0610-15 New York Times Crossword Answers 10 Jun 15, Wednesday

Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across
1. Newswoman Curry : ANN
The television journalist Ann Curry is perhaps best known for the time she spent as co-host on NBC’s “Today” show. NBC executives asked Curry to resign from the “Today” show because ratings were low. I just read online that Curry was also pushed out because of the way she insisted on dressing and because she refused to dye her gray hair. I hope that isn’t true …

4. Un-debugged software version, perhaps : BETA
In the world of software development, the first tested issue of a new program is usually called the “alpha” version. Expected to have a lot of bugs that need to be fixed, the alpha release is usually distributed to a small number of testers. After reported bugs have been eliminated, the refined version is called a “beta” and is released to a wider audience, but with the program clearly labeled as “beta”. The users generally check functionality and report further bugs that are encountered. The beta version feeds into a release candidate, the version that is tested just prior to the software being sold into the market, bug-free. Yeah, right …

13. Some Eurasian deer : ROES
Roe deer are found mainly in Europe. They would be the deer shown on television and in movies when Robin Hood was out hunting in Sherwood Forest.

16. Cookies in “Wonderfilled” ads : OREOS
Nabisco launched a new ad campaign for the Oreo brand of in 2012, telling us that that cookie is “wonderfilled”. The modest little Oreo cookie can bring about a positive change of perspective and create a sense of wonder. I think that’s the idea …

17. Ride on which to try for a brass ring : MERRY-GO-ROUND
Back in the late 19th century, riders on the outside horses of a carousel were given a little challenge: to reach out and grab a brass ring as the merry-go-round turned. There were also quite a few iron rings to grab as well, but the brass ring usually entitled the “grabber” to some prize. Apparently, these rings were introduced to encourage children to ride on the outside horses as it was only the inside horses that moved up and down. And, for what it’s worth, this is all new to me. The brass rings were only used on this side of the Atlantic …

20. Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary : YARROW
Peter Yarrow was the “Peter” in the folk music group Peter, Paul and Mary. Two of Yarrow’s most famous compositions are “Puff, the Magic Dragon” (co-written with Leonard Lipton) and “The Wedding Song (There is Love)”.

25. The Bruins’ Bobby : ORR
Bobby Orr is regarded as one of the greatest hockey players of all time. By the time he retired in 1978 he had undergone over a dozen knee surgeries. At 31 years of age, he concluded that he just couldn’t skate anymore. Reportedly, he was even having trouble walking.

The Boston Bruins professional ice hockey team goes way back, and has been in existence since 1924. The National Hockey League back then was a Canadian-only league, but was expanded to include the US in 1923. The Bruins were the first US-team in the expanded league.

26. Glaswegian “Gee!” : OCH!
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and sits on the River Clyde. People from Glasgow are known as Glaswegians. Back in the Victorian Era, Glasgow earned a reputation for excellence in shipbuilding and was known as “Second City of the British Empire”. Glasgow shipyards were the birthplaces of such famous vessels as the Lusitania, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth.

32. Siesta times: Abbr. : AFTS
We use the word “siesta” to describe a short nap in the early afternoon, taking the word from the Spanish. In turn, the Spanish word is derived from the Latin “hora sexta” meaning “the sixth hour”. The idea is that the nap is taken at “the sixth hour” after dawn.

36. Rue ___-Catherine (main commercial street of Montréal) : STE
Saint Catherine Street (Rue Sainte-Catherine) is the main commercial street in the Quebec city of Montreal. The street hosts Canada’s largest open-air sidewalk sale for one weekend in July every year. Attracting over 300,000 people annually, over a mile of the street’s length is closed to traffic for the event.

37. Williams of “Game of Thrones” : MAISIE
Maisie Williams is the young English actress who plays the tomboyish young girl Arya Stark on the hit HBO series “Game of Thrones”.

38. Dendrologists’ concerns : TREES
Dendrology is broader than just the study of trees. More completely it is the study of wooded plants, whereas botany is the study of plants in general.

42. Shampoo introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1947 : PRELL
Prell shampoo was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1947. Back then it was a clear green concentrate sold in a tube (like toothpaste).

45. Coastal 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.

47. Head table’s place : DAIS
Ultimately our word “dais”, meaning “raised platform for a speaker”, comes from the Latin “discus” meaning a “disk-shaped object”. I guess that many a dais was disc-shaped …

48. Once-popular TV serial set in Oakdale, Ill. : AS THE WORLD TURNS
The TV soap opera “As the World Turns” first aired in 1956, and ran for an incredible 54 years before it was pulled from the schedules in 2010. It was the most popular daytime drama for twenty of those years, from 1958 until 1978.

51. P, on campus : RHO
Rho is the Greek letter that looks just like our Roman letter “p”.

52. To God, in hymns : DEO
For example, “Gloria in excelsis Deo”, which translates as “Glory to God in the highest”.

53. “Hogan’s Heroes” setting : STALAG
“Stalag” was the term used for a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Stalag is an abbreviation for Stammlager, which in turn is the short form of Mannschaft Stamm und Straflager, literally meaning “crew master and prison camp”.

“Hogan’s Heroes” is a sitcom that ran in the late sixties and early seventies. The show starred Bob Crane as the ranking prisoner in a German POW camp during WWII. The four major German roles were played by actors who all were Jewish, and who all fled from the Nazis during the war. The French-American actor Robert Clary, who played Corporal Lebeau, spent three in concentration camps before being liberated from Buchenwald in 1945.

57. Tusker in a Beatles title : WALRUS
“I Am the Walrus” is a Beatles song released in 1967. It was written by John Lennon, with the Walrus being a reference to the poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass”.

60. The “I” in E. I. du Pont : IRENEE
The full name of the Du Pont company is E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. This American chemical company was founded as a gunpowder mill in 1802 by one Eleuthere Irenee du Pont. Du Pont was born in Paris, and immigrated to the US with his rather large family in 1800 and settled in Brandywine Creek in Delaware. Back in France, du Pont had been an assistant to the celebrated French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (“father of modern chemistry” and the man who discovered and name “oxygen”).

62. Academy newbie : PLEBE
“Plebe” is a slang term for a freshman in the US military and naval academies. Plebe is probably short for “plebeian”, an adjective describing someone of the common class in Ancient Rome, one of the “plebs” (a singular collective noun). “Pleb” is a shortened version of plebeian, and is a term used outside of the military schools to mean “commoner”.

64. “Gimme Shelter” band : ROLLING STONES
The 1969 Rolling Stones song “Gimme Shelter” is in essence a duet featuring lead singer Mick Jagger and guest vocalist, American soul singer Merry Clayton. Although, in the original and some subsequent releases, Clayton’s given name was written mistakenly as “Mary”.

67. Classic roadside logo name with red lettering in a blue oval : ESSO
The brand name Esso has its roots in the old Standard Oil company as it uses the initial letters of “Standard” and “Oil” (ESS-O). The Esso brand was replaced by Exxon in the US, but ESSO is still used in many other countries.

70. Flutie of football : DOUG
Doug Flutie is a former NFL football player, but is most famous as a Boston College quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner. Outside of sports Doug plays drums in the Flutie Brothers Band, along with his brother Darren (a famed wide receiver) on guitar.

71. Important number on Downing Street : TEN
10 Downing Street is one of the most famous street addresses in the world and is the official London residence of the British Prime Minister. Although it may not look it on television, it’s a spacious pad, actually a larger house made by combining three older houses back in the 1700s. Although Number 10 has over one hundred rooms, they are mostly offices and reception rooms and the actual residence itself is quite modest. It was so modest that when Tony Blair came to power he opted to move himself and his family into the more spacious residence next door at Number 11, an apartment traditionally reserved for the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the UK equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury). The succeeding Prime Minister, David Cameron, seemed to like the idea, because he now lives in Number 11 as well.

Down
3. Rio ___ (Amazon feeder) : NEGRO
The Rio Negro (Spanish for “black river”) is a tributary of the Amazon in South America. The Rio Negro is the largest blackwater river in the world. A blackwater river is a slow-moving waterway that flows through forestation, collecting decaying vegetable matter that turns the water to a dark coffee color.

5. Île surrounder : EAU
In French, an island (île) is a piece of ground (terre) surrounded by water (eau).

6. Martinez of the 1996-2001 Yankees : TINO
Tino Martinez has retired from Major League Baseball. Martinez played first base for a number of teams including the Mariners, Yankees, Cardinals and Devil Rays. Martinez was born and raised in Tampa, Florida and as a boy he worked in his father’s cigar factory.

10. Waters off the Korean Peninsula : YELLOW SEA
The Yellow Sea is located between China and the west side of the Korean Peninsula and is the northern part of the East China Sea. There are four seas named for colors in English: the Yellow Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the White Sea.

11. Onesie wearer : TOT
A “onesie” is a baby’s bodysuit, and is a common gift at a baby shower.

12. Covert W.W. II org. : OSS
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed during WWII in order to carry out espionage behind enemy lines. A few years after the end of the war the OSS functions were taken up by a new group, the Central Intelligence Agency that was chartered by the National Security Act of 1947.

18. Bipedal Aussies, informally : ROOS
The name “kangaroo” comes from the Australian Aborigine term for the animal. There’s an oft-quoted story that the explorer James Cook (later Captain Cook) asked a local native what was the name of this remarkable-looking animal, and the native responded with “kangaroo”. The story is that the native was actually saying “I don’t understand you”, but as cute as that tale is, it’s just an urban myth.

24. One of the Jackson 5 : TITO
The Jackson 5 singing group was originally made up of brothers Tito, Jackie, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael.

27. Dish in many a cook-off : CHILI
The full name of the dish that is often called simply “chili” is “chili con carne”, Spanish for “peppers with meat”. The dish was first created by immigrants from the Spanish Canary Islands in the city of San Antonio, Texas (a city which the islanders founded). The San Antonio Chili Stand was a popular attraction at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and that stand introduced the dish to the rest of America and to the world.

30. Faddish 1960s jacket style : NEHRU
A Nehru jacket is very like a regular suit jacket, except that the collar buttons at the neck. It was originally created in the 1940s in India, and then marketed as the Nehru jacket in the west in the sixties. The name Nehru was lifted from Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India from 1947 to 1964.

31. Encircle with a belt : GIRD
The phrase “gird your loins” dates back to Ancient Rome. The expression describes the action of lifting “one’s skirts” and tying them between the legs to allow more freedom of movement before going into battle. Nowadays, “gird your loins” is a metaphor for “prepare yourself for the worst”.

32. Oil from rose petals : ATTAR
Attar is a fragrant essential oil obtained from flowers. The term may particularly refer to attar of roses.

33. Campus newbies : FROSH
“Frosh” is a slang term for a college freshman. We call them “freshers” back in Ireland …

35. Rogen of “The Interview” : SETH
Seth Rogen is a Canadian comedian who got a lot of credit for his supporting role in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”. That led to him being cast as the lead in the 1970 film “Knocked Up”. More recently, Rogen co-directed and and co-starred in the movie “The Interview”, which created a huge ruckus in North Korea.

“The Interview” is a 2014 comedy film co-directed by and co-starring Seth Rogen. In the movie, Rogen and fellow star James Franco play journalists who are instructed by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during a scheduled interview. The film created a huge controversy when the government of North Korea threatened retaliation should the film be released. Sony arranged for a limited release in cinemas, but made it readily available for online rental and purchase. “The Interview” has made more money for Sony than any other digital release.

41. McCartney and Jagger, for two : SIRS
The ex-Beatles bass player’s full name is Sir James Paul McCartney. “Paul” was knighted for his services to music in 1997. The Rolling Stones lead singer’s full name is Sir Michael Philip Jagger. “Mick” was knighted for his services to popular music in 2003.

46. Scientific calculator function : ANTILOG
As an example, the number 10,000 is equal to 10 to the power of 4, so the base-10 logarithm of 10,000 is said to be 4. Inversely, the antilogarithm of 4 (in the base-10) is 10,000. But, we all remember that from school, don’t we?

50. Bollywood garment : SARI
Bollywood is the informal name given to the huge film industry based in Mumbai in India. The term “Bollywood” is a melding of “Bombay”, the former name of Mumbai, and “Hollywood”.

54. Dunham of “Girls” : LENA
Lena Dunham is a co-star in the HBO series “Girls”, and is also the show’s creator. Dunham garnered a lot of attention for herself during the 2012 US Presidential election cycle as she starred in ad focused on getting out the youth vote. In the spot she compared voting for the first time with having sex for the first time. I must say, I quite enjoy the show “Girls” …

“Girls” is an HBO comedy-drama series that was created by and stars Lena Dunham. The show follows a group of female friends living their lives in New York City. Good show …

55. Unease, Woody Allen-style : ANGST
Woody Allen’s real name is Allan Stewart Konigsberg. Allen has been nominated for an Academy Award an incredible 21 times in many different categories, and has won on three occasions. He has more Oscar nominations as a screenwriter than any other writer, but he spurns the Awards ceremony and only attended it once in all his years in the movie business. He broke tradition by turning up at the 2002 ceremony, unannounced, to beg producers to continue filming in his beloved New York City despite the fears created by the 9/11 attacks.

56. “Beau ___” : GESTE
“Beau Geste” is a 1924 novel by the British writer P. C. Wren. The hero of the piece is Michael “Beau” Geste, an upper-class Englishman who joins the French Foreign Legion and embarks on a life of adventure and intrigue.

58. Aid in a scam, e.g. : 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” meaning to aid or encourage someone in a crime.

61. Regatta foe of Radley : ETON
The world-famous Eton College is just a brisk walk from Windsor Castle, which itself is just outside London. Eton is noted for producing many British leaders including David Cameron who took power in the last UK general election. The list of Old Etonians also includes Princes William and Harry, the Duke of Wellington, George Orwell, and the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming (as well as 007 himself as described in the Fleming novels).

Radley College in Oxfordshire is boys boarding school, one of only four boys-only, boarding-only independent schools in England. The other three schools in the category are the famous Eton College, Harrow School and Winchester College. Radley was founded in 1847. Students at Radley are from ages 13 to 18.

63. Queens airport inits. : LGA
Fiorello La Guardia was the Mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945, racking up three full terms in office. The famous airport that bears La Guardia’s name was built at his urging, stemming from an incident that took place while he was in office. He was taking a TWA flight to “New York” and was outraged when the plane landed at Newark Airport, in the state of New Jersey. The Mayor demanded that the flight take off again and land at a small airport in Brooklyn. A gaggle of press reporters joined him on the short hop and he gave them a story, urging New Yorkers to support the construction of a new commercial airport within the city’s limits. The new airport, in Queens, opened in 1939 as New York Municipal, often called “LaGuardia” as a nickname. The airport was officially relabeled as “LaGuardia” (LGA) in 1947.

65. Sch. whose sports fans shout “Geaux Tigers!” : LSU
The LSU Tigers are the sports teams of Louisiana State University (LSU). They are officially known as the Fightin’ Tigers, and the school mascot is “Mike the Tiger”. The name comes from the days of the Civil War, when two Louisiana brigades earned the nickname the “Louisiana Tigers”. Given the French/Cajun history of Louisiana, the LSU fans use the cheer “Geaux Tigers” instead of “Go Tigers”.

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For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Newswoman Curry : ANN
4. Un-debugged software version, perhaps : BETA
8. Words on a check : PAY TO
13. Some Eurasian deer : ROES
15. Set in place : LAID
16. Cookies in “Wonderfilled” ads : OREOS
17. Ride on which to try for a brass ring : MERRY-GO-ROUND
19. Reminders of a lashing : WELTS
20. Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary : YARROW
21. Bone-related : OSTEAL
23. Decompose, as a stump : ROT OUT
25. The Bruins’ Bobby : ORR
26. Glaswegian “Gee!” : OCH!
29. Textile machinery of old : SPINNING WHEELS
32. Siesta times: Abbr. : AFTS
36. Rue ___-Catherine (main commercial street of Montréal) : STE
37. Williams of “Game of Thrones” : MAISIE
38. Dendrologists’ concerns : TREES
40. Words of surprise : OHS
42. Shampoo introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1947 : PRELL
43. Precisely : TO A TEE
45. Coastal inlet : RIA
47. Head table’s place : DAIS
48. Once-popular TV serial set in Oakdale, Ill. : AS THE WORLD TURNS
51. P, on campus : RHO
52. To God, in hymns : DEO
53. “Hogan’s Heroes” setting : STALAG
57. Tusker in a Beatles title : WALRUS
60. The “I” in E. I. du Pont : IRENEE
62. Academy newbie : PLEBE
64. “Gimme Shelter” band : ROLLING STONES
66. Checks out, in a way : OGLES
67. Classic roadside logo name with red lettering in a blue oval : ESSO
68. Referential words : AS TO
69. Histories : PASTS
70. Flutie of football : DOUG
71. Important number on Downing Street : TEN

Down
1. Ant horde : ARMY
2. Lack of musical ability : NO EAR
3. Rio ___ (Amazon feeder) : NEGRO
4. Angry outbursts : BLOWUPS
5. Île surrounder : EAU
6. Martinez of the 1996-2001 Yankees : TINO
7. Builds a wing, say : ADDS ON
8. Revitalizing snooze : POWER NAP
9. ___ rug : AREA
10. Waters off the Korean Peninsula : YELLOW SEA
11. Onesie wearer : TOT
12. Covert W.W. II org. : OSS
14. Word processing command : SORT
18. Bipedal Aussies, informally : ROOS
22. Skirt embellishment : TRIM
24. One of the Jackson 5 : TITO
27. Dish in many a cook-off : CHILI
28. Footwear sometimes carried to work : HEELS
30. Faddish 1960s jacket style : NEHRU
31. Encircle with a belt : GIRD
32. Oil from rose petals : ATTAR
33. Campus newbies : FROSH
34. Dish-drying cloths : TEA TOWELS
35. Rogen of “The Interview” : SETH
39. Like some rye : SEEDLESS
41. McCartney and Jagger, for two : SIRS
44. Washstand vessel : EWER
46. Scientific calculator function : ANTILOG
49. Promoted a new CD, say : TOURED
50. Bollywood garment : SARI
54. Dunham of “Girls” : LENA
55. Unease, Woody Allen-style : ANGST
56. “Beau ___” : GESTE
58. Aid in a scam, e.g. : ABET
59. Not that great : SO-SO
61. Regatta foe of Radley : ETON
62. A lot of Top 40 music : POP
63. Queens airport inits. : LGA
65. Sch. whose sports fans shout “Geaux Tigers!” : LSU

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