0605-14 New York Times Crossword Answers 5 Jun 14, Thursday

Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across
1. Presenter of “The Borgias,” in brief : SHO
“The Borgias” is a period drama aired by Showtime from 2011 to 2013. The show was created by Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan. The series follows the Borgia family, with Jeremy Irons starring as Pope Alexander VI. Sadly, the series was cancelled one season early, before the storyline could be completed as originally intended.

The Borgias were a Papal family that was very prominent during the Renaissance in Europe. Two of the Borgias became popes, namely Pope Calixtus III and Pope Alexander VI. Pope Alexander VI had several children, including Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. Cesare became a cardinal, and was the first cardinal to resign from the post. Lucrezia earned a reputation as a femme fatale, and as such turns up in many artworks, novels and movies.

10. Arizona’s ___ Canyon Dam : GLEN
Glen Canyon Dam is the second largest dam on the Colorado River and is located at Page, Arizona. The Dam was built to flood Glen Canyon, creating what we now know as Lake Powell.

14. Owner of Moviefone : AOL
Moviefone is a movie listing service, available by telephone in many parts of the country.

15. Jackie who played Uncle Fester : COOGAN
In the original television version of “The Addams Family”, the character called Uncle Fester was played by Jackie Coogan. In the first two adaptations for the big screen, Uncle Fester was portrayed by the talented Christopher Lloyd.

16. Italian beach resort : LIDO
The Lido di Venezia is a famous sandbar, about 11 km long, in Venice, Italy. It may be a sandbar, but it is home to about 20,000 residents, as well as the Venice Film Festival that takes place there every September. The Lido is also the setting for Thomas Mann’s famous novel “Death in Venice”. The name “lido” has become a term for any fashionable beach resort.

17. The “American Moses” : BRIGHAM YOUNG
Brigham Young was the second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Young believed in and practiced polygamy, so he has a large family of descendants. One of his more famous great-great-great-grandsons is Steve Young, the retired quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.

19. Hot spot in “Hansel and Gretel” : OVEN
“Hansel and Gretel” is a Germanic fairy tale found in the collection of the Brothers Grimm. It tells of two siblings, Hansel and Gretel, the children of a woodcutter. The youngsters are abandoned in a forest at the behest of an evil stepmother. Clever Hansel hears of the plan and leaves a trail of pebbles so that he and his sister can find their way home, which they do. But the children are abandoned again and this time leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Unfortunately, the crumbs are eaten by birds and so the children do indeed become lost. But eventually they do all live happily ever after …

26. TV great who said “I live to laugh, and I laugh to live” : BERLE
Comedian Milton Berle was known as “Uncle Miltie” and “Mr. Television”, and was arguably the first real star of American television as he was hosting “Texaco Star Theater” starting in 1948.

33. 1990s politico from Texas : PEROT
Henry Ross Perot graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1953, as president of his class. Ross Perot served his 4-year commitment but then resigned his commission, apparently having become somewhat disillusioned with the navy. He was ranked number 101 on the Forbes 400 List of Richest Americans in 2012, and at that time was worth about $3.5 billion.

The Reform Party of the USA was founded in 1995 by Ross Perot with the intent of creating an alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties. The Reform Party’s biggest success was the election of Jesse Ventura as Governor of Minnesota.

34. 1860s novel that is the basis for this puzzle’s theme : LITTLE WOMEN
“Little Women” is a novel written by American author Louisa May Alcott. The quartet of little women is Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March. Jo is a tomboy and the main character in the story, and is based on Alcott herself.

37. Flightless birds : RHEAS
The rhea is a flightless bird native to South America. The rhea takes its name from the Greek titan Rhea, an apt name for a flightless bird as “rhea” comes from the Greek word meaning “ground”.

41. Huck and Jim on the Mississippi, e.g. : RAFTERS
In Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, the title character befriends a slave called Jim and helps him escape.

“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 the following year 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.

44. Work that’s been punningly called a “lex icon”; Abbr. : 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”. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most-quoted author in the OED is William Shakespeare, with his most quoted work being “Hamlet”. The most-quoted female author is George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans).

Number puzzles similar to our modern-day Sudoku first appeared in French newspapers in the late 1800s. The format that we use today was created by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old freelance puzzle constructor from Connersville, Indiana and first published in 1979. The format was introduced in Japan in 1984 and given the title of “Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, which translates to “the digits are limited to one occurrence”. The rather elaborate Japanese title was eventually shortened to Sudoku. No doubt many of you are fans of Sudoku puzzles. I know I am …

A “selfie” is a self-portrait, usually one taken with a digital camera or cell phone.

46. Fixes : SPAYS
Our verb “to spay”, meaning “to surgically remove the ovaries of” (an animal) comes from an old Anglo-French word “espeier” meaning “to cut with a sword”.

49. Mission ___, Calif. : VIEJO
Mission Viejo is a city in Southern California in Orange County. According to FBI data, MIssion Viejo has qualified as the safest city in the US in some years.

53. Shark eater : ORCA
The taxonomic name for the killer whale is Orcinus orca. The use of the name “orca”, rather than “killer whale”, is becoming more and more common. The Latin word “Orcinus” means “belonging to Orcus”, with Orcus being the name for the Kingdom of the Dead.

55. Baby boomers, with “the” : ME GENERATION
The Baby Boomer generation was dubbed the “Me” generation by write Tom Wolfe in the seventies.

A baby boomer is someone who was born in the post-WWII baby boom. The rate of births had been falling fairly steadily in the US at least since 1900, but this trend was sharply reversed in 1946 after WWII. The higher birth rate continued until 1964, when it returned to pre-war levels. Since then the birth rate has continued to decline, although at a slower pace. The period between 1946 and 1964 is defined as the “baby boom”.

58. Canal with 36 locks : ERIE
The Erie Canal runs from Albany to Buffalo in the state of New York. What the canal does is allow shipping to proceed from New York Harbor right up the Hudson River, through the canal and into the Great Lakes. When it was opened in 1825, the Erie Canal had immediate impact on the economy of New York City and locations along its route. It was the first means of “cheap” transportation from a port on the Atlantic seaboard into the interior of the United States. Arguably it was the most important factor contributing to the growth of New York City over competing ports such as Baltimore and Philadelphia. It was largely because of the Erie Canal that New York became such an economic powerhouse, earning it the nickname of “the Empire State”. Paradoxically, one of the project’s main proponents was severely criticized. New York Governor DeWitt Clinton received so much ridicule that the canal was nicknamed “Clinton’s Folly” and “Clinton’s Ditch”.

59. Brightest star in Aquila : ALTAIR
Altair is the brightest star in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle). Altair is also one of the three vertices of the Summer Triangle, the others being Deneb and Vega.

60. Reactor safety agcy. : NRC
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission oversees most aspects of the safety of nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel in the US.

62. College named for a Norwegian king : ST OLAF
St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota is named after the former king and patron saint of Norway, Olaf II.

Down
1. Audrey Hepburn title role : SABRINA
“Sabrina” is a fabulous romantic comedy directed by Billy Wilder from 1954. A real favorite of mine, it stars Audrey Hepburn in the title role, opposite Humphrey Bogart in an unusual role for him. William Holden plays the inevitable second love interest. There’s a nice scene in the movie where Hepburn performs a nice rendition of “La Vie en rose”. “Sabrina was remade in 1995 in a version that’s almost as good as the original, starring Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear.

2. “___ Odes” (classic work of poetry) : HORACE’S
One of Ancient Rome’s leading lyric poets was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or “Horace” as we tend to know him.

4. Münster “Geez!” : ACH!
Münster is a city in the northwestern part of Germany, in the Westphalia region. Münster is noted for being the most bicycle-friendly city in the country with almost 40% of all traffic in the city being cyclists.

7. Malaria symptom : AGUE
An ague is a fever, one usually associated with malaria.

9. Lots of R.P.I. grads: Abbr. : ENGS
The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is a private school in Troy, New York. The university is named after its founder Stephen Van Rensselaer who set up the school in 1824. The goal of RPI has always been the “application of science to the common purposes of life”, an objective set by the founder. Given that, the name for the school’s sports teams is quite apt: the Engineers.

10. Shakespeare play setting : GLOBE THEATER
The Globe Theatre was built in London in 1599, and was used mainly for staging works by William Shakespeare and his theater company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The theater was destroyed by fire in 1613. A second Globe was built on the site a year later, and it remained open until 1642. The original theater was reconstructed on a nearby site by the Thames and opened in 1997. I had the privilege of seeing a fabulous performance of “As You Like It” in Shakespeare’s Globe (as the new theater is called) about a decade ago. Seeing a play in that remarkable theater is tremendous entertainment, much recommended for anyone visiting London.

12. Gertrude who swam the English Channel : EDERLE
Gertrude Ederle was an American swimmer, from New York City. Ederle became the first woman to cross the English Channel, in 1926. Only five men had made the same swim before Ederle, with the fastest crossing being in 16 hours 33 minutes. Ederle blew that record “out of the water”, arriving in Dover in 14 hours 39 minutes.

18. H.S. proficiency test : GED
The General Educational Development (GED) tests are a battery of five tests designed to demonstrate that a student has the academic skills of someone who has graduated from an American or Canadian high school.

26. Trite comment : BROMIDE
A “bromide” is a platitude, a trite phrase that is overused and suggest insincerity. The term derives from the bromide salts that were once used as sedatives.

36. Subatomic particle with no electric charge : NEUTRINO
Neutrinos are small subatomic particles that do not carry an electric charge. The term “neutrino” is Italian for “small neutral one”. There are three types of neutrino: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos.

39. Creature in Rowling’s Forbidden Forest : UNICORN
A unicorn is a mythical creature that resembles a horse with horn projecting from its forehead. The term “unicorn” comes from the Latin “uni-” (one) and “cornus” (horn).

The Forbidden Forest is a woodland at the edge of Hogwarts’ school grounds in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” universe.

41. Answered, quickly : RSVPED
RSVP stands for “répondez s’il vous plaît”, which is French for “please, answer”.

42. Place abuzz with activity? : APIARY
An apiary is an area where bees are kept. The Latin word for “bee” is “apis”.

43. Spenser’s “The ___ Queene” : FAERIE
Edmund Spenser was an English poet, required required reading at school where I grew up. His most famous work is “The Faerie Queene”, an epic poem and one of the longest ever written in the English language.

50. Some Swiss watches : OMEGAS
Omega is a manufacturer of high-end watches based in Switzerland. An Omega watch was the first portable timepiece to make it to the moon.

56. Narrow inlet : RIA
A drowned valley might be called a ria or a fjord, both formed as sea level rises. A ria is a drowned valley created by river erosion, and a fjord is a drowned valley created by glaciation.

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For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Presenter of “The Borgias,” in brief : SHO
4. Burning : AFLAME
10. Arizona’s ___ Canyon Dam : GLEN
14. Owner of Moviefone : AOL
15. Jackie who played Uncle Fester : COOGAN
16. Italian beach resort : LIDO
17. The “American Moses” : BRIGHAM YOUNG
19. Hot spot in “Hansel and Gretel” : OVEN
20. Four stars, say : RAVE
21. Critical elements : KEYS
22. “Attendance is mandatory” : BE THERE
23. Brewed refresher : ICED TEA
26. TV great who said “I live to laugh, and I laugh to live” : BERLE
27. Modern beginning? : NEO-
28. Use (up) : EAT
29. Wasn’t faithful : STRAYED
31. Parenthetical remarks : ASIDES
33. 1990s politico from Texas : PEROT
34. 1860s novel that is the basis for this puzzle’s theme : LITTLE WOMEN
37. Flightless birds : RHEAS
38. Electrify : WIRE UP
41. Huck and Jim on the Mississippi, e.g. : RAFTERS
44. Work that’s been punningly called a “lex icon”; Abbr. : OED
45. 63-Across, in France : UNE
46. Fixes : SPAYS
47. Waived the wake-up call : SLEPT IN
49. Mission ___, Calif. : VIEJO
50. Leave blank : OMIT
53. Shark eater : ORCA
54. You’re not going anywhere if you’re in this : PARK
55. Baby boomers, with “the” : ME GENERATION
58. Canal with 36 locks : ERIE
59. Brightest star in Aquila : ALTAIR
60. Reactor safety agcy. : NRC
61. Colors : DYES
62. College named for a Norwegian king : ST OLAF
63. 45-Across, in America : ONE

Down
1. Audrey Hepburn title role : SABRINA
2. “___ Odes” (classic work of poetry) : HORACE’S
3. Staple of Mediterranean cooking : OLIVE OIL
4. Münster “Geez!” : ACH!
5. Like a freshly drawn draft : FOAMY
6. View : LOOK AT
7. Malaria symptom : AGUE
8. Lots : MANY
9. Lots of R.P.I. grads: Abbr. : ENGS
10. Shakespeare play setting : GLOBE THEATER
11. Car service : LIVERY
12. Gertrude who swam the English Channel : EDERLE
13. “You’ve done enough” : NO NEED
18. H.S. proficiency test : GED
24. Goes through a stage of babyhood : TEETHES
25. Spring time : EASTER
26. Trite comment : BROMIDE
29. Wrap (up) : SEW
30. Tiler’s tool : TROWEL
32. Ribald humor : DIRTY JOKES
33. Foot: Lat. : PES
35. ___ Américas : LAS
36. Subatomic particle with no electric charge : NEUTRINO
39. Creature in Rowling’s Forbidden Forest : UNICORN
40. Price for forgiveness, perhaps : PENANCE
41. Answered, quickly : RSVPED
42. Place abuzz with activity? : APIARY
43. Spenser’s “The ___ Queene” : FAERIE
44. Pertaining to bone : OSTEAL
48. Big belly : POT
50. Some Swiss watches : OMEGAS
51. Tuna-and-cheese sandwich : MELT
52. Digging : INTO
56. Narrow inlet : RIA
57. Whelp’s yelp : ARF!

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