In the puzzle today, every across clue started with the word “not.” E.g., “Not exactly . . . ” was the clue for YES AND NO. “Not yet two years old” was the clue for ONE, which one commenter called “maybe the worst clue in the history of crosswords.” It is weak tea, as they say. Some thought the gimmick was clever and cute, and others thought it was stupid. Owl Chatter is ON THE FENCE (“Not yet decided”).
A centaur has the head, arms, and torso of a man, and the body and legs of a horse. In Greek mythology, Chiron was a centaur who was an old and wise mentor to Achilles. A “chyron” comes from the name of the Chyron Corporation that developed those superimposed crawling or stationary words on your TV screen used mostly on news reports or sporting events.
From Owl Chatter’s You-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up Department: Now that you know what a chyron is, I can tell you that the chyron used by FOX News during Trump’s post-arraignment speech was about Biden. It said: “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
Back on Planet Earth, there was a rare visit to the puzzle today by Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter. Here’s one of his fiercer catches, sedated (and autographed).
Irwin was an Australian zookeeper, conservationist, television personality, wildlife educator, and environmentalist. He co-hosted The Crocodile Hunter (1996–2007), the wildlife TV documentary series, with his wife Terri. They had two children: a daughter, Bindi Sue, jointly named after Bindi, a saltwater crocodile, and Sui, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier; and a son, Robert Clarence, named after Irwin’s father Bob and Terri’s father Clarence (Bore-ing!).
In 2003, Irwin was filming a documentary on sea lions off the coast of Mexico when he learned that two scuba divers were missing in the area. He suspended operations and his team’s divers searched with the rescue divers. Irwin used his vessel to patrol the waters and used his communications system to call in a rescue plane. On the second day of the search, kayakers found one of the divers, Scott Jones, perched on a narrow rock ledge jutting out from the side of a cliff. Irwin and a crew member escorted him to Irwin’s boat. The other lost diver, Katie Vrooman, was found dead later that day not far from Jones’ location. She was 77 years old.
In 2006, while filming a documentary in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Irwin died from an injury caused by a stingray. Numerous parks, zoos, streets, the snail species Crikey steveirwini, and the asteroid 57567 Crikey have been named in his honor. His family continues to operate Australia Zoo. Here are Steve and Terri with a friend. Steve often said that if he was to be remembered for anything, he hoped that it would be for being a good father.
The clue at 33D was “Possessive type?” The answer was DEMON (get it?).
I posted this joke for the commentariat. No response yet (thank God).
So this poor girl was in the grips of a demon and her dad finds an exorcist who can help. The problem is his fee is $50,000 and the dad doesn’t have it.
So they work out an arrangement for him to pay it off over 5 years.
The exorcism goes well and the girl is fine. But after 2 years, the dad loses his job and misses a few payments. So the girl was repossessed.
Ba da boom!
Owl Chatter Director of Puns, Brookline Carl, tells us he’s trying to arrange a lunch with Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman, but he’s having trouble making ends meet. On top of that, he was called into the pathologist’s office. Why? Remains to be seen. [Owl Chatter note: The man is at the top of his game!]
Today’s poem in The Writer’s Almanac is by Thomas Hardy. It’s called “A Thunderstorm in Town.” Been there, fellas?
She wore a new ‘terra-cotta’ dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom’s dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.
Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more.
The expression “to lose one’s head” has special significance in the art world. According to a front-page story in the NYT today, for many years a museum in Denmark (the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek), maintained that it had the head of a statue of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, and that the torso from which it had been separated was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. It arranged a loan of the torso so it could exhibit the two together in 1979, and tried to buy the torso (but failed).
Last February, however, the torso was returned by the Met to Turkey when investigators determined it had been looted from Turkey. Turkey wants the head too, but the Danish museum is now claiming that it reassessed the matter and concluded it’s an unrelated head. Turkey is crying Fowl! I mean Foul. The museum is conducting further research that will take two years. So we’ll have to wait and see. Here are the two puzzle pieces.
There are more separated parts (heads/torsos) than complete statues in museums today. This is partly because of the normal wear and tear of time — when a statue falls the thin neck is liable to break. But looting and regime change play a role too. Looters may have intentionally severed a head from a body so they’d have two artifacts to pass off. And a conquering army might symbolically lop off the head of a defeated ruler’s statue.
According to the Times, in one case, a bronze of the Emperor Augustus from around 25 B.C. was decapitated by Kushite raiders in Egypt, who then defiantly buried the severed head beneath temple steps in the Kushite capital of Meroë, in modern Sudan. The feet of multitudes trod atop the head before it was discovered in the 20th century. The head is now in the British Museum. It is not known where all those feet wound up. [Wait, what?]
And get this — Roman statue makers often created archetypal body types and separate, highly individualized heads. As an emperor’s power or popularity waned, one head could be swapped for another. [The popular Mr. Potato Head toys are loosely based on this approach. Various parts (eyes, ears, hat) can be switched on a basic head. BTW, Mr. Potato Head is the first toy ever to be advertised on TV.]
In some cases, the ancient statues just lost their noses. Early museum conservators replaced the noses with new ones, but the process was reversed in modern days as curators decided authenticity trumped appearances. The museum in Denmark has a collection of replacement noses (not kidding). Looks like some ears snuck in too. It’s a popular exhibit — the noses have been running for quite some time.
The rare occasion on which a head and a torso find their way back to each other is cause for great celebration. “Statue of a Draped Woman,” a 2,000-year-old torso, had spent almost 50 years at the Getty Museum in LA before a curator came across its head, a carved marble portrait of a stern-looking Roman woman in a NY gallery. That’s how the NYT described her — I don’t think she’s that stern-looking. That’s one thick-ass neck though.
Enough. More nonsense tomorrow. Thanks for popping in.
The Wellington Files 