I don't know how many of you remember Jean Redpath, the singer of Scottish folk songs who passed away three days ago at the age of 77.  Go to YouTube and type in her name and listen to just about anything.  And don't miss her duet with Garrison Keillor, singing about tuna casseroles.

The Wisdom of Carl Sagan

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

I seem to have lost the ability to create hyperlinks.  Is it because I haven't paid Xanga any money since June 2013?  Oh, well.

Here's what's been happening lately.  Life, as usual, has been busy and fun.  Spare time has always been a problem, but now it's a bigger problem because circumstances have forced me to move from a 4-day workweek to 5, but I refuse to stop being interested in attending concerts and lectures and watching golf tournaments and football games on TV and paying attention to Barbara, my five dogs, and a billion other things.

Including:  following the news.

And doing crossword puzzles.  Like, for example, today's amazing New York Times puzzle that first made me want to say:  why should I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out the gimmick when all I need to do is go to the Times crossword blog for the hint that I need?  Which is what I did.

And speaking of word games, there's a new Scrabble dictionary out, and it's a very long-term project assimilating the new words onto my word list.

Anyway.  Back to the Tmes puzzle.  The one entry that puzzled me the most was the answer SETI to the clue, "Program that asks 'Are we  aloe?,' for short."  Obviously, there needs to be an n in the word "aloe" for the clue to make any sense, and that was the gimmick.  The answers to 17A, 32A, 46A, and 62A were, respectively:  "EACH CLUE IN," "THE PUZZLE," "IS MISSING," and "THELETTERN."

And now it turns out that instead of being an impossible puzzle to solve, it's actually fairly easy.  Some of the clues/answers are still very tricky, but find what word in the definition is missing one or more n's, and go from there.

And now back to the wisdom of Carl Sagan.  I looked up SETI and found out it stands for "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence," listened to a charming interview of SETI founder Jill Tarter, an astronomer/cosmologist whom I fell in love with after listening to her for 30 seconds, then drifted over to the Wikipedia entry for Carl Sagan, and found a page of Sagan quotes that I'd love to share with my Xanga readers, so just go to http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan and enjoy!

Robin Williams
1951-2014

Sorry I haven't posted in so long.  Supremely busy, as always.

Barbara (who first met Robin Williams when they were high school students in Detroit) and I were shocked at the news yesterday.

Here is A. O. Scott's remembrance, which may or may not ever appear in my national edition of the New York Times.

(Link not working yet.  Maybe I'll try again later.)