa was such a huge organization in Germany that it had a building of its own on every university campus. I didn't have the heart to tell him that in German, "Mensa" means "cafeteria."

My mother told me that she was about twelve before she figured out that a hymn sung frequently in her church, "Gladly the cross I'd bear," wasn't about a bear named Gladly who suffered from strabismus.

Phyllis Dietrichson: Neff is the name, isn't it? Walter Neff: Yeah. Two "F"s, like in Philadelphia… — Double indemnity (1944)

It was bad enough that my father had once lived in Tulare, California, the eponym of tularemia. Then, without thinking, I married a woman from Lyme, Connecticut. On an unrelated note, is a doctor who is ready for an emergency an oncallogist?

Back in 1963, I took a tour of a factory in Copenhagen where they put up those little hams in heart-shaped cans. The guide, a pretty young woman in her early twenties, gave her remarks in English, French, German, and Italian. About halfway through the tour, she said, "Here in Denmark, we have a saying: We eat what we can, and what we can't, we can, and what we can't can, we export." She then went to say, in French, German, and Italian that she couldn't repeat what she had just said in English, but I think they all got it anyway because they laughed when she said it.

49-Down is wrong. DIM SUM is what you get when your calculator battery dies on you.

Why is Sibelius a better composer than Schubert? Because his symphony is Finnish.

Flatfish (e.g. halibut) start out in life vertical (dorsal fin up, anal fin down, one eye on each side); as they age, they turn 90° so that one side is down, the other up. As they do so, the eye on the down side migrates to the up side. Protective coloration in most fish is dark on top, light on the bottom. In flatfish, the down side turns light, the up side dark. Most flatfish are righthanded: their right side is the up side. A minority are lefthanded: their left side is up. For some reason, lefthanded flatfish are more susceptible than righthanded flatfish to cancer and organ damage caused by pollutants. The fisheries agencies of the European Union therefore monitor lefthanded flatfish as an indicator of ocean pollution.

What if the hokey pokey really *is* what it's all about?

Today's puzzle provides as good an occasion as any for me to announce my forthcoming screenplay inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, with a lead role specially written for Lily Tomlin. My working title is "One Ringy-Dingy To Rule Them All."

When I worked in a public library many years ago, I never got a request for a book about a Scottish artist named McEscher, but I did get one from a mother helping her seventh grader out with a report for a book about a French artist who lived ca. 1890-1910 named Art Noview.

19-Across brought to mind the summer of 1971 when I worked in a physiology lab at Berkeley whose research focus was the pituitary hormone prolactin. For months, they had sacrificed pigeons for their pituitaries, and squab had been a staple of the grad students' dinners. One of the postdocs told me that the saddest day of her life was when she found out that lobsters don't have pituitary glands.

Re 22D: When Walter Neff introduces himself to Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944), he says his surname is spelled "with two Fs, as in Philadelphia."

Maybe things have changed since I was in the Army, but when I was in uniform, the mess was where you ate; what you ate was "chow" or "Army food." Particular recurring items had their own names, such as "SOS" for chipped beef on toast. Also, elemental sulfur is odorless; the stinky stuff is sulfur compounds such as mercaptan and hydrogen sulfide.

I was a US Army personnel specialist, and it was my experience that nobody hunts AWOL soldiers, almost all of whom return to duty on their own. Those with serious behavioral problems usually run afoul of civilian police, who arrest them and turn them over to the Army. And the usual practice in the case of a soldier determined to stay gone is to wait 30 days, then drop him from the rolls as a deserter. In any case, AWOL is a duty status accorded someone whose whereabouts are unknown and who could be anywhere in North America. Where would you go to look for him?

The Dog Days get their name from the constellation Canis Major, not the star Sirius, which is not a constellation but part of Canis Major.

A unit of light is a lumen. A watt is a unit of power. The amount of power a lightbulb uses is expressed in watts; the light it emits is expressed in lumens.

In the entire corpus of medieval Icelandic literature, there are only two so-called Eddas: 1) the "younger" Edda of Snorri Sturluson, which is a poetic — a manual for poets; and 2) the "elder" Edda, a collection of short narrative poems written in alliterative verse. Sagas, of which there are many extant, are lengthy prose narratives similar to the modern novel. "Saga" and "Edda" are not synonymous.

If I had to translate English “Darn!” into German, the first thing that would come to mind would be “verdammt noch mal!” and the last thing would be “ach.” German “ach” corresponds to English “ah,” “oh,” “ha,” and “hah,” and in combination with other words, it yields a variety of meanings: ach je (“heigh ho”), ach ja (“why, yes”), ach was (“by no means”), ach der (“oh, him”), ach so (“so I see”), ach nein (“you don’t mean…”), ach wo (“no way!” or “get out of here!”), ach wie schön (“oh, how lovely”), die ach so eingebildete Dame (“the oh so hoity-toity lady”), mit Ach und Krach (“by the skin of one’s teeth”).

Etc[etera] = *and* other things; among other things = inter alia.

When I was thirteen, I stopped taking piano lessons, dropped out of Boy Scouts, left the church, and bought an English three-speed bicycle. The only one of these choices that I came to regret was buying the bicycle, which like all English vehicles was mechanically idiosyncratic, including being fabricated with left-hand thread screws and bolts. If a scew, bolt, or nut got lost, you couldn't replace it at the hardware store, where everything with screw thread is right-handed. The U.K. eventually joined the human race and adopted right-hand screw thread in the 1960s. Swann & Flanders incorporate this English quirk into their song about honeysuckle and bindweed, "Misalliance." <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYr0eNtpDHs" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYr0eNtpDHs</a>

“Fail-safe,” originally military jargon, entered general parlance in 1962 with the publication of the novel Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, which was made into a movie. The title describes the command system used by the Strategic Air Command. In an alert, SAC bombers fly to a position (called the “fail-safe point”) where they circle until they receive a command to proceed to their targets in the Soviet Union. After a set period of time and absent the order to attack, they return to their bases. In the words of a fictional General Bogan, who is explaining things to a fictional Congressman Raskob, “Fail-Safe simply means that if something fails it is still safe.” In other words, a fail-safe system is not guaranteed not to fail; it is designed to cause no harm when it does.

Re 19A: but a flightless woodpecker is a RATATATITE.

Forty years ago, I worked for a settlement company. My wife's boss dropped in to see him, bringing their three-year-old son with her. My boss introduced me to his wife and son, saying that his name was Shale. "Glad to meet you, Shale," I said. "That's a gneiss name."

Re: 1A: Dada was not a style but a movement, a rebellion against the political and economic system that had produced colonialism, industrial exploitation of workers and consumers, and destructive wars. An artistic style is a set of design criteria that can be reduced to a set of descriptive or prescriptive rules. Dada was by its very nature a rejection of all rules, and those who rejected it did so because of its anarchistic nature.

When Huey Long was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1932, Senator Carter Glass (R-NY) said that the Emperor Caligula had appointed a horse to the Roman Senate, but the Romans were fortunate in that they at least got the whole horse.

I date the beginning of the end at the day in the summer of 1966 when 2nd lieutenant George D. Taylor respnded to an assertion I had uttered by saying, "Whom told you that?"

I had just attended a public event in Bonn at which French President Charles De Gaulle delivered a speech — two weeks after a failed OAS attempt on his life — and, weary of pedaling upstream, took my bicycle aboard a boat bound for Koblenz. About halfway there, a middle-aged American couple approached me, and speaking slowly, carefully, and LOUDLY — to help me understand their English — asked me to point out the Lorelei. I had no idea but scanned the horizon for a likely-looking rock. Having found one, in the best Cherman ekzent I could fake, I pointed it out to them. They rewarded me for my assistance with a chocolate bar — they had brought a bagful to tip the locals, apparently thinking that it was still late 1945.

The title of the wife of a Russian sovereign or a female sovereign was Tsaritsa until 1721, when it was changed to Imperatritsa (“empress”). Catherine was on the throne from 1762-1796. Tsarina is an English portmanteau word cobbled together from Russian tsar and Latin regina.

If it were up to me, the clue to 64A would be "First words of 'Ode to a noble gas'".

Here’s a chronological synopsis of the grail in Arthurian literature, beginning in the late 12th century: in Chrétien de Troyes, it is “un graal” (*a* grail) without physical description or explanation. The First Continuator adds a procession in which a hundred grails are carried on each of which is the severed head of a boar. Helinand, abbot of Froidmont, describes a graal as a scutella lata et aliquantulum profunda in qua preciosæ dapes divitibus solent apponi (“a wide and slightly deepened dish on which the wealthy are accustomed to being served costly fare”). Robert de Boron describes the grail as the dish from which Jesus ate lamb at the Last Supper; Joseph of Arimathea uses it to catch his blood as he hangs on the cross. In the Old Welsh Peredur, the grail is a platter bearing a bleeding human head. In his Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach describes “the” Grail (der grâl) as a stone with supernatural powers brought down to the earth by the neutral angels — the ones who did not take sides in Lucifer’s rebellion against God. Sir Thomas Malory’s “Sangrail” is covered with a cloth every time it appears, so no one can say what it looks like. Arthurian scholar Roger Sherman Loomis finds in the Grail tradition — if it can be called that — “astonishing disharmony [and] consistent inconsistency.” The OED describes the supposition that the Grail is a cup or chalice as “erroneous.” If you want to call [the/a] grail a goblet, it’s a free country; but there’s no basis for it.

Another tautological place name: Canyon de Chelly (Navajo reservation). "Chelly" is the Spanish rendition of Navajo "tsegi," meaning "canyon."

"Their" is a possessive adjective, not a pronoun. The pronoun form is "theirs." A pronoun is a word that replaces a noun, e.g. as in "Our language is English; theirs is Spanish." "Their" cannot be used as the subject of a sentence or clause, ergo it is not a pronoun.

Wednesday is not named after the Norse god Odin but his Anglo-Saxon analogue, Woden. That's why "Wednesday" begins with W not O. The seven-day week with named days originated in the eastern Mediterranean, was adopted by the Romans, and then spread northward through Germania. It is documented in Rome in the first century, in England in the early 8th century, and is not documented in Scandinavia until ca. 1200 AD. Pagan Scandinavians had a five-day week whose only named day was the fifth (Bath Day, the name for Saturday in all modern Scandinavian languages). The seven-day week followed the Catholic church to Scandinavia.

Scheherazade is a Persian queen, and the story collection called the "Arabian nights" is so called only in English, on the whim of the publisher of the first English translation. It goes by the title "Thousand and one nights" in every other language of culture. It is a translation from the French — bowdlerized — version of Antoine Galland (1704). Galland's translation is based on a Mameluke Egyptian MS translated in turn from a Turkish MS translated in turn from Persian. Two tales not found in Galland's source — or anywhere else — are those of Aladdin and Ali Baba. Galland's French translation is the first known appearance of either in world literature, and in Galland, Ali Baba is identified as Persian, not Arabian (Aladdin is Chinese). Galland is suspected of having created both Ali Baba and Aladdin on his own. As to the Washington airport, it's located in a city whose formal name is SeaTac.

How ancient is the Athens of 55-Across? Eta (H) wasn't added to the Athenian alphabet until 403 BC, when it and omega (Ω) were officially adopted. Before that, long /e/ was written with double epsilon (EE) and long /o/ with double omicron (OO).

The First Amendment says you can believe what you like, but if the Good Book is anything to go by, the Ark did not land on "Mount" Ararat. Here's the passage in Genesis 8:4: "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the *mountains of* Ararat." Ararat is a mountainous kingdom, one item in a list of kingdoms found in Jeremiah 51: 27 — and not a mountain. "Ararat" appears four times in Hebrew Scripture and is rendered twice in King James, and also twice in the Vulgate, as "Armenia," a country roughly conterminous with the Biblical Ararat. The really ancient land of Biainili was known to its Assyrian neighbors as Urartu. Scriptural Hebrew made no provision for written vowels, so Urartu was rendered as RRT. When the Masoretic scholars invented vowel points centuries later, nobody remembered how RRT was originally pronounced, and the vowel A was arbitrarily inserted in front of each consonant. The same procedure turns FLORIDA into AFALARAD.

The US has been in debt since 1836, the second of two years in which there was no national debt (Jacksoon administration).

The Fawdon Wagonway was an English cable car system that started operation in 1826. Another was inaugurated in East London in 1840. The West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway started in New York in 1868, five years before cable cars started running in San Francisco. The grip used in San Francisco cable cars was an innovation in 1873, but the cable car itself was nearly a half-century old at the time. I thought my father was cool for commuting to work on SF's Clay Street cable car line, but in later years he and Stepmother #4 made Tony Bennett's ILMHISF "our song" and I cringed whenever they played it.

STP has never been a competitor of Pennzoil brand motor oil. When STP was introduced in 1953, it was marketed as an *oil additive* which purported to increase the lubricative quality of the oil, a claim which was stopped with a consumer protection order from the federal government in 1976, a penalty of $800,000 in 1978 and an $880,000 settlement payment to the FTC in 1995 for false advertising. In recent years, STP has been marketing a gasoline additive which claims to clean engine valves.

A quarter of NATO’s member states are monarchies, their heads of state being kings, queens, and one grand duke. With only a couple of exceptions (e.g. France and the U.S.), the rest have elected figureheads as head of state whose job consists mainly of cutting ribbons and waving at crowds. Those countries and the monarchies send their *heads of government* abroad to represent them in international bodies such as NATO summits. Further complicating the picture, Canada and the U.K. have the same head of state; Charles III would represent both countries, since Canada’s Governor General is head of state only in the absence of the monarch.

In today's mini, the clue "Unit of distance originally equivalent to 1,000 paces" is answered with MILE. Actually, the mile is more like 2000 paces. The Latin passus (plural passus) is the ancestor of English "pace" but means something different. English "pace" means a stride; Latin "stride" is gradus, and it takes two gradi to make one passus. The pace at quick time is defined by U.S. Army Field Manual 22-5 as 120 30-inch steps (strides) per minute; the gradus was 2.5 Roman feet, roughly the same (30 inches). A thousand 30-inch paces would be 2500 feet or less than half a statute mile (5280 feet).

An extraterrestrial walks into a record store, approaches the counter, and says to the clerk, "Take me to your lieder."

To 55-Down: the corpus of Norse literature contains only two Eddas, neither of them a saga. A saga is a prose narrative written in a spare, chiseled style that resembles the writings of Ernest Hemingway. A saga is a sort of novel. The so-called Younger Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson ca. 1200 AD, is a poetic — a manual for poets. It contains a catalogue of verse forms, a dictionary of convoluted metaphors called kenningar, and a source book of mythological lore for use by poets. The Elder Edda, compiled later than the Snorra Edda, is an anthology of short narratives written in alliterative verse. Snorri wrote his poetic in an atavistic effort to revive ancient forms of poetry 200 years after Christianity had replaced the heathen pantheon and the old poetic forms had been supplanted by uncomplicated songs using end rhyme and were so uninteresting that few have been preserved.

The Brooklyn Dodgers' Peewee Reese stood 5'10" tall — average height. He earned his nickname playing marbles as a boy (small marbles are called "peewees").