Did you know that the Big Bad Wolf had a name? I guess that’s good, so his buddies didn’t have to call him “Big” or “Biggie” or “Big Bad,” as in “Hey Big Bad — What’s up with the Grandma suit?” He pops up all over the place, most notably in his ridiculous Grandma disguise in Little Red Riding Hood, and tormenting the Three Little Pigs. He also drops in at the end of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and in the Russian Peter and the Wolf.
Disney’s version was introduced in 1933 in the cartoon short The Three Little Pigs, and it was in the comic strip incarnation that he was named: First name Zeke (1946), and middle name Midas (1949). Full name: Zeke Midas Wolf. I learned about this because today’s puzzle asked for ZEKE (Midas Wolf), described as the “Three Little Pigs” antagonist.
BTW, Zeke had a son, L’il Bad Wolf, who disappointed his dad by wanting to do good. (I’m not kidding.)
While we’re on the topic of names, Alex Rosen, today’s constructor, apparently expects us to know the names of the Magi, even though they are not named in the Bible. Tradition has them as Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. Caspar is the one in the puzzle, and one fellow noted he was the “friendly” one. Owl Chatter was able to snare a shot of him for you.
It was a great puzzle. The trick was that every two-word clue had to be reversed in order to get the correct answer. And they were clever. So, e.g., for the clue “Pan Asian,” you had to think Asian pan, and come up with WOK. For “Water buffalo,” you had to think “Buffalo water,” and the answer was ERIE (i.e., Lake Erie in Buffalo NY). My favorite was “Does not.” So reverse it to get “Not does.” The answer was BUCKS. Get it? “Doe” as in female deer. Deer that are not does are bucks (male deer).
The clue at 8D was very good. It was “Only human, briefly.” The answer was ADAM, who for a short time (briefly) was the only human. And at 16D “Went to third, say,” was SHIFTED. You had to think of shifting gears, not baseball.
One of the switcheroos was “Young musician.” You had to go with Musician Young, and the answer was NEIL, as in NEIL Young, one of Owl Chatters’ favorites. Here’s a little-known tune of his: “Falling Off the Face of the Earth.”
Neil Young is 77 now. He’s Canadian, and became a U.S. citizen in 2020. Welcome, Old Timer!
OMG, I had forgotten he’s been married to Daryl Hannah since 2018. Daryl is 62 in real life, which is about 40 years older than she is in my head. Young’s first marriage, to a restaurant owner, Susan Acevedo, lasted less than two years. He then had a five-year relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Diary of a Mad Housewife in 1970. They have a son Zeke who is 50 now (no relation to the Big Bad Wolf, see above), and who has cerebral palsy.
Young next married Pegi Young in 1978. He first met her in 1974 when she a waitress. They divorced in 2014 after 36 years of marriage, and she died in 2019. They had two children together, Ben and Amber. Ben has cerebral palsy, and Amber is epileptic. I don’t mean to define the kids by their conditions, only to note that parenting for Neil Young must not have been easy.
He’s a model train freak. He was part owner, and is now on the Board of Directors, of Lionel trains, and is named as co-inventor on seven patents related to model trains. Here’s a great “get off my lawn” shot of him. Then the missus, after a rough night.
This sentence is from Frank Bruni’s “For the Love of Sentences” feature this week. It was written by Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic in an article about Pamela Anderson:
“In the ’90s, Anderson was one of the most famous women in the world, the highest-paid actress on the most-watched television show (that would be ‘Baywatch’), her scarlet swimsuit and box-blond curls covering more bedroom walls than Sherwin Williams.”
The story of Caresse Crosby, born Mary Phelps Jacob, is pretty amazing. I’m not sure Owl Chatter will be able to do it justice. She was known as Polly Jacob when she married Dick Peabody in 1915. The ceremony was conducted by Endicott Peabody, founder of the Groton School. The Peabodies, some said, had by then supplanted the Cabots and the Lodges as the most distinguished family in the Northeast. Still Dick was a loser — he drank and was a bad dad to their two children. He spent as much time away as possible, mostly on military assignments.
Into the story steps Harry Crosby, a war hero who, after completing his studies at Harvard, met Polly on July 4, 1920 at a picnic. Polly was 28 with two small children and Harry was 22, but KABOOM! Within two hours he confessed his love for her, appropriately, in the tunnel of love at an amusement park. He pursued her like Zelensky going after a shipment of rocket launchers. Polly said, “Harry was utterly ruthless. To know Harry was a devastating experience.” By July 20th, they were sleeping together, and after a night in NY’s Belmont Hotel she said, “For the first time in my life, I knew myself to be a person.” It was a massive scandal for the families involved.
Eventually, Polly and Dick divorced, and she married Harry, but it devolved into an open marriage with many affairs and much drugs and drinking. At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name. They briefly considered Clytoris before deciding on Caresse. [You cannot make this stuff up.] Her Wikipedia entry is “Caresse Crosby.”
When he was 30, Harry met 20-year-old Josephine Noyes Rotch and fell in love with her, despite her funny-sounding last name. They had an affair that ended after about a year when she married, but it was soon rekindled, with deadly consequences. On December 9, 1929 Harry was found in bed in New York’s Hotel des Artistes with a bullet in his head. He was in an affectionate embrace with Josephine who also had died of a gunshot to the temple. In case this is all not striking you as unusual enough: Both were dressed but had bare feet. Harry sported red-painted toenails and tattoos on the bottom of his feet. [I guess he wasn’t ticklish.]
The coroner determined that Josephine died two hours before Harry. It was never determined whether it was a murder-suicide or a double suicide. No suicide note was found. (As Larry David remarked when someone he knew committed suicide without leaving a note: “No note? Would it have killed him to leave a note?”) Harry left Caresse the equivalent of $1.5 million, but his parents had the will invalidated.
Owl Chatter fell down this rabbit hole because the clue in the puzzle today, smack in the middle at 38A, was “Garment patented in 1914 by Mary Phelps Jacob.” The answer was BRA. She wasn’t the first to come up with the concept, but she was first to go for a patent. I might have clued it with “What men have been desperately fumbling with since 1914.” Here’s Caresse.
That will do it for today. See you tomorrow!
The Wellington Files 