The Jets season has mercifully come to a close. Faced with a chance to make the playoffs for the first time in who-remembers, they lost their last six games, failing to score a single touchdown in the last three. It’s a good thing I’m not the sort of fan who gets bitter (much). Here’s their poor coach. He had a full head of hair when the season started.
Have you heard of the word “supervocalic?” Rex used it today. It describes a word that contains all 5 vowels (excluding y). Supervocalic itself is supervocalic, btw. In today’s puzzle, the clue for 14D was “Ambidextrous features?” and the answer was AEIOU, because “ambidextrous” is supervocalic.
That’s the sort of thing, incidentally, that may be on the test. Have I not mentioned the test? — I’ll be posting your owl chatter midterm exam probably sometime next week. It will be all multiple choice questions — no essays. It will cover all owl chatter posts up to today’s: January 8. That’s a ton of material, so don’t leave your studying for the last minute (and don’t spend all your review time drooling over Taylor Swift or Ana de Armas, fellas.)
The highest test score will win a prize. In the event of duplicate results, ties will be awarded. No, that last sentence was a joke — in the event of duplicate high scores, a winner will be selected at random by my granddaughter Zoey’s cat Emily, whom you can see napping, below.
It’s Elvis’s birthday today, born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935. When he was eleven, he asked his parents for a bike, but they couldn’t afford one and got him a guitar instead — for $12.95 at Tupelo Hardware. His family moved to Memphis two years later. When he was 18 and working as a truck driver, he spent $4 to record two songs as a gift for his mom. The recording studio also housed Sun Records, owned by Sam Phillips. Phillips heard Elvis singing and asked if he knew any more songs. Ka Boom!
You know what Elvis looked like. Here’s Sam Phillips.
Nice to see Hall of Famer Rod CAREW in the grid today at 78A, clued by reference to his seven A.L. batting titles. Only Ty Cobb won more (12 – yikes!). Even though I was expecting a lot, his Wikipedia writeup blew me away. E.g., he appeared in 18 straight All-Star games. Chai! He hit .388 in 1977 and was the A.L. MVP. Get this — the A.L. batting title — the award itself — was named after him in 2016. So if you win the A.L. batting title now, you are the “Rod Carew American League Batting Champion.” (The N.L. crown is named after Tony Gwynn.) Carew stole home 7 times in 1969. How do you do that, even once?
Carew is a “Zonian,” i.e. born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was a political entity at the time (it was since absorbed into Panama). He was actually born on a train that was in the Zone. His mother was Panamanian. The train was racially segregated; white passengers were given the better forward cars, while non-whites, like Carew’s mother, were forced to ride in the rearward cars. Traveling on the train was Dr. Rodney Cline, who delivered the baby. In appreciation, Mrs. Carew named the boy Rodney Cline Carew. [My grandson Leon was named after one of Caity’s doctors. The circumstances were markedly different: Caity just liked the doctor’s name: Leon.]
Carew never converted to Judaism, although he wore a chai necklace during his playing days. His first wife, Marilynn Levy, is Jewish, and he was a member of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Ana, California. Their three daughters, Charryse, Stephanie, and Michelle, were raised Jewish and had their bat mitzvahs there. When Michelle died of leukemia at age 18, services were held at Beth Shalom, and she was buried in the family plot at a Jewish cemetery in Richfield, Minnesota. Carew has always identified as Episcopalian. (It sounds like he was “Jew-ish.”) Carew and Marilyn divorced in 2000, after 30 years of marriage.
In September, 2015, Carew suffered a major heart attack, and he received a heart transplant on December 15, 2016. Carew’s heart was donated by former Baltimore Ravens tight end Konrad Reuland who had attended middle school with Carew’s children. Carew participated in the 2018 Rose Parade aboard the Donate Life float, in honor of Reuland.
Here’s an autographed card of Rod Carew from my collection.
Speak of the devil — or, in this case, angel. The lovely ANA de Armas made the grid again today at 120A. Hi Ana! You are always welcome at owl chatter.
I was today old when I learned from the puzzle that an ATOLL is an island formed by a coral reef that forms around an underwater volcano. There are about 440 in the world, most of them in the Pacific Ocean. Over time the volcanic island subsides leaving a lagoon surrounded by the reef.
Department of Corrections. How fitting that IOWAN is the answer at 39A today, clued by “Like Captain James T. Kirk, by birth.” Iowan Pam tells us Bill Lee is wrong about Iowa being flat, as noted yesterday. But it’s more likely it is I who am wrong in remembering his quote. It may have been a different state, if not the state of confusion. [Don: you read Lee’s book — can you help?] Here’s Pam’s note. (Maybe it was Kansas.)
“Iowa is not flat, but rather a state of rolling hills. Growing up I had a big one to climb to get home by bike or by foot. If you want flat, drive across Kansas!
Here is a link to a picture of the beautiful fields of dreams and please note the undulations!”
Please accept sincere owl chatter apologies for dissing your home state, Ms. Smith.
I’d like to end by sharing a picture of Rex Parker, whose daily blog on the NYT crossword was a small part of the inspiration for owl chatter. It’s a silly picture of him with his cat, Olive, who died last year.
And here is what he wrote about her in summing up his 2022:
“I love the photo both because you can tell how goofy she is, and how goofy she made me. Her loss hurt for the obvious reasons, but also because she was so much a part of my daily routine, my daily rhythms and rituals. She was everyday. Quotidian. Just . . . on me, near me, being a weirdo, especially in the (very) early mornings when I was writing the blog. She took me out of myself. She also made me aware of how much the quotidian matters, how daily rituals break up and organize the day, mark time, ground you. They’re easy to trivialize, these rituals, precisely because they aren’t special. Feed the cats again, make the coffee again, solve the crossword again, etc. But losing Olive made me reevaluate the daily, the quotidian, the apparently trivial. In a fundamental way, those small daily things are life. No one day is so important, or so different from the others, but cumulatively, they add up, and through the days upon days you develop a practice—a practice of love, care, and attention given to the things that matter.”
Happy puzzling, everybody! See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 