1011-11: New York Times Crossword Answers 11 Oct 11, Tuesday

QuickLinks:
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: Ed Sessa
THEME: Tumblers … all the theme answers have the same clue: “Tumblers”:

17A. Tumblers : LOCK DEVICES
32A. Tumblers : CIRCUS ACROBATS
41A. Tumblers : WHISKEY GLASSES
59A. Tumblers : JACK AND JILL

COMPLETION TIME: 7m 45s
ANSWERS I MISSED: 0


Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across
20. Perry of “Beverly Hills 90210” : LUKE
Luke Perry is one of a long list of stars that made it big on the TV show “Beverly Hills 90210”. What is remarkable about Perry’s performances is that he joined the cast to play a 16-year-old (named Dylan McKay), while in real life Perry was in his mid-twenties!

“Beverly Hills, 90210” is a drama that aired on Fox from 1990 to 2000. The show follows the lives of little rich kids in Beverly Hills. Many of the cast members have made it big following their appearances on “90210”, including Jason Priestly, Luke Perry, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling. I’ve never even seen one episode …

21. Flu symptom : FEVER
Influenza is an ailment that is caused by a virus. The virus is readily inactivated by the use of soap, so washing hands and surfaces is especially helpful in containing flu outbreaks.

22. Execs’ degs. : MBAS
The world’s first MBA degree was offered by Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration, in 1908.

23. /, to a bowler : SPARE
In bowling, the downing of all ten pins in two balls in the same frame is called a “spare”, scoring ten points. The player gets a bonus, equal to the number of pins downed with the next ball, which could be up to ten. Hence, a spare can be worth up to 20 points.

Bowling has been around for an awfully long time. The oldest known reference to the game is in Egypt, where pins and balls were found in an ancient tomb that is over 5,000 years old. The first form of the game to come to America was nine-pin bowling, which had been very popular in Europe for centuries. In 1841 in Connecticut, nine-pin bowling was banned due to its association with gambling. Supposedly, an additional pin was added to get around the ban, and ten-pin bowling was born.

25. Beethoven’s Third : EROICA
Beethoven originally dedicated his “Eroica”, Symphony No. 3, to Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven admired the principles of the French Revolution, and as such respected Bonaparte who was “born” out of the uprising. When Napoleon declared himself Emperor, however, Beethoven (and much of Europe) saw this as a betrayal to the ideals of the revolution, so he changed the name of his new symphony from “Bonaparte” to “Eroica”, meaning “heroic” or “valiant”.

27. Frank’s wife before Mia : AVA
Ava Gardner is noted for her association with some big movies, but also for her association with some big names when it came to the men in her life. In the world of film, she appeared in the likes of “Mogambo” (1953), “On the Beach” (1959), “The Night of the Iguana” (1964) and “Earthquake” (1974). The men in her life included husbands Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. After her marriages had failed (and perhaps before!) she had long term relationships with Howard Hughes and bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin whom she met through her friend Ernest Hemingway.

Mia Farrow is an energetic, award-winning actress who really hasn’t looked back in her career since her first leading role, in “Rosemary’s Baby” back in 1968. Her on-screen celebrity is matched by the interest created by her personal life. Her first husband was Frank Sinatra, a wedding in 1966 that received a lot of attention partly due to the couple’s age difference (she was 21, he was 50). Her second husband was almost as famous, the magnificent musician André Previn. Farrow then moved in with Woody Allen, a relationship that famously fell apart when Farrow discovered that Allen was having a sexual relationship with Soon-Yi, one of her adopted daughters from the marriage with André Previn.

Frank Sinatra was the only child of Italian immigrants living in Hoboken, New Jersey. Like so many of our heroes, Sinatra had a rough upbringing. His mother was arrested several times and convicted of running an illegal abortion business in the family home. Sinatra never finished high school, being expelled for rowdy conduct, and he was arrested on a morals charge as a youth for carrying on with a married woman, an offence back then. But he straightened himself out by the time he was twenty, and started singing professionally.

31. Result of pushing too hard? : TILT
In a game of pinball, some players get an irresistible urge to “nudge” the machine . Such a nudge, a movement of the machine designed to influence the path taken by the ball, is called a “tilt”. Most pinball machines have sensors designed to detect a tilt, and when activated a “tilt” warning light comes on and the player’s controls are temporarily disabled.

38. Miler Sebastian : COE
Sebastian Coe is a retired middle distance runner from the UK who won four Olympic medals including golds in the 1500m in 1980 and 1984. After retiring from athletics he went into politics and served as a Member of Parliament from 1992 to 1997. He headed up London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, so he has to be getting pretty excited as that event is coming up pretty soon.

45. Bailed-out insurance co. : AIG
AIG is the American International Group, a giant insurance corporation (or I should say, “was”). After repeated bailouts by American taxpayers, the company made some serious PR blunders by spending large amounts of money on executive entertainment and middle management rewards. These included a $444,000 California retreat, an $86,000 hunting trip in England, and a $343,000 getaway to a luxury resort in Phoenix. Poor judgment, I’d say …

49. Stomach problem : ULCER
A peptic ulcer, until fairly recently, was believed to be caused by undue amounts of stress in one’s life. It is now known that 70-90% of all peptic ulcers are in fact associated with a particular bacterium.

52. Marie with two Nobels : CURIE
Marie Curie lived a life of firsts. She was the first female professor at the University of Paris, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and indeed was the first person to win two Nobel prizes. Most of her work was in the field of radioactivity, and was carried out in the days when the impact of excessive radiation on the human body was not understood. She died from aplastic anemia, caused by high exposure to radiation. To this day, Marie’s personal papers are kept preserved in lead-lined boxes as they are highly radioactive, even her personal cookbook.

58. First of three X’s or O’s : TIC
When I was growing up in Ireland, we played “noughts and crosses” … our name for tic-tac-toe.

59. Tumblers : JACK AND JILL
The “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme dates back at least to the 1700s:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

62. ___ of Man : ISLE
The Isle of Man is a large island located in the middle of the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland. I used to spend a lot of time there in my youth, and a very interesting place it is indeed. The Isle of Man is classed as a British Crown Dependency, and isn’t part of the United Kingdom at all. It is self-governing and has its own parliament called the Tynwald. The Tynwald was created in AD 979, and is arguably the oldest continuously-running parliament in the world. The inhabitants of the island speak English, although they do have their own language as well called Manx, which is very similar to Irish Gaeilge and Scottish Gaelic. And then there are those Manx cats, the ones without any tails. I’ve seen lots of them, and can attest that they are indeed found all over the island.

63. Garlicky shrimp dish : SCAMPI
The Italian dish known as “scampi” is a serving of shrimp in garlic butter and dry white wine.

Down
2. “___ Ben Adhem” : ABOU
Abou Ben Adhem, also known as Ibrahim Bin Adham, was an Arab Muslim saint. He was made famous in the western world with the publication in 1838 of the poem “Abou Ben Adhem” by James Henry Leigh Hunt, the English poet.

4. Little squirts : TYKES
“Tyke” has been used playfully to describe a young child since at least 1902, but for centuries before that a tyke was a cur or mongrel, or perhaps a lazy or lower-class man.

5. U.K. wordsmith’s ref. : OED
The “Oxford English Dictionary” (OED) contains over 300,000 “main” entries, and 59 million words in total. It is said it would take a single person 120 years to type it out in full. The longest entry for one word in the second edition of the OED is the verb “set”. When the third edition was published in 2007, the longest entry for a single word became the verb “put”.

10. The “S” in CBS: Abbr. : SYS
CBS used to be called the Columbia Broadcasting System.

11. Old-fashioned pregnancy check : RABBIT TEST
The rabbit test for pregnancy was developed back in 1927. In the test, a woman’s urine was injected into a female rabbit. A few days later the rabbit was killed and her ovaries examined. The ovaries would have a different appearance if the urine came from a pregnant woman, due to the presence of a specific hormone found only in women with fertilized eggs. There was a phrase used as a euphemism for a positive result in a pregnancy test, namely “the rabbit died”. Because of this misleading expression, many people think that in the rabbit test the rabbit died only if the woman was pregnant. In actual fact, the poor rabbit was doomed the minute she was selected for the test.

12. Hipbone-related : ILIAC
The sacrum and the two ilia are three bones in the human pelvis.

13. Good problem solvers, as a group : MENSA
If you ever had to learn Latin as did I, “mensa” was probably taught to you in lesson one as it’s the word commonly used as an example of a first declension noun. Mensa means “table”. The Mensa organization, for folks with high IQs, was set up in Oxford, England back in 1946. To become a member you are required to have an IQ that is in the top 2% of the population.

18. Big name in Italian fashion : VERSACE
Gianni Versace was an Italian fashion designer. His death was perhaps as famous as his llife. He was murdered in 1997 outside his mansion in Miami Beach by Andrew Cunanan. It is not certain that Cunanan knew who his victim was, as this was the last in a spree of five murders committed by him over a four month period. A few days after killing Versace, Cunanan used the same gun to commit suicide.

22. Wisdom teeth, e.g. : MOLARS
Wisdom teeth are an extra set of molars in the back of the jaws. There are usually four of them, and they only occur in about 65% of the population.

24. Otto von Bismarck’s realm : PRUSSIA
Germany first became a country of its own in 1871, when the Princes of the various independent German states met at Versailles outside Paris to proclaim Wilhelm of Prussia as the Emperor of the German Empire. The man behind this historic development was Wilhelm’s Ministerpräsident, Otto von Bismarck. Von Bismarck was a powerful figure in Prussia, and indeed on the world stage, earning him the nickname of the “Iron Chancellor”.

28. Penthouse perk : VIEW
Originally “penthouse” was used to describe a modest building attached to a main structure. In fact, in centuries past, the manger in which Jesus was born was often referred to as a penthouse. The modern, more luxurious connotation dates back to the early twenties.

48. Dickens’s ___ Heep : URIAH
Uriah Heep is a sniveling, insincere character in the novel “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens. The character is such a “yes man” that today, if we know someone who behaves the same way, then we might call that person a “Uriah Heep”.

The wonderful storyteller Hans Christian Andersen became very successful in his own lifetime. In 1847 he visited England for the summer and made a triumphal tour of English society’s most fashionable drawing rooms. There he met with the equally successful Charles Dickens, and the two seemed to hit it off. Ten years later Andersen returned to England and stayed for five weeks in Dickens’ home as his guest. Dickens published “David Copperfield” soon after, and supposedly the less than lovable character Uriah Heep was based on Dickens’ house guest, Hans Christian Andersen. That wasn’t very nice!

49. “Family Matters” dweeb : URKEL
Steve Urkel is a character on the TV show “Family Matters” that aired in the late eighties and nineties. The Urkel character was the archetypal “geek”, played by Jaleel White. Urkel was originally written into the show’s storyline for just one episode, but before long Urkel was the show’s most popular recurring character.

53. The Bruins’ sch. : UCLA
The UCLA Bruin mascots are Joe and Josephine Bruin, characters that have evolved over the years. There used to be “mean” Bruin mascots but they weren’t very popular with the fans, so now there are only “happy” Bruins at the games.

55. Long wheels : LIMO
The word “limousine” actually derives from the French city of Limoges. The area around Limoges is called the Limousin, and it gave its name to a cloak hood worn by local shepherds. In early motor cars, a driver would sit outside in the weather, while the passengers would sit in the covered compartment. The driver would often wear a limousin-style protective hood, giving raise to that type of transportation being called a “limousine”. Well, that’s how the story goes anyway …

56. Mont Blanc, par exemple : ALPE
Mont Blanc, is the highest mountain in the Alps (or Alpes, in French). The name Mont Blanc translates into “white mountain”. The mountain lies on the border between France and Italy, and it has been accepted for decades that the summit lies within French territory. However, there have been official claims that the summit does in fact fall within the borders of Italy.

59. Huck’s raftmate : JIM
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain was first published in 1884, not here in the US but rather in England. The original launch planned for the US had to be delayed until 1885, because some rascal had defaced the plate for one of the illustrations, making an obscene joke. Once the problem was spotted a new plate had to be made, and 30,000 copies already printed had to be reworked to cover up the obscenity.

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For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Convenience for working travelers : LAPTOP
7. The latest : NEWS
11. Tire holder : RIM
14. Dog that merits “Good boy!” : OBEYER
15. Sore all over : ACHY
16. Hoppy brew : ALE
17. Tumblers : LOCK DEVICES
19. Coal holder : BIN
20. Perry of “Beverly Hills 90210” : LUKE
21. Flu symptom : FEVER
22. Execs’ degs. : MBAS
23. /, to a bowler : SPARE
25. Beethoven’s Third : EROICA
27. Frank’s wife before Mia : AVA
30. N.F.L. ball carriers : RBS
31. Result of pushing too hard? : TILT
32. Tumblers : CIRCUS ACROBATS
37. PC whizzes : TECHS
38. Miler Sebastian : COE
39. Crinkly sole material : CREPE
41. Tumblers : WHISKEY GLASSES
44. “Would ___ to you?” : I LIE
45. Bailed-out insurance co. : AIG
46. Scores for 30-Across : TDS
47. Money spent : OUTLAY
49. Stomach problem : ULCER
51. Mice, to owls : PREY
52. Marie with two Nobels : CURIE
54. “Woe is me!” : ALAS
58. First of three X’s or O’s : TIC
59. Tumblers : JACK AND JILL
61. “Dig in!” : EAT
62. ___ of Man : ISLE
63. Garlicky shrimp dish : SCAMPI
64. Nonfielding A.L. players : DHS
65. Rare airline offering, nowadays : MEAL
66. Repeated : ECHOED

Down
1. Lounge around : LOLL
2. “___ Ben Adhem” : ABOU
3. Hunt-and-___ (typing method) : PECK
4. Little squirts : TYKES
5. U.K. wordsmith’s ref. : OED
6. Quick-to-erect homes : PREFABS
7. Born yesterday, so to speak : NAIVE
8. “Behold,” to Caesar : ECCE
9. Cabbie’s query : WHERE TO?
10. The “S” in CBS: Abbr. : SYS
11. Old-fashioned pregnancy check : RABBIT TEST
12. Hipbone-related : ILIAC
13. Good problem solvers, as a group : MENSA
18. Big name in Italian fashion : VERSACE
22. Wisdom teeth, e.g. : MOLARS
24. Otto von Bismarck’s realm : PRUSSIA
26. Protective part of a trunk : RIB CAGE
27. Play a role : ACT
28. Penthouse perk : VIEW
29. Ones making plans : ARCHITECTS
33. Unfriendly, as a greeting : CHILLY
34. Playfully shy : COY
35. King’s trappings : REGALIA
36. Went flat-out : SPED
40. Problem for lispers : ESS
42. Jingly pocket item : KEY CASE
43. Requirement to hunt or drive : LICENSE
47. Made a choice : OPTED
48. Dickens’s ___ Heep : URIAH
49. “Family Matters” dweeb : URKEL
50. Big Indian : RAJAH
53. The Bruins’ sch. : UCLA
55. Long wheels : LIMO
56. Mont Blanc, par exemple : ALPE
57. Lost traction : SLID
59. Huck’s raftmate : JIM
60. 700, to Caesar : DCC

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