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Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies

Across

9A Bryce Canyon’s state : UTAH

Bryce Canyon National Park is a beautiful part of America. The strange thing is that Bryce isn’t a canyon at all, but rather is a natural amphitheater created by erosion of sedimentary rocks that are part of the Paunsaugunt Plateau.

14A Cookies featured in Weird Al’s “The White Stuff” : OREOS

“The White Stuff” is a 1992 song released by Weird Al Yankovic that parodies “You Got It (The Right Stuff)”, a 1988 single from New Kids on the Block.

16A Condiment in potato salad, informally : MAYO

Mayonnaise originated in the town of Mahon in Menorca, a Mediterranean island belonging to Spain. The Spanish called the sauce “salsa mahonesa” after the town, and this morphed into the French word “mayonnaise” that we use in English today.

24A Ice cream drink : MALT

Walgreens claims to have introduced the malted milkshake, back in 1922.

31A Word after hand or band : SAW

A bandsaw has a blade that forms a “band”, a continuous loop that rotates around a pair of wheels positioned one above the other.

34A Actress de Armas of “Knives Out” : ANA

Ana de Armas is an actress from Cuba. Having attended the National Theater School of Cuba, she moved to Spain at the age of 18. There, she made a name for herself in a Spanish TV series called “El Internado”. De Armas moved to Los Angeles in 2014, after which her performance opposite Ryan Gosling in 2017’s “Blade Runner 2049” earned her critical acclaim.

“Knives Out” is an intriguing murder mystery film released in 2019. There’s a great cast including Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette and Christopher Plummer. I really enjoyed this one, partly because it’s a clever, contemporary take on a classic whodunit movie …

36A Copenhagener, e.g. : DANE

Copenhagen is the largest city and the capital of Denmark. I haven’t had the privilege of visiting Copenhagen, but I hear it is a wonderful metropolis with a marvelous quality of life. The city is also very environmentally friendly, with over a third of its population commuting to work by bicycle.

43A Cuisine from Bangkok : THAI

Bangkok is the capital city of Thailand. The exact etymology of the name “Bangkok” seems unclear, although “bang” is a Thai word for “a village situated on a stream”.

45A Artist with the albums “19,” “21,” “25” and “30” : ADELE

“Adele” is the stage name of English singer Adele Adkins. Adele’s debut album is “19”, named after the age she was during the album’s production. Her second album was even more successful than the first. Called “21”, the second album was released three years after the first, when Adele was three years older. Her third studio album “25”, released in 2015, broke the first-week sales records in both the UK and the US. “30” followed in 2021.

48A Online files for instruction manuals, often : PDFS

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format introduced by Adobe Systems in 1993. PDF documents can be shared between users and read using many different applications and platforms, making them more universally accessible than documents saved by one particular program.

65A Tickle Me Elmo toymaker : TYCO

The Tickle Me Elmo toy was a sensational fad in the late nineties, with stores raising prices dramatically above the recommended retail price to take advantage of demand. Reportedly, prices as high as $1500 were paid at the height of the craze. The toy’s manufacturer, Tyco, originally planned to market the “tickle” toy as Tickle Me Tasmanian Devil (after the “Looney Tunes” character), but then went with “Elmo” after they bought the rights to use “Sesame Street” names.

66A HR-V and CR-V automaker : HONDA

The Japanese auto manufacturer Honda was founded in 1946 as the Honda Technical Research Institute by Soichiro Honda. The company’s first products were improvised motorized bicycles that used 50cc, two-stroke engines that were originally built to power radios during the war.

67A Senior dance party : PROM

A prom is a formal dance held upon graduation from high school (we call them “formals” over in Ireland). The term “prom” is short for “promenade”, the name given to a type of dance or ball.

68A Meyers of “Late Night” : SETH

Seth Meyers is an actor and comedian who is perhaps best-known today for hosting his own late night talk show on NBC. Meyers might be described as a poker shark. He won the third season of Celebrity Poker Showdown in 2004.

Down

1D Gusto : ZEST

“Gusto” is an Italian word meaning “taste”. We use it in English in the phrase “with gusto” meaning “with great enjoyment”.

7D “Finding Nemo” setting : REEF

“Finding Nemo” is a 2003 animated blockbuster from Pixar. The film was the winner of the Oscar that year for Best Animated Feature. Believe it or not, “Finding Nemo” is the best-selling DVD of all time. It was also the highest-grossing G-rated movie until 2010’s “Toy Story 3”.

9D M.L.B. official : UMP

Back in the 15th century, “an umpire” was referred to as “a noumpere”, which was misheard, and hence caused the dropping of the initial letter N. The term “noumpere” came from Old French “nonper” meaning “not even, odd number”. The idea was that the original umpire was a third person called on to arbitrate between two, providing that the “odd number” needed to decide the dispute.

12D Moved like a kangaroo : HOPPED

The word “kangaroo” comes from the Australian Aborigine term for the animal. There’s an oft-quoted story that the explorer James Cook (later Captain Cook) asked a local native what was the name of this remarkable-looking animal, and the native responded with “Kangaroo”. The story is that the native was actually saying “I don’t understand you”, but as cute as that tale is, it’s just an urban myth.

22D Mountain visible from Anchorage : DENALI

“Denali” means “the high one” in the native Koyukon Athabaskan language, and is the name used for the peak formerly known as Mount McKinley. Denali’s summit stands at 20,310 feet, making it the highest mountain peak in North America. I was surprised to learn that there is a Denali State Park, as well as the Denali National Park. The two are located adjacent to each other (which makes sense!). The State Park is undeveloped for all practical purposes, with just a few campgrounds and trailheads.

29D Game with the goal of running out of cards : UNO

UNO is a card game that was developed in the early seventies and that has been sold by Mattel since 1992. It falls into the shedding family of card games, meaning that the goal is to get rid of all your cards while preventing opponents from doing the same.

30D Huge props : MAD RESPECT

“Props” is North American slang for “proper respect”.

38D Connecticut Ivy : YALE

The term “Ivy League” originally defined an athletic conference, but now it is used to describe a group of schools of higher education that are associated with both a long tradition and academic excellence. The eight Ivy League Schools are: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.

39D Home of Xenia, the U.S.’s largest city whose name starts with “X” : OHIO

Xenia, Ohio is in effect a suburb of Dayton. The name “Xenia” is the Greek word for “hospitality”. In terms of population, Xenia is the largest city in the US with a name beginning with the letter X.

40D Many an embedded animation : GIF

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is an image format developed in the 1980s by CompuServe (remember CompuServe?). GIF images are compressed, reducing the file size, but without losing information. So, the original image can be reconstructed perfectly from the compressed GIF version. But, and it’s a big but, GIF images use only 256 individual colors. This means that GIF is a relatively poor choice of compression for color photographs, while it is usually fine for logos with large blocks of single colors.

41D Settings for “The Pitt” and “Code Black,” for short : ERS

“The Pitt” is a medical drama TV show that premiered in 2025. The title refers to the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. In each episode, we follow the staff through an hour in the emergency department, navigating challenges like staff shortages and underfunding. The show has been praised by the medical community for its realistic portrayal of healthcare workers and the psychological challenges faced in a post-pandemic world.

48D Military mind games, for short : PSY-OPS

Psychological Operations (“PSYOP” or “psy-ops”) is a contemporary name for propaganda, the “winning of hearts and minds” in a combat zone.

51D Schuster’s partner in publishing : SIMON

Publishing house of Simon & Schuster is one of the “Big Five” publishers in the English language, alongside Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan and HarperCollins. Simon & Schuster started out as a publisher of books of crosswords, would you believe? Richard Simon was asked by his aunt if he knew of any book of crosswords, and as there weren’t any Simon decided to launch a little publishing business with Max Schuster, exploiting a gap in the publishing market. The first book of crosswords was published in 1924, and they’ve been going ever since. And another bit of trivia is that the same Richard Simon was the father of singer-songwriter Carly Simon.

60D Electrical resistance units : OHMS

The unit of electrical resistance is the ohm (with the symbol omega) named after German physicist Georg Simon Ohm. Ohm was the guy who established experimentally that the amount of current flowing through a circuit is directly proportional to the voltage applied (V=IR), a relationship that every school kid knows as Ohm’s Law.

62D [Facepalm] : D’OH

A facepalm is the gesture made by lowering one’s face into the palm of one’s hand or hands. It can be an expression of surprise, frustration or embarrassment. A related gesture with a similar meaning is the headdesk, the gentle striking of the forehead against a desk or a wall perhaps.

64D Nutritional intake amt. : RDA

Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA)