Conversation Piece

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Liza Blue

I would not consider myself a good conversationalist, and you can’t convince me otherwise, because every time I take one of those personality tests, I end up with all the other socially awkward people.  But I have developed a few work-arounds over the years, and the one that I have field tested the most extensively is to ask people, “What is your favorite sports memory?”  This never fails to get a response and sometimes a good anecdote – I figure it is better than asking someone, “Have you read any good books lately?”  I am frequently surprised that some people’s favorite memory involves watching sports and not participating in them, which wasn’t really the point of the question, but I try not to be judgmental.  Of course, this topic usually gives me the opportunity to tell the story when I went “downtown” in a ladies softball game in the late 70s.

I was participating in a summer league where we were routinely clobbered.  We were a group recent college graduates mixed in with some of my mother’s contemporaries; none of us was really any good.  There was one particularly warm night where I remember a couple of our players had to retire due to an impending heat rash on their thighs.  I think that we might have had a few gals with fading baseball prowess, and perhaps one player who could heave it with all her might from third base all the way to first.  My skills were primarily related to my intimate knowledge of the baseball rules, borne of many hours watching the Cubs on TV with my grandfather after Sunday lunch at his house.  On my high school team, I was one of the few women who knew exactly when a dropped third strike was applicable, and that if you got hit by a pitch you were only awarded a free base only if you made an honest effort to get out of the way.  Unfortunately these rules did not apply in this league.  The catcher was not supposed to catch the ball, and since this was slow pitch softball, it was impossible not to get out of the way of the pitch.

We were proud to be sponsored by the local plumber – our team name was the Hoity Toities – but our opponents were bar teams who showed up with a coach, a cooler of beverages, real uniforms and cleats.  We all wore tennis shoes, and one of our plays once played an entire game in Minnetonkan moccasins.  There was one team that even sported home and away uniforms even though we always played on the same field.  After trying out several positions, I stationed myself at first base.  I clearly had no shotgun for an arm, and was shocked to realize that I threw like a girl and could do nothing to fix it.  At first base I didn’t have to field too many balls, nor throw them, and if the ball ever did come my way, it was because my teammates were trying to throw it exactly to me.  Offensively, I was marginal, and drifted down to batting at the bottom of the order.  I was also an extremely slow runner, and once I tripped and fell on the way to first base, which was all part of the fun.  

This is all by way of setting the stage for my one night of glory.  It was a nondescript  humid summer evening but as I stood at the plate, I suddenly realized that I was in an otherworldy zone, and I felt a cone of magical light shining down upon me.  I remembered an interview with George Brett, the power hitter for the Kansas City Athletics, who said that occasionally, out of the blue, everything would fall into place, the pitches would look like grapefruits and there was nothing that he could do but go “downtown” and hit homeruns. That night I was standing exactly in the same place, and I felt the magic.  When first pitch came in, everything suddenly slowed down, the ball hung there and I just stepped up and crushed it in a perfectly choreographed display of hand-eye coordination.  This was no bloop, dying quail or Texas leaguer but an absolutely frozen rope to dead center, blazing far beyond the dazed fielder.  Not bad for the 7th batter.  I slowly jogged around the bases to the cheers of my stunned teammates. 

Next time up, I don’t think that the pitcher realized that she was facing me again, and again I nailed it, this time over the left fielder’s head.  Another home run.  The third time I was up, I received probably the best athletic compliment I have ever had.  The pitcher recognized me, called time out, and turned around to her outfield and with a waving motion yelled, “It’s her again, everybody move back – way back!”  This of course is the flip side to the more typical gesture I have received when the pitcher waves the fielders in.   But my opponents were helpless – once again I hit a rocket over the left fielder.  There were no boundaries on this field and so no official home run, but as I was rounding third I could see that the left fielder was still chasing down the rolling ball.

Now just to illustrate that there is no such thing as total perfection, there was one slight disappointment to the evening.  I had a boyfriend in tow, who in fact was the only spectator in the bleachers.  After each homerun I would come to sit next to him, flushed, chest heaving from my jog around the bases, expecting some sort of recognition for this hall of fame performance.  But I got nothing, not a word.  In fact I think that he was reading a medical textbook, which he evidently found more compelling that someone who could hit 4 epic homeruns in a row.  I conjured up several possible scenarios – either he thought this was routine and expected no less (not likely and in any case an impossible standard to maintain), he felt intimidated to have such an athletic girlfriend and thus was in deep denial (not likely, lack of confidence was not an issue for him) or finally, he took it all in but didn’t give a rat’s ass (sadly, as it turned out, the truth).

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missings words based on the above rules and context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers. 

My offensive output was typically feeble and meager,

 A – – – – at a pitch might produce a weak Texas leaguer.

 But the outfield had to keep – – – – on me that one magical night,

 But even when they moved back, I just hit it out of sight.

 So you want to see perfection, just take a look at my stats.

 You’ll see a home run recorded for every one of my at – – – -.

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Answers:  stab, tabs, bats

 

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Rendering Judgment

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Liza Blue

I recently heard a friend describe her declining atheletic prowess as like “a horse who should be sent to the glue factory,” which set me to pondering about the fate of loyal farm animals when they make the inevitable transition from livestock to deadstock.  And I had always wondered whether glue of my childhood, good old Elmer’s or the intoxicating rubber cement, was somehow derived from Old Dobbin.   Though I had not put much thought into it, I had assumed only the hooves of horses were used for the glue, so it seemed a bit wasteful to send the whole horse to the factory.  But perhaps that is the whole point of the phrase – someone has grown so useless that only the hooves, which are nothing more than a big old toenail, are of any value.   I called up the fellow that lives near my parents’ gentleman farm and asked him what happens if one of his beef cows unexpectedly went hooves up.  “Well I just call the renderer,” he said, “ and they come with a ramp and winch and just haul it away.”  When I asked him where, he said “well I don’t know, but I think that they make glue from their feet.”  Picking up dead animals and taking them to a glue factory must certainly be an entry level job to a pretty grisly enterprise.

There is no better testament to the power of the internet when I can type in “animal rendering” and discover a 314 page manuscript entitled, “Essential Rendering Techniques,” authored by the National Rendering Association.  Here was my first glimpse into a huge and vital industry that annually processes some 100 million hogs, 35 million cattle and 8 billion chickens producing 54 billion pounds of renderment, There are some 20,000 rendering plants sprinkled across the country.  Field trip anyone? 

I could envision a huge bubbling vat at the centerpiece of the plant, a relentless gaping maw that ground up endless Dobbins, Elmers and Elsies into a myriad of products.  The first step in the process is to steam the carcass at high heat, allowing the fat to float to the surface.  The fat has many industrial uses, but plenty of human uses, such as for soaps and lotions.  McDonald’s also came under fire for using the beef tallow to cook their fries.  Everything else becomes bone meal and pet and animal food.  The renderer’s website refer to themselves as the “first recyclers” and points out that without their services the countryside would be overwhelmed with rotting carcasses and mass graves.  But at the same time I could sense a little skittishness.  Basically using the meat scraps as food forces these animals to be cannibals, and there was the disquieting specter of  mad cow disease.  When I clicked on this topic, up came a blank screen entitled “under review.”       

Prior to the centralization of rendering plants, our forefarmers would sell their deadstock to local Mom and Pop operations, and actually make as much money off the carcass as the live animal.  While there was no mention of a “glue factory” in the 314 page document, it is quite possible that the hooves were processed separately.  For example, Julia Child, in her classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” points out that you can make your own gelatin by boiling pigs feet.  Gelatin is essentially the same thing as glue, but with a higher water content.  The image then emerged of self sufficient farm wives boiling hooves to make glue for their children’s art projects.  I then recalled Elmer’s glue, the staple of countless childhood art projects, and its symbol of the smiling cow on the label.  Could the cheerful smiling cow reflect the bovine origin of Elmer’s?  Oddly enough, Elmer’s glue was initially made by Borden’s, which also was one of the first commercial diaries.  The symbol of Borden’s milk was Elsie the cow, and thus Elmer was contrived as Elsie’s “husband.”  It was somewhat unsettling to think that Borden’s both made milky white milk and milky white glue, but it made sense as a vertical integration strategy.  Elsie could be milked endlessly and then when barren, renamed as Elmer and sent to the proverbial glue factory and then off to grade schools all over the country.

In my childhood there were two principle types of glue, either Elmer’s or rubber cement.  (Airplane glue was only a fringe product for me since building plastic models was a male dominated activity.)  I wondered if the preference for one or the other was one of those polarizing issues, much like the debate between mayonnaise and Miracle Whip. (I like mayonnaise.)  One entire summer my family debated the relative merits of Wheat Thins and Triscuits, and it seemed that everyone had an entrenched opinion, despite the fact that Wheat Thins are clearly superior.  But not so for Elmer’s and rubber cement, as both have their distinct appeals.  Personally, I am a rubber cement fan, though I have dabbled in Elmer’s.  First there was the intoxicating odor of rubber cement and the cute little brush attached to the cap.  You could take the rubber cement and smear it on your hands and then clap your hand together and let the glue set, just so.  You could then mush your hands back and forth and slightly separate them to see the little stalag-tighty and –mighty tendrils of glue.  Now for the best part, rolling the little globs of cement into rubbery boogeroid balls.  That was the end point for me, I was perfectly happy rolling the little balls around and peeling the glue off my hands.  However, some of the boys might throw them at each other, put them in each other’s hair, or sneak one into the pages of a textbook.  As I recall, rubber cement was labeled as flammable, and thus rubber cement could have been a gateway drug for both glue sniffers and arsonists. 

Elmer’s glue had less appeal since it didn’t smell or ball up.  But you could paint a thin veneer of Elmer’s on your hand, let it get dry and shiny and then peel it off like sunburned skin, which would even have the tiny little wrinkle marks in your skin.  While rubber cement might have appealed mostly to nose pickers, Elmer’s might particularly appeal to those who liked to nurse scabs and pick them over and over again.  My friend Maria used Elmer’s to feign some sort of tragic skin disease.  You could horrify your friends by sadly explaining that you had contracted leprosy and now your skin was falling off in sheets.  In our safety conscious age, I am sure that rubber cement has been banned from schools and that Elmer’ glue has been replaced by glue sticks.  A shame, since as far as I can tell, you can’t repurpose glue sticks.

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like post, stop, spot) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the previous or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers. 

As the first recycler the renderer lets nothing go to waste, 

He boils dead carcasses to make pet food, candles and *****.

Such clever repurposing is something Americans should admire,

But a ***** of mad cow disease cases has the industry under fire.

As we dig into a McDonald’s burger here is a scary prediction,

 Perhaps we are now  * **** closer to this brain rotting affliction.

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Answers: paste, spate, a step

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No Place Like Home

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Liza Blue

My meeting downtown finished early, and so I arrived at O’Hare hours ahead of time for my evening flight to Atlanta.  I settled in to read, and then deep into my novel, I became irritated at the flashing lights above me.  As I got up to move my seat, I realized that I had been at the airport so long that I was now in the midst of an entirely new weather system, and what I had assumed was the malfunctioning flicker of fluorescent lights was really a tremendous thunder storm.  I was disenheartened to realize that I was in for a long vigil at the airport.  No book can be that good, and lets face it, it is just too hard to get any work done.  I immediately began to ponder my professional and ethical obligation to attend this all day Saturday meeting.  Did my commitment to attend really extend to an all nighter at the airport?  I was just one of many, would they really miss me?  Just as I concluded that the answer to those questions were unfortunately yes, the departure board twitched and my flight came up CANCELLED!  And then in a fit of due diligence I confirmed that there was no later flight that evening, and no early AM flight the next morning that could get me there on time.  I was free!  I called the conference organizers to relay the sad news and also ask them what to do with the ticket.  The ticket was nonrefundable, so they told me that it was mine to keep.  I was free and had a free ticket!

When I got home the house was dark, as Nick had made other plans in my presumed absence.   As a NetFlix subscriber, a couple of movies were awaiting me, one about an immigrant who tries to eke out an existence by being a drug mule, and the other was about a hardworking 1950s British housewife who was an abortionist on the side.  When I established my movie queue on NetFlix, I clearly had put myself on too high a plane.  I had selected a steady diet of movies that were supposedly thought-provoking, unsettling, unflinching, tragic, long-suffering and ennobling.  Not a guilty pleasure among them, just the ticket for the end of a long tiring day.  Therefore, I turned to network and cable TV, a vast wasteland since we had cancelled access to the movie channels in lieu of NetFlix!  

I despaired as I scrolled through dreary options, but then joyfully stumbled across the Wizard of Oz, and I thought this would be a perfect evening to relive my childhood.  Before the days of cable, VHS or DVD, you had but one chance per year to see the Wizard of Oz on network TV, and it was an occasion you really didn’t want to miss.  I remember that it always seemed to be on at the beginning of November on a late Sunday afternoon.  You would be horsing around outside, playing in leaf piles or playing touch football, when someone would announce, “Hey isn’t the Wizard of Oz on tonight?”   We would rush inside, trailing the fresh air inside and get cozy in the TV room, still slightly feeling the autumn chill.  My most salient memories of the Wizard of Oz were the flying monkeys which always scared the Beejeezus out of me, and that I always got misty eyed at the end when Dorothy said goodbye to the scarecrow.  Now I would get to see the movie again after a span of about 20 years.

My first discovery was that I don’t think that I had ever seen the very beginning of the movie before; I think I missed the part were the farm hands Hunk, Hickory and Zeke clearly established themselves as the future Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion.  All these years I thought that I was a most clever girl to figure this out at the end; it was something that I always kept to myself as my secret insight.  I also never stopped to wonder whatever happened to Dorothy’s birthparents, which would certainly be a ripe topic for a prequel, given Hollywood’s formula for creating movie franchises.  Additionally, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are quite old enough to be her grandparents, so it would seem that an entire generation of relatives got wiped out somehow.  Perhaps a prior tornado, which would certainly be ironic, since Dorothy’s last name is Gale.

Apparently in one of the earlier stage versions, Dorothy was accompanied not by a dog, but by her pet cow Imogene.  While Toto is an upgrade over a cow, I admit that I find common ground with the crabby Almira Gulch – Toto is yappy and annoying, albeit loyal.  As I watched Dorothy pop Toto into her little wicker purse, I realized that she might have been the original trendsetter for toy dogs as fashion accessories.  I am not proud to admit that I indulge in People magazine from time to time, but this is how I know about those wretched anorexic starlets whose little hairless dogs are peeking out from their oversized Birken bags. 

Of her traveling companions, I think that I was most mystified about the lion, mainly because he walked on two legs instead of all fours.  But it must have been something more, because if I was willing to accept a man made of tin, I should have been able to accept a bipedal lion.  And now I think I figured it out.  As a child at the zoo, one could not help but be impressed with the manly attributes of the king of beasts, not only his glorious mane of hair, but his readily apparent male anatomy.  And so, when the lion emerged from the woods and stood up, something was missing, the full frontal as it were.  And if we may succumb to the obvious stereotype, perhaps that was why he lost his courage.

My respect for Dorothy grew enormously as she moved on down the road.  In the sepia world of the Kansas farm, she was helpless, frantic and casually dismissed.  In her fantasy world, she became a better version of herself, formulating and sticking to a plan, and developing a mentoring and equal relationship with men.  She was a brilliant role model clearly ahead of her time. The original actress slated for the role was Shirley Temple, who charmed audiences with her perky cuteness.  How fortunate to have a plucky and confident Dorothy instead, a picture of undaunted and competent courage.

Was the Wizard of Oz the first movie to use the ticking clock?  This race against time is certainly a staple of every single James Bond movie.  Perhaps 007 owes a debt of gratitude to the Witch, who inexplicably doesn’t dispatch Dorothy forthwith.  While the special effects of the grotesque flying monkeys are clearly very primitive, I don’t think that I have seen a better death scene than the melting witch.  Brilliantly nonviolent.  How many times has this been reenacted in community theaters and school gymnasiums?   What fun to scream out a tortured, “Help, I’m melting,” and then slowly slip down through a trap door.

The good bye sequence at the end always left me teary, though I tried mightily to conceal it, perhaps pretending to scratch my eye, or attending to an itch along the side of my nose.  This time as I listened to Dorothy’s earnest explanation of the key to returning home, I realized that it was basically incomprehensible.  Here are the verbatim words, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”  What?  Somewhere there is a starchy grammarian who is shuddering at the triple negative: “won’t look/isn’t there/never lost it.”  Try as I might, I can’t decipher this, but fortunately, by the time she clicks her heels together, she has condensed this to the more memorable, “There’s no place like home.”  I think that from time to time, we can all agree with that.  

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop, post) and the number of asterisks indicates the numbers of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve for the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers:

Why Dorothy is a Good Role Model

Dorothy was not really scared as she was tossed and turned in a tornado ****

And when she landed amongst the Munchkins she was briefly nonplussed

Forthwith she became a problem solver, and headed to Emerald City in competent style

Relying on **** and brians instead of the more typical coquettish smile and guile

She  made true and equal friends with men like the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion,

And her farewell to them at the end **** at my heart and makes me feel like crying.

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 answers:  gust, guts, tugs

  

 

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Don’t Drink the Water

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Liza Blue

For two crystal clear days in June I was sequestered in a conference room in a swanky Chicago hotel listening to presentations on mouth sores – an exquisitely painful side effect of cancer therapy.  The room darkened and the group was treated to lurid slide after slide of glistening red and oozing mouth sores.  Oblivious to the sight of people wincing in pain and general misery,  some of the oncologists were already multitasking, answering e-mails in the guise of taking notes on the computer, or discreetly answering a blackberry partially hidden underneath the desk. My job was to write up the proceedings of the meeting so I was supposed to pay attention and look sharp – even though I knew I would rely mostly on the transcripts that would eventually come my way.  So my multi-tasking had to be even more subtle.  I glanced out the window and realized that there was a little sliver of blue peaking out between the dense office buildings.  Restlessly, I reached for some ice water, and realized that here I was just three blocks from Lake Michigan, one of the jewels of the largest body of fresh water on this planet, and the Peninsula Hotel thought it fit to provide me with water from Fiji.  What ever happened to the pitcher of iced tap water?  

With nothing else to do, I pored over the labels of the bottle, both front and back, and began to envision the marketing strategy that had successfully convinced people that Fiji water was something special.  I imagined the chief marketing officer assembling his/her minions and saying – “okay this third of the room, you guys are the image makers.  You brainstorm on the front label depicting Fiji.  Now you guys over there, you are going to work on the label on the back of the plastic bottle.  Your job is to come up with as many “disturb points” as you can to convince the consumer that tap water is unhealthy and even dangerous.  Now finally, you guys in the way back of the room, I want you to devise the pricing strategy.  Let’s show hotels and restaurants how they can turn good ole H20 into a profit center.”

I must say the guys assigned to the front label did not get too creative, going with the standard image of a sun-kissed Pacific island with colorful hibiscus and bougainvillea flowers.  The bottle itself was tinted light blue, giving the water itself and azure blue hue that was designed to evoke the popular image of pure, simple and pristine island life. 

However, the guys assigned to the disturb points really went to town.  As I looked across the table, I realized that the Fiji water across from me had a different label, and there was yet another different label to the right and left.   Now this was worth investigating.  I managed to squirrel away another bottle from the buffet table, and another as I feigned a bad back to get up and walk around.  Now arrayed in front of me was a series of disturb points trying to convince me that drinking the local water was an act of supreme folly. 

Two labels played off of the same theme of the splendid purity of isolation, i.e. since Fiji was thousands of miles away from the nearest industrialized content, it had cleaner clouds, purer rains and ! tah dah! cleaner water.  This was an obvious dig at all of us who enjoy the fruits of an affluent economy, and are polluting the world and raising its temperature in the process.  The  United States is presumably Fiji water’s most significant client – who else would commit the environmental absurdity of hauling fresh water all the way across the ocean, and then pay about $5 per galloon for what could be had for free.  It is horrifying to realize that given the cost of manufacturing the bottle itself and transportation costs, it actually takes more water to make the bottle than it actually holds.  The label also proclaimed that “Fiji is one of the last virgin ecosystems on Earth,” which to me immediately cries out for a definition of a “virgin” ecosystem and who is the judge of lost virginity. 

Although the first couple of labels point to the clean air and rains, the next couple of labels took a different tact and suggested that the water does not come from yesterday’s cleansing rain but instead from an ancient artesian aquifer deep within the earth where it is protected from external elements.  “It’s the way nature intended water to be.  Untouched.”   Personally, I don’t think that nature has any specific agenda or intent; it/she just takes what is given, processes it and spits it out.  The artesian reference is intriguing.  As I recall many years ago there was an ad campaign about some sort of beer that was made from Artesian water.  These marketers seemed to throw up their hands in despair in trying to explain the beneficial hydraulics of an artesian system and instead tried to simplify matters by pretending that the Artesians were some sort of secretive elves.  The Fiji water people probably figured that since “artesian” sounded scientific, who needs to explain it? 

A few of the labels veered from disturb points and attempted to find positive attributes of Fiji water – presumably attributes that Fijians would like to enjoy, except that their precious resource is being siphoned off and sold to elitists half way around the world.  One label claimed that Fiji water had a “unique and refreshing taste,” which is a very confusing premise to me.  My opinion is that the major attributes of water are that is cold and has absolutely no taste.  If it had taste, it would be called something else, like lemonade. 

Apparently since Fiji water is loaded with silica, they used the time-tested strategy of turning a potential negative into a positive.  Thus one of the labels extolled the health virtues of silica, such as its ability strengthen bone, connective, tissue, teeth, skin, nails and hair.  And then finally the trump card, “Silica is what gives Fiji water its soft mouth feel.” Whoa, in addition to its taste, Fiji water has a feel, and it is soft.  When someone says water, I think wet, and when someone says “soft mouth feel” I don’t think of water – pudding perhaps, but not water.

I was so engrossed in my water project that I was startled when the lights went up, and the conference moderator turned to me and said, “Dr. Brown, would you like to make any comments on mouth sores and how you will be approaching the manuscript?”  Fortunately I have been doing this long enough that I always roll out the same boilerplate comments that 1. work will begin in earnest when I receive the manuscripts, 2. that I will send an outline to the taskforce chair, and 3. I appreciated the opportunity to learn about mouth sores (and Fiji water). 

The missing words in the following poem contain two sets of anagrams (i.e. words that share the same letters, like spot, stop and post).  One set is indicated with asterisks, the other with dashes.  the number of asterisk or dashes indicated the number of letters in the word.  One word in each set of anagrams will rhyme with the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve for the missing words.  Scroll down for answers. 

 The entrepreneur gathered his —– and key marketing staff,

 And had them stare at iced water in a large carafe.

 “How can we get people to pay for water and stop drinking from the ***?

 So let’s brainstorm now, everyone please put on their thinking cap.

 I know this sounds silly, but kindly set all your doubts —–

 Good marketers have gotten people to pay for what’s free when they really tried.

 For example, people may be more *** to buy water if they think its perfectly pure,

 Or comes from a country like Fiji with an exotic allure.”

 Other —– included its soft mouth feel, or a taste fresh and clean,

 Harvested from a snow capped mountain, virgin and pristine.

 Well these geniuses deserve a *** on the back; their wildest dreams were exceeded.

 They managed to create a market for something that is totally unneeded.

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Answers:  aides, tap, aside, apt, ideas, taps

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Living the Dream

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Liza Blue

I was over 30 years old by the time I finished my college, medical school and residency training.  One of the most joyful aspects of this feat of endurance was the realization that I would no longer be subjected to standardized tests.  The guiding philosophy of the medical school I attended was not to train you to be a good doctor, but instead to train you to pass the medical boards on the first try.  Therefore, all tests were in the style of the medical boards consisting of a dreary procession of multiple/multiple choice questions on isolated medical factoids. 

And with all this testing came the periodic nightmares that have achieved the status of urban legend among college students, who just refer to “The Dream.”  The dream consists of some sort of variation of anxiety over the final exam.  A frequent version is the panicky realization that you have forgotten that you had signed up for a course and are totally unprepared for the final exam.  My anxiety dreams tended to be more organizational.  For example, I would dream that I had a pencil box full of No. 2 pencils, but none of them would have an eraser, or all the pencils would have jumbo erasers but be unsharpened.  In other instances, I would be rushing around dark unnamed corridors desperately trying to find the right classroom, or there would be some sort of veil over my eyes so that I could not find my way through the corridors.  Anxiety about public speaking was an odd variation of the dream, where my mouth would inexplicably accumulate some sort of debris.  In the dream, I would attempt to discretely scoop all the material, and then struggle to find someplace to dispose of it, all the while the debris was accumulating again.  With the formal end of my academic career, I thought that these dreams would vanish.

But my anxious dreaming mind quickly found a new anxiety theme – getting to the airport on time.  I would dream that I couldn’t find the correct suit case, or my clothes or the ticket would be missing, the car didn’t have any gas, the keys were gone.  Perhaps these dreams were built more on actual experience, since each one of these events has occurred in isolation.  But then one day last summer, all aspects of the dream came true in one epic trip to the airport to pick up Ned and Susie.  I knew this airport pickup was going to be slightly more complicated than usual in this post 9/11 age, since neither of us had cell phones, but I felt confident that I could get to the airport, park and meet them in baggage claim. 

At the appointed hour, I went to the garage to get into the car, and was aghast to see that both of our cars were gone.  We had recently moved into the neighborhood and I did not feel comfortable in asking for this somewhat aggressive favor from our swanky neighbors.  I then hopped on my bike and madly pedaled over to my father’s house, assuming there would be an idle car, particularly since he no longer drove.  As I huffed and puffed into the driveway, I was stunned to see a totally empty driveway and house.  I was seriously running late at this point, so I took a big gulp and decided to call my parents’ life long neighbor Mrs. Reed.  Now I have come to know Mrs. Reed as a generous and loyal friend, but growing up, she was a figure of imposing authority, and somewhat persnickety in her tastes.  I was afraid of her then and those feelings had lingered for over 40 years.  I remember once saying to her, “Mrs. Reed can I ask you a favor?” and her response was, “Well you can always try.” 

Mrs. Reed immediately responded to my plight and minutes later I was on my way in an immaculate Volvo.  I wanted to return the car to her in the exact same condition, so I mentally noted which radio station was on, the position of the seat, and the gas gauge.  My perilous situation seemed to have righted itself – until I reached the first toll booth and realized that the Reed’s car did not have an EZ pass and I did not have any change.  Now normally I would just blast through the EZ pass, which I have done several times in my mother-in-law’s car, but I did not dare to do it in Mrs. Reed’s car lest she get a ticket in the coming months.    I then resorted to a strategy that I had often used with the kids.  I figured that no matter what I did, I would always be an embarrassment to them, so why not do something that truly deserving of their embarrassment?  Therefore, whenever we were at a toll booth, I would stop, open the door and pick up the loose change abandoned by people whose errant toss had missed the toll booth.  I would point out to the kids that some people were willing to just throw money out the window, but not this family.  The kids would roll their eyes and slink down in the seat as I picked up dimes, nickels and the occasional quarter.  Now this strategy came in handy.  The toll at this booth was about a buck, so I had to park the car at the side of the road, and scrounge at several different toll booths until I got enough change.

I breathed a sigh of relief as now I was in sight of the airport, and only about 15 minutes late.  As I drove toward the parking lot, I was horrified to see that for the first time ever, the parking lot was full, and all cars were being directed to remote parking, which required taking a tram back to the terminals.  I had erupted in a nervous sweat at this point since I had no way of communicating with Ned and Susie, and decided to try my luck at the international parking, which was much closer than remote parking.  However, mine was not an original thought, and I joined a competitive sea of cars jostling and milling around trying to nab the first open spot.  I almost got side-swiped in the precious Volvo as someone aced me out, so I decided to try a more focused strategy my mother had once used.  I drove to the spot where people were exiting from the terminal and spotted an overburdened and bleary eyed couple and offered to give them a ride to their car if I could have their spot.  Success!  I raced into the terminal, wild eyed, sweating, and disheveled, to find Ned and Susie peacefully waiting for me.  I relaxed as well, and we turned around and headed back to international parking.  However, as I stood on the sidewalk, I suddenly realized that in the rush of getting to the airport, I had neglected to notice the color, style or license plate number of the Reeds’s car nor could I remember what row I had parked it in… 

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks indicate the number of letterse.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers. 

If you have a huge gap between what you need and what you’ve got

You might not care if your tossed coin misses the toll booth ****

But for **** of people, throwing money out the window is the epitome of waste

And typical of Americans whose wanton excess is in such poor taste.

So if you want to participate in a most lucrative **** and found

Just open the door next to the tollbooth to find coins strewn upon the ground

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Answer:  slot, lots, lost

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Vindictive Snack Mom

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Liza Blue

I greeted my first assignment as snack mom with undiluted pleasure.  Like many of my contemporaries, I had delayed childbearing into the thirties, and had only two children.  Now was the time for commitment to participate intimately in the life of my children and to bear witness to every school pageant, field trip and sports event. And if the new system required snack moms, then I was going to be one kick-ass snack mom, with creative and healthy snacks.  The initial enthusiasm quickly soured by the second semester; instead of hand baked goodies, like everyone else I rushed to the store to get a box of just-in-time sugary Teddy grahams (who came up with that genius marketing idea) and a jug of sugary juice.  I didn’t want to buck the system right away and become a pariah amongst the other attentive moms, but it did seem to me that children could bring their damn snack, thank you very much!

 Snack mom is also very akin to the Halloween greeter, who must sit by the door for several hours and dispense candy to waves of unknown children.  In one of the neighborhoods we lived in, our street consisted of houses that were fairly close together with short driveways, a very efficient street to trick or treat on.  As the years went by, I realized that carpools were arriving on our street from adjacent suburbs, where I guess the trick or treating was less fertile.  I would see a car pull up at the end of the street and disgorge six or seven kids with barely a token costume on.  The car would wait while the kids made their way down our block, where they would then be picked up and moved to the next block.

Trick or treating was a two adult job, one to escort the kids, another to man the homefront.  For several years in a row, Nick managed to be out of town for Halloween, so I had to juggle both responsibilities.  I didn’t want our house to get egged, so I put a bowl of candy on our doorstep with a note asking children not to be greedy and take one candy each.  When I came back after about an hour, all the candy AND the bowl was gone.  The next year, I simply spread the candy out on the porch on top of some newspaper.  One year I got home from work a little bit late, and Vashni, our babysitter from India, was fielding the first trick or treaters.  She was entirely unfamiliar with the traditions of Halloween, so was quite perplexed when children came to the door asking for candy.  She rushed around the house to find something to give the children and ended up putting a popsicle in each of their trick or treat bags!   

I think that my mother shared the same frustrations, but she got very inventive about venting them.  I remember that she would take a piece of raw liver in her hand, and ask all the older trick or treaters to shake hands with her.  They would be left with sticky calf’s blood on their hands.  I can’t imagine that this would be tolerated in this day and age, and would expect a summons from the police or children’s services.  There was also a group of boys that mother particularly disliked, because they always took large handfuls of candy without any words of thanks.  One year she got a whole bowl of tapioca and dotted some decoy candy on top of it.  When the boys showed up, she offered them the bowl, and said, “We have too much candy this year, so just dig in as deep as you can!”

I thought that I would outgrow snack mom responsibilities as my children got into middle school, but then came the list of snack moms for all the soccer games.  There were two snack moms for each game, one to provide the cut-up oranges at half time, the other to bring juice and a cookie at the end of the game.  Some of the parents went whole-hog and arrived with a cooler on wheels lugging it across to field 13, or wherever we were.  The kids would dig into the snacks, and then litter the ground with orange peels, water bottles, candy wrappers, etc.  We then got an announcement asking the snack moms to stay after the game, since if there was too much garbage on the field, the team would be assessed a fine by the city.  As the home team, this meant that we also had to pick up after the visiting team.   I frankly snapped at this point and my revenge is recounted in the fanagram below: 

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like post, stop, spot, etc).  The number of asterisks indicates the number of letters and one missing word will rhyme with either the previous or following line.  Your job is to solve for the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

I resented the concept of soccer snak mom, but the real coup de grace 

Was watching greeding kids *******open juice boxes or throwing garbage on the grass

There were no thank yous – each one seemed a rapacious *******

I was so annoyed,  I immediately began devious plans to retaliate.

My resolve was like ******* as I planned my counter attack,

Should I spike the juice, or perhaps give them a moldy snack?

When I found some lemons my plan began to crystallize,

I mixed them in with cut-up oranges for a ******* surprise!

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Answers:  tearing, ingrate, granite, tangier

 

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Chapter 4. SAT: The Reveal

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Liza Blue

(For the complete SAT experience see other 3 chapters and a YouTube song parody about the SAT test!)

It has been one month since I took the SATs and while awaiting my scores I have been interested to learn more about its history.  It turns out that the SAT test was an outgrowth of the IQ tests that were first developed by Binet in 1905.  France had recently made a commitment to offer education to all of its children and the test was designed to identify children with significant learning disabilities so that they could receive special education.  In other words, the IQ test was designed as a way to extend educational opportunities to everyone, as opposed as a technique of identifying elite students.  Additionally, Binet stressed the diversity of intelligence and the certain impact of environment. 

In this country, those caveats were largely ignored; the IQ test was initially used on a large scale by the military before WWI to identify potential officers.  The SAT perked along at a low level until it received a big boost from the Korean War when the government announced that college deferments for active service would be based on SAT scores.  The idea was that the education of future scientists who could contribute to the war effort should not be interrupted.  Some soldiers were certainly assigned to units reflecting known skills – i.e. doctors served in the medical corps – but this program deferred soldiers based on their potential worth (judged by their SAT scores) to a potential job that could be potentially useful in a future war effort.  The bottom line was that you didn’t want the next Albert Einstein killed in a trench somewhere.

One of the early champions of the SAT was a Harvard dean named Henry Chauncey.  He was infatuated with standardized testing in general, and thought that the SAT could be a great leveler that would serve to extend elite educational opportunities to those outside the usual students drawn from East coast boarding schools.  His belief in the objectivity of standardized testing seems hopelessly naïve, given the obvious flaws in every step of the logic train: 1) that you can define intelligence; 2) that you can produce a number that would reflect that intelligence; 3) that you can determine this number by a multiple choice test focused on math and vocabulary; and 4) that the test produces consistent results across genders, cultures and ethnicities. 

One of the persistent criticisms is the inherent bias in the test, particularly in the reading sections, where questions ask for interpretation of the dreary reading passages.  The SAT has to include questions with a range of difficulty in order to distinguish the bright from the average mind.  One way to introduce difficulty is simply to make both the questions and the answers more ambiguous.  And there is bias in the way the SAT decides which questions are easy or difficult.  In every SAT, there is a section which experiments with  new questions; these questions do not count toward the final score.  A question is considered difficult if only those students who get a high score on the “real” part of the SAT answer the experimental questions correctly.  Therefore, this circular definition reinforces any bias that favors students who have undergone coaching who presumably are scoring higher; these students are the final arbiters of what is considered difficult.  The other simple way to introduce difficulty is to just make the test longer so that not everyone can finish it – so at this point the SAT is testing speed, which is an interesting criteria for aptitude. 

And then of course there is the subjectivity in grading the essay section.  The SAT essay is graded from a low of 1 to 6.  Grade 6 is defined as an essay with “clear and consistent mastery with an effective and insightful point of view.” Grade 5 is defined as “reasonably consistent mastery with a effective (but not insightful) point of view, and so on.  The SAT states that their scorers are rigorously trained on sample tests that some sort of expert committee has judged as 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, etc.  While it is probably possible to come to some agreement on the extremes, the 6’s and the 1’s, the consistent discrimination of the intermediate zone, i.e. 2-5, where most essays will lie, just has to be more problematic.  I am just not buying the SATs breezy assurance of objectivity and the cross checking of scores among multiple scorers.   Another criticism is that good writing depends on thoughtful consideration of a topic and the ability to revise, two aspects that are clearly not part of the SAT essay, where a topic is sprung upon students who are writing with 25 minute shotguns pressed into their temples.  Finally, the SAT makes a point of stating that facts are not checked.  Therefore a student can cheerfully state that the Civil War began in 1842 without getting dinged.

The College Board’s steadfast assertion that the SAT cannot be coached is self-serving and silly.  Prep courses like the Princeton Review make millions of dollars in training students to think like the SAT so that they can answer the ambiguous questions.  In fact thoroughly prepped students can often answer the reading comprehension questions without even reading the passages.  The Princeton Review is absolutely gleeful about outsmarting the SAT; its president tells its students, “The SAT is bullshit, let’s blow these assholes away.”   

My indignation has risen as I have gathered more information on this cruel and stigmatizing hoax, and I would love to lambast the SAT.  But my message would be more convincing if delivered from a position of power, for example, an 800 ft. mountain.  So brings me to the question of how I did, and this is the first question that everyone asks when they hear of this experiment.  Truthfully, I don’t really want to know, but this is a story, and the story needs to have an end.  I can foresee several possible scenarios:

1.  The test is totally invalidated since I made additional errors in gridding in my name or number of the testing center on the score sheet.

2.  When I skipped those annoying math questions, my answers got misaligned, resulting in totally random answers.

3.  I could have held my own with middling SAT scores, which I could claim was a satisfying result, but these results would also feed into the conceit of the SAT who could claim that they had a test-retest reliability that extended over decades.

4.   I could have hit it out of the park.  From this vantage point, it would be a pleasure to totally dismiss and diss the SAT.   

5.  I could totally bomb out

And of these scenarios, which would I feel comfortable in sharing?  I am generally pretty agreeable about humiliating myself, but I think that there are some statistics that people feel more private about – for example, nobody goes around asking or telling people their IQs, which are not far from the SAT.  I found two interviews where the guest expert on the SAT was asked what his scores were; one said around 1500, which of course is a very high score and made me think he was pretty cocky, and the other said that it was a private matter, which made me think that maybe he was ashamed of his scores.  I went into this project thinking that it was just a lark, but now, with the scores imminent, I have to admit that I do have some ego riding on this.  I still recall with disappointment my high school scores, and perhaps I have put myself at risk by secretly trying to make amends.  It is disenheartening to realize that your high school intelligence – either under or over achievers –  is pegged to standardized test scores.  Underachievers have the gift of untapped potential and can always improve if they just pull it together, whereas the word overachiever has a negative whiff to it.  We overachievers (not test undertakers) are operating without the safety net of untapped potential and can only go down.  At any moment Toto could go skittering across the floor and pull the curtain away revealing that I was no Wizard, I was just an overachiever and that my nice plump GPA was a fluky sham.   

My friend Dick said, “Let’s make this interesting, I’m willing to put a little money on the over/under.  I bet you get under 600 on the math due to disuse atrophy, and over 700 on the reading.  Well I can triumphantly report that he lost the bet.  Reading:  Wow an 800!  Math: I got 48 out of 56 correct, which put me in the 90th percentile, which translated to a score of 680.  This leaves me in awe of the students who get 800.  Writing: 650.  It looks like they hated my essay, and my scorn for Standard Written English did me in. 

So what have I learned?  Well one thing the SAT has taught me is that every good essay must have a concluding paragraph.  So here it is.  I could not find one redeeming factor about the SAT.  It does not test aptitude – how could a timed, multiple choice test possibly – it is not a great leveler, due to the persistent cultural biases, and the ability to prep – and it is not a strong predictor of college success.  The validity of the predictive value of the test is its raison d’être, but the data only shows that the SAT test predicts a small fraction (8-15%) of the variability in freshman test scores.  This means that about 88% of the time the SAT results are no more predictive of first year grades than a role of the dice, and whatever predictive value the test does have, it dissipates by sophomore year.  At yet every year, Americans spend more than $100 million dollars on the test itself.    So why do we persist in this folly?  For one, colleges get the scores for free, but if you asked them if they would budget 100 million dollars for SAT information, they would surely decline.  Secondly, they can use the SAT scores to confirm their status as an elite institution and possibly attract more highly qualified candidates.  Finally, the SAT sucks them in by giving them additional demographic information about their students.  For me, it was an interesting experience and I am pleased with my scores, but if it were not so expensive I would be tempted to take the Princeton review and “blow those assholes away.”

The missing words in the above poem are all anagrams (like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks indicated the number of letters.  One of the words will rhyme with the previous or following lines.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

Reasons Why the SAT is Bullshit

It is a test that is culturally biased, stigmatizing and *****

Especially since it doesn’t really predict how well you do in school

When everyone practice and preps hoping for Ivy League success 

The most likely result is a bleeding ***** from anxiety and  stress.

Only the ETS benefits, rubbing their greedy hands with unfettered glee

As they rake in filthy ***** from students’ admission fees.

 

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Answers: Cruel, ulcer, lucre

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Thrown Under the Bus

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Liza Blue

This spring, on an ill advised impulse, I signed up for a ladies’ ice hockey league, where random teams were formed based on the self ranking of the players.  I originally had no interest, but then I was contacted directly and urged to participate.  This was the first time I had ever been pursued athletically and I fell for the cheap compliments.  In reality, the league was short on goalies, and they knew that I had access to pads and a helmet.  At the first game, our “maroon team” was asked to sign a roster, which included recording your birthdate.  When the sheet came to me, I was horrified to see that most of my team mates were born in the 1980s, and I was at least 20 years older than everyone else.

As we got on the ice, everyone was trying to size up both team mates and opponents, and it quickly became obvious that there were a couple of very experienced players on both sides, a few serviceable players, and a smattering of deer in the headlights.  The ringers were wheeling, preening and making theatrical stops that sent sprays of ice chips aloft.  As they passed me with their well muscled crossovers, I could hear the ice succumb beneath them with a deep seated knuckle-cracking crunch.  I quickly realized our ringer was the short girl with the buzz cut and the tattoos.  Since she played defense, she was my new BFF.

In my previous league at the Winter Club, shots rarely were airborne, and my basic and somewhat successful strategy was just try to take up space in the goal, not get hurt and not do anything stupid (aside from playing hockey in the first place).   During the warm up, I was getting peppered with shots all over my body; one ricocheted off my helmet.  Although I basically felt adequately padded in swaddling/waddling clothes, there were two vulnerable spots; my pubis bone (there is no built in padding in the pants since men always were cups) and my neck.  I had gotten hit in the pubis bone once before at the Winter Club.  While it stung at the time I forgot about it until I noticed an angry bruise in the shower later on.  I initially thought that a big leech had taken up residence in my near nether regions.  I motioned over to my faithful husband Nick and asked him to find me some protective equipment.  I turned down his first offer of his Forbes magazine and sent him scurrying off to the locker room to find a ratty old “Jill” cup from my hockey equipment.  When he rushed back to the ice, the game had started, so Nick gave the cup to the startled ref who delivered it to me in the nets, where I quickly shoved it down my pants.  As for my neck, I just had to keep my chin down.

In one of our first games, we were totally outmatched, and while I know that it is poor form to complain about your team mates, the phrases, “fish in a barrel,” “sitting duck,”  “hung out to dry,” “left twisting in the wind,” and “thrown under the bus” all came to mind.  When I saw that girl in the white pants gather up the puck at the other end of the ice, I know that I was in trouble.  She steamed up the ice, while one by one my defenders evaporated like (you pick ‘em) 1. a popsicle on a hot day; 2. New Year’s resolutions by the following week or 3. cash in your wallet; 4. promises from children to keep their rooms neat; 5. socks in the dryer.  And there I was, a 50+ AARP candidate with limited goalie experience, face to face with a large 20 something Canadian farm girl who had honed her power game by playing hockey on the backyard pond with her brothers.  And all this happened within the first minute of the game. 

While the margin of victory quickly mounted and neared the double digit mark, I am pleased to report that I did not do anything stupid, given what I am willing to do as a goalie.  My skills, such as they are, are very limited by the fact that I make it a point not to fall down on the ice, for the simple reason that it is very difficult and time consuming to get up.  And I did do one good thing, which is recorded in the fanagram below.

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop, post) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

When I joined the ***** of women hockey players I got in over my head,

 I found that I couldn’t stop or turn so I offered to be goalie instead. 

With all the padding I wore I didn’t think that I would fear what I faced,

 But with each onslaught, I went weak in the knees and my heart always *****.

 In one game, the slapshot from the point ***** toward me faster and faster,

 I trembled and put up my glove to avoid the oncoming disaster.

 But then I heard that wonderful thunk and a thud that all goalies love 

 If I had ***** to open my eyes, I would have seen the puck in my glove!

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Answers:  cadre, raced, arced, cared

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I Can Hear My Breasts

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Liza Blue

For several years friends have been recommending that I read Nora Ephron’s collection of essays called “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” saying that we have a similar writing style and that both of us seem to be pretty agreeable about making fun of ourselves. I think that they are probably right, but I have resisted, mostly because I think of Ephron as one of
the New Yorkers who insists that she could live nowhere else. As a proud Midwesterner, this condescending attitude rankles. Over the years, I have run into New Yorkers who have been transferred to Chicago and then do nothing but anticipate the joyous moment when they get called back to the mother ship. I have heard comments like, “you can turn right on red back home, but can you do this in Chicago?” Or “I can’t believe that I will be spending a summer without smelling the salt air on Long  Island.” I contend that the majority of the world’s population lives near an ocean, but it is only a privileged few who can live near the planet’s greatest body of fresh water. So there.

This weekend I finally read her 137 page book. By about page 10 it was already obvious that the audience for these essays are wealthy New Yorkers. Ephron natters on about having two salon appointments per week, since she does not have the time to blow dry her own hair. And in fact, she has apparently sworn off every going to Africa due to the ready lack of blow dryers on a safari. She reluctantly moved to Washington DC with her husband, but immediately began to complain that she was not in NYC, and the upside of her divorce was that she joyfully moved back to NYC a block
from Zabar’s.

Her observations are all told for comic effect, but somehow making fun of a life of privileged excess hits a wrong note for me.  Yes, I am being very hard on her, and I will own up to a bit of jealousy of her tremendous commercial success. Having your book in the library would be a major coup. There are two copies of Ephron’s book in our library.

The eponymous essay, “I Feel Bad About my Neck,” is an 8 page riff on aging, but instead of focusing on the typical wrinkles and age spots, she focus on a sagging turkey neck that can only be camouflaged with turtlenecks or Barbara Bush pearls.

This essay does raise the issue of how all of us are going to assimilate the inevitable physical changes of aging – go with grace, or go down swinging. It has certainly crossed my mind as I approach age 60. Ephron describes a hierarchy of weapons for skin care starting with the generic moisturizes that promise nothing more than softness. If the word“exfoliant” is part of your vocabulary you have moved one step further along. From there you can move to the really expensive lotions that promise softness plus rejuvenation. The most expensive product is probably “La Prairie Cellular Power Infusion.” A one month supply sells for $475.00, and the website is full of fatuous marketing jargon such as:

“Cellular power infusion supports the cellular power stations in your cells, even allowing them to go into hyperdrive to fuel renewal process. It triggers a renewal process that propels your skin towards agelessness.”

The slippery slope really begins when you decide you are willing to endure pain for youth maintenance. First there is the needle for Botox. If you then segue to the scalpel and anesthesia you are into a totally different league. You become that person that people whisper about – “doesn’t it look like she has had her eyes done?” If you are a celebrity,
before and after pictures could land you on the cover of a cheap tabloid and a
botched plastic surgery could elevate you to the cover of People magazine.  Ephron’s issue with a sagging neck is that there is no hierarchy – it is surgery or nothing, and if you want surgery, you will probably end up having an entire face lift, and you become that person.

My approach, as I reach the age of 60, is to combine calm acceptance with a dose of delusion. My favorite sport is paddle tennis, and at the beginning of each year I make a list of improvement goals.  (The goal to reliably hit that nasty spin overhead into the background corner has now been on my list for about 10 years.) I pity Roger Federer at the peak of his game technically, physically and mentally, such that the slightest erosion
of his physical skill will be immediately apparent. Luckily, I am not that great a player, so there is always room for improvement.  My bit of delusion started when I dropped out of
the league had I played in for 20+ years, and instead played with a cadre of my
peers. I don’t think that any of us believe that we have significantly declined, but the truth is that we are all probably deteriorating at the same rate so the change is not noticeable. Until, of course, you sub back into the league. Now, my eroding skills are immediately apparently as opponents, less than have my age and wearing skin tight spandex, scamper around the court, while I lumber. They hit screaming drives while I put balls into orbit or the bottom of the net. However, I have yet to meet an opponent who can hit that
slice overhead that I have been working on, so I still have hope for the
craftiness of age and experience.

Calm acceptance is noticing the gray hairs, but looking forward to a new hair color, and positioning the wrinkles as hard-earned experience. I remember watching my mother get ready for a dinner party while she sang the Bloody Mary, from the musical South Pacific:

“Bloody Mary is the girl I love,

Her skin’s as soft as Dimaggio’s glove.”

The song combined two of her favorite things, clever lyrics and sports. After all, this was a woman who collected baseball autographs as a hobby – her collection even included Lou Gehrig on the day he pulled himself from the Yankee line up. As she looked into the mirror she cheerfully said ,“Well my skin might be soft now, but when I get older I bet my
face will be as well worn as DiMaggio’s glove.” Calm acceptance.

The one thing that I will give Ephron credit for is the catchy title about her neck, which I think is half the marketing battle.  Well, I will go Ephron one better. My essay about the compromises of aging is titled, “I Can Hear My Breasts.” It started one lazy morning in bed when I felt something clogging up my armpit, a wayward pair of socks perhaps. When I moved to investigate, I was horrified to discover that it was my breast – a breast
that had hit the wall of estrogen deprivation and had completely lost its spunk. Seemingly overnight, it had totally sagged out. I was reminded of the old mother ape at the zoo whose only distinguishing female feature were paper thin breasts hanging down to her waist. The picture of calm acceptance.

 

 

 

The next episode happened on the tennis court. I heard this strange noise as I hustled to the net. It went away, but then returned again as I hit a serve, but then went away again. I slowly realized that I could hear my breasts. The low profile bras that I have been wearing for the past 10 years are adequate to control the routine jiggle, but are now no longer capable of tamping the thwacking of my breasts against my rib cage. Calm acceptance.

The missing words in the following poems are anagrams (i.e. like spot, stop, post) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters. One of the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following line. Your job is to solve the words based on the above rules and the context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.

******* with advancing age is an issue we all face

Do we fight it or give a big warm-hearted embrace?

Do we use Botox for wrinkles or collagen for lips?

Or do we go to a ******* surgeon for discreet tucks and nips?

Or there’s calm acceptance, but realize that it means that you won’t mind

If your waist is where your breasts are now droopily *******

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Answers:  dealing, leading, aligned

 

 
 

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Words with No Meaning

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Liza Blue

A while ago I wrote about the specialized vocabulary shared by seasoned crossword puzzle aficionados – words that tend to have a lot of “e’s” in them, like epée and ewer, essential to the crossword fill surrounding the theme words.  I have come to know exactly what these words mean, even though they have no place in a casual conversation.  I also realize that I have a whole separate vocabulary of words that are totally meaningless, words like teel, theine, haet, snaw, all words that I have come to value through many hours of playing Boggle.  Knowing the meaning of these words is totally irrelevant – all I have to know is that the word exists.  Actually some of my frequent Boggle words are happy typo accidents – a misspelled hate became haet, misspelled teal became tael.

It all started about 8 years ago when my sister-in-law Debbie introduced me to online Boggle.  We share a love of word-play and on family occasions we always bring out a bag of letter tiles and play games like anagrams, speed scrabble or Boggle.  In Boggle, there is a 5 by 5 grid of letter cubes, and within 2 minutes you have to find as many words from adjacent cubes as you can, with bonus points awarded for length and uniqueness.  Very quickly you learned to spot fruitful combinations of letters, i.e the “ght” that will get you words like night, sight and even the obscure “dight.” Spotting an “ing” is critical to success, since appending this to various verbs results in bonus points for length.  I also took advantage of anagrams – if I spotted the word “lair,” I could quickly reel off lira, liar, rail, aril, rial and lari.  I did recall from my remote college botany days that aril was a seed coating, but only just now found out that lari is a coin from the Maldives, joining lira (Italy) and rial (Iran) as other anagrammatic currencies.   

These sessions of Thanksgiving and Christmas Boggle separated us from the more casual player, until, of course online Boggle.  There it was, online, 24/7, and I foolishly opened the door and let the devil waltz in and make himself at home.  This online version was particularly seductive since it assigned you a color indicating your skill level, ranging from the neophyte green, through blue, purple, orange and elite red.  If you beat another online player with a score higher than you, your score increased, and if you reached certain cut-off points your banner color changed.  Blue was 700 and red was 1500.  When I first signed on to play I was assigned the middle of the road purple, but I quickly plummeted until I got enough experience to start my slow climb up, chipping away at the colors.  It took me two years but I finally and briefly got to the red level, and then explicably went into a frustrating orange slump.  (An embarrassing detail was that the site recorded the number of times that you played, and if you multiplied that by the 2 minutes for each game, you immediately got an idea of what kind of time suck you had fallen into.  My tally remains a closely guarded secret.) 

I tended to play online Boggle more in the winter, given the more limited range of outdoor options.  I enjoy birdwatching in the spring, and decided that I could continue to birdwatch on Boggle in the off seasons.  I routinely spotted wrens, robins or tits in my Boggle game, and ernes (sea eagle) were a frequent find, well known to me from crossword puzzles. I also made a fortuitous discovery that if you spelled the seabid skua backwards you got auks.  Auks are sadly extinct flightless seabirds of the Northern Hemisphere that basically fill the niche of penguins.  Their limited number of nesting sites and ineptness on land made them easy prey for hunters, both for food and for down feathers.  The great auk was extinct by the mid 1800s.  The Boggle beauty of these birds was that if I found auks, I automatically knew that skua was available.  I was always the only person to find the skua/auks duo, thus netting me bonus points for originality. 

I started categorizing Boggle words in different way.  My most entertaining game was Boggle body fluids to see if I could find both the formally correct words and their corresponding jargon, – saliva (spit), bile, sweat, urine (pee), mucus (noun), mucous (adjective), sebum (oil), semen (cum), and then I made the executive decision to force fit feces and its jargon (pooh, crap, shit) into my growing list of fluids.   Snot was also easy to find, but its more formal partner, phlegm, was more problematic.  After a couple years of looking, I made a deal with myself that if I ever found phlegm, I would shut down the Boggle site and kick the devil out of my house for good and go cold turkey.   Phlegm would be a good note to end on – its combination of consonants would make it a difficult word to find and I would probably be the only one to find it. 

Besides, I like the word phlegm –  that sly use of “phl” instead of “fl” and that sneakily silent “g”.  I wonder if this word has tripped up spelling bee contestants, who probably know that the word would not be spelled as simply as flem, but would wonder what the trick spelling was.  There are only a few other words in the dictionary that begin with “phl,” basically just phlebotomy, which means to draw blood off, i.e. a blood test, and phlox, a perennial whose bright fuschia flowers are blooming in my garden right now.  Phlegm entered our vocabulary as one of Hippocrates 4 body humours –  blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm.  His theory was that an imbalance of humours resulted in disease.  Each humour was produced by a different organ in the body.   Phlegm was produced by the lungs and had a cold and moist quality.  In contrast, yellow bile, for example, was produced by the spleen and was considered hot and dry.  Each humour was associated with a personality type described by a related adjective.

phlegm → sluggish, cowardly (i.e. phlegmatic)

yellow bile →  violent, vengeful (i.e. splenetic)

black bile → introspective (i.e. choleric)

blood → happy generous (i.e. sanguine)   

As much as I like the word phlegm, the adjective phlegmatic is even better.  The syllable break between the “g” and “m” lets that hard “g” come out swinging.  In fact, if you overpronounce the word with a hard guttural “g” you could conceivably produce some phlegm in the process. 

Despite my best efforts over the past several years, I never found the word phlegm and so continued to happily play online Boggle.  And then yesterday it happened –I was coaxed into some sort of Internet Explorer upgrade and in one of those queer internet mysteries, I can no longer open the Boggle website.  Best thing that could have happened.  As this essay clearly illustrates, I am getting way too squirrely.  It is time to move on.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (like post, stop, spot) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the words will rhyme with either the preceding or following lines.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

The  Peculiar Intersection of Anagrams, Boggle and Saddam Hussein

President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was a big fat —-.

And that his weapons of mass destruction posed a threat that was imminent and dire.

So with shock and awe he launched air strikes to make Saddam nervous,

Trying to destroy the infrastructure including the —- and postal service.

Saddam hid out in an underground —- made of concrete

And tried to organize uprising from his hometown of Tikrit.

He stashed away money, mostly dollars, but also a —-, —-, —- or two

But in the end he was captured like a caged animal without fuss or ado.

Now this last word has nothing to do with Iraq, a point I will concede,

But for completeness sake, botanists know that an —- is the covering of a seed.

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liar, rail, lair, rial, lira, lari, aril

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

liar, rail, lair, rial, lira, lari, aril

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