Day: July 21, 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, or leave a comment below. 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: 9m 48s
THEME: BROKEN HEARTS … Rows 4, 5, 8 & 11 of the grid all contain the word HEART, broken by a black square e.g CATASTROP-HE*ART, LEA-H*EART-LY
ANSWERS I MISSED: 0

TODAY’S WIKI-EST, AMAZONIAN GOOGLIES
Across
1. “Impression, Sunrise” painter : MONET
Claude Monet painted the harbor of Le Havre in the north of France in 1872, giving it the title “Impression, Sunrise“. The painting is not a “realistic” representation of the scene in front of him, hence the name “impression”. It was this very painting that gave rise to the name of the Impressionist movement.

9. Dreamworks’s first animated film : ANTZ
Dreamworks SKG is the studio founded by Steven Spielberg with two partners, in 1994. The company released “Antz“, its first feature movie, in 1998. “Antz” has a stellar cast that includes Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Gene Hackman and many, many other big names. The cartoon is quite unique in that the facial features of the actors providing voices are reflected in the animated characters.

14. End of a boast : VICI
The oft-quoted “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) was apparently written by Julius Caesar. The words date back to 47 BC and refer to the short war between Rome and Pharnaces II of Pontus.

16. Pitcher Derek : LOWE
Derek Lowe is a starting pitcher for the Atlanta braves. Off the field Lowe is a great advocate for many groups that raise funds for fighting cancer. Lowe himself is a cancer survivor, recovering from squamous cell carcinoma.

19. Subject of many Georgia O’Keeffe paintings : IRIS
Georgia O’Keefe was an influential American artist, one who led the introduction of American art into Europe. Famously, she was married to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who helped develop her career in the early days. One of her most famous paintings is from 1926, “Black Iris III”.

24. Woman’s name meaning “weary” in Hebrew : LEAH
Leah is the first wife of Jacob, and mother of six of the twelve tribes of Israel.

30. Word before and after “for” : MEASURE
“Measure for Measure” is one of William Shakespeare’s plays, ostensibly a comedy. The title “Measure for Measure” is actually a quotation from the Bible, the Gospel According to Luke.

32. Airport info: Abbr. : ARR
Arr: Arrival time.

33. Maryland athlete, for short : TERP
The sports teams of the University of Maryland are called the Maryland Terrapins, or “the Terps” for short. The name dates back to 1932 when it was first coined by the the university’s president at the time, Curly Byrd. He took the name from the diamondback terrapins that are native to the Chesapeake Bay.

34. They’re often eaten with applesauce : LATKES
A latke is a delicious potato pancake (I’m Irish … anything made with a potato is delicious!).

43. Flirtatious one : COQUET
A coquet is a male flirt, with coquette the name for the female variety. The word comes from French, being the diminutive of “coq”, the word for a cock. A cock might well be accused of “strutting his stuff” around the chicken run.

50. Bibliographic abbr. : ETAL
Et alii is the equivalent of et cetera, with et cetera being used in place of a list of objects, and et alii used for a list of names.

51. Experience a mondegreen, e.g. : MISHEAR
A mondegreen is usually a series of words that have been misheard, often with comical effect. For example “I led the pigeons to the flag” is a mondegreen for “I pledge allegiance to the flag”. The term was created by American author Sylvia Wright citing the mishearing of words from the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray”. The line “laid him on the green” might be heard as “Lady Modegreen”.

57. Lover’s woe … or something found, literally, in the 4th, 5th, 8th and 11th rows of this puzzle : BROKEN HEART

62. Brass component : ZINC
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. Compare this with bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Copper and bronze are often mistaken for each other.

64. When doubled, popular 1980s-’90s British sitcom : ‘ALLO
“‘Allo ‘Allo!” is a pretty funny sitcom from the BBC originally aired from 1982 to 1992. It is set in WWII France, and involves German occupation of a town, a hapless cafe owner, the French Resistance, and downed British pilots. Hard to believe one could make a comedy out of that, but it does seem to work.

65. Alexander the Great conquered it ca. 335 B.C. : IONIA
Ionia, now in present day Turkey, in the days of Ancient Greece was more a collection of tribes, and was never a unified state.

71. Editors’ marks : STETS
Stet is the Latin word meaning “let it stand”. In editorial work, the typesetter is instructed to disregard any change previously marked by writing the word “stet” beside the change, and then underscoring the change with a line of dots (or dashes).

Down
1. Like bueno but not buena: Abbr. : MASC
Bueno s the masculine form of the adjective “good” in Spanish, and “buena” is the feminine form.

2. Filmdom’s Willy, for one : ORCA
The orca who starred in the 1993 movie “Free Willy” was actually called Keiko, with Willy being his “stage name”. Keiko had a sad life. He was captured near Iceland in 1979, and sold to a local aquarium, and then onto Marineland in Ontario, and Six Flags Mexico in 1985. After starring in the movie, his fans raised money with the intent of returning Keiko to the wild. Keiko had become very ill, partly from being confined in a small tank in Mexico, so a lot of money had to be spend restoring him to health. He was purchased by the Oregon Coast Aquarium who undertook the task of treating him and preparing him for the wild. You might recall the dramatic journey he took from Mexico to Oregon in US Air Force transport plane in 1996. Having regained his health, he was flown to Iceland and there gradually reintroduced into the wild. Sadly, Keiko did not fare too well back in the ocean. He was never adopted by a pod, so lived a solitary life. He lost weight, would sometimes follow fishing boats and play with any humans who would give him attentions. In 2003 he beached himself in Taken Bay in Norway, where he died.

9. The Greatest : ALI
Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. was born in 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky. He changed his name to Muhammed Ali when he converted to Islam in 1964. Who can forget Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic flame for the 1996 games in Atlanta? Ali won a gold medal in the 1960 games, which he threw into the Ohio River after being refused service at a “whites only” restaurant. He was presented with a replacement medal during the 1996 Games.

10. Singer Jones : NORAH
75 NORAH: The beguiling Norah Jones, one of my favorite singers. She is the daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. If you haven’t heard her “Come Away with Me“, you haven’t lived …

22. Mess-ups : ERRATA
Errata is the past participle of the Latin word “errare” meaning “to err”.

26. French bean? : TETE
Tete: the French word for “head” (or “bean” in slang).

27. French bench : BANC
Banc: the French word for bench or seat.

28. Uh-Oh! ___ (Nabisco product) : OREO
Uh-Oh! Oreo is a variant of the Oreo cookie, the reverse of the original in that the outside is made of vanilla wafers, and the filling is chocolate cream. The name was changed to Golden Chocolate Creme Oreo in 2007. I’ve never had one …

36. “At Last” singer James : ETTA
Etta James is best known for her rendition of “At Last”. Sadly, she discloses in her autobiography, Etta James has lived a life that has been ravaged by drug addiction, leading to numerous legal and health problems.

37. Poet/illustrator Silverstein : SHEL
Author Shel Silverstein had a varied career, and did more than write books. He was a poet, composer, cartoonist and screenwriter among other things.

41. Slow alternative to I-95 : ROUTE ONE
US Route 1 runs from Fort Kent in Maine, right down to Key West in Florida.

49. Lower class in “1984” : PROLES
George Orwell introduced us to the proles, the working class folk in his famous novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four“. Collectively, the proles made up the section of society known as the proletariat.

51. Protegé, for one : MAZDA
The Protegé was one brand name of a whole family of compact cars made by Mazda between 1964 and 2003, with he whole group of cars going under the name of Familia. At one point, the guts of the Familia/Protegé was rebranded as the Ford Escort here in North America.

52. Poem with approximately 16,000 lines : ILIAD
The Iliad is an epic poem by the Greek poet Homer, which tells the story of the siege of Ilium during the Trojan war.

53. With 45-Across, largest city in California’s wine country : SANTA
45. See 53-Down : ROSA
Santa Rosa is the largest city in California’s Wine Country, and the county seat of Sonoma County. The epicenter of the so called 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was located near Santa Rosa, so there was actually more damage in Santa Rosa, for the size of the city, that in San Francisco.

58. Painter Paul : KLEE
The artist Paul Klee was born in Switzerland, but studied art in Munich in Germany. You can see many of his works in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and if you get to Bern in Switzerland, even more of them at the Zentrum Paul Klee that was opened in 2005.