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Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

1 Discontinued Apple music player : IPOD

The iPod is Apple’s discontinued signature line of portable media players. The iPod first hit the market in 2001 with a hard drive-based device, now known as the iPod Classic. Later models all used flash memory, allowing a smaller form factor. The smallest of the flash-based models is the iPod Shuffle, which was introduced in 2005.

9 Iranian language : FARSI

Farsi (also known as Persian) is a language spoken by about 62 million people as a first language, and another 50 million or more as a second language. It is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

14 Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me ___” : MUCH

Shania Twain is a country and pop singer from Windsor, Ontario. Shania’s birth name is “Eileen Edwards”, and this changed to “Eilleen Twain” when her mother remarried. Twain changed her name to Shania in the early 1990s, around the same time that her musical career started to take off.

20 Cocktail made with Southern Comfort, sloe gin, amaretto and orange juice : ALABAMA SLAMMER

An Alabama Slammer is a cocktail served over ice in a Collins glass. A common recipe is:

• ¾ oz. Amaretto
• ¾ oz. Southern Comfort
• ¾ oz. Sloe Gin
• top up with orange juice

Southern Comfort is a brand of liqueur that comprises whiskey flavored with fruit and spice. It was first produced in 1874, by a bartender in New Orleans called Martin Wilkes Heron. Heron originally named his formulation “Cuffs and Buttons”.

Amaretto is an Italian liqueur with a sweet almond flavor. Even though the drink is sweet, it has a bitterness lent to it by the bitter almonds that are often used as a flavoring. The name “amaretto” is a diminutive of the Italian word “amaro” meaning “bitter”.

34 Crinkly kitchen wrap : ALUMINUM FOIL

Before thin sheets of aluminum metal were available as aluminum foil, thin sheets of tin were used in various applications. Tin foil isn’t a great choice for wrapping food though, as it imparts a tinny taste. On the other side of the pond, aluminum foil has a different name. No, it’s not just the different spelling of aluminum (“aluminium”). We still call it “tin foil”. You see, we live in the past …

39 Actor Daniel ___ Kim : DAE

Daniel Dae Kim is an American actor who is famous for playing Jin-Soo Kwon on “Lost”. Kim moved on to play one of the leads on the CBS remake of “Hawaii Five-O”, portraying the character Chin Ho Kelly.

46 Capital of the Bahamas : NASSAU

Nassau is the capital of the Bahamas, and used to be called Charles Town. Located on the island of New Providence, the original settlement was burnt to the ground by the Spanish in 1684. It was rebuilt and named Nassau in honor of King William III of England (“William of Orange”), a Dutchman from the House of Orange-Nassau. Nassau is a favored location for the James Bond series of movies. The city and surroundings feature in “Thunderball”, “Never Say Never Again”, “Casino Royale” and “For Your Eyes Only”. Bond portrayer Sean Connery lived for many years at Lyford Cay, which is just a 30-min drive from the center of Nassau.

47 Green Gables girl : ANNE

“Anne of Green Gables” is a 1908 novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery that she set in the fictional Prince Edward Island community of Avonlea. Montgomery wrote several sequels to “Anne”, with them all being set on Prince Edward Island (PEI), from where the author hailed.

48 Passé : OLD

“Passé” is a French word, meaning “past, faded”. We’ve imported the term into English, and use it in the same sense.

51 Stephen Colbert’s network : CBS

Stephen Colbert is a political satirist who hosted his own show on Comedy Central, “The Colbert Report”, before taking over the “Late Show” when David Letterman retired. Colbert’s first love was theater, and so he studied to become an actor. Fans of the “Lord of the Rings” films might know that Colbert makes a cameo appearance in “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”. Don’t blink though, or you’ll miss it …

53 ___ Babies (stuffed toys) : BEANIE

There were originally just nine Beanie Babies when Ty Warner introduced the stuffed animal in 1993. In the late nineties the toy became a real fad, largely due to innovative marketing techniques. For example, there was no mass marketing with constant TV ads, and the production volume was limited pushing the line into the realm of collectibles. Beanie Baby models were also “retired” on a regular basis, fueling a “must have” behavior in the market.

55 1986 hit song for Paul Simon … or an instruction from the starts of 20-, 34- and 41-Across? : YOU CAN CALL ME AL

“You Can Call Me Al” is a song by Paul Simon that leads off his 1986 “Graceland” album.

60 Pianist’s pace : TEMPO

The tempo (plural “tempi”) of a piece of music is usually designated with an Italian word on the score. For example, “grave” is slow and solemn, “andante” is at a walking pace, “scherzo” is fast and light-hearted, and “allegro” is fast, quickly and bright.

62 “To write is human, to ___ is divine”: Stephen King : EDIT

Author Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine and graduated from the University of Maine. He now lives in Bangor, Maine and many of King’s stories are set in the state of Maine.

65 Grp. whose logo features an orbiting spacecraft : NASA

The official insignia of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is referred to as a “meatball”. It is round in shape, with white stars on a blue background. There is also a white orbital path, a red chevron, and the letters NASA in white.

Down

4 Abu ___ : DHABI

Abu Dhabi is one of the seven Emirates that make up the federation known as the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The two largest members of the UAE (geographically) are Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the only two of the seven members that have veto power over UAE policy. Before 1971, the UAE was a British Protectorate, a collection of sheikdoms. The sheikdoms entered into a maritime truce with Britain in 1835, after which they became known as the Trucial States, derived from the word “truce”.

5 2022 dark comedy that satirized haute cuisine : THE MENU

“The Menu” is a 2022 comedy horror movie starring Ralph Fiennes as a celebrity chef with an exclusive restaurant. I’m afraid that I don’t do horror, not even comedy horror …

7 Collectible cardboard caps of the 1990s : POGS

The game of pogs was originally played with bottle caps from POG fruit juice. The juice was named for its constituents, passion fruit, orange and guava.

8 Compete in a bee : SPELL

Back in 18th-century America, when neighbors would gather to work for the benefit of one of their group, such a meeting was called a bee. The name “bee” was an allusion to the social nature of the insect. In modern parlance, a further element of entertainment and pleasure has been introduced, for example in a quilting bee, or even a spelling bee.

11 Like yellow bananas : RIPE

The banana is actually a berry, botanically speaking. And, bananas don’t really grow on trees. The “trunk” of the banana plant is in fact a pseudostem. The pseudostem is a false stem comprising rolled bases of leaves, and it can grow to 2 or 3 meters tall.

22 Free speech grp. : ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has its roots in the First World War. It grew out of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB) that was founded to provide legal advice and support to conscientious objectors. The ACLU’s motto is “Because Freedom Can’t Protect Itself”. The ACLU also hosts a blog on the ACLU.org website called “Speak Freely”.

27 Online source for cinephiles : IMDB

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) website was launched in 1990, and is now owned by Amazon.com. It’s a great site for answering questions one has about movies and actors.

32 Short-term engagement : GIG

Musicians use “gig” to describe a job, a performance. The term originated in the early 1900s in the world of jazz. The derivative phrase “gig economy” applies to a relatively recent phenomenon where workers find themselves jumping from temporary job to temporary job, from gig to gig.

36 Chinese dynasty during which paper was invented : HAN

The Han dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China and lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD. It came after the Qin dynasty, and before the Three Kingdoms.

42 Trash-loving critter : RACCOON

The raccoon is native to North America. In captivity, raccoons can live to over 20 years of age, but in the wild they only live two or three years. The main causes for the shorter lifespan are hunting and road traffic.

43 What’s deep in a pit? : TUBA

The tuba is the lowest-pitched of all brass instruments, and one of the most recent additions to the modern symphony orchestra (usually there is just one tuba included in an orchestral line-up). “Tuba” is the Latin word for “trumpet, horn”. Oom-pah-pah …

44 Subjected to public condemnation, in modern slang : ON BLAST

Here’s a term coming from social media, a term new to me. To “put someone on blast” is to publicly expose and shame that person, or their behavior. I guess that means “blasting” out screenshots, messages, photos or other media items to achieve the goal of shaming the person or exposing the behavior.

50 These upper- and lowercase Greek letters: Δ δ : DELTAS

Delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. We are most familiar with an upper-case delta and its distinctive triangular shape. The letter’s shape has influenced terms such as “deltoid muscle” and “river delta”. The upper-case delta is also used in mathematics and science to indicate a change in value. The lower-case delta looks a bit like our lower-case D, and indeed the Greek letter delta gave us our Latin letter D.

55 Steven ___, Oscar-nominated actor for “Minari” : YEUN

Steven Yeun is a South Korean-born American actor who is perhaps best known for playing Glenn Rhee in the TV show “The Walking Dead”. He also starred in the 2020 film “Minari” in a performance that earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination, making him the first Asian-American to be so honored.