Constructed by: Hoang-Kim Vu & Jessica Zetzman
Edited by: Will Shortz
Not your puzzle? Try today’s …
… syndicated NY Times crossword
Today’s Reveal Answer Heartbroken
Themed answers each contain the letter sequence H-E-A-R-T, and that sequence BREAKS (separates) as we descend the grid:
- 60A Despondent … as progressively suggested by 17-, 24-, 38- and 48-Across? : HEARTBROKEN
- 17A Classic work with chapters titled “Attack by Stratagem” and “Maneuvering an Army” : THE ART OF WAR
- 24A Signature Phil Collins hit ranked among VH1’s “100 Greatest Songs of the 80s” : IN THE AIR TONIGHT
- 38A Changes political affiliation : SWITCHES PARTIES
- 48A Flee to remote safety : HEAD FOR THE HILLS
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Bill’s time: 8m 27s
Bill’s errors: 0
Today’s Wiki-est Amazonian Googlies
Across
6 Buenos ___ : AIRES
Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina, and is located on the estuary of the Ria de la Plata. As it is a port city, the people of Buenos Aires are known as porteños (“people of the port”). The name “Buenos Aires” can be translated from Spanish as “fair winds”.
11 The “me” of “Despicable Me” : GRU
The main protagonist in the “Despicable Me” movies is the supervillain Felonius Gru, usually referred to simply as “Gru”.
14 First name in cosmetics : ESTEE
Estée Lauder was a very successful businesswoman, and someone with a great reputation as a salesperson. Lauder introduced her own line of fragrances in 1953, a bath oil called “Youth Dew”. “Youth Dew” was marketed as a perfume, but it was added to bathwater. All of a sudden women were pouring whole bottles of Ms. Lauder’s “perfume” into their baths while using only a drop or two of French perfumes behind their ears. That’s quite a difference in sales volume …
16 Alley-___ (fancy basketball shot) : OOP
An alley-oop is a play in basketball in which one player lobs the ball close to the basket for a teammate who usually scores with a slam dunk.
17 Classic work with chapters titled “Attack by Stratagem” and “Maneuvering an Army” : THE ART OF WAR
“The Art of War(fare)” is an ancient military text that is attributed to a high-ranking Chinese general called Sun Tzu. I’ve even seen the principles in Sun Tzu’s book applied to modern business.
19 Clear tables at a restaurant : BUS
A busboy is a person who assists a waiter, mainly by clearing tables. The verb “to bus” arose in the early 1900s and is probably a reference to the wheeled cart that was used to carry dishes.
20 Kylo ___ of “Star Wars” : REN
Kylo Ren is the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa in the “Star Wars” universe. The character’s birth name was Ben Solo. He was trained as a Jedi knight by his uncle, Luke Skywalker. However, Ben came to embrace the Dark Side, and changed his name to Kylo Ren. Ren is played by actor Adam Driver.
21 Emerald ___ (Ireland) : ISLE
Ireland is often referred to as “the Emerald Isle” (and described as “green”) because of all that green grass that grows due to the seemingly non-stop rain.
24 Signature Phil Collins hit ranked among VH1’s “100 Greatest Songs of the 80s” : IN THE AIR TONIGHT
“In the Air Tonight” was a hit in 1981 for drummer and singer Phil Collins. His debut single, it is often referred to as his signature song. There’s an urban legend that “In the Air Tonight” is about a drowning. The story is that Collins was too far away to help the drowning victim, but he saw someone nearby who could have saved the person, but failed to do so. Collins has denounced the story, but it persists. Eminem even mentions the legend in his 2000 song “Stan”.
29 Cher or Sade, voicewise : ALTO
“Cher” is the stage name used by singer and actress Cherilyn Sarkisian. Formerly one half of husband-wife duo Sonny & Cher, she is often referred to as the Goddess of Pop. In her acting career, Cher was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar of 1984 for her performance in “Silkwood”. She went further in 1988 and won the season’s Best Actress Oscar for playing Loretta Castorini in “Moonstruck”.
Singer Sade’s real name is Helen Folasade Adu. Although born in Nigeria, Sade grew up and lives in the UK. She was the lead vocalist for the English group Sade, and adopted the name of the band. The band’s biggest hits were “Smooth Operator” (1984) and “The Sweetest Taboo” (1985).
35 Wed. follower : THU
We have seven days in a week because there are seven classical planets in the Solar System. The days were named for these “planets” during the Roman era:
- Sun (Sunday)
- Moon (Monday)
- Mars (Tuesday)
- Mercury (Wednesday)
- Jupiter (Thursday)
- Venus (Friday)
- Saturn (Saturday)
45 Only player on more than two winning World Cup teams : PELE
“Pelé” is the nickname of Edson de Nascimento, a soccer player who has used the name “Pelé” for most of his life. Pelé is now retired, and for my money was the world’s greatest ever player of the game. He is the only person to have been a member of three World Cup winning squads (1958, 1962 and 1970), and is a national treasure in his native Brazil. One of Pele’s nicknames is “O Rei do Futebol” (the King of Football).
46 Stage name of Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys : MCA
Beastie Boys are a hip hop band from New York that formed back in 1981.
56 Book that comes with a set of keys : ATLAS
The famous Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator published his first collection of maps in 1578. Mercator’s collection contained a frontispiece with an image of Atlas the Titan from Greek mythology holding up the world on his shoulders. That image gave us our term “atlas” that is used for a book of maps.
57 Sign of sainthood : HALO
The Greek word “halos” is the name given to the ring of light around the sun or moon, which gives us our word “halo” that is used for a radiant light depicted above the head of a saintly person.
58 Debtor’s note : IOU
I owe you (IOU)
64 Computing pioneer Lovelace : ADA
Ada Lovelace’s real name and title was Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the poet. Lovelace was fascinated by mathematics and wrote about the work done by Charles Babbage in building his groundbreaking mechanical computer. In some of her notes, she proposed an algorithm for Babbage’s machine to compute Bernoulli numbers. This algorithm is recognized by many as the world’s first computer program and so Lovelace is sometimes called the first “computer programmer”. There is a computer language called “Ada” that was named in her honor. The Ada language was developed from 1977 to 1983 for the US Department of Defense.
67 Director Spike or Ang : LEE
Film director Spike Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia but has very much made New York City his home and place of work. Most of Lee’s films are set in New York City, including his first feature film, 1986’s “She’s Gotta Have It”. That film was shot over two weeks with a budget of $175,000. “She’s Gotta Have It” grossed over $7 million at the US box office.
Taiwanese director Ang Lee sure has directed a mixed bag of films, mixed in terms of genre but not in terms of quality. He was at the helm for such classics as “Sense & Sensibility” (my personal favorite), “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “Hulk”, “Brokeback Mountain” and “Life of Pi”.
68 Big books : TOMES
“Tome” first came into English from the Latin “tomus” which means “section of a book”. The original usage in English was for a single volume in a multi-volume work. By the late 16th century, “tome” had come to mean “large book”.
69 “Really?,” in textspeak : SRSLY?
“Srsly?” is text-speak for “seriously?”
Down
1 ___ dish : PETRI
Julius Richard Petri was a German bacteriologist and was the man after whom the Petri dish is named. The petri dish can have an agar gel on the bottom which acts as a nutrient source for the specimen being grown and studied, in which case the dish plus agar is referred to as an “agar plate”.
3 Bit of equipment for an angioplasty : STENT
In the world of surgical medicine, a stent is an artificial tube inserted inside a vessel in the body, say an artery, in order to reduce the effects of a local restriction in the body’s conduit.
Angioplasty (“angio”, for short) is a mechanical widening of a narrowed artery. In the surgical procedure, a balloon catheter is inflated at the point of the obstruction to open up the artery. A stent may then be inserted to make sure the vessel remains open.
4 Spill the ___ (gossip) : TEA
To spill the beans is to divulge a secret. The expression first appeared in American English, in the early 1900s. The phrase arose as an alternative to “spoil the beans” or “upset the applecart”. The similarly meaning phrase “spill the tea” is more prevalent on the other side of the Atlantic.
5 Top Italian soccer league : SERIE A
Serie A is the premier soccer league in Italy, and has been operating since 1929. Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan (three of the most famous football clubs in the world) compete in Serie A.
6 Kind of sauce : AIOLI
To the purist, especially in Provence in the South of France, aioli is prepared just by grinding garlic with olive oil. However, other ingredients are often added to the mix, particularly egg yolks.
9 Emissions control grp. : EPA
The air quality index (AQI) is monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
10 Florence Griffith Joyner or Wilma Rudolph : SPRINTER
The American track and field athlete Florence Griffith-Joyner was also known as Flo-Jo. Flo-Jo’s world records for the 100 and 200 meters were set in 1988, and amazingly they still stand today. Sadly, Flo-Jo was only 38 years old when she died in her sleep in 1998 due to epilepsy.
Wilma Rudolph was a track and field athlete from Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee. Winning three gold medals in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, she was labelled “the Tornado, the fastest woman on earth”. Rudolph suffered from infantile paralysis when she was four years old, and had to wear a brace on her left leg for five years. She had to wear an orthopedic shoe for a further two years. Amazing …
11 It’s prepacked for an emergency : GO-BAG
A bug-out bag (also “go-bag”) is a portable collection of items that one would grab when evacuating from a disaster. One well-accepted guideline is that a bug-out bag contains all that would be needed to survive for 72 hours. A related kit is a get-home bag that might be kept in one’s car or place of work. A get-home bag contains the items needed to get back home in the absence of public transportation. My wife and I put together bug-out bags recently, having moved into an area that is at high risk for wildfires …
12 Where a slice might go : ROUGH
That would be golf.
13 Victory by a Cinderella team, e.g. : UPSET
In the world of sports, a Cinderella story is a situation in which a competitor or team is far more successful than is reasonably expected. The term is a reference to the “Cinderella” fairy tale.
18 Russian despot : TSAR
A despot is a ruler with absolute power, and often one who wields that power oppressively. “Despot” is an old French term from the 14th century that is ultimately derived from the Greek “despotes” meaning “master of a household, absolute ruler”.
23 “Ay, dios ___!” : MIO
“Dios mio!” translates from Spanish as “My god!”
26 All-weather protectors : TARPS
Originally, tarpaulins were made from canvas covered in tar that rendered the material waterproof. The word “tarpaulin” comes from “tar” and “palling”, with “pall” meaning “heavy cloth covering”.
27 Olympian Korbut : OLGA
Olga Korbut is from modern-day Belarus, but was born during the days of the Soviet Union. Korbut competed for the USSR team in the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games. She was 17 when she appeared in the 1972 Munich Games, and had been training in a sports school since she was 8-years-old. The world fell in love with her as she was a very emotional young lady, readily expressing joy and disappointment, something that we weren’t used to seeing in athletes from behind the Iron Curtain. Korbut immigrated to the US in 1991 and now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.
33 Home for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : SEWER
The “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” started out as a parody of comic book superheroes, first appearing in a self-published comic book in 1984. A couple of years later the characters were picked up by someone who built a whole line of toys around the characters, and then television and movies followed. Do you remember the names of all four of the Turtles? Their names were all taken from Renaissance artists:
- Leonardo
- Raphael
- Michelangelo
- Donatello
34 Communication at Gallaudet Univ. : ASL
Gallaudet University is a private school in Washington, D.C. that is focused on the education of the deaf and hard of hearing. Gallaudet was founded in 1864 and is officially a bilingual institution, with classes held in both English and American sign language (ASL).
37 Euro rival, in brief : USD
Both the euro (EUR) and the US dollar (USD) are currencies.
39 Toque : CHEF’S HAT
A toque was a brimless style of hat that was very fashionable in Europe in the 13th to 16th centuries. Nowadays we associate toques with chefs, as it is the name given to a chef’s hat (called a “toque blanche” in French, a “white hat”). A chef’s toque is quite interesting. Many toques have exactly 100 pleats, often said to signify the number of ways that an egg can be cooked.
45 Show of love, for short? : PDA
Public display of affection (PDA)
46 One of the Spice Girls : MEL B
“Mel B” is the stage name of Melanie Brown, who came to fame as a member of the Spice Girls musical group. She took the name Mel B to distinguish herself from fellow band member Melanie Chisholm (Melanie C). Mel B was also known as “Scary Spice”, a nickname given to her by the media. American viewers saw Mel B on the TV show “America’s Got Talent” from 2013 through 2019, on which show she served as a judge.
48 Islamic equivalent of kosher : HALAL
“Halal” is a term describing an action or object that is permissible under Islamic Law. In particular “halal” is used to describe food that can be consumed. Anything that is not allowed is described as “haram”.
49 Practice piano piece : ETUDE
An étude is a short instrumental composition that is usually quite hard to play and is intended to help the performer master a particular technique. “Étude” is the French word for “study”. Études are commonly performed on the piano.
50 Pond scum, typically : ALGAE
Algae are similar to terrestrial plants in that they use photosynthesis to create sugars from light and carbon dioxide, but they differ in that they have simpler anatomies, and for example lack roots.
54 Trompe ___ : L’OEIL
“Trompe l’oeil” is a technique in art that creates the optical illusion that a drawn object exists in three dimensions. “Trompe-l’oeil” is French for “deceive the eye”.
63 “___ Lips Are Sealed” (Go-Go’s hit) : OUR
The Go-Go’s were an all-female rock band that was formed in Los Angeles back in 1978. The band’s biggest hit is “We Got the Beat”, which was released in 1982. The best-known member of the Go-Go’s is probably Belinda Carlisle.
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Complete List of Clues/Answers
Across
1 Some people have checkered ones : PASTS
6 Buenos ___ : AIRES
11 The “me” of “Despicable Me” : GRU
14 First name in cosmetics : ESTEE
15 Like some online purchases : IN-APP
16 Alley-___ (fancy basketball shot) : OOP
17 Classic work with chapters titled “Attack by Stratagem” and “Maneuvering an Army” : THE ART OF WAR
19 Clear tables at a restaurant : BUS
20 Kylo ___ of “Star Wars” : REN
21 Emerald ___ (Ireland) : ISLE
22 It’s reversed in a mirror : IMAGE
24 Signature Phil Collins hit ranked among VH1’s “100 Greatest Songs of the 80s” : IN THE AIR TONIGHT
28 Musical skill : EAR
29 Cher or Sade, voicewise : ALTO
30 State generating the highest percentage of its electricity by wind : IOWA
33 Drill conductor, informally : SARGE
35 Wed. follower : THU
38 Changes political affiliation : SWITCHES PARTIES
42 Egg layer : HEN
43 Cries of protest : HOWLS
44 Cowboy’s charge : HERD
45 Only player on more than two winning World Cup teams : PELE
46 Stage name of Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys : MCA
48 Flee to remote safety : HEAD FOR THE HILLS
56 Book that comes with a set of keys : ATLAS
57 Sign of sainthood : HALO
58 Debtor’s note : IOU
59 Oaf : LUG
60 Despondent … as progressively suggested by 17-, 24-, 38- and 48-Across? : HEARTBROKEN
64 Computing pioneer Lovelace : ADA
65 Concur : AGREE
66 Scheduled to arrive : DUE IN
67 Director Spike or Ang : LEE
68 Big books : TOMES
69 “Really?,” in textspeak : SRSLY?
Down
1 ___ dish : PETRI
2 Pale : ASHEN
3 Bit of equipment for an angioplasty : STENT
4 Spill the ___ (gossip) : TEA
5 Top Italian soccer league : SERIE A
6 Kind of sauce : AIOLI
7 Derive by logic : INFER
8 Like some data and deals : RAW
9 Emissions control grp. : EPA
10 Florence Griffith Joyner or Wilma Rudolph : SPRINTER
11 It’s prepacked for an emergency : GO-BAG
12 Where a slice might go : ROUGH
13 Victory by a Cinderella team, e.g. : UPSET
18 Russian despot : TSAR
23 “Ay, dios ___!” : MIO
25 Pressure, metaphorically : HEAT
26 All-weather protectors : TARPS
27 Olympian Korbut : OLGA
30 “Sorta” : ISH
31 What the middle of 58-Across stands for : OWE
32 Victory : WIN
33 Home for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : SEWER
34 Communication at Gallaudet Univ. : ASL
35 Fashion dictates that its width be the same as that of one’s lapels : TIE
36 Recipient of Grammy’s 2020 Song of the Year award for “I Can’t Breathe” : HER
37 Euro rival, in brief : USD
39 Toque : CHEF’S HAT
40 Prefix with -gram : HOLO-
41 Homophone of 35-Down : THAI
45 Show of love, for short? : PDA
46 One of the Spice Girls : MEL B
47 Musical combos? : CHORDS
48 Islamic equivalent of kosher : HALAL
49 Practice piano piece : ETUDE
50 Pond scum, typically : ALGAE
51 Afternoon hour : THREE
52 Abhors : HATES
53 Approvals on Facebook : LIKES
54 Trompe ___ : L’OEIL
55 Optimistic : SUNNY
61 “Me” problem : EGO
62 Pitching asset : ARM
63 “___ Lips Are Sealed” (Go-Go’s hit) : OUR
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