Day: January 26, 2010

The name’s William Ernest Butler, but please call me Bill. I grew up in Ireland, but now live out here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m retired now, from technology businesses that took our family all over the world. I answer all emails, so please feel free to email me at bill@paxient.com

If you are working on the New York Times crossword in any other publication, you are working on the syndicated puzzle. Here is a link to my answers to today’s SYNDICATED New York Times crossword. To find any solution other than today’s, enter the crossword number (e.g. 1225, 0107) in the “Search the Blog” box above.

This is my solution to the crossword published in the New York Times today …

Completion Time: 7m 59s
Theme: KEEP … The word KEEP can precede either halves of the starred clues, e.g. COUNTDOWN (KEEP COUNT, KEEP DOWN).
Answers I missed: 0

TODAY’S WIKI-EST GOOGLIES 
Across
9 -ESQUE: The suffice -esque came into English from Italian (-esco), which in turn derives from Latin (-iscus).

14 ATRA: The Atra was introduced by Gillette in 1977, and sold as the Contour in some markets, and its derivative products are still around today.

15 IDEA: If “necessity is the mother of invention”, I guess an idea is its child!

19 ALICE: “Alice’s Restaurant Masacree” is the actual name of the Arlo Guthrie song, all 18m 48s of it, that takes up one whole side of the album “Alice’s Restaurant“.

20 HESSIAN: The Hessians were German regiments that fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War. They took their name from the homeland of about one third of the men, namely Hesse-Kassel.

21 SADIE: Sadie Hawkins was a character in Al Capp‘s comic strip “Li’l Abner“. Sadie was still a spinster at the age of 35, so declared a “Sadie Hawkins Day” in which she chased the local men in footrace, with marriage as the prize when one was caught.

28 TAO: The Chinese character “tao” translates as “path”, but the concept of Tao signifies the true nature of the world.

36 IRA: Roth Individual Retirement Accounts were introduced in 1997 under a bill sponsored by Senator William Roth of Delaware.

44 ADELE: Adele Astaire was Fred Astaire’s elder sister. Before Fred made it big in movies, the two were a successful music hall act, particularly in England. Adele married into nobility in England, taking the name Lady Charles Cavendish.

62 BOCCE: Bocce is the plural of the Italian word “boccia” meaning “bowl”. Bocce is based on a game played in Ancient Rome.

63 LARS: “Lars and the Real Girl” is a pretty weird film about a shy young man who develops a relationship with an anatomically correct, life-size doll.

66 ARTY: Someone who is “chichi” is showily trendy and pretentious.

Down
1: BACH: The six beautiful Brandenburg Concertos were composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and presented to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721.

3: TRUST: Teddy Roosevelt’s “trust-busting” was basically designed to curb the powers of large corporations. I’m not sure how successful he was!

10 SALINAS: The Salinas Valley is just south of here, and takes up  much of Monterey County.

22 ADOLF: The names Adolf (in Germany) and Adolphe (in France) are dying out, with very few babies being given the name since the days of Nazi Germany.

26 DONNE: I don’t know about here in America, but at school in Ireland we all had to learn John Donne‘s “Holy Sonnet X”, also known as “Death Be Not Proud“.

31 TIDAL: A tidal basin is an area that fills with water at high tide, and then that water level is maintained by artificial means. I used to live in a village on the East Coast of Ireland where there was a salt water swimming pool that would be filled by the high tide twice a day, the same principle I guess.

38 AD HOC: The Latin phrase “ad hoc” means “for this purpose”.

39 FARRAH: Farrah Fawcett-Majors played Jill Munroe in “Charlie’s Angels”.

51 SNERT: “Hagar the Horrible” was created by the late Dik Browne, and is now drawn by his son, Chris Blowne.

52 INUIT: The Inuit peoples live in the Arctic, in parts of the US, Russia, Greenland and Canada.

50 LOO: When I was growing up in Ireland, a “bath-room” was the room that had the bath and no toilet. The  separate room with the toilet was called “the toilet” or sometimes the W.C., the water closet. Apparently the term closet was used because in the 1800s as toilets moved indoors they often displaced clothes in a “closet”, as a closet was just the right size to take the commode. It has been suggested that the British term “loo” comes from Waterloo (water-closet … water-loo), but no one seems to know for sure.