"Handsaw" and "Heronsaw" explained

One of yesterday's NYT crossword clues was "the handsaw in Hamlet's 'I know a hawk from a handsaw.'" (5 letters)  I had to work around sideways to discover the answer as "heron" - which prompted a visit to some online sources.

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2:  "I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a hand saw."

Modern footnotes offer "A hand saw is very different from a hawk. Even in his disturbed emotional state, Hamlet can see the obvious, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are agents of the king and queen."  So I accepted that 50 years ago, assuming that a handsaw was a carpentry tool.

But the crossword clue forced me to dive more deeply: "handsaw" is the obsolete (Shakespearean) version of "heronsaw," a term applied to young herons, because it comes from Middle English heronsewe, from Old French haironcel, diminutive of heiron.

You learn something every day.  

Jim Croce's "Operator" (1972)

"Operator, well could you help me place this call? See, the number on the matchbook is old and faded.  She's living in L. A. with my best old ex-friend Ray, a guy she said she knew well and sometimes hated.

[Refrain] Isn't that the way they say it goes? But let’s forget all that. And give me the number if you can find it, so I can call just to tell them I’m fine, and to show I've overcome the blow, I've learned to take it well. I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn't real - but that's not the way it feels.

Operator, oh, could you help me place this call? ’Cause I can’t read the number that you just gave me. There’s something in my eyes, you know it happens every time I think about the love that I thought would save me.   [Refrain]

Operator, well, let's forget about this call. There's no one there I really wanted to talk to. Thank you for your time - Oh, you've been so much more than kind - You can keep the dime."   [Refrain]

This backstory from a website about Jim Croce and his work:

"I got the idea for writing "Operator" by standing outside of the PX waiting to use one of the outdoor phones. There wasn't a phone booth; it was just stuck up on the side of the building and there were about 200 guys in each line waiting to make a phone call back home to see if their "Dear John" letter was true, and with their raincoat over their heads covering the telephone and everything, and it really seemed that so many people were going through the same experience, going through the same kind of change, and to see this happen especially on something like the telephone and talking to a long-distance operator-this kinda registered."

(reposted from 2013).  Reposted again from 2015 because I heard a familiar song in the background of Fargo season 2 about a young man agonizing on the phone, which I wanted to post, but I looked up "Operator" and then realized it was the wrong tune.  But I'll repost it anyway because it's a good one, and it's been on the back pages of the blog for almost ten years.

St. Paul (Minnesota) city council: all women, all under age 40 - updated

"Last fall, all seven city council seats were up for grabs. On 7 November, after a campaign season packed with candidates, Minnesota’s capital city elected its new city council – comprised entirely of women. Last week marked the group’s inauguration.

Noecker’s fellow council members – Nelsie Yang, Cheniqua Johnson, Hwa Jeong Kim, Saura Jost, Anika Bowie and Mitra Jalali – are all women of color and, like her, progressive in their politics. All council members are also below the age of 40.

In 2019, Nevada became the first state with a majority-women state legislature. Today, women make up 62% of the Nevada state legislature – the largest percentage of any state.

But experts have noted that no major city has achieved the feat of electing an all-woman city council like St Paul.

Notably, St Paul has a population of roughly 300,000 people, the second most populous city in the state after fellow Twin city, Minneapolis. Around 46% identify as a race other than white, according to the US census."

More at The Guardian.  The City Council president offered these comments from the podium at the inauguration of the council:

“If you read my Twitter replies lately, the responses sure are something. They’re fighting for their lives in there,” Jalali said. “Let’s just say a whole lot of people who are comfortable with majority male, majority white institutions for nearly 170 years of city history are suddenly sharply concerned about representation.”

“My thoughts and prayers are with them in this challenging time,” she added, the crowd erupting in cheers.

Worth mentioning: The City of Asheville, North Carolina, also has an all-female city council, making state history in 2020.

Reposted from just a week ago to make readers aware of the lengthly comment thread (50+) about the subject matter of this post.  I get quite a few compliments on TYWKIWDBI, most of which boil down to "nice blog", but the one that I remember and cherish the most is from a reader who said that TYWKIWDBI was the only blog they read where they enjoyed reading the comment threads, and specifically clicked on the comments.  I do review and curate all comments before they get posted, weeding out trash, spam, and trolls, but I try to leave in opposing viewpoints, which sometimes results in long and well-thought-out exchanges from readers who are both knowledgeable, opinionated, and... civilized.  There are certainly an abundance of topics in modern news cycles on which one is not going to change one's mind, but it is still useful to hear/read well-expressed differing viewpoints.

A surprise on the underside of dresser drawers

The owner was concerned when he discovered that the bottoms of the drawers appeared to be "not original."

Map of the periodical cicada broods

Coming to our neighborhood this summer.  Via Neatorama, where note is made of the coincidence of a 13-year brood and a 17-year brood this year.

Image credit USDA Forest Service.

The middle strip is NOT a gradient

I checked it myself by selecting a segment from the left of the strip and pasting it on to the right side of the strip.  It disappeared.  Found in the opticalillusions subreddit.

"Free" annual checkups are not actually free

More in an endless stream of horror stories about the bullshit American health care delivery system:

When Kristy Uddin, 49, went in for her annual mammogram in Washington state last year, she assumed she would not incur a bill because the test is one of the many preventive measures guaranteed to be free to patients under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The ACA’s provision made medical and economic sense, encouraging Americans to use screening tools that could nip medical problems in the bud and keep patients healthy.

So when a bill for $236 arrived, Uddin — an occupational therapist familiar with the health-care industry’s workings — complained to her insurer and the hospital. She even requested an independent review.

“I’m like, ‘Tell me why am I getting this bill?’ ” Uddin recalled in an interview. The unsatisfying explanation: The mammogram itself was covered, per the ACA’s rules, but the fee for the equipment and the facility was not...

Over the past several years, the medical industry has eroded the ACA’s guarantees, finding ways to bill patients in gray zones of the law. Patients going in for preventive care, expecting that it will be fully covered by insurance, are being blindsided by bills, big and small...

Peter Opaskar, 46, of Texas, went to his primary-care doctor this year for his preventive-care visit — as he’d done before, at no cost. This time, his insurer paid $130.81 for the visit, but he also received a perplexing bill for $111.81. Opaskar learned that he had incurred the additional charge because when his doctor asked if he had any health concerns, he mentioned that he was having digestive problems but had already made an appointment with his gastroenterologist. So, the office explained, his visit was billed as both a preventive physical and a consultation. “Next year,” Opasker said in an interview, if he’s asked about health concerns, “I’ll say ‘no,’ even if I have a gunshot wound.”

"The Front Fell Off"

Reposted from 2008 because I saw this news today:

... and an hour later this report:

What butterfly enthusiasts do in the winter

This is a "Scrabblegram"

Explained at The Guardian:

The Scrabblegram is a form of constrained writing in which you must write a piece of text that uses all 100 tiles in an English Scrabble set, and no other letters. The blank tiles must be used, and as per the rules can be any letter.

This example by David Cohen [embedded above] is considered one of the best examples in the genre: it is a remarkable piece of text because not only does it make sense and paint an amusing picture, but it also flows beautifully, rhymes and has the correct number of syllables for a limerick.

You can create Scrabblegrams at this link (although I haven't been able to figure our how to utilize blanks) (apparently just keep typing as long as the number of red letters doesn't exceed two).

An ode to Dot (Dorothy)

What an absolutely superb character the Fargo team created for this fifth season.  And an absolutely faultless portrayal by Juno Temple.  

These four balls are congruent in terms of color

All four are the same color (not the same color throughout their area, but congruent in terms of color at each point).  Via the opticalillusions subreddit, where readers have confirmed the identical colors using digital sampling techniques.

Pubic lice

Nits on the pubic hairs, and some lice on the skin (a gif at the NEJM source shows the red blood pulsing inside the louse that looks like it has a death grip on that hair).

Huge quantities of water ice detected on Mars

The image above is of the Valles Marineris, the "Grand Canyon" of Mars, which despite its arid surface appearance, has now been found to have immense water deposits below the surface.

The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has detected an area about the size of the Netherlands where water could make up as much as 40 percent of the material near the surface...

FREND detected a water-rich region measuring some 41,000 km2 (15,800 square miles). Within the upper 1 m (3.3 ft) of soil, up to 40 percent of the material seems to be water, which the team says most likely exists as ice...

 “This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.”

Reposted from 2021 to add an update:

"... a new radar survey of the Medusae Fossae Formation region on the Martian equator has revealed what appears to be giant layered slabs of buried water ice, several kilometers thick...

There's as much water buried there, scientists say, as can be found in Earth's Red Sea; if it were brought to the surface and melted, it would cover Mars in a shallow ocean between 1.5 to 2.7 meters (4.9 to 8.9 feet) deep...

There's no liquid water on Mars now, that we know of. Where all that water went remains a mystery: did it disappear into space as vapor, or is it sequestered inside the planet, locked away where we can't see it? The Medusae Fossae Formation may hold some answers to this question..."

So, not "water" in the form of hydrated minerals, but actual water water, frozen into ice.  Fascinating.

Social generations of the western world

Posted for my own reference, since I keep forgetting the time frames.  Via.