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Solution to today’s crossword in the New York Times
Solution to today’s SYNDICATED New York Times crossword in all other publications
CROSSWORD SETTER: Tony Orbach
THEME: UM → OME … all the theme answers are well-known phrases in which an “UM” sound has been changeD to an “OME: sound:
17A. Balding person’s directive to a barber? : COMB ON OVER (come on over)
27A. Meandering trip from Kingston to Montego Bay? : JAMAICAN ROAM (Jamaican rum)
43A. Covered stadium that’s off-limits to bands? : DON’T PLAY DOME (don’t play dumb)
57A. Protection for a fairy-tale dwarf’s brain? : GNOME SKULL (numbskull)
COMPLETION TIME: 7m 25s
ANSWERS I MISSED: 0
Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across
10. Place to order a stack, say : IHOP
The International House of Pancakes (IHOP) was founded back in 1958. IHOP was originally intended to be called IHOE, the International House of Eggs, but that name didn’t do too well in marketing tests …
The athletic teams of Georgetown University are known as the Hoyas. The name is derived from “Hoya Saxa”, a traditional cheer yelled out at Georgetown games as far back as 1893. The term is a mixture of Greek and Latin, with the Greek word “hoya” meaning “such” or “what”, and “saxa” translating from Latin as “rocks” or “small stones”. The cheer is usually rendered in English as “what rocks!”.
I’ve always considered “pneu” such a lovely French word as it has a unique nasal sound. “Un pneu” is what you call “a tire” in France.
20. Yemeni leader ___ Abdullah Saleh : ALI
Ali Abdullah Saleh is the President of the Republic of Yemen. Like many leaders in the Middle East, Saleh is facing a lot of opposition from his people these days. He was injured in an attack on his domicile in June 2011 and was moved to Saudi Arabia for treatment.
Boz Scaggs is an American musician, and a longtime collaborator with Steve Miller.
26. Like geysers : ABOIL
The Great Geysir in Iceland is the first known geyser to have been discovered and documented. The name “Geysir” comes from the Icelandic and Old Norse word “geysa” meaning “to gush”. It is the Great Geysir that gives us our English word “geyser”.
27. Meandering trip from Kingston to Montego Bay? : JAMAICAN ROAM (Jamaican rum)
Rum was first distilled by slaves on the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean in the 1800s, with the tradition being that the very first production came from Barbados.
31. Green option : SOLAR
Solar panels make use of what’s known as the photovoltaic effect. We all learned about the photoelectric effect in school, in which electrons were ejected from the surface of some materials when it was exposed to light or other forms of radiation. The photovoltaic effect is related but different. Instead of being electrons ejected from the surface, in the photovoltaic effect electrons move around inside the material creating a difference in voltage.
34. Boomers’ followers : XERS
The term Generation X originated in the UK, the name of a book by Jane Deverson. Her book discussed a study of British youths in 1964, contrasting their lifestyle to those of previous generations. It was Canadian author Douglas Coupland who was responsible for popularizing the term, with his more successful publication “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”. By the latest accepted definition, Gen-Xers were born between 1961 and 1981.
In the year 2000 the Crayola company, very cleverly I think, held the “Crayola Color Census 2000” in which people were polled, asking for their favorite Crayola colors. President George W. Bush chose “Blue Bell” and Tiger Woods chose “Wild Strawberry”.
Henry Knox was the chief artillery officer in the Continental Army, and a friend of General George Washington. Knox became the first Secretary of War in President Washington’s cabinet.
37. Bygone Las Vegas casino : SANDS
The famous Sands hotel and casino in Las Vegas once stood on the ground now occupied by The Venetian.
39. ___-Pacific : ASIA
The term “Asia-Pacific” is often used, particularly in the world of business. However, it tends to be quite imprecise, as the exact definition of which countries and regions are included in Asia-Pacific isn’t really clear. Sometime Asia-Pacific might include the United States for example, and sometimes not.
41. State bordering the Pacific, informally : BAJA
Baja California is both the most northern, and the most western of the Mexican states.
47. Kapellmeister’s charge : CHOIR
“Kapellmeister” is the German word for a person in charge of music, from the words “kapelle” meaning “choir” or literally “chapel”, and “meister” meaning “master”.
48. Famous last words? : EPITAPH
Our word “epitaph” ultimately comes from the Greek “epitaphion”, the word for a funeral oration.
Our word “baleen” meaning “whalebone” comes from the Latin “balleana”, which in turn comes from the Greek “phallaina”, the word for a “whale”. “Phallaina” is apparently related the Greek “phallos” meaning “swollen penis”, a reference to the shape of a whale.
Drone bees and ants are fertile males of the species whose sole role in life seems to be to mate with a queen.
60. “Little Women” woman : BETH
“Little Women” is of course a novel written by American author Louisa May Alcott. The quartet of little women is, eldest first, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Jo is a tomboy and the main character in the story, and is based on Alcott herself.
“Jane Eyre” is of course the novel written by Charlotte Bronte under the pen name Currer Bell. I’ve been sharing here on the blog that the storyline is a little too dark and Gothic for my taste, but a very persuasive blog reader convinced me to look more at the romantic side of the story and give it a second chance. I watched a wonderful 4-hour television adaptation of the novel made by the BBC very recently, and I have to say that because I was focused on the relationship between Jane and Rochester, I was able to push past the Gothic influences (that depress me) so I really enjoyed the performance. I thoroughly recommend this latest BBC adaptation
I think Paul Rudd is a very talented actor. He has played a variety of roles in movies but is probably best known on television for playing Phoebe Buffay’s boyfriend and then husband on the sitcom “Friends”.
65. Argentine soccer hero Maradona : DIEGO
Diego Maradona has to be the most famous of Argentina’s soccer players. He is also one of the country’s most controversial sportsmen, noted for his outspoken manner with journalists and his cocaine addiction.
Down
1. Old Renault : LE CAR
French auto-maker Renault made the “mini-like” Renault 5 and sold it as the Renault “Le Car” in North America. My Dad had a Renault 5 back in Ireland …
“Waterworld”, a Kevin Costner vehicle released in 1995, really wasn’t that great a movie despite it’s promising storyline about land submerged by melting polar ice caps. The movie was filmed in Hawaii, a massive production with a huge budget overrun. I went SCUBA diving in one of the locations a few years after the filmcrews had headed home. All along the reef there were small metal plates embedded in the rock, used as anchor points for various floating sets. I would have thought that kind of thing would have been cleaned up, but no …
4. Head, slangily : NOB
The slang term “nob” has been used for “head” for over 300 years, and is a variant of “knob”.
Having lived on both sides of the Atlantic, I find the Mars Bar to be the most perplexing of candies! The original Mars Bar is a British confection (and delicious) first manufactured in 1932. The US version of the original Mars Bar is called a Milky Way. But a Milky Way is also produced in the UK, and it is completely different to its US cousin, and is more like an American “3 Musketeers”. And there is an American Mars Bar, something different again. No wonder I gave up eating candy bars …
12. Cassini of fashion : OLEG
Oleg Cassini, the French-born American fashion designer, had two big names particularly associated with his designs. In the sixties he produced the state wardrobe for First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and he was also the exclusive designer for Hollywood’s Gene Tierney, Cassini’s second wife.
Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at MIT. He is known as one of the fathers of modern linguistics.
23. Bamboozles : CONS
It’s thought that the lovely word “bamboozle” came into English from the Scottish “bombaze” meaning “perplex”. We’ve been using “bamboozle” since the very early 1700s.
25. “Iliad” figure : AJAX
As described in Homer’s “Iliad”, Hector was a Trojan prince and a great fighter. During the war with the Greeks, in order avoid a bloody battle, Hector challenges any one of the Greek warriors to a duel. Ajax is chosen by the Greeks, and the two fight for an entire day before they declare a stalemate.
28. “No siree!” : IXNAY
Ixnay is a word in Pig Latin. Pig Latin is in effect a game, whereby one takes the first consonant of an English word and moves it to the end of the word, and then adds the letters “ay”. So the Pig Latin for the word “nix” is “ix-n-ay” … ixnay.
29. Inter ___ : ALIA
Inter alia means “among other things” in Latin.
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a short story penned by J. D. Salinger.
J. D. Salinger was a very reclusive author, most famous for his novel “Catcher in the Rye”. Salinger fought in WWII after he was drafted into the US Army. He saw action on Utah Beach on D-Day, and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also spent a lot of time interrogating prisoners due to his knowledge of French and German, and was one of the first Americans to go into a liberated concentration camp. He later spent time in hospital suffering from what was then called combat stress reaction, as he tried to deal with what he saw in the German camps.
38. A little open : AJAR
Our word “ajar” is thought to come from Scottish dialect, in which “a char” means “slightly open”.
39. Help with a job : ABET
The word “abet” comes into English from the Old French “abeter” meaning “to bait” or “to harass with dogs” (it literally means “to make bite”). This sense of encouraging something bad to happen morphed into our modern usage of “abet” to mean aid or encourage someone in a crime.
41. Fraternal grp. : BPOE
The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE) was founded in 1868, and is a social club that has about a million members today. It started out as a group of men getting together in a “club” in order to get around the legal opening hours of taverns in New York City. The club took on a new role as it started to look out for poor families of members who passed away. The club now accepts African Americans as members (since the seventies) and women (since the nineties), but atheists still aren’t welcome.
44. “Tommy” rockers : THE WHO
“Tommy” was the name given to the fourth album recorded by the British band, The Who. It was the original “rock opera”, and was adapted for both the stage and screen, both adaptations becoming huge successes.
Ron Howard sure has come a long way since playing Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show”. He has directed some fabulous movies, including favorites of mine like “Apollo 13”, “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Da Vinci Code”. And today, Opie is a grandfather …
50. Pequod co-owner : PELEG
The Pequod is the ship that figures in Herman Melville’s classic, “Moby Dick”. The ship is owned by a consortium of the citizens of Nantucket Island, including Captains Ahab, Bildad and Peleg.
53. Tours “with” : AVEC
Tours is the largest city in the Centre region of France. It is said that the people of Tours speak the “purest” form of French in the whole country, and when spoken by a local it is also said to be free of any accent.
54. One “a-leaping” in a Christmas song : LORD
The fabulous Christmas Carol called “The Twelve Days of Christmas” dates back at least to 1780 when it was first published in England, and may be French in origin. The concept of twelve days of Christmas comes from the tradition that the three kings came to visit the Christ Child twelve days after he was born. This same tradition is the origin of the title to Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night”.
58. Big Apple sch. : NYU
The main campus of the private New York University (NYU) is located right in Manhattan, in Greenwich Village. It has over 12,000 resident students, the largest number of residents in a private school in the whole country.
Chang Kai-Shek was the leader of the Nationalist Movement in China right through to the end of WWII. The Nationalists lost out in a Civil War to the Communists backed by the Soviet Union after war, and Chiang Kai-Shek and his government were forced to flee to Taiwan. He claimed rule over China from Taiwan until his death in 1975.
For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Inclined : LEANT
6. Didn’t sink : SWAM
10. Place to order a stack, say : IHOP
14. Fund : ENDOW
15. Georgetown athlete : HOYA
16. Chambers of commerce? : MALL
17. Balding person’s directive to a barber? : COMB ON OVER
19. French tire : PNEU
20. Yemeni leader ___ Abdullah Saleh : ALI
21. Peeved : SORE
22. “Lido Shuffle” singer Boz : SCAGGS
24. Knocking sound : RAT-A-TAT
26. Like geysers : ABOIL
27. Meandering trip from Kingston to Montego Bay? : JAMAICAN ROAM
31. Green option : SOLAR
34. Boomers’ followers : XERS
35. Commercial suffix with Cray- : -OLA
36. Henry ___, first secretary of war : KNOX
37. Bygone Las Vegas casino : SANDS
39. ___-Pacific : ASIA
40. “Lord, is ___?” : IT I
41. State bordering the Pacific, informally : BAJA
42. Construction piece : I-BEAM
43. Covered stadium that’s off-limits to bands? : DON’T PLAY DOME
47. Kapellmeister’s charge : CHOIR
48. Famous last words? : EPITAPH
52. Whalebone : BALEEN
54. Strings of islands? : LEIS
55. Drone, e.g. : BEE
56. Acknowledge : AVOW
57. Protection for a fairy-tale dwarf’s brain? : GNOME SKULL
60. “Little Women” woman : BETH
61. “Jane ___” : EYRE
62. Canvas holder : EASEL
63. Bounce back : ECHO
64. Paul who co-starred in “I Love You, Man” : RUDD
65. Argentine soccer hero Maradona : DIEGO
Down
1. Old Renault : LE CAR
2. “Waterworld” girl : ENOLA
3. Open a door to : ADMIT
4. Head, slangily : NOB
5. Somewhere between excellent and poor, as a restaurant : TWO STAR
6. January 2nd? : SHORT A
7. Didn’t go straight : WOVE
8. When repeated, a cry at sea : AYE
9. Alternatives to Butterfingers : MARS BARS
10. Damage : IMPAIR
11. Chill : HANG LOOSE
12. Cassini of fashion : OLEG
13. “Not only that …” : PLUS
18. First name in linguistics : NOAM
23. Bamboozles : CONS
25. “Iliad” figure : AJAX
26. Breezed through : ACED
28. “No siree!” : IXNAY
29. Inter ___ : ALIA
30. Sir’s counterpart : MA’AM
31. Kind of mark : SKID
32. Not tricked by : ONTO
33. Ascetic’s wear : LOINCLOTH
37. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” writer : SALINGER
38. A little open : AJAR
39. Help with a job : ABET
41. Fraternal grp. : BPOE
42. “Oops!,” to a shooter : I MISSED
44. “Tommy” rockers : THE WHO
45. Considered : DEEMED
46. 1960s TV boy : OPIE
49. Bullying, e.g. : ABUSE
50. Pequod co-owner : PELEG
51. “You there?” : HELLO
52. Honey : BABE
53. Tours “with” : AVEC
54. One “a-leaping” in a Christmas song : LORD
58. Big Apple sch. : NYU
59. Chiang ___-shek : KAI
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