Constructed by: Kathy Wienberg
Edited by: Will Shortz
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Not your puzzle? Try today’s …
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Today’s Reveal Answer: Add to Cart
WE often ADD the word CART to the start of each of the themed answers:
- 63A. Message clicked on by an online buyer … or a hint for 17-, 24-, 39- and 51-Across : ADD TO CART
- 17A. Locale for a traditional Japanese ceremony : TEA GARDEN (giving “tea cart”)
- 24A. Slip of paper to take to the grocery : SHOPPING LIST (giving “shopping cart”)
- 39A. The Masters and others : GOLF TOURNAMENTS (giving “golf cart”)
- 51A. Classic Austrian pastry : APPLE STRUDEL (giving “apple cart”)
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Bill’s time: 5m 11s
Bill’s errors: 0
Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies
Across
5. Branded cotton swab : Q-TIP
Cotton swabs were originally marketed under the name “Baby Gays”. This was changed in 1926 to “Q-Tips”, with the Q standing for “quality”.
9. Much-prized golden statuette : OSCAR
Legend has it that actor Emilio Fernández was the model for the Oscar statuette. Cedric Gibbons, art director at MGM, created the design and supposedly convinced a reluctant Fernández to pose nude for “Oscar”.
15. ___ Bell : TACO
Taco Bell was founded by a former US Marine, 25-year-old Glen Bell. His first restaurant was Bell’s Drive-In, located in Southern California. After opening that first establishment, Bell bought up some more restaurants including four named El Taco. He sold off the El Taco restaurants but used the name in part when he opened his first Taco Bell in 1962. Bell sold then sold franchises, with the 100th Taco Bell opening in 1967. The ex-Marine sold off the whole chain to PepsiCo in 1978, and I am guessing he made a pretty penny. Taco Bell has been using the “Live Más” slogan since 2012, with “más” being the Spanish word for “more”.
20. Toll units for semis : AXLES
A “semi” is a “semi-trailer truck”. The vehicle is so called because it consists of a tractor and a half-trailer. The half-trailer is so called because it only has wheels on the back end, with the front supported by the tractor.
21. Israeli gun : UZI
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.
23. Lead-in to fall : PRAT-
“Prat” is a relatively new word for me, and is a slang term for the buttocks. A “prat-fall” is when someone falls and lands on the buttocks.
28. Louis who developed a rabies vaccine : PASTEUR
“Rabies” is actually the Latin word for “madness”. The name is a good choice for the viral disease, as once the virus spreads to the brain the infected person or animal exhibits very tortured and bizarre behavior including hydrophobia, a fear of water. The virus is passed on to humans most often through a bite from an infected dog. It is curable if it is caught in time, basically before symptoms develop. Once the virus passes up the peripheral nervous system to the spine and the brain, there isn’t much that can be done.
31. High-five sound : SLAP
The celebratory gesture that we call a “high five” is said to have been invented by former baseball players Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke when they were both playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the later 1970s.
32. Yoko who loved John : ONO
Yoko Ono is an avant-garde artist. Ono actually met her future husband John Lennon for the first time while she was preparing her conceptual art exhibit called “Hammer a Nail”. Visitors were encouraged to hammer in a nail into a wooden board, creating the artwork. Lennon wanted to hammer in the first nail, but Ono stopped him as the exhibition had not yet opened. Apparently Ono relented when Lennon paid her an imaginary five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail into the wood.
36. Sushi bar eel : UNAGI
“Unagi” is the Japanese name for freshwater eel, and “anago” is the name for saltwater eel.
39. The Masters and others : GOLF TOURNAMENTS (giving “golf cart”)
The four major golf competitions in men’s golf are:
- the Masters Tournament
- the US Open
- the Open Championship (aka “the British Open”)
- the PGA Championship
44. ___ John letter : DEAR
The expression “Dear John letter” originated in WWII among American troops who were serving abroad. The servicemen highly valued letters from girlfriends and wives back home, and almost invariably those missives started out with “Dearest”, or “My Darling” or some other expression of affection. A curt, “Dear John” set the tone for a letter which was likely to contain news of a new love interest in the life of the girlfriend or wife. The contemporary equivalent missive from a male to a female is a “Dear Jane letter”.
48. Risky bridge play : FINESSE
A finesse is a ploy used in the wonderful card game of bridge. I find it a little tricky to explain here, but I can say that winning a finesse depends on a player making a correct assumption about which of his or her opponents holds a particular card.
51. Classic Austrian pastry : APPLE STRUDEL (giving “apple cart”)
Strudel is a layered pastry that is usually sweet. The word “strudel” means “whirlpool, eddy” in German.
57. Rubs the wrong way : MIFFS
To miff is to put out, to tee off, and is verb that has been around since the early 1600s. Interestingly, in 1824 Sir Walter Scott described the word “miffed” as “a women’s phrase”. That should get him a slap, I’d say …
61. Actress Zellweger : RENEE
Renée Zellweger’s big break came in the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire”. A few years later, Zellweger followed that up with a string of successes in “Bridget Jones Diary” (2001), “Chicago” (2002) and “Cold Mountain” (2003). My wife and I love watching her play Bridget Jones, and as someone coming from the British Isles, I have to say that Zellweger does a remarkable job with the accent. She worked hard to perfect that accent, and of course she had a voice coach. She also went “undercover” and worked as a temp in an office for three weeks fine-tuning her skills.
67. “Hold the ___” (deli order) : MAYO
Mayonnaise originated in the town of Mahon in Menorca, a Mediterranean island belonging to Spain. The Spanish called the sauce “salsa mahonesa” after the town, and this morphed into the French word “mayonnaise” that we use in English today.
68. Build-it-yourself furniture chain : IKEA
Every IKEA store features a restaurant that serves traditional Swedish food, including Swedish meatballs and lingonberry jam. Each store also has a Swedish Food Market where customers can purchase specialty foods from Sweden.
69. ___ corgi (dog breed) : WELSH
The Welsh corgi is a herding dog that originated in Britain, with two recognized breeds: the Pembroke and Cardigan. Corgis aren’t speedy enough to do their job by running around livestock like collies, and instead nip at the heels.
Down
1. Crumbly cheese : FETA
Feta is a Greek cheese made from sheep’s milk, or a mixture of sheep’s and goat’s milk. The cheese is salted and cured in a brine solution for several months before it is eaten.
2. Mountain goat : IBEX
Ibex is a common name for various species of mountain goat. “Ibex” is a Latin name that was used for wild goats found in the Alps and Apennines in Europe.
8. ___ scheme (scam) : PONZI
Charles Ponzi was born in Luigi, Italy in 1882 and arrived in the US in 1903, flat broke having gambled away all his money on the voyage to Boston. Ponzi devised a scheme to buy what were known as “international reply coupons” through friends in Italy, which he had sent to him in the US so that he could redeem them on this side of the Atlantic. As the value in the US was greater than that in Italy, he could make a handsome profit. This was in itself an “illegal” transaction, buying an asset in one market at a low price, then immediately selling it in another market at a higher price. But it’s what he did next that became known as a Ponzi Scheme. He couldn’t redeem his coupons quickly enough due to red tape so he approached other investors, initially friends, and had them give him cash so that he could buy more coupons in Italy. He promised the investors he would double their money, which they did initially. Many people wanted to get in on the scheme seeing that Ponzi was able to make the new investors a profit and double the money of the original investors. Eventually, somebody did the math and word started to get out that the investment was risky, so the number of new investors started to fall. Without sufficient new investors Ponzi couldn’t double the money of his latest investors, and the whole scheme unraveled.
9. Unit of electrical resistance : OHM
The unit of electrical resistance is the ohm (with the symbol omega) named after German physicist Georg Simon Ohm. Ohm was the guy who established experimentally that the amount of current flowing through a circuit is directly proportional to the voltage applied, (V=IR) a relationship that every school kid knows as Ohm’s Law.
11. Apparel also known as clamdiggers : CAPRI PANTS
Capri pants first became popular on the island of Capri, apparently. They were invented in Europe in 1948, but only became stylish in the US in the sixties. Mary Tyler Moore often wore Capri pants on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and to some extent she sparked a fashion trend. After a lull in the seventies and eighties there was a resurgence in sales after Uma Thurman wore them (and danced in them) in “Pulp Fiction”.
12. Rand McNally book : ATLAS
Rand McNally is a company long associated with the city of Chicago. Its roots go back to 1856 when William Rand opened a printing shop in the city. Two years later he hired an Irish immigrant named Andrew McNally and the pair turned to printing tickets and timetables for the railroad industry. They diversified into “railroad guides” in 1870, including the first Rand McNally map in the December 1872 edition. When automobile travel started to become significant, Rand and McNally turned their attention to roads and they published their first road map in 1904, a map of New York City. Rand and McNally popularized the use of highway numbers, and indeed erected many roadside highway signs themselves, long before the state and federal authorities adopted the idea.
13. Scarlett’s Butler : RHETT
In Margaret Mitchell’s novel “Gone with the Wind”, when Rhett Butler finally walks out on Scarlett O’Hara he utters the words “My dear, I don’t give a damn”. Most of us are more familiar with the slightly different words spoken by Clark Gable in the film adaption of the story: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
18. Tennis legend Arthur : ASHE
Arthur Ashe was a professional tennis player from Richmond, Virginia. In his youth, Ashe found himself having to travel great distances to play against Caucasian opponents due to the segregation that still existed in his home state. He was rewarded for his dedication by being selected for the 1963 US Davis Cup team, the first African American player to be so honored. Ashe continued to run into trouble because of his ethnicity though, and in 1968 was denied entry into South Africa to play in the South African Open. In 1979 Ashe suffered a heart attack and had bypass surgery, with follow-up surgery four years later during which he contracted HIV from blood transfusions. Ashe passed away in 1993 due to complications from AIDS. Shortly afterwards, Ashe was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.
25. Anise-flavored liqueur : OUZO
Ouzo is an apéritif from Greece that is colorless and flavored with anise. Ouzo is similar to French pastis and Italian sambuca.
The essential oil in the anise plant is anethole. Anethole has a licorice-like flavor, and is used extensively in cooking and to flavor several distilled alcoholic drinks.
28. “We have met the enemy and he is us” comic strip : POGO
“Pogo” is a comic strip that was launched in 1948, and was the creation of cartoonist Walt Kelly. The story centers on animals that live in the Okefenokee Swamp on the Georgia-Florida border, with the title character “Pogo Possum” being an anthropomorphic opossum.
30. Green energy source that might go on top of a house : SOLAR PANEL
Solar panels are arrays of solar cells that make use of what’s known as the photovoltaic effect. We are more likely to have learned about the photoelectric effect in school, in which electrons were ejected from the surface of some materials when it was exposed to light or other forms of radiation. The photovoltaic effect is related but different. Instead of being electrons ejected from the surface, in the photovoltaic effect electrons move around in the material creating a difference in voltage.
35. Not just a glitch : SNAFU
SNAFU is an acronym standing for “situation normal: all fouled up” (well, that’s the “polite” version!). As one might perhaps imagine, the term developed in the US Army, during WWII.
37. Old sporty Pontiacs : GTOS
The Pontiac GTO was produced by GM from 1964 to 1974, and again by a GM subsidiary in Australia from 2004 to 2006. The original GTO’s design is credited to Pontiac chief engineer at the time John DeLorean, who later was found the DeLorean Motor Company.
47. “Spring forward” letters : DST
On the other side of the Atlantic, Daylight Saving Time (DST) is known as “summer time”. The idea behind summer/daylight-savings is to move clocks forward an hour in spring (“spring forward”), and backwards in the fall (“fall back”) so that afternoons have more daylight.
49. Disney clown fish : NEMO
“Finding Nemo” is a 2003 animated blockbuster from Pixar. The film was the winner of the Oscar that year for Best Animated Feature. Believe it or not, “Finding Nemo” is the best-selling DVD of all time and, until 2010’s “Toy Story 3”, it was the highest-grossing, G-rated movie at the box office.
51. Cupid’s missile : ARROW
Cupid was the god of love in Roman mythology. Cupid’s name comes from the Latin verb “cupere” meaning “to desire”. Cupid’s Latin name was Amor, and his Greek counterpart was Eros.
52. Pet ___ : PEEVE
The phrase “pet peeve”, meaning “thing that provokes one most”, seems to be somewhat ironic. A “peeve” is a source of irritation, and the adjective “pet” means “especially cherished”.
60. Lee of Marvel Comics : STAN
Stan Lee did just about everything at Marvel Comics over the years, from writing to being president and chairman of the board. If you like superhero movies based on the characters from Marvel Comics, then you could spend a few hours trying to spot Stan Lee in those films as he has a penchant for making cameo appearances. Lee can be spotted in “X-Men” (2000), “Spider-Man” (2002), “Hulk” (2003), “Fantastic Four” (2005), “Iron Man” (2008) and many other films.
65. Slinky or Silly Putty : TOY
The marvelous Slinky toy was invented in the early forties by a naval engineer called Richard James. James was developing springs for the navy that could stabilize sensitive instruments in rough seas. One day he accidentally knocked one of his experimental coils off a shelf and watched it “step” onto a stack of books, then onto a table and from there onto the floor where it recoiled itself very neatly. The Slinky was born …
Silly Putty is a silicone polymer that is marketed as a toy, usually sold in an egg-shaped plastic container. It is a remarkable material that can flow like a liquid and can also bounce. Silly Putty was one of those accidental creations, an outcome of research during WWII in search of substitutes for rubber. The substitution became urgent as Japan invaded rubber-producing countries all around the Pacific Rim.
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Complete List of Clues/Answers
Across
1. Classic name for a poodle : FIFI
5. Branded cotton swab : Q-TIP
9. Much-prized golden statuette : OSCAR
14. Black, in poetry : EBON
15. ___ Bell : TACO
16. Tract of low-growing shrubs : HEATH
17. Locale for a traditional Japanese ceremony : TEA GARDEN (giving “tea cart”)
19. Source of pancake syrup : MAPLE
20. Toll units for semis : AXLES
21. Israeli gun : UZI
23. Lead-in to fall : PRAT-
24. Slip of paper to take to the grocery : SHOPPING LIST (giving “shopping cart”)
28. Louis who developed a rabies vaccine : PASTEUR
31. High-five sound : SLAP
32. Yoko who loved John : ONO
33. Places with lions and giraffes : ZOOS
36. Sushi bar eel : UNAGI
39. The Masters and others : GOLF TOURNAMENTS (giving “golf cart”)
43. Sign in a broadcast booth : ON AIR
44. ___ John letter : DEAR
45. Part of the body that’s stubbed : TOE
46. Marsh grass : REED
48. Risky bridge play : FINESSE
51. Classic Austrian pastry : APPLE STRUDEL (giving “apple cart”)
55. Homophone of 46-Across : READ
56. ___-la-la (song syllables) : TRA
57. Rubs the wrong way : MIFFS
61. Actress Zellweger : RENEE
63. Message clicked on by an online buyer … or a hint for 17-, 24-, 39- and 51-Across : ADD TO CART
66. Obvious : OVERT
67. “Hold the ___” (deli order) : MAYO
68. Build-it-yourself furniture chain : IKEA
69. ___ corgi (dog breed) : WELSH
70. Hunted animal : PREY
71. Pre-twentysomething : TEEN
Down
1. Crumbly cheese : FETA
2. Mountain goat : IBEX
3. Stable newborn : FOAL
4. Consume : INGEST
5. 15 min. of college football : QTR
6. Tiny amount : TAD
7. Acquire a winter coat? : ICE UP
8. ___ scheme (scam) : PONZI
9. Unit of electrical resistance : OHM
10. Flier that can take off from water : SEAPLANE
11. Apparel also known as clamdiggers : CAPRI PANTS
12. Rand McNally book : ATLAS
13. Scarlett’s Butler : RHETT
18. Tennis legend Arthur : ASHE
22. Electees : INS
25. Anise-flavored liqueur : OUZO
26. Peacockish : PROUD
27. Down in the mouth : GLUM
28. “We have met the enemy and he is us” comic strip : POGO
29. Ever and ___ : ANON
30. Green energy source that might go on top of a house : SOLAR PANEL
34. Rock with valuable nuggets : ORE
35. Not just a glitch : SNAFU
37. Old sporty Pontiacs : GTOS
38. “So that’s it!” : I SEE!
40. Fly ball catchers : FIELDERS
41. Genealogical chart : TREE
42. Desert-dry : ARID
47. “Spring forward” letters : DST
49. Disney clown fish : NEMO
50. Draw out : ELICIT
51. Cupid’s missile : ARROW
52. Pet ___ : PEEVE
53. Walk with heavy steps : TRAMP
54. Speed reader? : RADAR
58. Not real : FAKE
59. Gratis : FREE
60. Lee of Marvel Comics : STAN
62. Biblical verb ender : -ETH
64. Clothes colorer : DYE
65. Slinky or Silly Putty : TOY
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