0425-15 New York Times Crossword Answers 25 Apr 15, Saturday

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CROSSWORD SETTER: James Mulhern
THEME: None
BILL BUTLER’S COMPLETION TIME: Did not finish
ANSWERS I MISSED: Several in the bottom-left

Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across

1. Leader in electronic music with multiple Grammys : SKRILLEX
Skrillex is a the stage name of Sonny Moore, a producer of electronic dance music. Not something or someone that I know anything about …

9. Elks and others : ORDERS
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.

15. 1960s-’70s band that took its name from an Aldous Huxley title : THE DOORS
The Doors formed in 1965 in Los Angeles. The band chose their name from a book by Aldous Huxley called “The Doors of Perception”.

19. Green-lit : OKD
“OKd” is slang for “okayed”.

22. Henry ___ : FONDA
Actor Henry Fonda had already started his Hollywood career when along came WWII. Fonda enlisted in the Navy, and served for three years on the destroyer USS Satterlee. Then he served as a Lieutenant Junior Grade in Air Combat Intelligence in the Pacific, earning the Bronze Star.

23. Henry ___ : VIII
Famously, King Henry VIII had six queens consort. There is a rhyme that is commonly used to help remember the fates of each of his wives, which goes:

King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.

The use of the term “divorce” isn’t quite accurate though, as in fact Henry had two of his marriages annulled. His wives (and their fates) were:

– Catherine of Aragon (Annulled),
– Anne Boleyn (Beheaded),
– Jane Seymour (Died)
– Anne of Cleves (Annulled),
– Catherine Howard (Beheaded),
– Catherine Parr (Survived).

28. Bar : ESTOP
The term “estop” means to block or stop by using some legal device. The word “estop” comes from Old French, in which “estopper” means “to stop up” or “to impede”.

32. Brand name with 2/3 capital letters in its logo : TAB
Tab was the first diet cola introduced by the Coca-Cola company, in 1963. It was produced as a competitor to the very successful Diet Rite cola that was made by RC Cola. The name “Tab” was used as the beverage was aimed at people who wanted to keep “tabs” on their weight. The name “Tab” is stylized as “TaB” in the drink’s logo.

33. Org. with many magazines : NRA
National Rifle Association (NRA)

35. Capture-the-flag game : STRATEGO
The wonderful board game called Stratego derives from a traditional Chinese game called “Jungle” or “Animal Chess”. The major difference between Stratego and Jungle is that in the latter the identity of the pieces is not hidden from one’s opponent.

42. 2000 film set in France that was nominated for five Academy Awards : CHOCOLAT
The movie “Chocolat” released in 2000 is a big screen adaption of the novel of the same name by Joanne Harris. “Chocolat” tells the story of a young mother with a six-year-old daughter who opens up a chocolate shop in a French village. The mother is played by the talented Juliette Binoche.

44. Literary inits. : GBS
George Bernard Shaw (GBS) was a very successful Irish playwright. Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature, and an Oscar. He won his Oscar for adapting his own play “Pygmalion” for the 1938 film of the same name starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. Most people are more likely to have seen the musical adaptation of “Pygmalion” that went by the title “My Fair Lady”.

45. First name in Objectivism : AYN
Ayn Rand was the pen name of Russian-American novelist Alisa Rosenbaum. Rand’s two best known works are her novels “The Fountainhead” published in 1943 and “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957. Back in 1951, Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City. Soon after, she gathered a group of admirers around her with whom she discussed philosophy and shared drafts of her magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged”. This group called itself “The Collective”, and one of the founding members was none other than future Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan.

The philosophy of objectivism comes in several forms, all holding that reality is objective and independent of the mind. The emphasis is on reality based on the observation of objects and events rather than feelings or thoughts that grow out of literature or art.

46. ___ Games : PAN AM
The Pan American Games are held every four years, the year just before the Summer Olympic Games. The participating athletes all come from the Americas.

48. Leonine : lion :: lutrine : ___ : OTTER
There are thirteen species of otter, all belonging to the subfamily Lutrinae (along with weasels, minks, polecats and badgers). The fur of the sea otter is exceptionally thick, and is in fact the densest fur in the whole animal kingdom.

52. Secretary of energy under Clinton : PENA
Federico Peña served both as the Secretary of Transportation and as the Secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration.

54. Leaves on the side? : SALAD
Our word “salad” comes from the Latin “salare” meaning “to salt”. The Latin “herba salata” translates as “salted vegetables”.

56. They’re often blitzed : SOTS
Our word “sot” comes from the Old English “sott”, meaning a fool. The word “sot” started to be associated with alcohol and not just foolery in the late 1500s.

“Blitzed” and “lit” are slang terms for “drunk”.

61. Alma mater for Benjamin Netanyahu : MIT
Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has been the Prime Minister of Israel since 2009. Netanyahu is the only leader of the country to date who was born in the state of Israel. After graduating high school, he served in the Israeli special forces and participated in several combat missions, and was wounded on multiple occasions. After leaving the army in 1972, Netanyahu studied at MIT in the US, earning bachelors degree in architecture and a masters degree in business.

62. Composer György whose music was featured in Kubrick films : LIGETI
György Ligeti was a 20th-century classical composer from Transylvania in Romania, who also lived in Hungary and Austria. Ligeti’s music is best-known from the soundtracks of several Stanley Kubrick films including “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “The Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut”.

68. Group with the motto “Service Above Self” : ROTARY
The first Rotary Club meeting was held in 1905 in Chicago in the office of one of the four businessmen who attended. The name “Rotary Club” was chosen as the plan was to “rotate” the locations of the meetings to the offices of each of the club’s members in turn.

69. 17-time All-Star of the 1960s-’80s : PETE ROSE
Pete Rose was a talented baseball player who holds the record for all-time Major League hits. In recent years of course his reputation has been tarnished by admissions that he bet on games in which he played and managed.

Down
2. Some business casual attire : KHAKIS
“Khaki” is an Urdu word, translating literally as “dusty”. The word was adopted for its current use as the name of a fabric by the British cavalry in India in the mid-1800s.

3. Website with “Ask Me Anything” interviews : REDDIT
Reddit.com is a networking and news website that started up in 2005. It is essentially a bulletin board system with posts that are voted up and down by users, which determines the ranking of posts. The name “Reddit” is a play on “read it”, as in “I read it on Reddit”.

4. First name in infamy : IDI
Idi Amin received most of his military training in the British armed forces, eventually achieving the highest rank possible for a Black African in the British Colonial Army in 1959, that of Warrant Officer. On his return to Uganda Amin joined his country’s military and quickly rose to the rank of Deputy Commander of the Army. During that time he was quite the athlete. He was a noted rugby player and swimmer, and for nine years held the Ugandan national light-heavyweight boxing title. By the early seventies, Amin was commander of all the armed forces of Uganda and in 1971 seized power in a military coup, displacing the country’s president Milton Obote. There followed seven years of brutal rule by Amin during which it is estimated that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were murdered. Amin was ousted from power in 1979 after a war with Tanzania, and fled to Libya where he stayed for a year. He then moved to Saudi Arabia, where he was financially supported by the Saudi Royal Family for the remainder of his life. Amin died in 2003.

5. Boodle : LOOT
“Boodle” is a slang term for money accepted as a bride, or money that is counterfeit.

6. High-end fashion brand : LOEWE
LOEWE is a fashion house based in Madrid, Spain. The company started in 1846 as a cooperative of leather artisans that consolidated under the guidance of a German entrepreneur called Enrique Loewe Roessberg.

8. Chalk talk symbols : XS AND OS
A “chalk talk” is a presentation in which the speaker draws on a chalkboard, well, these days on a whiteboard or perhaps a computer screen.

10. Place for a dish : ROOF
One might place a satellite dish on a roof.

12. Notable features of David Foster Wallace books : ENDNOTES
American author David Foster Wallace’s most famous work was his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest”. Wallace’s books are known for extensive use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes, which can take up as many pages as the novel’s text. Wallace struggled with depression for about twenty years. Sadly, he ended up committing suicide in 2008 by hanging himself, when he was only 46 years old.

13. Possible effect of doping : ROID RAGE
Steroids are found commonly in nature, with familiar examples being cholesterol and testosterone. The controversial class of drugs called anabolic steroids (known informally as “roids” or simply “steroids”) are artificially produced chemicals designed to mimic the effect of the male sex hormone, testosterone. They are termed “anabolic” as they build up cellular tissue (particularly muscle) in a process called anabolism. Taking anabolic steroids can be termed “juicing”, and the aggressive behavior that can be a side-effect is known as “roid rage”.

24. Kind of bond : IONIC
In the world of chemistry, an ionic bond is formed between two oppositely-charged ions, like that between positively-charged sodium atoms and negatively-charged chlorine atoms to form table salt (NaCl). A covalent bond, on the other hand, is formed when two atoms share electrons, making each of the sharing atoms more stable, so they prefer to stay together rather than apart.

26. Headgear for Eminem : DO-RAG
Hip-hoppers might wear do-rags today, but they have been around for centuries. If you recall the famous image of Rosie the Riveter, she was wearing a do-rag. The etymology is pretty transparent, a piece of cloth (rag) to hold a hairstyle (do) in place.

Rap star Eminem’s real name is Marshall Mathers, a native of Saint Joseph, Missouri. Mathers grew up poor, raised by a single-mom as the family was abandoned by his father when he was 18 months old. Marshall and his mother moved around the country before settling in a suburb of Detroit. He didn’t do well at school, and dropped out at the age of 17. But in the end he made it pretty big …

31. Reckless tough guy : RAMBO
A “rambo” is very violent and militant person. The term is relatively recent one, coming from the character John Rambo played by Sylvester Stallone in the “Rambo” series of movies. The first Rambo film made was “First Blood” in 1982. The film in turn is based on the 1972 novel of the same name by David Morrell.

34. Global superpower? : ATLAS
In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan who was tasked with holding up the celestial sphere on his shoulders. The Greeks observed the planets moving and the stars in fixed positions. They believed that the stars were on the surface of a single starry sphere, the celestial sphere that was supported by Atlas.

37. Religious garment suspended from the shoulders : SCAPULAR
A “scapular” is a religious garment in the Christian tradition that hangs the length of the body from the shoulders. The name comes from the Latin “scapulae” meaning “shoulders”.

39. Author who created the fatalistic optometrist Billy Pilgrim : VONNEGUT
Kurt Vonnegut was an writer from Indianapolis whose most famous work is probably the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” from 1969. The inspiration for the book was the time he spent in the US Army in WWII. After being captured during the Battle of the Bulge, Vonnegut was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden. Many of his fellow prisoners were killed during the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, but he and others survived by sheltering in an underground meat locker that had been converted to a detention facility. The Germans called the meat locker “Schlachthof Fünf”, which translates to “Slaughterhouse Five”.

Billy Pilgrim is a protagonist in the 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut.

40. Unesco World Heritage Site on the Arabian Peninsula : SANAA
Sana (also Sanaa) is the capital city of Yemen. Within the bounds of today’s metropolis is the old fortified city of Sana, where people have lived for over 2,500 years. The Old City is now a World Heritage Site.

47. Danson’s role on “Cheers” : MALONE
The actor Ted Danson is noted for in particular for three successful roles that he has played on television. He played Sam Malone on the sitcom “Cheers”, and the title role on the sitcom “Becker”. Danson is currently leading the cast on the drama series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”. Danson has been married to the lovely actress Mary Steenburgen since 1995.

50. Most plentiful pieces in a certain board game : E TILES
The game of Scrabble has been produced in many international versions, and each of these editions has its own tile distribution to suit the local language. For example, in English we have two tiles worth ten points: one “Q” and one “Z”. If you play the game in French then there are five tiles worth ten points: one “K”, one “W”, one “X”, one “Y” and one “Z”.

51. Bonus round freebies on “Wheel of Fortune” : RSTLNE
On the game show “Wheel of Fortune”, players are given the letters R, S, T, L, N, E when guessing the hidden word or phrase. The contestant then selects four more letters before trying to come up with the answer.

53. “In the ___” (Nixon memoir) : ARENA
“In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal” is a 1990 memoir written by President Richard Nixon. President Nixon resigned from office in 1974, and passed away in 1994.

55. “The beacon of the wise,” per Shakespeare : DOUBT
The following is from William Shakespeare’s play “Troilus and Cressida”.

Modest doubt is call’d
The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches
To the bottom of the worst.

William Shakespeare wrote his tragedy “Troilus and Cressida” in 1602. The play was inspired by “The Iliad”, and is a retelling of events during the Trojan War leading up to the death of Hector.

63. Plural suffix : -ITY
“Plurality” is another word for “majority”. The term is often applied to the excess of votes received by one candidate over another candidate in an election.

65. Mini, e.g. : CAR
The original mini was a fabulous car, one that I drove all over Ireland in my youth. It had a unique front-wheel-drive layout that took up very little space, allowing for a lot of room (relatively speaking) for passengers and baggage. One space-saving trick was to mount the engine transversely, so it sits rotated 90 degrees from the norm. That engine had a capacity of only 848cc. In 1961, a Mini Cooper model was introduced, a sporty version of the Mini. The Mini Cooper was a phenomenal hit, especially after repeated wins in the Monte Carlo Rally. The Mini marque has been owned by BMW since 1994.

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For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Leader in electronic music with multiple Grammys : SKRILLEX
9. Elks and others : ORDERS
15. 1960s-’70s band that took its name from an Aldous Huxley title : THE DOORS
16. Temporarily : FOR NOW
17. Golden age for voice acting : RADIO ERA
18. Gourmet : FOODIE
19. Green-lit : OKD
20. Sound of an arrow being shot : TWANG
22. Henry ___ : FONDA
23. Henry ___ : VIII
25. Wound up : ENDED
27. Computer part : PORT
28. Bar : ESTOP
30. One who may give you his heart? : DONOR
32. Brand name with 2/3 capital letters in its logo : TAB
33. Org. with many magazines : NRA
35. Capture-the-flag game : STRATEGO
37. Space racers : SOVIETS
41. Like some unions : SAME-SEX
42. 2000 film set in France that was nominated for five Academy Awards : CHOCOLAT
44. Literary inits. : GBS
45. First name in Objectivism : AYN
46. ___ Games : PAN AM
48. Leonine : lion :: lutrine : ___ : OTTER
52. Secretary of energy under Clinton : PENA
54. Leaves on the side? : SALAD
56. They’re often blitzed : SOTS
57. Internet statistic : USERS
59. Parcel : ALLOT
61. Alma mater for Benjamin Netanyahu : MIT
62. Composer György whose music was featured in Kubrick films : LIGETI
64. “It’s not my place to decide” : YOUR CALL
66. Marketing space : AD UNIT
67. Never topped : UNBEATEN
68. Group with the motto “Service Above Self” : ROTARY
69. 17-time All-Star of the 1960s-’80s : PETE ROSE

Down
1. Put in effort : STROVE
2. Some business casual attire : KHAKIS
3. Website with “Ask Me Anything” interviews : REDDIT
4. First name in infamy : IDI
5. Boodle : LOOT
6. High-end fashion brand : LOEWE
7. Mailing a letter, perhaps : ERRAND
8. Chalk talk symbols : XS AND OS
9. Cockeyed : OFF
10. Place for a dish : ROOF
11. Wilt : DROOP
12. Notable features of David Foster Wallace books : ENDNOTES
13. Possible effect of doping : ROID RAGE
14. Uncomfortably tight spot, informally : SWEATBOX
21. Sign on a saloon door : GENTS
24. Kind of bond : IONIC
26. Headgear for Eminem : DO-RAG
29. Awaiting a sex change, say : PREOP
31. Reckless tough guy : RAMBO
34. Global superpower? : ATLAS
36. Checks : TESTS
37. Religious garment suspended from the shoulders : SCAPULAR
38. Emphatic rebuttal : OH YES I DO!
39. Author who created the fatalistic optometrist Billy Pilgrim : VONNEGUT
40. Unesco World Heritage Site on the Arabian Peninsula : SANAA
43. Count : TALLY UP
47. Danson’s role on “Cheers” : MALONE
49. Shade of red : TOMATO
50. Most plentiful pieces in a certain board game : E TILES
51. Bonus round freebies on “Wheel of Fortune” : RSTLNE
53. “In the ___” (Nixon memoir) : ARENA
55. “The beacon of the wise,” per Shakespeare : DOUBT
58. Get moving : STIR
60. Ring bearer : TREE
63. Plural suffix : -ITY
65. Mini, e.g. : CAR

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