Word: baffler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Elliott Roosevelt's conversation was getting in the papers again and making people unhappy, but the latest tempest was a baffler. In Warsaw, reporters fought to see him to check up on something he had been heard to say. They finally won an audience. Declared Elliott: he had positively not given an interview. He had just made a conversational remark. What it was all about: he had said that he "liked Poland very much...
...wrecked ships (he is now working for the Navy), "dust" storms, some strange fish. His method makes it possible to observe certain fish which cannot be caught alive with nets because they live only at ocean-bottom pressures. He also hopes that his camera will clear up an old baffler: why do fish from the presumably dark ocean bottom have well developed eyes, while those at slightly higher levels seem nearly blind? Ewing's guess: there are large amounts of luminescent organisms on the ocean floor...
...Boston Braves' baffler throws a poky knuckle ball that dips and waltzes down & out just as it reaches the plate. Said the Dodgers' Mickey Owen last week: "What we needed was a net." Tobin walked Paul Waner, the first man up; breezed by the next 26; walked Waner again in the ninth, struck out Dixie Walker to end the game (2 to 0). Tobin himself hit a home run for good measure. Afterwards he guessed aloud that he was just about 'as happy as the time he hit three home runs against the Chicago Cubs...
...does a spider stretch its legs? That question is an old zoologist baffler. Spiders have no leg-stretching muscles, yet they have an unquestioned ability to unflex all eight pedal extremities. A Caltech biologist, after long study, has finally solved the riddle: the answer is blood pressure...
...pages on three of the most treacherous openings ever devised: the Edinburgh Single, a deciding factor in more match and tournament games than any other known opening; the Octopus, whose "manifold tentacles . . . have ensnared many of the game's ablest critics"; and Oliver's Twister, a baffler ever since Manhattan's Oliver J. Mauro laid down its basic "theme" some years...