0713-15 New York Times Crossword Answers 13 Jul 15, Monday

Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across
1. Folk legend Guthrie : ARLO
Arlo Guthrie is the son of Woody Guthrie. Both father and son are renowned for their singing of protest songs about social injustice. Arlo is most famous for his epic “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”, a song that lasts a full 18m 34s. In the song Guthrie tells how, after being drafted, he was rejected for service in the Vietnam War based on his criminal record. He had only one incident on his public record, a Thanksgiving Day arrest for littering and being a public nuisance when he was 18-years-old.

5. “Moby-Dick” captain : AHAB
Captain Ahab is the obsessed and far from friendly captain of the Pequod in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”. The role of Captain Ahab was played by Gregory Peck in the 1956 John Huston film adaptation. Patrick Stewart played Ahab in a 1998 miniseries in which Peck made another appearance, as Father Mapple.

The full title of Herman Melville’s novel is “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale”. Note that the convention is to hyphenate “Moby-Dick” in the title, as that was how the book was first published, in 1851. However, there is no hyphen in the name of the whale “Moby Dick” as reproduced throughout the text.

16. Supermodel Kate : UPTON
Kate Upton is a fashion model from St. Joseph, Michigan. Kate is a niece of US Representative Fred Upton of Michigan.

21. LG and RCA products : TVS
LG is a very large, South Korean manufacturer of electronics, chemicals and telecom products. LG used to be known as Lucky-Goldstar.

During WWI, the US government actively discouraged the loss of certain technologies to other countries, including allies. The developing wireless technologies were considered to be particularly important by the army and navy. The government prevented the General Electric Company from selling equipment to the British Marconi Company, and instead facilitated the purchase by GE of the American Marconi subsidiary. This purchase led to GE forming the Radio Corporation of America that we know today as RCA.

23. Manager Hodges of the Amazin’ Mets : GIL
Gil Hodges was a professional baseball player and manager. Perhaps Hodges’ most celebrated achievement was managing the New York Mets team (the “Miracle Mets”) that won the 1969 World Series. Hodges died from a heart attack just a few years later in 1972, when he was only 48 years old.

24. Actress Brennan of “Private Benjamin” : EILEEN
I mainly remember the actress Eileen Brennan from the great 1973 film “The Sting”, in which she played the brothel madam. However, Brennan’s most famous was the commanding officer in “Private Benjamin”, a role that she reprised in the spinoff television show of the same name.

29. “How’s it going?,” in Paris : COMMENT CA VA?
The common French phrase “comment ça va?” is usually translated as “how are you?” A more literal translation might be “how goes it?”

34. Mafia V.I.P. : DON
In the Mafia, a don is a head of a family.

35. Dog in “Garfield” : ODIE
Odie is Garfield’s best friend and is a slobbery beagle, a character in Jim Davis’s comic strip named “Garfield”.

36. Place to get a perm : SALON
“Perm” is the name given to a permanent wave, a chemical or thermal treatment of hair to produce waves or curls. I don’t worry about such things, as it’s a number-one all over for me …

43. Baltimore footballer : RAVEN
The Baltimore football team’s name “the Ravens” has a literary derivation. Baltimore was the home of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, and so the team took its moniker from his most famous poem, “The Raven”. The name was selected in a fan contest.

“The Raven” is a narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe that tells of a student who has lost the love of his life, Lenore. A raven enters the student’s bedchamber and perches on a bust of Pallas. The raven can talk, to the student’s surprise, but says nothing but the word “nevermore” (“quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’”). As the student questions all aspects of his life, the raven taunts him with the same comment, “nevermore”. Finally the student decides that his soul is trapped beneath the raven’s shadow and shall be lifted “nevermore” …

45. California wine valley : NAPA
The first commercial winery in Napa Valley, California was established way back in 1858. However, premium wine production only dates back to the 1960s, with the region really hitting the big time after its success at the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976. The story of that famous blind wine tasting is told in the entertaining 2008 film “Bottle Shock”.

47. World Cup cry : OLE!
The 1994 FIFA World Cup was held in the US, with nine cities across the country acting as host. The average attendance at the games was about 69,000, which set a record for a FIFA World Cup that persists to this day. Brazil won the tournament, beating Italy in a penalty shootout.

51. Rapper with a Harvard hip-hop fellowship named in his honor : NAS
Rapper Nas used to go by another stage name, Nasty Nas, and before that by his real name, Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones. Nas released his first album “Illmatic” in 1994, and inventively titled his fifth studio album “Stillmatic”, released in 2001. In 2013, Harvard University established the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship, a fund to support the education of students exhibiting potential in the field of hip hop. Not my cup of tea, I would say …

52. 140-character messages : TWEETS
I have never tweeted in my life, and have no plans to do so (but one should never say “never”). Twitter is a microblogging service that limits any post sent to just 140 characters. In a sense, it is similar to this blog. Here I send out a post once a day containing information that I think might be useful to folks (thank you for reading!). I don’t think I could send out much of interest using just 140 characters.

53. Part of E.S.T.: Abbr. : STD
Eastern Standard Time (EST)

55. “Thar ___ blows!” : SHE
“Thar she blows!” is a phrase that originated on whaling ships. A lookout spotting a whale surfacing to breathe might see the spray from the blowhole caused by the expulsion of carbon dioxide. Thar (there) she blows!

58. Bygone cross-Atlantic jet, for short : SST
The most famous supersonic transport (SST) is the retired Concorde. Famously, the Concorde routinely broke the sound barrier, and cruised at about twice the speed of sound. Above Mach 2, frictional heat would cause the plane’s aluminum airframe to soften, so airspeed was limited.

59. “Will it play in ___?” : PEORIA
Peoria is the oldest European settlement in the state of Illinois, having been settled by the French in 1680. The city is famous for being cited as “the average American city”. The phrase, “Will it play in Peoria?” is used to mean, “Will it appeal to the mainstream?” It is believed the expression originated as a corruption of, “We shall play in Peoria”, a line used by some actors in the 1890 novel “Five Hundred Dollars” by Horatio Alger, Jr.

66. Instagram posting : PHOTO
Instagram is a photo-sharing application, one that is extremely popular I hear. Instagram was started in San Francisco in 2010. Facebook purchased Instagram two years later, paying $1 billion. The billion-dollar Instagram had just 13 employees at the time …

67. Derrière : REAR
“Derrière” is a French term meaning “back part, rear”.

69. Hunky-dory : DANDY
Surprisingly (to me), the term “hunky-dory” has been around a long time, and is documented back in the mid-1800s. Nobody’s really sure of its origin, but some say it is an Anglicization of Honcho dori, that back in the day was a street of ill repute in Yokohama, Japan.

71. Where Vientiane is the capital : LAOS
Vientiane is the capital city of Laos, situated on the famous Mekong River. The city was originally called the “city of sandalwood” by Buddhist monks, naming after the valued trees that grew in the area. The French took the Pali words for “city of sandalwood” and rewrote it as the French-sounding “Vientiane”.

Down
1. Grp. that heralded Edward Snowden as a patriot : ACLU
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has its roots in the First World War when it was founded to provide legal advice and support to conscientious objectors.

Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor who leaked several top secret NSA documents to the media beginning in June 2013. After disclosing his name as the source of the leaks, Snowden tried to seek asylum in Ecuador. While travelling to Ecuador he had a layover in Moscow. While in Moscow, the US government revoked his passport, which effectively left him stranded in the transit area of Moscow Airport. The Russian government eventually granted him annually-renewable temporary asylum.

2. French kings : ROIS
In French, a king and queen (roi et reine) are members of the nobility (noblesse).

3. Body of water on the French/Swiss border : LAKE GENEVA
Lake Geneva straddles the border between France and Switzerland. The lake has a lot of “official” names!

– English: Lake Geneva
– French: Lac Léman or Lac de Genève
– German: Genfersee or Genfer See
– Italian: Lago Lemano or Lago di Ginevra

4. Former “S.N.L.” regular Cheri : OTERI
Cheri Oteri was the SNL cast member who regularly appeared with Will Farrell in the skit featuring a pair of Spartan cheerleaders.

5. Adderall target, for short : ADHD
The “official” name for the condition we sometimes still refer to as “attention deficit disorder” (ADD) is “attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD).

8. Classic VW : BEETLE
VW stands for Volkswagen, which translates from German into “people’s car”. The original Volkswagen design was the Beetle and was built under a directive from Adolf Hitler, who wanted a cheap car built that ordinary people could afford to purchase. He awarded the contract to engineer Ferdinand Porsche, whose name (paradoxically) would forever be associated with high performance, expensive cars. The Beetle was the official name of the VW model released in North America, but it was usually referred to as a “Bug” here in the US, and a “Beetle” elsewhere in the world.

10. Broadcaster that relies on listener contributions : NPR
National Public Radio (now just called NPR) was launched in 1970 after President Johnson signed into law the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The intent of the act was to provide funding for radio and television broadcasting that wasn’t simply driven by profit. As a longtime fan of the state-funded BBC in the UK, I’d have to agree with that intent …

12. Designer Chanel : COCO
Coco Chanel was a French fashion designer. Perhaps because I am a man, clothes design is not my forte. However, if I had to pick a designer whose clothes I really liked, it would be Chanel. She had a way of creating simpler designs that looked so elegant on a woman.

13. Banjo’s place in “Oh! Susanna” : KNEE
“Oh! Susanna” is a song that was published in 1848, written by Stephen Foster. The song is often called “Banjo on My Knee”, an understandable slip given the words of the chorus. “Oh! Susanna” came to be associated with the Forty-Niners, the miners who travelled to California in the 1849 Gold Rush. The lyrics were changed to suit the Gold rush theme with “Alabama” being replaced by “California”, and “banjo” being replaced by “washpan”.

18. “Consider it done” : WILCO
In the world of radio telephony, “wilco” is short for “I understand and will comply”.

24. Kuwaiti leader : EMIR
In English, emir can also be written as emeer, amir and ameer (watch out for those spellings in crosswords!).

The State of Kuwait sits at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, famously sharing a border to the north with Iraq. After WWI, Kuwait was a Protectorate within the British Empire and then gained independence from the UK in 1961. Iraq annexed Kuwait in 1990, which led to the Gulf War of 1990-1991.

26. Sports org. with divisions I, II and III : NCAA
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) dates back to the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. When his son broke his nose playing football at Harvard, President Roosevelt turned his attention to the number of serious injuries and even deaths occurring in college sports. He instigated meetings between the major educational institutions leading to the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) in 1906, which was given the remit of regulating college sports. The IAAUS became the NCAA in 1910.

28. TV journalist O’Donnell : NORAH
Norah O’Donnell is the chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC. Along with her husband, restaurateur Geoff Tracy, O’Donnell published what sounds like an interesting cookbook in 2010, namely “Baby Love: Healthy, Easy, Delicious Meals for Your Baby and Toddler”.

31. Popular chocolate-covered toffee : ALMOND ROCA
Almond Roca is a brand of chocolate-covered toffee.

32. Exclamation often following “Et” : VOILA!
“Voilà” means “there it is”, and “voici” means “here it is”. The terms come from “voi là” meaning “see there” and “voi ici” meaning “see here”.

33. Range through Chile : ANDES
The Andes is the longest continuous chain of mountains in the world, running right down the length of the west coast of South America for about 4,300 miles. The highest peak in the range is Mt. Aconcagua, at an elevation of 22,841 feet. Interestingly, the peak of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador is the furthest point on the Earth’s surface from the center of the planet. That’s because of the equatorial “bulge” around the Earth’s “waist”.

The land of Chile has a very distinctive shape. It is a narrow strip that runs up the west coast of South America. The average width of the country is only a little over 100 miles, and yet its length is about 2,700 miles. Chile is touted as the longest country in the world, although I am not so sure what that means exactly. I mean, Russia extends about 4,800 miles from east-to west, so maybe “longest” implies long in the north-south direction?

38. “American Progress” muralist : SERT
Catalan artist Josep Maria Sert was commissioned to paint a large mural for the west wall of the Grand Lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The work is titled “American Progress”, and features likenesses of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

41. Gibbon, e.g. : APE
Gibbons are referred to as lesser apes as they differ in size and behavior from the great apes e.g. chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and humans.

49. Mexican money : PESO
The coin called a “peso” is used in many Spanish-speaking countries around the world. The coin originated in Spain where the word “peso” means “weight”. The original peso was what we know in English as a “piece of eight”, a silver coin of a specific weight that had a nominal value of eight “reales”.

55. Bay Area law force inits. : SFPD
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is the 11th largest police department in the country. The SFPD dates back to the days of the Gold Rush, being founded in 1849 as a force of 35 officers. SFPD has featured a lot in movies and on television. The most famous films are probably “Bullitt”, the “Dirty Harry” series and “48 Hrs.” On television there was “Ironside”, “The Streets of San Francisco” and now “Monk”.

56. Audible “LOL” : HA-HA
Laugh out loud (LOL, in text-speak).

59. Unsullied : PURE
“To sully” is to stain, tarnish. The term is often used in the context of sullying or tarnishing a reputation.

61. Yard sale caveat : AS IS
A caveat is a warning or a qualification. “Caveat” is the Latin for “let him beware”.

63. When a plane is due to take off, for short : ETD
Estimated time of departure (ETD)

64. Hawaii’s Mauna ___ volcano : KEA
Mauna Kea is a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, the peak of which is the highest point in the whole state. Mauna Kea is in effect the tip of a gigantic volcano rising up from the seabed.

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For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Folk legend Guthrie : ARLO
5. “Moby-Dick” captain : AHAB
9. Between-meals bite : SNACK
14. Jacket : COAT
15. “I bet you won’t dive off the high board with your eyes closed,” e.g. : DARE
16. Supermodel Kate : UPTON
17. As close as close can be : LIKE WHITE ON RICE
20. Log-in info : USER ID
21. LG and RCA products : TVS
22. Shoe’s end : TOE
23. Manager Hodges of the Amazin’ Mets : GIL
24. Actress Brennan of “Private Benjamin” : EILEEN
27. Goalie’s jersey number, often : ONE
29. “How’s it going?,” in Paris : COMMENT CA VA?
34. Mafia V.I.P. : DON
35. Dog in “Garfield” : ODIE
36. Place to get a perm : SALON
37. Underground metals : ORES
39. Comedy’s counterpart : DRAMA
42. In the center of : AMID
43. Baltimore footballer : RAVEN
45. California wine valley : NAPA
47. World Cup cry : OLE!
48. Stock quotes : SHARE PRICES
51. Rapper with a Harvard hip-hop fellowship named in his honor : NAS
52. 140-character messages : TWEETS
53. Part of E.S.T.: Abbr. : STD
55. “Thar ___ blows!” : SHE
58. Bygone cross-Atlantic jet, for short : SST
59. “Will it play in ___?” : PEORIA
62. What the first words in 17-, 29- and 48-Across are : FACEBOOK BUTTONS
66. Instagram posting : PHOTO
67. Derrière : REAR
68. It follows a curtain-opening : ACT I
69. Hunky-dory : DANDY
70. Domesticated : TAME
71. Where Vientiane is the capital : LAOS

Down
1. Grp. that heralded Edward Snowden as a patriot : ACLU
2. French kings : ROIS
3. Body of water on the French/Swiss border : LAKE GENEVA
4. Former “S.N.L.” regular Cheri : OTERI
5. Adderall target, for short : ADHD
6. Japanese for “yes” : HAI
7. Paintings, e.g. : ART
8. Classic VW : BEETLE
9. Beautiful sights at dusk : SUNSETS
10. Broadcaster that relies on listener contributions : NPR
11. Going ___ (fighting) : AT IT
12. Designer Chanel : COCO
13. Banjo’s place in “Oh! Susanna” : KNEE
18. “Consider it done” : WILCO
19. Pizzeria fixture : OVEN
24. Kuwaiti leader : EMIR
25. “Seriously!” : I MEAN IT!
26. Sports org. with divisions I, II and III : NCAA
27. Nose wrinklers : ODORS
28. TV journalist O’Donnell : NORAH
30. Strange : ODD
31. Popular chocolate-covered toffee : ALMOND ROCA
32. Exclamation often following “Et” : VOILA!
33. Range through Chile : ANDES
38. “American Progress” muralist : SERT
40. Alternatives to PCs : MACS
41. Gibbon, e.g. : APE
44. Old-time crier of “Extra! Extra!” : NEWSBOY
46. Something positive on the balance sheet : ASSET
49. Mexican money : PESO
50. Comeback : RETORT
54. Sum : TOTAL
55. Bay Area law force inits. : SFPD
56. Audible “LOL” : HA-HA
57. Supply-and-demand subj. : ECON
59. Unsullied : PURE
60. Wild about : INTO
61. Yard sale caveat : AS IS
63. When a plane is due to take off, for short : ETD
64. Hawaii’s Mauna ___ volcano : KEA
65. Crash sound : BAM!

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