0423-16 New York Times Crossword Answers 23 Apr 16, Saturday

Today’s Wiki-est, Amazonian Googlies
Across
18. Blogging site owned by Yahoo : TUMBLR
Tumblr.com is a website that hosts private blogs that was founded in 2007 and has been owned by Yahoo! Since 2013. The site takes its name from the phenomenon known as “tumblelogs”, simple blogs that are used to make simple posts without much thought or planning.

22. “The Glass Bead Game” author : HESSE
Hermann Hesse was not only a novelist, but also a poet and a painter. Hesse’s best-known work is probably his 1927 novel “Steppenwolf”.

23. 10/15, e.g. : IDES
There were three important days in each month of the old Roman calendar. These days originally depended on the cycles of the moon but were eventually “fixed” by law. “Kalendae” were the first days of each month, originally the days of the new moon. “Nonae” were originally the days of the half moon. And “idus” (the ides) was originally the day of the full moon, eventually fixed at the 15th day of a month. Well, actually the ides were the 15th day of March, May, July and October. For all other months, the ides fell on the 13th. Go figure …

29. Acronym in 1990s news : NAFTA
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is between Canada, Mexico and the United States. When NAFTA came into force in 1994 it set up the largest free trade zone in the world.

30. Ingredient in a Dark ‘n’ Stormy : RUM
A Dark ‘n’ Stormy is a classic cocktail made from dark rum and ginger beer, served over ice. The name comes from the ingredients, with the “dark” being the rum, and the “stormy” being the ginger beer.

33. 1936 novel family : O’HARAS
Scarlett O’Hara’s home is the Tara plantation, in Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind”. Tara was founded not far from the Georgia city of Jonesboro by Scarlett’s father, Irish immigrant Gerald O’Hara. Gerald named his new abode after the Hill of Tara back in his home country, the ancient seat of the High King of Ireland.

38. Banded status symbols : ROLEXES
My most prized possession is a beautiful stainless steel Rolex watch that my uncle bought while serving with the RAF in Canada during WWII. Rolex watches were made available to the Canadian servicemen at that time as they were shipping overseas. My uncle brought his Rolex home to Ireland after the war. He needed money for booze one weekend and so sold the watch to my Dad, for five pounds. My Dad gave it to me just before he died, as he knew I loved the watch, and my brothers weren’t interested in it all. Not so long ago I had the watch appraised ($3,000), and my brothers suddenly took a liking to it! Still, it’s not something that will ever be sold, that’s for sure …

40. Paris suburb that holds the tombs of numerous Fr. monarchs : ST-DENIS
The lovely Basilica of Saint Denis in Paris is home to the remains of almost every French king from the 10th to the 18th centuries.

43. Counterintelligence grp. in 007 novels : SMERSH
James Bond went up against a fictional organization called SMERSH, but Ian Fleming lifted that name from a real Soviet agency called SMERSH. The name is an acronym from the melding of two Russian words meaning “Death to Spies” (and that’s the real agency!). The real SMERSH was founded in 1943, and was in charge of counterintelligence for the Soviet Army.

45. “CSI” setting : VEGAS
The “CSI” franchise of TV shows has been tremendously successful, but seems to be winding down. “CSI: Miami” (the “worst” of the franchise, I think) was cancelled in 2012 after ten seasons. “CSI: NY” (the “best” of the franchise) was cancelled in 2013 after nine seasons. The original “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, set in Las Vegas, hung in there until 2015 when it ended with a two-hour TV movie. The youngest show in the series is “CSI: Cyber”, and it’s still on the air.

47. Intl. org. that was the first to land a probe on a comet (2014) : ESA
Rosetta is a space probe that was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2004. Rosetta reach its target, the comet 67P, in 2014. The probe sent a lander called Philae to the surface of the comet, which made two huge bounces before coming to rest. The Rosetta mission marked the first time a spacecraft orbited a comet, and the first time a probe landed on a comet.

48. Cheese dish : RAREBIT
Welsh rarebit is a delicious dish made using a cheese-flavored sauce served over toast. It may be that the name Welsh rarebit was originally a bit of an insult to the folks in Wales. The dish was called Welsh “rabbit” back in the 1700s. In those day’s rabbit was the poor man’s meat, and the implication of the dish’s name is that in Wales cheese was the poor man’s rabbit.

50. Novel character with “a comfortable home and happy disposition” : EMMA
Jane Austen’s novel “Emma” is the tale of Emma Woodhouse and the wonderful George Knightley. On the surface, the title character really isn’t very likeable, described as “handsome, clever and rich” and who shows herself to be spoiled and headstrong. Austen herself wrote before starting on “Emma” that “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”. Well, I think that most readers come to like the young lady by the end of the tale …

53. Some party wear : TOGAS
In Ancient Rome the classical attire known as a toga (plural “togae”) was usually worn over a tunic. The tunic was made from linen, and the toga itself was a piece of cloth about twenty feet long made from wool. The toga could only be worn by men, and only if those men were Roman citizens. The female equivalent of the toga was called a “stola”.

59. “Aladdin” setting : ARABIA
The marvelous collection of folk tales from the Middle East called “One Thousand and One Nights” is sometimes known as “Arabian Nights” in the English-speaking world. The original collection of tales did not include the three with which we are most familiar in the West. European translators added some stories, including “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad”.

61. Chocolaty treats introduced in 1932 : MARS BARS
Having lived on both sides of the Atlantic, I find the Mars Bar to be the most perplexing of candies! The original Mars Bar is a British confection (and delicious) first manufactured in 1932. The US version of the original Mars Bar is called a Milky Way. But there is candy bar called a Milky Way that is also produced in the UK, and it is completely different to its US cousin, being more like an American “3 Musketeers”. And then there is an American confection called a Mars Bar, something different again. No wonder I gave up eating candy bars …

63. Piece of den furniture : LA-Z-BOY
La-Z-Boy is a furniture manufacturer based in Monroe, Michigan. Although the company makes furniture for every room in the house, it is famous for it’s recliner chairs found in family rooms all over the country.

64. Relationship in many a Seth Rogen film : BROMANCE
A “bromance” is the name given these days to a close relationship between two straight males.

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”. I am afraid that I haven’t seen either movie …

65. Sitcom character whose dancing is described as “a full-body dry heave” : ELAINE
The character called Elaine Benes, unlike the other lead characters (Jerry, Kramer and George), did not appear in the pilot episode of “Seinfeld”. NBC executives specified the addition of a female lead when they picked up the show citing that the situation was too “male-centric”.

66. Frowned-upon construction material : ASBESTOS
Asbestos was very, very popular in so many applications for many years. The world’s largest asbestos mine was in Quebec, Canada in the town of … Asbestos.

Down
1. Portia de ___ (Ellen DeGeneres’s wife) : ROSSI
Portia de Rossi is an actress from Australia who played Nellie Porter on “Ally McBeal” and Lindsay Bluth/Fünke on “Arrested Development”. Off the screen, de Rossi is famous as the wife of Ellen DeGeneres whom she married in 2008.

3. Some home remedies : GINGER ALES
Ginger ale is used as a home remedy to treat indigestion and motion sickness, and to soothe sore throats and coughs.

4. Hall of fame on TV : EDD
Edd Hall is most famous as the former announcer for Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show”. Hall replaced Ed McMahon when Johnny Carson retired from the show.

6. Like all contestants on “The Bachelor” : UNWED
“The Bachelor” is a US reality television show that first aired in 2002 on ABC. I’ve avoided this one like the plague …

8. Highlanders, e.g. : TOYOTAS
The Highlander is an SUV made by Toyota that is built on the Toyota Camry platform.

9. Astronomers’ std. : GST
GST is Greenwich Sidereal Time.

Astronomers use sidereal time to know where to locate given stars in the night sky. Sidereal time is a time scale that takes into account the Earth’s rotation relative to stars with a fixed location in the night sky.

11. Citi Field icon : MR MET
Mr. Met is the mascot of the New York Mets. He is a guy with a large baseball as a head, and has been elected to the Mascot Hall of Fame.

12. Winners at the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, for short : REBS
The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou was fought in December 1862 during the Civil War. It was the opening engagement of the Vicksburg Campaign that was later deemed to be a turning point in the war. Although the Confederate forces emerged victorious at Chickasaw Bayou, the Union forces prevailed in the end, taking Vicksburg six months later.

14. Pericles’ domain, in Shakespeare : TYRE
“Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is a play that was written in the Jacobean era. Many experts believe that at least half of the play was written by William Shakespeare, and half by some collaborator.

24. The New Yorker cartoonist Edward : SOREL
Edward Sorel is an illustrator and cartoonist from New York City. He is noted for creating content that is critical of right-wing politics and organized religion.

26. Need for sabermetricians : STATS
“Sabermetrics” is the name given to the statistical analysis of the sport of baseball. The term comes from the acronym SABR, standing for the Society for American Baseball Research.

28. Panama Papers revelation : TAX EVASION
The Panama Papers are a huge collection of confidential documents providing information about more than 200,000 offshore companies that use(d) Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The leaked papers demonstrate the tactics employed by wealthy individuals to hide assets from public scrutiny. The leak took place over many months, starting in early 2015, but journalists around the world evaluated in the information in secret for over a year before publishing news stories starting in April 2016.

31. Tomb Raider weaponry : UZIS
The first Uzi submachine gun was designed in the late 1940s by Major Uziel “Uzi” Gal of the Israel Defense Forces, who gave his name to the gun.

Lara Croft was introduced to the world as the main character in a pretty cool video game (I thought, back then) called “Tomb Raider”, back in 1996. Lara Croft moved to the big screen in 2001 and 2003, in two pretty awful movie adaptations of the game’s storyline. Angelina Jolie played Croft, and she did a very energetic job.

33. Self-described “Family City U.S.A.” : OREM
Orem, Utah was originally known as “Sharon” (a Biblical name), then “Provo Bench”, and in 1914 it was given the family name of a local railroad operator called “Orem”. Orem gave itself the nickname “Family City USA” and sure enough in 2010, “Forbes” rated Orem the 5th best place in the country to raise a family.

34. College athlete wearing blue and gray : HOYA
The athletic teams of Georgetown University are known as the Hoyas. The name is derived from “Hoya Saxa”, a traditional cheer yelled out at Georgetown games as far back as 1893. The term is a mixture of Greek and Latin, with the Greek word “hoya” meaning “such” or “what”, and “saxa” translating from Latin as “rocks” or “small stones”. The cheer is usually rendered in English as “what rocks!”.

37. One of the 12 gifts of Christmas : GEESE
The fabulous Christmas Carol called “The Twelve Days of Christmas” dates back at least to 1780 when it was first published in England, though it may be French in origin. The concept of twelve days of Christmas comes from the tradition that the three kings came to visit the Christ Child twelve days after he was born. This same tradition is the origin of the title to Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night”.

39. Jason of “How I Met Your Mother” : SEGEL
Actor Jason Segel is best known for playing Marshall on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother”. Marshall is an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church and performed a wedding ceremony on “The Tonight Show” in 2010.

42. 1987 #1 hit with the lyric “Soy capitán, soy capitán” : LA BAMBA
“La Bamba” is a folk song from Veracruz, Mexico that became a huge hit for Ritchie Valens in 1958. The most notable cover version of the Valens hit was recorded by Los Lobos in 1987 as the title track of 1987 movie “La Bamba”.

46. Things played on the floor : SITARS
The sitar has been around since the Middle Ages. The sitar is a stringed instrument that is played by plucking, and is used most often in Hindustani classical music. In the West we have been exposed to the instrument largely through the performances of Ravi Shankar and some music by George Harrison of the Beatles, a onetime student of Shankar.

51. ___ Island, Fla. : MARCO
Marco Island is the largest of the barrier islands in southwest Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands.

53. “The Twilight Zone” episode, usually : TALE
The iconic television series called “The Twilight Zone” first aired in 1959 and then ran for 156 episodes before being pulled in 1964. “The Twilight Zone” was revived for four years in the late eighties, and was also spun-off into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 1983.

55. City captured during the Six-Day War : GAZA
Gaza City is the largest city in Palestine. The Ancient Egyptians called the city “Ghazzat”, meaning “prized city”.

The Six-Day War took place from June 5th to June 10th, 1967, and was fought between Israel and its neighbors Egypt, Jordan and Syria. By the time the ceasefire was signed, Israel had seized huge swaths of land formerly controlled by Arab states, namely the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Golan Heights. The overall territory under the control of Israel grew by a factor of three in just six days.

57. “A Series of Unfortunate Events” villainess : ESME
Esmé Squalor is an antagonist in the series of children’s books called “A Series of Unfortunate Events” by Lemony Snicket.

Lemony Snicket is a pen name used by Daniel Handler, a novelist from San Francisco, California. Snicket also appears as the narrator of his books, including the best known of the works: “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.

60. Word that sounds like a letter of the alphabet that’s not in it : AYE
“Aye” sounds like “I”, which is a letter in the the alphabet. And (as “Ed Z” kindly pointed out in a comment below), the letter I isn’t in the word “aye”.

62. Results of some four-year programs, for short : BAS
Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Return to top of page

For the sake of completion, here is a full listing of all the answers:
Across
1. Give up out of frustration, in slang : RAGE QUIT
9. Person with pressing things to do? : GYM RAT
15. [Shrug] : OH, I DUNNO
16. Very much : SORELY
17. Exile : SEND AWAY
18. Blogging site owned by Yahoo : TUMBLR
19. Lose support : SAG
20. Look inside : DECOR
22. “The Glass Bead Game” author : HESSE
23. 10/15, e.g. : IDES
25. Table material : DATASET
27. Garbage : ROT
29. Acronym in 1990s news : NAFTA
30. Ingredient in a Dark ‘n’ Stormy : RUM
33. 1936 novel family : O’HARAS
36. Wander around Hollywood, maybe : STARGAZE
38. Banded status symbols : ROLEXES
40. Paris suburb that holds the tombs of numerous Fr. monarchs : ST-DENIS
41. Ideal height for some contact : EYELEVEL
43. Counterintelligence grp. in 007 novels : SMERSH
44. Partners of 58-Across : MAS
45. “CSI” setting : VEGAS
47. Intl. org. that was the first to land a probe on a comet (2014) : ESA
48. Cheese dish : RAREBIT
50. Novel character with “a comfortable home and happy disposition” : EMMA
53. Some party wear : TOGAS
56. Shop item : LATHE
58. Partners of 44-Across : PAS
59. “Aladdin” setting : ARABIA
61. Chocolaty treats introduced in 1932 : MARS BARS
63. Piece of den furniture : LA-Z-BOY
64. Relationship in many a Seth Rogen film : BROMANCE
65. Sitcom character whose dancing is described as “a full-body dry heave” : ELAINE
66. Frowned-upon construction material : ASBESTOS

Down
1. Portia de ___ (Ellen DeGeneres’s wife) : ROSSI
2. In the future : AHEAD
3. Some home remedies : GINGER ALES
4. Hall of fame on TV : EDD
5. Learning center : QUAD
6. Like all contestants on “The Bachelor” : UNWED
7. How soda may be sold : IN A CAN
8. Highlanders, e.g. : TOYOTAS
9. Astronomers’ std. : GST
10. Parent’s reproof : YOU HEARD ME
11. Citi Field icon : MR MET
12. Winners at the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, for short : REBS
13. “___ well” : ALL’S
14. Pericles’ domain, in Shakespeare : TYRE
21. Lots : RAFTS
24. The New Yorker cartoonist Edward : SOREL
26. Need for sabermetricians : STATS
28. Panama Papers revelation : TAX EVASION
30. Went unchecked : RAN RAMPANT
31. Tomb Raider weaponry : UZIS
32. Go together : MESH
33. Self-described “Family City U.S.A.” : OREM
34. College athlete wearing blue and gray : HOYA
35. End : SEVER
37. One of the 12 gifts of Christmas : GEESE
39. Jason of “How I Met Your Mother” : SEGEL
42. 1987 #1 hit with the lyric “Soy capitán, soy capitán” : LA BAMBA
46. Things played on the floor : SITARS
48. Black hat wearer : RABBI
49. Pound : THROB
51. ___ Island, Fla. : MARCO
52. Yo-yos : ASSES
53. “The Twilight Zone” episode, usually : TALE
54. Like some arguments : ORAL
55. City captured during the Six-Day War : GAZA
57. “A Series of Unfortunate Events” villainess : ESME
60. Word that sounds like a letter of the alphabet that’s not in it : AYE
62. Results of some four-year programs, for short : BAS

Return to top of page